Friday, 10 September 1886: To the Broadway Grand Central Hotel

With the last of the "modern zinck covered Rochester made trunks" packed and final instructions issued to Cedar Hill's caretakers, Helen now set out for New York City where she checked into the Grand Central Hotel to await the arrival of her husband from Boston.

The hotel, incidentally, was located at 671 Broadway, occupying the block between Bond and Third Streets. Anyone today who knows anything about that part of Manhattan probably already suspects, first, that a massive Victorian-era building no longer stands in that spot and, second, that the real estate has been absorbed by the sponge that is New York University. Both suppositions are, of course, correct. The hotel structure became apartments, that became low-income apartments, which meant they fell into disrepair. A section collapsed in the 1970s, leading to the demolition of the site. NYU dorms now occupy the property.

Back then, Helen could look forward to her first trip abroad in relative luxury. While much of this trip has the focus on Frederick, remember that Helen came from a modest background. She grew up in rural New York. While not poor, and certainly among the upper class of her town and now elevated in social class in her marriage to one of the most recognizable black men in the country, Norfolk, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Iowa, and Connecticut were probably as far away from the place she had been born. Unlike her husband, she had never been overseas. Furthermore, she was not just going to see the exiting places that everyone went to see on the Grand Tour. She was also going to see the places that Douglass had visited and wrote about during his younger, feistier abolitionist days, back when she herself was a mere child presumably being fired to action by his autobiographies and speeches.

Indeed, the abolitionist movement played a "now and then" harmony through the first leg of their journey.

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Sources:
Image from Frederick Douglass National Historic Park Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/frederickdouglassnhs/albums

Quote about trunk: FD to H.C. Kudlich, Cedar Hill, Anacostia, D.C., 14 Sept 1887, General Correspondence, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.

Hotel: Helen Pitts Douglass Diary, 14 Sept 1886, Family Papers, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.

Hotel: Michael Pollack, "Broadway Central Hotel's Heyday Before a Fatal Collapse," New York Times, 6 Nov 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/nyregion/broadway-central-hotels-heyday-before-a-fatal-collapse.html

Hotel (any of my students reading this, don't do this at home!): Grand Central Hotel, Wikipedia, 10 Sept 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Hotel

Sunday, September 5, 1886: Bon Voyage!

Washington Bee, 11 Sept 1886

In the afternoon, the guests arrived. Former Senator Blanche K. Bruce escorted his socialite wife, Josephine. The black Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Milton M. Holland, and his wife, Virginia, made their way up to the Hill, too. John Smythe, who had returned from his second term as U.S. minister to the black republic of Liberia, a position he had gained through Douglass's influence, joined them, as did Dr. John F. Cook and Dr. Furman Jeremiah Shadd of Howard University.

These lights of the capital's black bourgeoisie were only those named by the Washington Bee. This leading African American paper assured its readers that "many others" attended. So, too, did Lewis, Frederick, Jr., Charles, and Rosetta, along with their spouses. The grandchildren roamed the grounds; and, while the Bee did not specifically mention croquet, most knew that the wickets had become a
fixture of the Douglass back yard during any gathering.

This would be the last of such gatherings at Cedar Hill for some time. Literary societies, Shakespeare clubs, calling hours all would be suspended for the coming year or two. Upstairs, except for the baggage that Frederick would take with him the next day for a scheduled engagement at the Wendell Phillips Club in Boston, the trunks awaited packing. Otherwise, Lewis had been granted power of attorney, Charles left in charge of Cedar Hill, and caretakers left to oversee its daily care.  In a week, Frederick and Helen would rendezvous at the Broadway Grand Central Hotel in Manhattan, then board the steamer City of Rome for their Grand Tour of Europe.

"My Free Life Began on the Third of September, 1838"

He "finally resolved upon the third day of September, as the day upon which I would make a second attempt to secure my freedom." For three weeks he prepared, seeming to go about business as usual. Finding employment for himself, turning over his wages to his de facto master, Hugh Auld, lulling Auld into believing that Frederick had once more submitted to the conditions of his enslavement. "My object in working steadily," Douglass later confessed, "was to remove any suspicion he might entertain of my intent to run away; and in this I succeeded admirably."

(I call him "Frederick" throughout this post for he was shedding Bailey, would not take up Douglass for another week or two, and had perhaps not yet assumed the name "Johnson" that he used when he married Anna a few days later.)

Those three weeks had their moments of apprehension. He knew that he would be severing the ties that he had with the community he had formed in Baltimore that had helped him develop his mind and sense of self. "The love of them was my tender point," he admitted, "an shook my decision more than all things else." Furthermore, while he had failed in a previous escape attempt, he felt certain that a failure this time would doom him to slavery forever. "I could not hope to get off with any thing less than the severest punishment," he knew, "and being placed beyond the means of escape."

(Imagine, for a moment, an alternate history in which he was discovered, punished, and sold into a coffle to New Orleans. What mischief would he have wrought on the Mississippi? Would he have led a school? A revolt? A maroon community in the swamps? Would he have survived another Covey-like encounter? Would he have found a wife and had children and died an early death of overwork or stroke or heart attack from containing the rage to preserve their lives?)

He was not entirely alone, however. Anna planned to join him, and she was among those helping him prepare. She and their future life and children were also a reason to make this escape succeed. He protected her respectability just as he protected his Baltimore friends' identities by not mentioning them by name in the planning in his first two autobiographies lest the "underground railroad" become and "upperground" one.

Decades passed before he told the details of his escape, and you can find an account in the first chapter of the second part of his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. He begins by telling of the dangers in telling the tale before the end of slavery, "for publication of details would certainly have put in peril the persons and property of those who assisted." The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was still in the country's future when he lit out for freedom in 1838, but aiding a fugitive was still a crime and federal law sided with slaveholders.

He told his audience that he would have shared his story much earlier "had there been anything very heroic or thrilling in the incidents connected with my escape." How to top Harriet Tubman's multiple missions to retrieve her family from Maryland, or the Crafts' ingenious disguise of master and "man servant" when they boarded a train in Savannah, or Henry "Box" Brown mailing himself north, or the "Jerry Rescue" in Syracuse? "My success was due to address rather than courage;" he demurred, "to good luck rather than bravery."

First, he borrowed a Seaman's Protection Certificate from a black sailor friend. who clearly trusted him to return it. (Mystic Seaport has a database of many.) After all, that sailor was vulnerable to kidnapping or arrest during the time that he did not have the papers upon him. Then, he purchased a ticket with the money that he had saved and the money donated by Anna Murray from the sale of a featherbed. Black hackman Isaac Rolls brought his baggage to the train station, timed to arrive just as the train departed. Frederick, dressed in a sailor's uniform sewn by Anna, grabbed his belongings and hopped on the train as it began moving. His life in a maritime community allowed him to fit into his role well-enough to evade detection, "for I knew a ship from stem to stern, and from keelson to cross-trees, and could talk sailor like an 'old salt.'" Even his cocky attitude toward the conductor asking to see his free papers suited the part.

The train sped through Maryland, and while fast for the time, not as quickly as Frederick would have liked. They crossed into Delaware, which he reminded his readers was still "another slave State, where slave catchers generally awaited their pray, for it was not in the interior of the State, but on its borders, that these human hounds were most vigilant and active." At Havre de Grace, he boarded a ferry, where a black boat hand hoped to trade sea stories and nearly blew his cover. The same nearly happened again after the crossing when, on his second train of the trip, he spied a white captain from Baltimore on the opposite platform and a blacksmith "whom I knew well" on the same train as himself. The blacksmith, Frederick was sure, recognized him, "but had no heart to betray me."

This second train took him to Wilmington, Delaware, where he transferred to a steamship. The steamship took him upriver to Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, he found his way to the Willow Street train station, and too his third train trip to New York. The whole business took place in the space of twenty-four hours.

When you drive I-95 or take Amtrak from Baltimore to New York City, you follow roughly the same path (but not exactly). I used to call it the Frederick Douglass Freedom Route when I lived down that way. At the end of this chapter he wrote that the end of this journey was "the end of my experience as a slave" and began the next chapter by declaring that "my free life began on the third of September, 1838. So, I like to call September 3rd "Frederick Douglass Freedom Day."

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Sources:
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. Blassingame, et al (1845; paperback, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, ed. McKivigan, et al (1882; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

Seaman Protection Certificates, and Register of Seaman Protection Certificates, G.W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport.

Obtaining The Passport

The man stood six feet tall, or so Newton Benedict, the passport clerk, estimated. Hair gray. Dark skin. Bearded, oval face. Forehead of medium height. Nose prominent. Eyes dark, too. If he was born in February1817 and this year was 1886 now August -- Benedict worked a quick calculation on the bottom corner of the application -- then the applicant was sixty-nine years old. Would the gentleman be travelling alone? "Wife" Benedict dashed down, in the middle of the page, amid the descriptive features. No affidavit nor witness testimony of the applicant's citizenship would be needed. Anyone who had lived in the nation's capital at any time in the past decade knew that the man who signed the form "Fred'k Douglass" was a legal American.

That had not been the case twenty-six years earlier.

Citizens of the United States passed across the ever changing global borders with very little documentation during the nineteenth century. Indeed, that held true until 1941. Therefore, in spite of being a fugitive slave in the eyes of the law on his first trip to England in 1845 and a person of interest in a federal case on his second in 1860, Douglass made the passage fairly easily in terms of State Department bureaucracy.

That is, until he decided to visit France during that second trip. As he recounted in his memoir, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, "The attempt upon the life of Napoleon III about that time, and the suspicion that the conspiracy against him had been hatched in England, made the French government very strict in the enforcement of its passport system." Sarah Parker Remond and Caroline Putnam, sisters to Douglass's first African American lecturing partner, Charles Lenox Remond, had also made an application for a visa a few months earlier. They were turned down.

Although the details of both cases differed, ultimately the Dred Scot decision had rendered them non-citizens unentitled to passports. He did not go to France, although he did receive permission to visit from the French minister in London. Remond and Putnam did go, but only after publically embarrassing Benjamin Moran, the assistant secretary who had denied them their visas.

Still, in 1886, Douglass did not need a passport. As in 1860, he may have wanted to "leave nothing to chance." Nevertheless, this is a public document, issued by the Department of State and held by the National Archives, that implies that Frederick Douglass, specifically, is a citizen of the United States.

Helen Douglass, "wife," on the other hand, like all other married women, had a legal identity covered by her husband's.

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Sources:

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Washington D.C.; NARA Series: Passport Applications, 1795-1905; Roll #: 285; Volume #: Roll 285 - 01 Aug 1886-30 Sep 1886, Ancestry.com

History of passports: https://www.archives.gov/research/passport 

Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, ed. John R. McKivigan, et al (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) 1: 252.

Sarah Parker Remond's passport incident: “Sara Parker Remond and the Passport Issue,” Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), I: 469-73; Sirpa Salenius, An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 105-110

The Arts Fuse Review of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass and other Links

I've been lazy and not keeping up with Douglass on the Grand Tour or much of anything, really. Meanwhile, the Arts Fuse has published a stunning review of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass: http://artsfuse.org/160748/book-review-women-in-the-world-of-frederick-douglass-crucial-partners/

Roberta Silman, I don't know you, but I adore you! You read the book, you get the book, you get what I was trying to say probably  more than I did. Plus, I'm not sure anyone has eover called anything I have done "fierce" and meant it seriously or as a compliment. Thank you!

Thank you also to Amy Cools of Ordinary Philosophy for your favorable mention. I'm so glad that you enjoyed reading the book after so long a wait. Amy is a fellow Douglassonian (to adopt a term coined by another Douglassonian, John Muller, author of Frederick Douglass in Washington, D.C.) interviewed me about the book last year.

As of today, a piece I wrote for the My Book: the Movie blog, which is part of the Campaign for the American Reader and edited by Marshal Zeringue, went up. Actually, I got very carried away with the assignment to cast the movie version of my book and wrote several pages, casting at least half of the figures who appear. They just wanted 600 words, so this represents only a fraction of a much longer version. Needless to say, I've been playing this game for a very long time.:
 https://mybookthemovie.blogspot.com/2017/07/leigh-foughts-women-in-world-of.html 

Poland Springs , 1883

Douglass spent the month of July 1883 in Poland Springs. He let his daughter, Rosetta, know that he was on his way there on 9 July:

My dear Rose: the journey in prospect gave me more trouble than in realization. It was extremely warm, but I suffered much less than I expected from smoke dust & heat. All turned out well as to making connections at New York, reached Providence promptly Sunday morning – went straight to Mrs. Greene’s & after breakfast to Miss Eddy, who without Sabbath day scruples went to work on my portrait which has been much improved since I left here five weeks ago. I shall probably leave here tomorrow for Poland Springs Please let the children at home know that I am in good care – I will write to them soon – You know when I am away from home, I am as much a part of my surroundings that I can do but very little in writing letters so you may consider as usual, no news, good news. But if anything should happen to me out of the common way it will be speedily make known through the newspapers. I shall however keep you pretty well informed as to how I am getting along. Don’t forget to tie up my daily letters & keep them securely –

                You may write to me if you please at Poland Springs.

                Love to the children all –

                Affectionately –

                Fredk. Douglass[1]

This was his destination as it would have appeared when he arrived:

Here is how it appeared in the early 20th century:

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[1] Frederick Douglass to Rosetta Douglass Sprague, Providence, 9 July 1882, FDP, DHU-MS

Douglass Visits the Vatican and is Unimpressed

Although the cost of a ticket and the size of the crowds today causes a visitor to cram a visit to the Vatican into a single day, leaving her overwhelmed and fatigued by closing time, the Douglasses spread their visit out over three days. Art seems not to have been something that moved him to great effusion except when the subject offended him (of course, I'm now going to have to go back and search for his writing on art a little more methodically, but he did not strike me as a great art aficionado, leaving that to Helen). Usually, the offense was in the depiction of people of African descent, such as his tirade against the crouching emancipated slave at Lincoln's feet in a statue erected in Washington, D.C. near his home on Capitol Hill.  In the Vatican, the work that awakened his criticism was this:

"Saw among other great pictures a modern one proclaiming the new dogma of the emasculate conception of the Virgin, the Mother of Jesus. "

To be perfectly honest, I did not expect to actually see this painting, thinking that it was much smaller and would not be highlighted amid the works of Rafael, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and the anonymous artists of antiquity. How little did I know! As Douglass wrote, "The announcement of this fresh tax upon the credulity of the faithful in this picture is well calculated to impress favorably the devout Catholic[.]" Indeed, this picture three walls of an entire room, with a statue of the virgin in the center. The photo above is the typical tourist photo: walk into the room, say "oh, wow!" and snap a picture. This one below is on the wall to the left of the main image.:

 This one is on the right side of the main image:



Douglass then describes his impression of the figures in the painting: "The face of Pope Pius was given by the artist a celestial expression surpassing any modern attempts in that direction I have seen."

"Some of the faces of the Cardinal's seemed to be a little doubtful and have been brought to consent to the new dogma under external pressure rather than internal conviction."

Well, is he wrong? Some of those officials seem less than enthusiastic. This doctrine had been declared in 1854, followed by papal infallibility in the 1870s, all of which took place against a backdrop of Italian nationalism and unification that reduced the political power of the church in Italy. Douglass's detection of political expediency rather than faith probably did not miss the mark.
Douglass, secular and devoted to republicanism, had a difficult time refraining from mocking such ideas. I wonder if he held back around his hosts. He and Helen had been able to see parts of the Vatican through the influence of Gertrude Putnam's connections with one of the Cardinals (although I'm not certain if she knew him personally of if this was a matter of simply writing and asking for permission). That and her lodgings so close to the Vatican might suggest that she was sympathetic to Catholicism if not a believer herself (I would have to research this a little further).


Douglass, of course, never shied from expressing his opinion, and loved lively debate, including and perhaps especially with intelligent women. The Remond sisters were well aware of his propensity for debate and probably warned Putnam. Certainly, the lunch afterward with Gertrude, Edmund, and Caroline Putnam along with Maricha Redmond, Dr. Sarah Pinter, and Christine Sargent, the daughter of a Unitarian minister, must have been lively and fascinating. After all, as he looked around at the Remond sisters, Caroline, Maricha, and Sarah, he thought "in all of them I saw much of the fire of their eloquent Brother Charles;" and Charles had helped Douglass stoke his own flame so many decades earlier.

More Sightings of "Women In the World of Frederick Douglass"

In a Houston bookstore:

That one is really quite groovy because I spent a good twenty-five(ish) years of my life in Houston.

In a Saratoga Springs, NY, bookstore:

At the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, aka "The Big Berks," with credit to my arkie pal Digger, editor of LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History  for the National Parks Service.:

Also at the Berks, among some embarrassingly great company:

Number 1 New Release in Civil War Women on Amazon!:

Also, part of "A Double-Dip of History" at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York, with the eminent historian, Douglas R. Egerton (aka "Mr. Leigh Fought") tonight, June 8, 2017, at 7 pm.

Riding high on Fortuna's Wheel!

Douglass Visits the Vatican, part 1

During their first week at in Rome, the Douglasses visited the Vatican three times. On their first full day, January 20, 1887, they went to the Dome of St. Peter's Basilica.:

I stood where until recently I never expected to stand, under the Dome of St. Peters, the largest Cathedral in the world, and around which clusters a larger interest perhaps than any other so called Christian edifice. In looking at its splender, one could not help being deeply impressed by its gorgiousness and perfection despite of its utter contradiction to the life and lessons of Jesus. he was meek and lowly, but here was little else than pride and pomp. It is well for the world that the age that could rear this wonderful building so perfect in architectural grace has past. Yet in view of what it speaks of architectural skill of man and of his possibilities we may rejoice that this marvellous building was erected and that it will long stand to pleas the eye of man.

The Baedeker's guide doesn't mention a fee for entering the Basilica at the time, but today here are a number of different ticket packages for self-guided tours, audio tours, and guided tours that include various parts of Vatican City including the Basilica, the Vatican Museum, gardens, palace, and so on. You can also wait in line for hours and hours. Scalpers -- yes, like at rock concerts -- will definitely offer to sell you "jump the line" tickets at highly inflated prices. They wear official looking tags that say "Vatican Information," but have no actual affiliation with the Vatican at all from what I could tell. Douglass seemed not to have encountered any of this. Still, I wonder if he stood in line at all and what the procedure for admittance was. This will take a little more scrutiny of the Baedeker's and more research into the Grand Tour.

Frederick's initial impressions of the contradiction of great worldly beauty and power in celebration of the humility of a carpenter's son who championed the poor and downtrodden continued when he and Helen were able to get a private tour of "the interior treasures of St. Peter's." This tour came through the connections of Mrs. Edmund Quincy Putnam. Mrs. Putnam was Gertrude [Elliston] Putnam, the daughter-in-law of Caroline Putnam. 

Caroline Putnam was born Caroline Remond, and she was the sister of Sarah Parker Remond and Charles Lenox Remond. We'll get back to Sarah Parker Remond, but Charles Lenox Remond was Frederick's first black companion on the antislavery lecturing circuit and Frederick derived quite a bit of courage in standing up to his white allied while travelling with Remond. The American Anti-Slavery Society Collection is filled with letters in which Maria Weston Chapman despairs at their independence and their failure to be what she deemed appropriately deferential. They went their separate ways quite acrimonously in the 1840s, but that was four decades earlier by the time the Douglasses arrived in Italy, and Remond had died in 1873. 

The Putnams also had a very convenient address to the Vatican. They lived at Hotel Palazzo Moroni, 165 Borgo Vecchio. You won't find Borgo Vecchio on the map today, nor its companion Borgo Nuovo. Google Maps turns up neither except as restaurant names. A "Find" search in the Baedeker, however, turns this up:

The Castle S. Angelo is adjoined by the Piazza Pia, whence four streets diverge to the W.: in the centre, on both sides of the fountain, which like the two adjacent facades was erected by Pius IX, are the streets called the Borgo Vecchio (l.) and Borgo Nuovo (r.); to the left, by the river, the Borgo S. Spirito; to the right is the Borgo S. Angelo.....The usual route to the Vatican is by the BORGO NUOVO. 

Using these clues and Google Maps:

I realized that the two have since been merged into the Via della Conciliazione.:

Indeed, they were merged and the layout all designed in the 1930s. Let the date sink in. Yes, by the Fascists; but that lay fifty years in the future. The Putnams' Borgo Vecchio address lay somewhere along the line of buildings on the left. On their second trip back through Rome later in the spring, the Douglasses also stayed there for nearly three weeks.

The day that Gertrude Putnam gave them a private tour of St. Peter's, the Douglasses went to lunch there where they were joined by not only Caroline Putnam but her two sisters, Maritcha Remond, and "she that I knew forty years and more ago as Miss Sarah Remond," now a doctor working in Florence and married to painter Lazzaro Pintor Cabras. On their second trip back through Rome, the Douglasses visited her where she lodged at 6 Piazza Barberini. 

I would not be surprised if she accompanied them on their journey to Florence or at least gave them recommendations on where to stay. 

The last that Frederick had, in fact, seen Sarah Remond, the two had met in England in 1860 as he promoted his second autobiography and lay low after being implicated in the Harpers Ferry raid. They both had hoped to visit France at the time, but both were denied passports under the argument that they were not U.S. citizens under the Dred Scot decision and therefore not entitled to one. Douglass turned back, and then returned to the U.S. after learning of the death of his daughter, Annie. Remond continued on defiantly, never returning to the country that had rejected her. After the Douglasses departed Rome for the last time, she sent along her love, telling Gertrude that "she treasures the pleasant memory of you both."

But, alas, this post is entering the range of TLDR ("too long didn't read") and must leave you hanging for the next entry. What did Douglass see in the Vatican and what did he think of it? 

Arriving in Rome

The Douglasses visited Rome twice in the winter and spring of 1887. The first time they arrived on January 19, "the day of days in our tour" Frederick proclaimed to his journal. "Like the mysterious lodestone to steel," he told a later audience, anyone with any love for history "is attracted by an invisible power and the attraction increases with every step of his approach" to Rome.

That was certainly the case for me. I chose Rome for my 50th birthday trip because, when I was in my early twenties and not so much living as existing in Houston, where everything was ugly and not allowed to stand for longer than 30 years, I wanted to see something that had endured longer than my own nation -- longer than Christ. I wanted to see beauty.

Unfortunately, the Douglasses arrived in Rome in the evening and, Frederick sighed, "we must curb our curiosity till morning." Waking added to their disappointment. "We were landed in the new part of the city which contradicted all our dreams of the Eternal City," he lamented, "To all appearances we might have been dropped down at any railway station in Paris, London or New York, or at some of the grand hotels at Saratoga or Coney Island."  I think that the young folk these days call that "humble bragging." Still, you can almost hear his crest fall as he describes a bustling, contemporary train station in which "all was more like an American town of the latest pattern than a city whose foundations were laid nearly a thousand years before the flight of Joseph and Mary into Egypt."

Perhaps all travelers experience that sort of clash between the imagined place and the city in which people actually live. For instance, on our first full day, we went to see the Colosseum, and a fundraiser for breast cancer research was taking place on the streets around the ancient center of the city.

I think I had prepared myself for that, or was used to the experience. Indeed, back when I was in my twenties, that was part of what I wanted to see: the juxtaposition of the ancient with the modern. You can find that around every corner in Rome, where every scratch on the earth's surface opens a layer of the past and half of the buildings seem held up by a wall built in the Middle Ages on a foundation build before Christ was born. As in this picture of the Teatro Marcello, which became part of a Medieval Villa, which is now apartments.

Here, the walls of an Etruscan temple lie under the Capitoline Museum, which is an edifice from the Renaissance, in a room built in the past decade to contain and preserve a bronze statue of Augustine dating to his own era.

The Douglasses checked into the Hotel Du Sud, located at 56 Via Capo le Case, which he pronounced "a very comfortable Hotel." I will confess that I did not do meticulous research before this particular trip because it was meant to be vacation with a little Douglass thrown in (I'm intending another that will be all Douglass), so I did not scope out the Hotel Du Sud's location before hand. Here is the Via Capo le Case according to my best friend, Google Maps.:

The heck of it is, I walked near there several times.

The Douglasses stayed in Rome until January 27, when they departed for Naples. In town for only a week, they saw the two major sites that draw most people to Rome: the ruins of the Roman Empire and the Vatican. 

This was the juxtaposition that fascinated Frederick. He later ruminated:

Here can be seen together the symbols of both Christian and pagan Rome; the temples of discarded gods and those of the accepted Savior of the world -- the Son of the Virgin Mary. Empires, principalities, powers and dominions have perished; altars and their gods have mingled with the dust; a religion which made men virtuous in peace and invincible in war, has perished or been supplanted, yet the Eternal City itself remains. 

Bearded Zeus becomes Jupiter becomes Michaelangelo's Creator. The Emperor becomes the Pope. Hadrian's Masoleum become the Pope's fortress becomes the Pope's palace. The statues of religious reverence become the statues of artistic reverence, but serve as the models for new objects of religious worship. The old myths become the metaphors for the new morality. The city regenerates.