I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Great Caesar’s Ghost: On the Crypt of the Capuchins

2 4 5 On the Crypt of the Capuchins Great Caesar’s Ghost in the dream life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, Italy and the Gothic were conjoined twins. The first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) —a spookhouse ride whose oubliettes, subterranean passageways, and doors that slam shut by themselves still stock the Gothic prop room—is set in medieval Italy. In fact, the first edition purported to be a translation of a sixteenth-century manuscript by an Italian cleric named “Onuphrio Muralto,” rediscovered in the library of “an ancient Catholic family in the north of England.”1 Ann Radcliffe’s hugely influential Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which provided seed DNA for all Gothic romances to come, takes place partly in Italy, in a gloomy medieval pile in the Apennines where Our Heroine is menaced by the sinister Count Montoni. (Radcliffe had used Italy as a backdrop before, in A Sicilian Romance [1790], and would again, in The Italian [1797], where a diabolical monk named Schedoni puts a twisted face on the terrors of the Inquisition.) To Northern Europeans, especially the English, Italy reeked of cultural atavism—the inbred depravity of a decaying aristocracy and the perversions of Papism (paganism in a reversed collar, as far as Protestants were concerned). It’s as if the sheer antiquity of the place—all those Roman ruins, haunted by the godless shades of all those parricidal , pedophilic Caesars Gibbon described in such scandalous detail in The Decline and Fall (1776–88)—deformed the Italian psyche, G R E A T C A E S A R ’ S G H O S T 2 4 6 warping it under the accumulated weight of a thousand years of perversion and profanation, scheming and throat slitting. To the Enlightenment mind, ancient Rome was undeniably the embodiment of classical virtues in philosophy and culture. But the brilliance of Seneca, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil had to be weighed against the horrors of Nero, Domitian, and Caligula. True, the Apollonian perfection of a Roman column was an inspiring sight, even in ruins. But it was also a melancholy reminder that even Rome, the sunburst of Western civilization, had succumbed to an epic fail. By the Middle Ages, the Eternal City had decayed into a necropolis of ten thousand, abandoned by the popes. By day, the Forum was a pasture for grazing cows; after dark, wolves hunted the streets of the Vatican City. The Grand Tour of the Continent impressed these lessons on England’s upper class. Intended to certify the scions of the powerful as worldly-wise and culturally literate, worthy of their lofty perch on the social pyramid, the Grand Tour was by 1700 “part of an English Crypt of the Capuchins, Rome, Italy. Photograph copyright Eric Berger; all rights reserved. 2 4 7 G R E A T C A E S A R ’ S G H O S T gentleman’s preparation for life,” as Richard Davenport-Hines notes in Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin.2 Italy, more than any other country, was seen as indispensable in sanding the rough edges off entitled party animals, turning them into wellrounded gentlemen: the term Grand Tour was first used in Richard Lassels’s Voyage of Italy (1670). The more studious Grand Tourists studied Italian and acquired a fashionable taste for Italian art and architecture: Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, remodeled his Oxfordshire home on the Villa Borghese in Rome. But English Italophilia was darkened by the shadow of the Gothic. “The broken magnificence which was to become integral to the gothic imagination fascinated the English in Italy,” writes Davenport-Hines. The morbidness in their approach was exemplified by two young gentlemen . . . whose grand tour in 1707 took them to Rome, where they were “assiduous . . . in visiting . . . the remains of the superb Monuments of the Grandeur and of the Magnificence of the Ancient Romans.” The Catacombs held a horrible fascination for the English brothers, [which] “is not very surprising for young Men who had heard it said that a Company of four German Gentlemen were lost there for some time, previously, with their Guide, [and] would not have appeared again, had it not been that Trumpeters and Drummers were led there several times to see if the sound of these instruments of war would enable them to find the right way again. . . .” Dark...