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Great world events were passing under Faraday’s very nose in that place, but he did not seem to fathom their importance. His entry for Tuesday, 1 February is restricted to: ‘This morning the town was all in uproar and running to see the passing of a large train of artillery which is going up towards Lyons. They seem in great haste.’
And four days later, having amused himself by standing at the edge of the parade ground and watching the clumsy square-bashing:
Drilling is now the occupation of the town, and the Peyrou looks like a Parade. During the morning it is covered by clusters of clumsy recruits who are endeavouring to hold their arms right, turn their toes out, keep their hands in, hold their hands up &c according to the direction of certain corporals who are at present all authority and importance.
Then, as if it were merely a passing show, ‘The Pope passed through this place a few days ago in [sic] his way to Italy. He has just been set at liberty … Almost every person in the town was there but myself.’
Faraday’s indifference to Pope Pius VII’s return to Rome may reflect Sandemanian attitudes, but nonetheless Sandemanians were encouraged to keep abreast of current affairs. What did catch Faraday’s attention in these few weeks in Montpellier, however, was the French manner of weighing goods in the market, and of sawing large logs of wood, a technique he recorded in a sketch. Neither method had he seen in England. He trawled around the booksellers, he watched peddlers performing in the market, and he went to the theatre. Although he did not understand the dialogue, he ‘unexpectedly found out the meaning by that universal language of gesture, for it was most exuberantly employed’.
While Faraday ignored the climactic events, their significance was clear to Sir Humphry. He wove the grand sight of a British fleet in the Gulf of Lyons, which Faraday too must have seen, into his poem ‘The Canigou’, in praise of the peak in the French Pyrenees.
… On the wave
Triumphant ride the fleets of Ocean’s Queen.
My heart throbs quicker, and a healthful glow
Fills all my bosom. Albion, thee I hail! –
Mother of heroes! mighty in thy strength!
Deliverer! from thee the fire proceeds
Withering the tyrant; not a fire alone
Of war destructive, but a living light
Of honour, glory, and security, –
A light of science, liberty, and peace!
Though he had been admitted to France as a guest of Napoleon, perhaps also as a political pawn, a sign to all warring parties that science was above politics and warfare, Davy had no doubt at all where his loyalties lay. Science, to him, was a real part of the war effort, part of Britain’s fire, the living light sent out to wither the tyrant, as he expressed it. His role, as exemplified by his analysis of iodine, was to be the leading edge of the fire, and being jealous of French achievements, he aimed to humiliate French science before he returned to England.
Leaving Montpellier before sunrise on Monday, 7 January, they arrived in Nîmes at noon. They spent the rest of the day, and the next, picking about the Roman remains, the Pont du Gard, the Amphitheatre, the Maison Carré and the Grand Fountain. Faraday goes into much detail about these – some of the information reads as if it has been lifted out of a guidebook – but he seems to be more greatly taken by the geological activity around the Grand Fountain than by the antiquities themselves: ‘Rocks of enormous magnitude and height are so thrown together by nature as to form a broken kind of crescent.’
He is prosaic about the remains, descriptive, matter-of-fact:
This place was by the various and overwhelming accidents of time nearly buried and forgotten. The canal was filled up with earth and the springs stopped or diverted. It was not more than a century ago that the encumbring rubbish was cleared away and the broken or destroyed parts rebuilt, but this has been done in a manner approaching to the ancient style and thus an adequate idea may be formed of what it originally was.
From Nîmes they went to Avignon, across the Rhône on the rope-ferry, their carriage perched precariously across the beam. Then to Vaucluse to see the famous fountain and the home of Petrarch. The place inevitably drew out the poet in Davy, and warmed his fellow-feeling with Petrarch:
A scene of pastoral beauty glads my eye,
Well suited to a pastoral poet’s song.
…
I wonder not the poet loved thy wave, –
Thy cavern’d rocks, – thy giant precipice;
For such a scene was suited well to break
The tyrant-spell of love …
Davy, the romantic scientist, is hopelessly revisionist when it comes to writing poetry. Although he performed his science with the aplomb of a man of the Romantic era, his poetry drives him back to the first half of the eighteenth century, the golden age of Thomson, Pope and Akenside. From Faraday’s perspective, however, we have a more detached reading of Petrarch’s vale:
At some little distance from the head, and after having passed two or three beautiful cascades, the stream divides into branches forming three rivers of considerable size. The water is extremely clear and pure, and of a beautiful green colour. The bed of the river is carpetted with a thousand water plants, and an eternal verdure seems to reign in the environs of Petrarch’s haunts.
Faraday is wholly susceptible to natural beauty, and writes in a style that can evoke the high colour, sparkle, light and jewels in a landscape. It is a language that Goethe, Humboldt and Coleridge knew best.
There are signs in the Journal that Sir Humphry explained things regularly to Faraday as they went along, discussed the geology of the country, talked about scientific phenomena as the occasion demanded. Much of the geological information that Faraday records must have come from Davy there and then; because there are only a few recorded instances of direct instruction we should not suppose that that was all there was. In the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes Sir Humphry expatiated on the nature of the wind coming down the valley at Vaucluse, on the melt-water running off Mont Ventoux, and together he and Faraday seem to have discussed the dramatic crepuscular rays that they saw on the road to Aix-en-Provence.
They were now travelling along some of the most beautiful coastal roads in Europe, and after forty-seven days on the road from Paris, the ecstatic responses that burst out of Faraday in the Forest of Fontainebleau had been temporarily blunted: ‘Left Aix this morning. Nothing particular the whole day, for pretty scenery has now become common, though not less interesting.’
It was not the grand sweep of landscape that captivated him now, but detail and opportunities to exercise, so he ran around after the small green lizards, ‘too nimble to be caught’, that he found basking in the sun on banks of lettuces. He was amused at being told by an innkeeper that the Pope had spent the night at his inn six days earlier; to induce them to stay they were given the Pope’s bed to sleep in. Faraday was surely the only Sandemanian ever to have been offered the Pope’s bed, an event for which his religious training gave no particular guidance.
They travelled on through Fréjus, ‘the delightful town of Nice’, and on towards the Italian border. Faraday’s sense of wonder returned to him in a flood.
I never saw such fine scenery as on this part of our road. It was magnificence and immensity itself. The rocks often rose perpendicularly on the side of the road for many hundred feet, and sometimes overhung it in the most terrific manner. In one place the way had by blasting and hewing been actually cut out of the side of a leaning rock, and with the roaring river at the bottom and the opposite precipices was an inconceivably romantic situation. The whole here limestone.
They had now turned north up the valley of the Roya. The freezing weather had caused enormous icicles to form where water poured out of the rocks, and many of these had broken off and scattered onto the road, ‘threaten[ing] destruction to the passing traveller’. They had to move them aside to make a way through, but, Faraday wrote, ‘the fragments were often too heavy for me to lift’.
On Saturday, 19 February, they rose at dawn and girded themselves to make the final climb over the Col de Tende into Italy. Faraday put on an extra waistcoat and two pairs of stockings under the thick leather overalls and shoes which were his travelling garments. Instead of putting it away when he dressed that morning, he kept his nightcap on. He was ready to go.
There was a deep snowfield all around them as they set off. The men they had hired to help them over the mountain were beginning to gather. There would be about sixty-five of them altogether, mountain men from the villages whose job it was to dismantle the carriage and rope it to sledges, and manhandle the lot up to the peak and back down the other side. They whistled and talked, totally familiar with and unimpressed by the dramatic mountainscape, and scaring the travellers with their warnings about avalanches and precipices. Sir Humphry and Faraday kept their nerve by taking readings on their barometer to gauge their height, and discussing the geology. Davy pointed out the micaceous schist, and told Faraday that where there was micaceous schist there was also granite. There were two sedan chairs, one each for Lady Davy and her maid, who both went on ahead. Travellers coming the other way passed them, and the men with the sledges set off at a run, shouting and cheering as they went. The party was soon scattered into groups, Davy and Faraday taking up the rear. They followed the mule tracks, and Faraday stopped to sketch how the mules’ footsteps enlarged and softened as the sun on the snow warmed them. Far ahead in the distance they could see the sedan chairs crawling along a ridge, ‘and a bird soaring below it – the men pointed out to me as an eagle’.
By late afternoon they had reached the summit, six thousand feet above sea level.
The view from this elevation was very peculiar, and if immensity bestows grandeur was very grand. The sea in the distance stretching out apparently to infinity. The enormous snow-clad mountains, the clouds below the level of the eye and the immense white valley before us were objects which struck the eye more by their singularity than their beauty, and would after two or three repetitions raise feelings of regret rather than of pleasure.
The sledge with the carriage paused at the top, while the foot-passengers and some of the mules went ahead. They had been warned about hollows in the snow, practically invisible on the surface, but nevertheless Faraday slipped many times and found himself up to his chest in snow. One animal and its load were nearly lost – it missed its footing and tumbled over, rolling several yards down the mountain, and had to be dug out and righted by all hands. Looking back, they saw the carriage on its sledge setting off, gathering speed rapidly, with the men running alongside skidding down the mountain, practically out of control. As night fell, they heard the dong, dong of a village bell, and carried on through the snow until they crossed into Italy and reached Limone Piemonte, where they spent the night.
Continuing northwards for two days, they reached Turin during Carnivale. The following day was Shrove Tuesday, and Faraday ‘strolled’ – his word – into the whirling streets in search of a party. Faraday’s stroll in a new town had become a ritual for him, and in Turin he went to the edge of the city and among some trees by the River Po he listened to the bands and watched the dancers spin around the musicians in rings. Between the bands and the circles of ‘ever-moving and never-tired dancers’ were ‘singers, leapers, boxers, chestnut merchants, apple stalls, beggars’, everyday Italian life, enchanted by the excitement and celebration. Faraday then strolled back into town, where he saw the Corso, the even more extraordinary custom of the well-to-do of Turin who despatched their ‘carriages, curricles, saddle horses &c’ to be driven empty for several hours up and down for show, as the crowd looked on.
There were … an immense number of persons who stood on each side of the street looking and gazing with great apparent satisfaction, and who if they had been conscious of the comparison I was then making between the scene before me and the one I had just left would have looked down on me with contempt and derision, no doubt equal at least to that which at the same time occupied my mind.
The continental journey was, for Faraday, beginning by now to develop a pattern of its own. Long, weary travelling from town to town was enlivened by ad hoc instruction from Davy, and landscapes and antiquities that he had read or been told about and perhaps never dreamt he would one day see. His Journal record is detailed and engaging, and although scientific subjects are regular themes, they do not dominate. He writes as if he is taking notes (which he probably was), quite as much as making an account for his own future reflection, enjoyment and remembrance.
Davy and Faraday were among the very last of the Grand Tourists, those wealthy Englishmen and their companions who in the decades leading up to the war with France had travelled in their thousands through France and Germany to Italy in search of antiquities and classical learning. Davy’s mission was science, while for Faraday there was an ambivalence about the true aims of the journey. He had scientific duties to perform for Sir Humphry, certainly, but for himself the dividend would not be science but a widening knowledge that it brought him of the depth, richness and pattern of European culture. This came to underpin Faraday’s outlook all his life, and as the decades passed we can see how crucial these eighteen months in Europe were for him, and how they influenced the pattern and direction of his career and achievement.
The character that the Journal most directly evokes is of a receptive young man, talkative, animated, urgent, eager to know, determined to understand, one who happily disregards the discomforts in exchange for the riches that travel will reveal. He is curious about religious practices on the continent, but there is little clear evidence of his own religious beliefs. On his travels this reluctant Sandemanian comes across as a bon viveur who enjoys good food and wine, attending the theatre, dressing up and taking part with enthusiasm in masked balls. He has read his guide books, and is precise in recording details of distance and dimension, as if he too were writing a guide. As a tourist, slogging round the towns he visits on foot, he is energetic and assiduous, keen to find the high point for the panoramic view, eager to visit museums, galleries and gardens, and to watch local celebrations and processions. He does not waste his time. Whether in the marketplace, the inn or the museum, Faraday is curious, and works very hard to feel and to express the textures of the continent, and the customs of the people around him.
All these qualities, which the continental Journal articulated, emerge in their time in Faraday’s later life. The Journal is the seedbed where we can see the shoots of his coming character beginning to poke through. The fact that he wrote it up a second time, the latter part perhaps nearly ten years later, also tells us something worth noting: without making too much of it, Faraday is preserving the young, ebullient Mike for posterity before he is sucked down into adulthood, marriage, responsibility, social conformity, religious non-conformity, decisions, and the perpetual need to earn a living.
In many of the towns he visited, Faraday sought out the bookshops, printers and bookbinders, looking back through them at his earlier, now abandoned, life. He wrote to Riebau: ‘My old profession of books has oftentimes occurred to my mind and been productive of much pleasure.’
He bought books at ‘every large town we came to’, but soon found he had accumulated too many, and had to deny himself, though he may have lost some of those he had bought somewhere en route.
He tried to buy a French grammar in France, an Italian—English dictionary in Italy, and later in the journey an English—German dictionary, but try as he might, languages always had a tendency to elude him. He went to the theatre on two or three occasions, but never really understood the dialogue, unable to keep up with its relentless speed.
A recurrent and characteristic theme in the Journal is Faraday’s fascination for detail. There was the phosphorescence in the harbour mud at Morlaix; the analysis of a postillion’s equipment; the glow-worm on the road to Rennes; the telegraph at Montmartre; notices of the various methods of weighing goods in the marketplace, with comparisons between the English, French and Italian practices. Together, these and many other observations add up to an extended series of insights into continental life of a depth which would have graced any great travel writer of the nineteenth century – Richard Ford or Sir Richard Burton come to mind – and could have provided material for a painter on his travels. If Michael Faraday had achieved nothing else in his lifetime, this Journal would by now have had due recognition, and we would know him well as an incisive travel writer who sparkled once and vanished like a shooting star.
There is another beam along which we can take a fresh perspective on Faraday’s youthful life and character. This shines out from his letters home, to his mother, sisters, and principally to Benjamin Abbott. Each letter is heavily and opaquely overwritten, but they have an immediacy which time and revision might have blunted in the Journal. The first surviving letter, to Faraday’s mother, is dated 9 December 1813, six weeks after the party had arrived in Paris.
The war frustrated the free flow of correspondence between France and England, and this letter was carried home by ‘a person who is now here, but who expects soon to part for England’. It is a short letter, a mere wave, with no news, just the apologetic ‘I could say much more, but nothing of importance.’
Margaret Faraday gets a longer letter four months later, from Rome, and it is from this that we can begin to take a new view of the journey. From the start there is a studied deference to Sir Humphry, which reflects the style of the pair’s day-to-day relationship: ‘by a high favour Sir H. Davy will put [this letter] with his own, and it will be conveyed by a particular person’. There are tiny hints of unhappiness such as a loving son might try to suggest to his mother, but not so much as to worry her. The journey had been ‘as pleasant and agreeable (a few things excepted, in reality nothing) as it was possible to be’. Faraday runs quickly over events in Paris, how Sir Humphry’s ‘high name’ in the city gave them easy access to everything they wanted to see, and how their passports were granted ‘with the utmost readiness’. He sweeps his mother down through France in a line or two, gives her a hint of the dangers of travel in a remark about their stormy passage between Genoa and Lerici, writes nothing about Florence, and tips her out at Rome, ‘in the midst of things curious and interesting’. But with this and the letter written a fortnight later to Benjamin Abbott, we begin to get additional information that adds depth to the Journal account.
They had been held up by bad weather in Genoa, while trying to take a boat across the bay to Lerici. Taking advantage of the delay Sir Humphry called on Professor Viviani, who had some electric fish in captivity, and tried to discover if the fishes’ electric charge was strong enough to decompose water; he found it was not, but nevertheless they gave some good shocks.
The short voyage to Lerici was rough and dangerous, but it had the effect of silencing Lady Davy, who seems not to have stopped talking since they left England. Faraday was beginning to get fed up with her and her imperious ways, treating him like the servant he did not consider himself to be. In a later recollection Abbott wrote an account of what Faraday must have told him when he came home:
When in a boat in the Gulf of Genoa a sudden storm of wind … placed them for some time in some danger, and she (Lady D) was so alarmed that she became almost faint and in consequence ceased from talking. This, he told me, was so great a relief to him that he quite enjoyed the quiet and did not at all regret the cause that produced it, though the situation was for some time critical.
Passing through Italy, they drove into Lucca a day ahead of the English army that had landed at Livorno, and received a surprising and rapturous welcome. The entire town, waiting outside the gates, cheered and ululated as they trotted past. The crowd did not care that the carriage carried no guns to drive the French out; all that mattered was that the passengers were English, and grandees too apparently, smiling and waving as they passed along the line of people. To Abbott Faraday wrote:
… since we have left the French dominions we have been received with testimonies of pleasure & gratitude as strong as it was possible for the tongue to express. At Lucca we found the whole population without the gates waiting for the English … The town was decorated in the most brilliant manner by colours, drapery and embroidery flying from every window, & in the evening general illuminations took place done as expressive of their joy at the deliverance from the French government, & the English were hailed everywhere as their Saviours.
They arrived in Florence flushed and delighted. It was a glorious morning, enhanced by the good fortune of finding the best hotel, ‘a Palace both outside and inside’, as Faraday described it,
and that is probably just what it was. For the next two days he took himself off on his strolls about town. He discovered the River Arno, admired the bridges, particularly Ponte Santa Trinità, with its ‘air so light and free one can scarcely imagine it to be of stone’.
He walked to the Duomo, the Baptistery, considered climbing Giotto’s campanile for ‘the finest possible view of Florence & the environs’, and then on to the Piazza Signoria. The bronzes in these public areas caught his eye particularly – the Baptistery doors, ‘bronze and most beautifully cast’; in the square ‘the bronze is a fine figure of Perseus with the head of Medusa’.
The great object of the visit to Florence was to go with Sir Humphry to see the scientific instruments formerly in use at Accademia del Cimento, once the working place of Galileo, and by now in the Museo di Storia Naturale. Faraday told Abbott all about it: ‘here is a fine Museum of Natural History containing an immense quantity of things curious & instructive and some wax works in anatomy & botany of the most delicate kind. The collection of apparatus is numerous and rendered invaluable by the instruments of Galileo & the Duke of Tuscany.’
He goes on to describe the telescope with which Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in 1610, the ‘vast quantity’ of electrical machines and apparatus, the magnets – one of which could support a weight of 150 pounds
– and particularly the great lens that Grand Duke Ferdinand III had commissioned. There were minerals, shells, insects, and stuffed birds and their eggs. The last room ‘contains some singular specimens of carving and modelling representing the horrors of death in the Plague and in a sepulchre. There were some Egyptian mummies in the room, one of them opened.’
For two days Sir Humphry and Faraday worked on iodine in the museum’s laboratory, and also began to prepare for a dramatic experiment to show that diamond is pure carbon, a chemically identical substance. They set the Duke’s lenses, the larger one fourteen or fifteen inches in diameter, out in the garden. It was a sunny morning, and they tested their strength and efficacy by putting a piece of wood at the focus. Instantly the wood burst into flame. These were also the days of the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrated in Florence with great excitement. Faraday recorded the atmosphere in his Journal: ‘The country people flocked into the town in their best attire, the women ornamented with enormously large ear-rings and an abundance of gold and silver lace about the head.’
People were shouting, cannon firing, and fairground booths had been set up in the streets between the cathedral and the Annunziata. Faraday went into the cathedral ‘at about 11 o’clock’ and heard the Te Deum to the sound of trumpets and cannonfire: ‘The sound of the trumpet in so large an inclosed space produced a striking effect on the mind – the music beautiful.’
On Sunday morning, the Feast of the Annunciation, Sir Humphry set a diamond on a perforated dish mounted on a platinum rod inside a thick glass globe. This was filled with a stream of hydrogen, ignited to heat the diamond. They had moved the equipment out of the garden, and now they were upstairs in the museum, by a south-facing window. On a wooden framework to one side was an air pump whose iron arm and oiled joints glistened in the sunshine as Faraday gently wound them up and down. Adjacent was a bubbling retort with potassium chlorate being heated to produce oxygen. Pipes joined the pump to the globe and the globe to the retort. As the hydrogen was drawn out of the globe by the pump, the oxygen, with a huff and a sneeze, was drawn in. Thus, the diamond was bathed in an atmosphere of oxygen, as pure as Davy and Faraday could make it.
They all kept an anxious eye on the sun, for the sky must be clear and the sun as high and as hot as possible to give the required heat to the lens. With the noise of the Annunciation crowds sussurating across the garden, and the bangs of the cannon going off at the cathedral, Sir Humphry adjusted the lenses. The large one, nearest to the window, took the sunlight first and focused it onto the smaller one, set about three and a half feet away. This focused the light yet again, into an intense, dazzling, severe point which passed sharply through the wall of the glass globe and fell like a pinprick onto the diamond. This too sparkled, glorying in the experiment, but nothing else seemed to be happening. For about three-quarters of an hour they let the heat point play on the diamond, adjusting the apparatus from time to time to let the wall of the globe cool and to compensate for the relentless motion of the sun. Then, ‘on a sudden Sir H Davy observed the diamond to burn visibly, and when removed from the focus it was found to be in a state of active and rapid combustion. The diamond glowed brilliantly with a scarlet light inclining to purple, and when placed in the dark continued to burn for about four minutes.’
They must have cheered and danced, having achieved what many thought impossible, the creation of about seven hundred degrees centigrade of heat at a tiny point of light, and the sudden, incandescent, unearthly consumption into a pile of black dust of the hardest substance known to man. Cheers echoed in the distance from the celebrations of the Feast of the Annunciation, where the crowds were celebrating another creation at a tiny point, one which would generate more light and heat than any diamond.
Over the next few days they repeated the experiment. It failed once because the sun was not strong enough, but as they progressed they found they could light up and damp down the burning diamond at will. They tried the procedure in different atmospheres – with carbonic acid and nitrous oxide – but the prize of the experiment was the proof that diamond is pure carbon, one and the same as graphite, pure and black. The experiments went on so long, day by day across a week, that Faraday was too late on one of the days to get into the Uffizi to see the paintings. But it was an intense, magnificent and spectacular week, comparable in excitement to anything in the long months of laboratory work in London and Paris that Sir Humphry had shared with Faraday. It was a definitive instance of the star scientist creating spectacular effects to pluck one more certain fact from the bosom of nature.
The party left Florence early on Sunday, 3 April, a week after the first success with the burning glass. ‘In no place since I left England have I been so comfortable and happy,’ Faraday wrote.
They had been welcomed to Italy as conquerors, and left Florence with a conquest of their own. ‘Englishmen are here respected almost to adoration,’ Faraday wrote to his mother from Rome, ‘and I proudly own myself as belonging to that nation which holds so high a place in the scale of European Powers.’
CHAPTER 7 Mr Dance’s Kindness Claims my Gratitude (#ulink_9ba68f86-ffab-5b6b-a38b-c41a7960a1e7)
On the way to Rome Sir Humphry became more buoyant than he seems to have been on other parts of the journey, and he spoke with excitement about the geological features of the landscape. The double success of the iodine discovery and the burning of diamonds must have loosened his tongue, for the geological information that Faraday writes down in the Journal is fuller and more detailed than any earlier notes. They were also, now, well away from the French.
They spent the first night in Siena, where Faraday visited the cathedral, a building ‘of great magnitude and covered externally with black and white marble’.
Some of the designs in the mosaic floor were uncovered for him, and he also looked at illuminated missals in the Libreria Piccolomini. South of Siena, where they spent a second night, they passed through a volcanic ridge of the Apennines and stopped to climb one of the peaks.
The summit was lava & pumice of various kinds, below under the lava basalt occurred, split irregularly in a perpendicular direction. There were many cavities in the basalt, some of them contained very minute cubical crystals of a black colour and opaque. In others were larger semi-transparent white and prismatical crystals. These Sir H Davy thought to have been formed by the cooling of a substance rendered fluid by heat.
They travelled on to Lago di Bolsena, the largest volcanic lake in Italy, past ‘mountains singularly ridged and rifted on their south and western sides, as if cut into their present form by enormous torrents’.
As they made their way down into the Tiber valley, they looked out anxiously and with growing excitement for their first glimpse of Rome. Then, coming round a turn of a hill, there was the dome of St Peter’s and, surrounding it, gradually the eloquent panorama of Rome revealed itself. They clattered down into the city, through the Porta del Popolo, and took the Via del Babuino to their hotel in the Piazza di Spagna.
Faraday got away as soon as he could for his first stroll. He crossed the Ponte Sant’ Angelo and visited St Peter’s, ‘of which more anon if I am able’.
This was Easter week, and the cathedral was being prepared for the celebrations. He went back to St Peter’s the next day, Thursday, 7 April, to see the spectacle.
Towards the evening the illumination of the churches for which preparations had been making for two days took place and St Peter’s presented a magnificent sight. A large cross was suspended over the middle of the aisle, nearly under the centre of the dome, and illuminated in a brilliant and perfect manner on all sides. The effect it produced on the mind on entering the church was singular and powerful. In the chapel of our saviour was an illumination consisting of above two thousand wax candles of great size, and everything was arranged for the reception of the pious or curious. The various religious societies in the city came in procession by turns with lighted tapers and chaunting to give homage, and the whole city appeared engaged in the service of religion. On the Saturday after at about 10 o’clock a general firing of all the pistols, guns &c &c in the town commenced, and continued for nearly two hours, the people taking this method of expressing their joy for the resurrection.
Overwhelmed as he was by the religious spectacle, Faraday’s interest was taken more by the antiquities than by the buildings which he had described earlier as ‘modern work’.
There is genuine amazement in his voice at the size, extent and magnificence of ancient Rome. Though he may have had ample opportunity in Riebau’s shop to read pre-war histories, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the perspective of Faraday’s generation as it reached adulthood was one of rebuilding, reconstruction, analysis and discovery. Michael Faraday was one of the first Englishmen to enter Rome after Napoleon’s abdication, and he saw the city with the eyes of a young subject of a newly triumphant nation. Travelling through France, he had been a licensed visitor to an enemy country; in Italy he was a welcomed and admired representative of a liberating power. This gave him an altered perspective, and as a young man of modest manner and enquiring outlook, he handled the change in viewpoint with courtesy and tact. There was also a new moral ingredient: Faraday’s generation looked at the ruins of ancient Rome in the light of their experience of the new Europe, which had itself suffered ruin during thirty years of war.
Faraday tended to set off on his sightseeing walks at about eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and to stay out until four in the afternoon. On one morning he started by climbing the Antonine Column ‘to trace out from it the route I wished to go’.
He walked to the Piazza di Pietra, to the Church of the Gesù, and up the hill to the Capitol, where he saw the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius: ‘the air and energy of the horse is wonderful: it is considered as the most perfect work of its kind’.
Then he slowly picked his way across the Forum, and walked on to the Colosseum, to the Campo Vaccino and the Palace of the Caesars to San Giovanni in Laterano, ‘a magnificent piece of architecture, and within abounds in riches paintings and statues’. He was now near the easternmost part of the city walls, approaching Porta Maggiore, ‘formerly part of the aqueduct of Tiberius Claudius, but being the part under which passed the public road it was formed in a more magnificent and imposing manner than the other arches’. Turning for home, Faraday noted the ruins of the Temple of Minerva Medica, and walked up Via Merulana to Santa Maria Maggiore. He was ‘astonished’ by the baths of Trajan,
some of the finest of the baths which
inclosed temples, perystiles, games, the schools of philosophers, libraries, theatres, alleys, arbours &c, indeed everything that the arts could contribute to their magnificence, their convenience or their luxury … There were at Rome twelve public baths or therma, and 860 were counted which were private. In the reign of Nero their number was almost infinite.
That was about enough for one day, and ‘turning off took my road home hungry, thirsty and fatigued’. But at eight o’clock the next morning he was off again, this time in the other direction, towards the Pantheon, south to the Teatro di Marcello and, via the Arch of Janus Quadrifons and the Cloaca Maxima, to the Circus Maximus, the baths of Caracalla and the start of the Appian Way. The Journal breaks off in mid-sentence just as Faraday writes ‘I rambled along …’;
and so he probably did for the rest of that day. These are entirely manageable expeditions for a man of his age, and it was early April, not high summer, but nevertheless the assiduity, energy and single-minded determination to get about on his ‘rambles’ reflects the importance to Faraday of seeing as much of Rome as he possibly could.
The letter to Abbott that Faraday began in Rome on 1 May he continued in Geneva nearly three months later. There he reflected on what he had seen in Italy, and with the benefit of distance wrote:
… the things [in Rome] would affect anyone, and that mind must be dull indeed that is not urged to think & think again on these astonishing remains of the Romans when they appear in sight at every corner … The two things here most striking are the Coliseum and St Peter’s, and one is not more worthy of the ancients than the other is of the moderns. The Coliseum is a mighty ruin & indeed so is Rome & so are the Romans, & it is almost impossible to conceive how the hardy warlike race which conquered the globe has degenerated into modern, effeminate, idle Italians. St Peter’s appears to have been erected on the plan of some fairy tale, for every luxury, every ornament and every embellishment & species of embellishment have been employed in its erection. Its size is mighty, it is mountainous, its architecture elegant, its materials costly. They consist of Marbles of every hue & every kind of mosaics, statues, casts, bronzes, Jewels, Gold & silver not spread [?] sparingly but shiny & glittering in every part.
There is a break in the record of Faraday’s weeks in Rome, because the first draft of the Journal is lost, and something must have distracted him when he was writing it up years later, for he never returned to finish it. His first biographer Bence Jones, however, who was working from the original draft, picks up the story fifteen days later on 5 May. There was not much science done in Rome by Sir Humphry and Faraday, by all accounts. After a long early-morning walk on 15 April from the Piazza di Spagna to the Colosseum, the Forum and the Campo Vaccino and back again, Faraday had breakfast and went with Sir Humphry to the Accademia dei Lincei in the Palazzo Corsini to experiment with charcoal. This was probably to continue ideas Davy had developed during the burning of the diamonds, but ‘in two experiments the globes burst and the results were lost’.
Just before they left Rome they went together to the home of Domenico Morichini, where they repeated his experiment which aimed to show that violet light, when isolated in the spectrum, had the property of magnetising a needle. From the Journal account, Faraday was convinced by what he saw, but Davy remained sceptical.
At about two o’clock in the morning of Saturday, 7 May they left Rome for Naples, driving past the Colosseum, ‘beautiful in the extreme’ in the moonlight.
They had set out so early to avoid robbers, and at dawn met the party of gendarmes detailed to escort them through dangerous country. The Journal record now goes silent for a week, until we find Sir Humphry, Faraday and a boy servant at the foot of Mount Vesuvius preparing to climb. They paused halfway up to enjoy ‘the extensive view of both sea and earth’,
and continued over ‘rough and hilly’ ground broken by lava streams, impeded by layers of ash, ‘a very bad foundation for the feet, continually receding as the foot advances; nevertheless, by the aid of strong sticks and two or three restings, we attained the top by about half past two o’clock’.
