at a chance hour was the biggest adventure of all that had crowded the way to it.
One night the Trattoria happened to be the Posta in a narrow street back of the Piazza Colonna. It was small: not more than twenty could have dined there together in any comfort. It was beautifully clean. And the padrone, his son, and the one waiter—all the establishment—greeted us with that enchanting smile to which, during my first year in Italy, I fell only too ready a victim. Once we had dined at the Posta, we found it so pleasant that we fell into the habit of getting hungry in its neighbourhood.
I have since got to know many more famous or pretentious restaurants, but never have dinners tasted so good as at this little Roman trattoria where we had to consider the centesimi in the price of every dish, and the quarter of a flask of cheap Chianti shared between us was an extravagance, and we ate with the appetite that came of having eaten nothing all day save rolls and coffee for breakfast, and fruit and rolls for lunch, that we might afford a dinner at night. And I have dined in many restaurants of gilded and mirrored magnificence, but in none I thought so well decorated as the Posta with its bare walls and coarse clean linen and no ornament at all, except the stand in the centre where we could pick out our fruit or our vegetable. Nor has any restaurant, crowded with the creations of Paquin and Worth, seemed more brilliant than the Posta filled with officers. In Philadelphia I had never seen an army officer in uniform in my life; at the Posta I saw hardly anything else. We were surrounded by lieutenants and captains and colonels, and as I watched them come and go with clank and clatter of spurs and swords, and military salutes at the door, and military cloaks thrown dramatically off and on, and gold braid shining, I began to think a big standing army worth the money to any country, on condition that it always went in uniform—on condition, I might now add, that this uniform is not khaki, then not yet heard of. When the old spare, grizzled General, always the last, appeared and all the other officers rose upon his entrance, our dinner was dignified into a ceremony. Sometimes, I fancied he felt his importance more than anybody, for he is the only man I have ever known courageous enough in public to begin his dinner with cake and finish it with soup.
Now and then, on very special occasions, when we had sent off an article or received a cheque, we went to the Falcone and celebrated the event by feasting on Maccheroni alla Napolitana, Cinghale all'Agra Dolce and wine of Orvieto. The Falcone was another accident of our tramps, though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished of itself as a haunt of the Cæsars, and was prepared to believe the waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial head on the greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London point to the mark of Dr. Johnson's, while the flamboyancy of the cooking revealed to me the real reason of the decline and fall of Rome. I am afraid I should be telling the story of our own decline and fall had we sent off articles and received cheques every day. Fortunately, the intervals were long between the feasts, but unfortunately our digestion can never again be imperilled at the Falcone, for they tell me it has gone with the Ghetto and so many other things in the Rome I knew and loved.
By the middle of the winter we gave up the Posta and went to the Cavour instead. I don't know how we had the heart to, for the Cavour never had the same charm for us, we never got to like it so well. It was too large and popular for friendliness, the officers carried their ceremony and gorgeousness to a room apart, and the padrone and his waiters were too busy for more than one fixed smile of general welcome. But then there, if we paid for our dinner by the month, it cost us next to nothing by the day, and our Letter of Credit allowed as narrow a margin for sentiment as for clothes. Moreover, the dinner was good as well as cheap. And when the streets of Rome were rivers of rain, as they often were that winter, it was brought to our rooms in a dinner pail by a waiter, after he had first come half a mile to submit the menu to us, and in that cold, bleak interior, wrapped in blankets, a scaldino at our feet, a newspaper for tablecloth, we made a picnic of it, freezing, but thankful not to be drowned. And on great holidays, the padrone spared us a smile all to ourselves as he offered us, with the compliments of the season, a plate of torrone and a bottle of old wine from his vineyard.
III
With dinner the night was but beginning and smiles must have faded had we lingered over it indefinitely. I learned to my astonishment, however, that hours could be, or rather were expected to be, devoted to the drinking of one small cup of coffee, and that always near the trattoria was a café [A] which provided the coffee and, at the cost of a few cents, could become our home for as long and as late as might suit us. In Philadelphia after dinner coffee had been swallowed promptly, in the back parlour if we were dining alone, in the front if people were dining with us, and I was startled to find it in Rome an excuse to loaf at a convenient distance from the domestic hearth for Romans with apparently nothing to do and all their time to do it in.
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