{"id":8105,"date":"2025-03-13T19:29:16","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T19:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/?p=8105"},"modified":"2025-07-16T17:34:43","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T17:34:43","slug":"james-roman-note-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/james-roman-note-book\/","title":{"rendered":"James, Henry,\u201cFrom a Roman Note-Book.\u201d Galaxy 16 (November 1873): 679-86."},"content":{"rendered":"

Henry James, “From a Roman Note-Book ” (1873)<\/strong><\/p><\/h1><\/div><\/div><\/div>

RELATED SITES & IMAGES<\/span>

<\/i><\/div>Villa Medici, Rome<\/a><\/p>\n

RELATED TEXTS<\/span>

<\/i><\/div>James, \u201cRoman Rides\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/i><\/div>James, \u201cRoman Neighborhoods\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/i><\/div>James, \u201cThe After-Season in Rome\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/i><\/div>James, \u201cOther Roman Neighborhoods\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

January 26th. \u2014 With S. to the Villa Medici\u2014perhaps on the whole for most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called the Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion of tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little miniature trunks\u2014dwarfs playing with each other at being giants\u2014and such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid west! At the end of the wood is a steep circular mound, up which the short trees scramble amain, with a long mossy staircase climbing up to a belvedere. This staircase, rising suddenly out of the leafy dusk to you don\u2019t see where, is delightfully fantastic. You expect to see an old woman in a crimson petticoat and with a distaff come hobbling down and turn into a fairy and offer you three wishes. I should name for my own first wish that one didn\u2019t have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and work at the Acad\u00e9mie de France. Can there be for a while a happier destiny than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred shades? One has fancied Plato\u2019s Academy \u2013his gleaming colonnades, his blooming gardens and Athenian sky; but was it as good as this one, where Monsieur H\u00e9bert does the Platonic? The blessing in Rome is not that this or that or the other isolated object is so very unsurpassable; but that the general air so contributes to interest, to impressions that are not as any other impressions anywhere in the world. And from this general air the Villa Medici has distilled an essence of its own\u2014walled it in and made it delightfully private. The great fa\u00e7ade on the gardens is like an enormous rococo clock-face all incrusted with images and arabesques and tablets. What mornings and afternoons one might spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satisfied\u2014either persuading one\u2019s self that one would be \u201cdoing something\u201d in consequence or not caring if one shouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n

James, Henry. Italian Hours<\/em>, ed. John Auchard. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, pp. 185\u2013186.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8105"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8830,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105\/revisions\/8830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu\/catena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}