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waded through melting snow to the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura. They also stopped at Arles, where Fuller saw “saxifrage blossoming on the steps of the Amphitheatre ,” fruit trees flowering amid the tombs, and an old woman knitting where once twenty-five thousand people gazed down on men fighting lions. The trip to Genoa by steamer through a cutting wind gave her a headache and kept her from appreciating Genoa’s palaces, though she enjoyed meeting Mazzini’s friends and family, especially his mother, Maria, whose son had told her to be kind to the American correspondent as well as to keep track of where she was staying as she traveled throughout Europe. Mazzini, after all, continued to count on Fuller to help spread his message of Italian liberation. He had even arranged with editors at Saunders’s People’s Journal, which published his writing, to publish her work in progress on the Italian fight for freedom. This arrangement, along with requests for her writing from the Howitts in London and from Pauline Roland in Paris, led her to consider extending her stay in Europe.11 Though the path on which destiny was now leading her seemed to her clear, an incident on the way to Naples from Leghorn unnerved her. On a clear night, her English boat had been rammed by a French mail steamer. The incident ended with the mail steamer returning the traveling party—which now included George Palmer Putnam of the publishing firm Wiley and Putnam, and his wife, Victorine —to Leghorn on a night when Mother Nature, as she had in the past, seemed to Fuller hauntingly seductive. The sea was as calm as a lake, the sky was full of stars, and the mail steamer with its smoke and lights circled round to them “like the bend of an arm embracing.” In less poetic terms Fuller wrote Emerson, “Between Leghorn and Naples, our boat was run into by another, and we only just escaped being drowned.”12 52SOn to Rome Fuller enjoyed the boat ride down the coast from Leghorn to Naples, especially since on it she happened to meet “a Polish lady,” one of Mickiewicz’s former lovers, of whom there was apparently an impressive number. One suspects it was in part Fuller’s meeting Countess Zaluska on the boat that made her conclude upon arriving at Naples: “Only at Naples have I found my Italy.”1 From the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily (also called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), which was ruled by the tyrannical Bourbon King Ferdinand II, the traveling party went north toward the Papal States by coach on a bumpy road that had been built in the first century A.D. and that joined with the Via Appia Antica, which had been built in 312 B.C. Though the coach was bulky and the six horses that pulled it heavy and slow, Fuller preferred this mode of travel to the railroad, which she thought a “convenient” but “stupid way of traveling.” Since the Papal States had no railroad, it was fortunate she liked to travel by coach, which gave her On to Rome 309 310 the rising tide of revolution a chance to view the villages she saw nestled in the hills where olive trees guarded the entrance to Rome.2 In Rome Fuller was soon to discover the land she had imagined while sitting at the window in her father’s book closet and reading books like the Aeneid, with its bloody battle scenes, and Oberon, wherein the Christian knight Huon and pagan princess Rezia defy Oberon’s decree not to consummate their relationship before being blessed by a priest in Rome. When compared to such childhood dreams, Rome at first did not live up to her ideal of it. For, unlike Rezia, Fuller had no companion with whom to share its pleasures. Without such a friend, she found Rome’s magnificent temples and tombs disappointing . In her May 1847 dispatch she complains that of the once-great City of the Caesars there remained standing only a few ruins. There was, for instance, the Colosseum , where she heard owls hoot by moonlight. With the tourists she had seen the pomps and shows of Holy Week in St. Peter’s and “ascended the dome and seen thence Rome and its Campagna.” She had even been in the cathedral undercroft, where she saw “by torch-light the stone Popes” lying “on their tombs, and the . . . Virgins with gilt...

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