Octavius wrestled for seven months outside her gates, and when
he entered them was cheated of everything but honour; because a
citizen, rather than yield his city to the first emperor, set fire
to it, and stabbed himself in the holocaust which followed. Totila
would not rest until he possessed her, and all through the Middle
Ages she fought like a termagant with her neighbours; and the name
of that griffin's brood, the Baglioni, was a terror throughout the
Umbrian vales.[4]
It was Paul III. who brought her to her knees, and forced her to
build his great fortress upon the palaces of her princes, and not
long since she turned and rent it stone from stone, seeking to wipe
out the old insult.
But it is not only in the marvellous and peaceful beauty of her
setting that Perugia is a paradox, for how is it possible to
reconcile the pictures of Perugino and his great pupils--Raphael,
Lo Spagna, Pinturicchio, and Eusebio di San Giorgio--with the
awful deeds of the Oddi and the Baglioni; or the wailing of the
Flagellants with the great soldiers who ruled this turbulent
city--Biordo Michelotto, foully done to death by the wicked Abbot
of Mommaggiore, and Braccio Fortebraccio, the idol of the people?
Paradox again! For the bones of Braccio Fortebraccio, which, to
satisfy the vengeance of Martin V., were buried in unconsecrated
ground, lie in a wooden box in the museum, and sigh to posterity
through their melancholy inscription:
Hospes lege et luge.
Perusiae natum Montonium me exulem excepit,
Mars patriam Umbriam et Capuam mihi subegit.
Roma paruit; Italia theatrum; spectator orbis fuit.
At Aquila cadentem risit quem patria lugens brevi hac urna tegit.
Eheu! Mars extulit, Mors substulit.
Abi.
In the days when Perugino and his pupils were painting their
calm-eyed Madonnas and saints with the blue Umbrian hills as the
background to a world of ineffable peace, Perugia was drenched
with blood daily, and every man carried his life in his hand. Yet
hardly any of the artists of Perugia painted war, though here and
there in their blue distances you see a little band of knights
pricking out on the plain. Bonfigli, the master of Perugino, was
the only one who cared to speak the truth; dear Bonfigli, who loved
Perugia so well, and painted her with such naïve joy upon the
walls of the Palazzo Comunale!
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTER OF S. PIETRO DE'
CASSINENSI.]
Trace Perugia in his frescoes, and you will wonder that it should
be so little changed to-day. There is the slender minaret of San
Pietro de' Cassinensi, and the great Gothic window of San Domenico,
whose cloisters are to-day a barrack, and Sant'Ercolano soaring up
beneath the city walls beside the ancient Porta Marzia. Here you
see the Palazzo Comunale, one of the most sublime Gothic palaces
in Italy, with its curving front and delicate fourteenth-century
windows and majestic portal, and the loggia which Fortebraccio
built by the cathedral. It is all much the same to-day as it was
when Bonfigli painted his primitive wars, except that the citizens
no longer dress in scarlet and fur, and that there are fewer towers
in the city, and none at all on the circuit of the walls.
San Pietro de' Cassinensi is still the gracious church Bonfigli
loved. We walked there one evening towards the hour of sunset. A
little rainstorm, like a petulant burst of weeping, overtook us as
we drew near, and we saw the yellow sunset and the cloud-shadows
in the valley through a web of silver threads woven by the rain
under the acacias. Inside, it was too dark to see the pictures with
which the walls are covered, but we gathered an impression of space
and dignity and richness. In the dim light we marvelled at the
beauty of the choir-stalls, the intarsia, and the carving in which
Stefano of Bergamo, and some say Raphael himself, gave free rein to
fancy, and dreamed of delightful mythical beasts, and sphinxes with
lovely faces, and a wealth of flowers and fruit and joyful little
children. A mad world!
Then the old monk, glad that we loved his treasures, opened
the doors of the choir, so that we might see their exquisite
workmanship in the fading light; and we looked down upon the
incomparable Valley of Spoleto, with Assisi and her sister city,
little Spello, on the skirts of Monte Subasio, and Foligno and
Trevi rising out of rosy sunset mists. There is a small round hill
below San Pietro, just such a little hill as Pinturicchio loved,
encircled by a winding white road, and shadowed with slender trees.
We almost looked to see his gay horsemen in red and blue and
shining steel pricking down into the plain. There were still storms
abroad, and the clouds drifted like great birds across the heavens,
casting their shadows on the valley.
'This is the work of a great artist,' said the philosopher, with a
little sigh of complete content. And indeed it was a worthy picture
to be framed in those exquisite doors.
Night overtook us before we reached Sant'Ercolano, which looked
more like a mosque than ever with its soaring arches in the
twilight. We climbed up the steps beside it, and passed into the
city through the Gate of True Dreams. At night Perugia of the
Middle Ages awakes. As we wandered in her dark and silent streets,
ill-lit and bridged with gloomy arches, our ears were tuned to
catch the voices of the past.
We divided our evenings. Sometimes we took our coffee and vermouth
in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where there was a band or music of
sorts. At other times the poet had his way, and we visited a humble
café opposite the Palazzo Comunale, and afterwards plunged into the
dark and mysterious alleys of the mediaeval city. These were the
evenings that I loved the most. In the distance we could hear the
faint beat of music, and up and down the Corso flowed the gay tide
of promenaders, which always turned before it reached us. Above us
loomed the great Palazzo, which is justly Perugia's pride. In the
gloom its brown and bulging walls would have been as forbidding as
a fortress's but for the delicate tracery of its windows and its
fantastic Gothic door, with the Griffin of the City gazing down
hungrily into the night. The lovely fountain on which the Pisani
and Arnolfo di Cambio lavished their genius was nothing but a
beautiful silhouette against the loggia which Braccio Fortebraccio
put up to shield his beloved citizens from the sun; and on the
steps of the gaunt cathedral the statue of Papa Giulio III., with
raised hand, blessed his careless people.
For Perugia is careless, beautifully and graciously careless. She
has forgotten her woes, she has almost forgotten her old enemies;
she has certainly forgotten to finish her cathedral. And yet
when we sat at night in this romantic spot, where the art of
four hundred years is garnered, we noticed a little yellow lamp
flickering unsteadily above the cathedral door, no brighter than
a glow-worm in comparison with the flare of electric light close
at hand. The passers-by told us its history: how the people of
Perugia, feeling the iron hand of the Farnese Pope, turned for help
to Ridolfo, the last of the great Baglioni Princes. How Ridolfo
failed them, and how in their extremity they turned to Christ,
and besought Him with cries and sobs, tearing their garments and
beating themselves like the Flagellants of the thirteenth century,
to defend them against the terrible Paul III. They placed the
crucifix above the door of San Lorenzo, where the light shines
every night, and laid the keys of the city below the tortured
feet of the Saviour. We know that their prayers were of no avail,
yet every night in Perugia, that city of beautiful and romantic
memories, they still light the little lantern over the cathedral
door, where the crucifix was placed, when they crept with fear
and trembling to the feet of Christ to ask for help against his
Vicar, because Ridolfo Baglione, forsooth! had failed them in their
necessity.
[Illustration: PERUGIA: PORTA EBURNEA.]
A step from here and we found ourselves in the dark and
memory-laden streets of the old town, with their vaulted passages
and their blocked-up Doors of the Dead--those pitiful defences
against the Common Enemy, in which Japan as well as Italy put
faith.[5] Of them all I loved the Via Vecchia best, with its air of
mystery and its many arches linking the grim old palaces together.
At night it was so gloomy there that we could barely find our way
past the ancient Canonica in which so many of the Popes snatched
a holiday from Rome; and as we went down the hill, always between
great palaces, the darkness closed round us. Here and there a
feeble light illuminated the steep path, but for the rest there was
only the starlight to guide us until we came to the great Porta
Augusta, which spanned the road majestically, full of the dignity
of dead Etruria. Seen thus against the stars, with its graceful
fifteenth-century loggia faintly illumined by a yellow light
within, it was as impressive as the pylon of an Egyptian Temple.
Or, if our steps took us another way, we passed the grim towers
of mediaeval mansions, and presently found ourselves at the
Baglioni's Gate of Dreams, or the Porta Mandola, as the Etruscan
gate is called. Here, of a certainty, we would hear music, for
whenever I have passed through that ancient gate at night, the
silence has been broken by gay songs. Sometimes I have sat there
far into the night, dreaming of the Baglioni and listening to the
careless music of I knew not what laughter-loving house. For no
one can live long in Perugia without being fired by the memory of
those strange men whose strength and beauty was famous throughout
Italy, and whose lovely names alone fit them to be the heroes of
romance--Grifonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Sermonetto, Morgante. If
we believe their adoring chronicler, who though he traced their
downfall could not speak of them without the stately prefix 'High
and Mighty Lords,' their beauty was the beauty of the ancient Gods
of Greece, and their courage was the courage of the Heroes. And who
of us but has wept over the Great Betrayal, and the passing of the
beautiful Grifonetto, forgiven at the last by Atalanta? And who has
not loved the young Astorre in his Cloth of Gold bringing his fair
young bride back to his home; and thrilled to read of the Homeric
death of Sermonetto, 'so strong and gallant while he lived that
tongue of man cannot tell the worth of him. One, in very truth, who
never in all his days knew what fear was, and till the last word
died on his lips ever showed himself the greater-hearted, as though
he were not vanquished, but victor of his foe.'
* * * * *
[Illustration: PERUGIA: THE TOMB OF THE VOLUMNII.]
Early one hot and cloudless August morning, while the farmers
with many cries of 'per la Madonna!' were urging their oxen up
the hill to market in the shadow of the old grey University of
Perugia, we drove down into the Valley of the Tiber to see the
wonderful Etruscan tomb close to Ponte San Giovanni, which was
the burial-place of the Volumnii. It is of special interest not
only for its excellent preservation, but because it belongs to the
Roman-Etruscan period, and forms the connecting link between the
old Etruscan tombs and the famous Roman sepulchres a mile or two
outside Rome on the Latin Way.
A short descent took us into the subterranean vault at whose
portal, cut out of the tufa rock, lay the ancient stone door,
set aside now for a modern gate of iron. As we passed into the
dark antechamber the chill damp air was cold as death after
the cicala-haunted sunshine of the fields above. But while we
strained our eyes to pierce the gloom the custode turned on an
electric light hidden behind the cornice, and straightway we
forgot everything in the wonder of the scene before us. In an
inner chamber, resting upon their carved sarcophagi, we saw the
inmates of the tomb grouped round the urn on which reposed the head
of the house above two finely sculptured furies. On the coffered
ceiling a gorgon's head, very terrible, with knotted snakes on its
temples and horror in its face, stared down upon the dead. And
as our eyes became accustomed to the dim light we discovered the
strange symbolism of Etruria all round us. From the ceiling of
the ante-chamber, on whose benches the relatives of the deceased
reclined, to feast or watch beside their dead, little genii,
exquisitely beautiful and light as butterflies, were hanging by the
leaden chains by which they were suspended more than two thousand
years ago. Over the doorway was a sun-disk, springing from the
waves--fit emblem of the immortality of these Etruscans, springing
from the waves of oblivion which for so many centuries washed over
them. But there was none of the colour which makes beautiful the
Tombs of Egypt, and there was hardly the same air of eternity. In
the long corridors of the Royal Tombs of the Pharaohs there is an
archaic defiance as of a life long since forgotten and lost in
the dust of centuries. Here the life is of yesterday; we could
almost hear the heart of Greece and Rome beating gaily in a young
world, and the languid tread of the effete Etruscans, whose curious
symbolism at once repels and mystifies, with its red lascivious
serpents, its demons and furies, its beautiful and reluctant
Medusas, and its solemn mockery of the feasting dead.
TODI
When I think of Todi the first things that I remember are the
golden tassels of the corn against the sky, and the blue chicory
which starred the dusty roadside as we drove to her from Perugia
across the young Tiber. For little Todi, enthroned on her steep
hill, has no railway within thirty-three miles of her gates; and if
you do not wish to ravish the leagues which separate her from the
world by motor, you can only reach her after many hours spent in
the exquisite and touching beauty of the Umbrian Vale. She is one
of those forgotten cities which are still to be found on the hills
of Italy. The years have trampled lightly within her ancient walls;
she has no trains, no jangling trams, very few motors except the
grey automobile from Perugia which bursts noisily into the heart
of her every day. She is a charmed city, whose name is painted on
a signboard outside the gates lest the traveller should pass her
by unwittingly. Within her walls we shook the dust of a work-a-day
world from our feet, and forgot its turmoil in the music of her
bells, which tell the passing hours with the loving persistence of
those grown old in labour.
To many people Todi is a mere horizon of towers on the crest of a
distant hill. To me she is the dwelling-place of happiness. And
because I am a little jealous for Todi, and would have you love
her as I loved her, having watched her grow in beauty as the miles
decreased between us, I beg your patience while we thread the plain
between Perugia and Tuder of the Umbrians.
It was a day of sun and shadow, an ideal morning for an expedition
into Arcady, and we found the beauty of a young world down in the
Valley of the Tiber. The jangle of harness-bells called us early
from our breakfast, and the air was like wine cooled with snow as
we drove down Perugia's four-mile hill, past her great churches,
and on to the long white road where the vines are linked together
for miles in festoons of archaic grace. The only people that we
met were peasants toiling barefoot in the sun. Their olive skins
were deepened to pomegranate; they had lithe figures; their finely
moulded heads were set on long, slender necks; and when we saw them
working under the olives, or coming towards us along the dusty
road from some village fair, leading the milk-white oxen whose
horns were bound with scarlet fillets, we knew that these were the
ideal shepherds among whom the Gods of Greece were content to
dwell. Their white homesteads rose from fields of maize and corn,
and among the vineyards and olive-gardens were crops of tomatoes
and hemp and pumpkins, and always figs and mulberries, for Umbria
is the land of plenty, the home of Maia, and of Hermes,[6] her
light-hearted son. The vines which linked the mountains to the
plain had the beauty of a classic frieze, and when our eyes turned
from the dappled hills we saw flowers weaving a multi-coloured web
on the loom of dusty grass by the roadside--purple loosestrife and
scabious, blue chicory, sugamele and rare borage, poppies and pink
veronica, yellow spanocchi, dandelions, and golden broom. All the
dyes of the East were woven there; and brambles and blossoming
clematis stretched out long swaying arms towards the little shrines
with which the fields were strewn, or twined a crown of flowers
and thorns about the rust-worn symbols of the Passion on a lonely
crucifix.
Little cities which had been hidden in the folds of the valley
grew into our horizon--Torgiano, towering on our left, Deruta and
Ripa Bianca. Our road, which had run in a straight line across
the plain from the foot of Perugia's hill, crossed the Tiber on a
bridge with a fifteenth-century gate-tower, and turned along the
banks of the river. Tall Lombard poplars lingered on its brink, and
peasant women in gay kerchiefs were washing linen in its green
water. Across the valley we could see Perugia, most beautiful of
all hill-cities, smiling in the sunshine, already far away; and
in front across a sea of lesser hills rose Todi, perched on her
mountain like a city in a fairy-tale, which surely could be reached
by no other way than on the wings of a genie!
We rested our horses at Deruta, and clambered up into its
precipitous streets. It is a mere hamlet, though a great deal of
majolica has been made here for the last three hundred years, and
it is extremely picturesque, perched high over the Tiber. Deruta is
like a piece of its own pottery. It is built of gray stone, much
the same colour as the unglazed plates which we saw drying on the
walls, and its people dress in bright colours like the pigments on
the finished ware. Every one goes barefoot here, and the old women
toil up the steep stair-streets with their sandals slung over their
arms, and huge bundles of sticks or fodder on their backs. And
apart from its picturesqueness Deruta is well worth a visit for the
sake of a beautiful fresco by Caporale in Sant'Antonio Abbate.
After Deruta the Umbrian Valley was all vineyards and olive-groves
and fig-trees and acacias. Sometimes the Tiber was close beside us
like a blue ribbon dividing us from the plain as we jangled through
the cicala-haunted woods on the hillside; at others we could
only trace it among the vineyards by the tall reedy poplars which
followed its winding course.
The day grew hotter; the song of the cicalas swelled up like an
anthem, and the butterflies drowsed upon the flowers. Presently we
came to a wayside fountain, where a lovely girl with a jar of water
poised on her head was talking to a young herdsman, beautiful as an
Apollo, who was watering his oxen. There was a garden of ancient
olives on the hillside above, and a welcome shade for our horses
in the road. And because we had seen Todi on her hill, and that she
was beautiful, we ate our lunch and took our siesta there under
the olives in the scented air. Near at hand a boy was singing like
a lover at his work; there were flowers at our feet, and cicalas
fluting in the silver foliage overhead. The great white oxen were
still drinking at the fountain, and their bells made pleasant
music; sometimes a woman with a water-jar on her head came from
the village, or a peasant rode by on his mule. It was a magic day.
We had had so many hours of joy, so many hours of sun and wind and
beautiful primitive things, that we had left care behind us. As we
lay there on the soft earth and watched the cloud-shadows sweeping
over the hills, we forgot the toil of life; we no longer heard the
world throbbing its soul away in its great cities. The voice of
the wind mingled with the shimmering music of summer--the insects,
the song of the boy at work, and the bells of the oxen, in a paean
of joy. For Umbria is like that garden in which Siddârtha dwelt
with Yasôdara, shut off from all ugly and painful things. If you
look deep enough you will assuredly find death, even as Siddârtha
did--the hawk preying upon the small bird, the small bird upon the
gnat, and you will see the sweat upon the oxen as they strain in
the sun. You may find the world as sad a place, as full of pain and
toil as he did, or you may find it just such a mirror of God's Love
as did Francis, the chief of Umbrian saints. Here the butterflies
seem to dance more gayly than they do elsewhere, the trees grow
free, the flowers stretch upwards to the sun; no questions vex you
when you see a wayside shrine. In the garden of Umbria there are
only God and Nature, the Soul of Things is at ease.
So, with our hearts attuned to her simplicity, we came to Todi
on the top of her hill, with her towers and walls, and her winds
and clouds. We caught her asleep in the siesta hour. There was no
one astir when we drove into her beautiful golden piazza, where
the Middle Ages have never been forgotten: even to-day it is full
of mediaeval grace, with its two great palaces and its exquisite
cathedral. But if we had come to her in the busy morning stir of
the market we could still have found the Middle Ages there, for the
peasants ride in on the old leather saddles picked out in brass
and scarlet that we see in fifteenth-century frescoes; the asses
bear on panniers barrels, or huge bundles of rough wood; the mules
are harnessed with bells and tassels, three abreast, so that they
straggle across the narrow road as they strain up the hill, and
all the women carry their marketing on their heads. The cathedral
of Todi is one of the gems of Umbrian architecture. It is a great
golden church with beautiful and very ancient doors, and an ornate
rose window; it soars above the piazza on a wide flight of steps
which not even a gigantic cinematograph advertisement can rob of
dignity. Below its southern wall is a row of shabby little shops
where the people sit at work in their doorways, but the northern
side has flying buttresses and a cornice of fantastic heads of men
and birds and beasts; and there is a pleasing baroque arch with
shallow, grass-grown steps leading down to the piazza.
[Illustration: DETAILS FROM THE APSE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF TODI.]
Like her cathedral Todi is full of quaint and beautiful things.
She is an artist's city, solitary and beautiful, unexpectedly rich
and frankly poor. Once away from her stately piazza with its three
great buildings, which are like three jewels in the crown of King
Cophetua's Beggar Maid, we found her humble and out of elbows.
Her old brown houses bulged out over the steep little streets, or
towered like lean fortresses on her city wall, with all manner of
green things, even fig-trees, growing out of them. From below they
seemed to be piled up one on the top of the other like children's
bricks. The vineyards and olive-gardens, which swept up the
hillside, forced entrances at every point; and on the crest of
the hill among her palaces was one slender cypress spire, soaring
up as though Nature herself must climb through this clear air to
heaven. She had long avenues of acacias and flowering laurels, and
ancient gateways like the Porta Aurea, through which we had a vista
of mediaeval towers, and a Perugino landscape of green valleys
with a river winding away to the amphitheatre of blue hills. Here
and there in her walls were courses of splendid masonry, Umbrian
perhaps, and on the eastern side of the town were four gigantic
niches of a Roman basilica. But as in most Umbrian cities, it was
the Middle Ages that left Todi her chief treasures, her stately
palaces and her cathedral; and further down the hillside, on a
flight of earthquake-riven steps, San Fortunato, which was the home
of the Antipope Nicholas v. in the days when rebellious little Todi
was a thorn in the side of the papacy, and Lewis of Bavaria made
her his headquarters. Fra Jacopone of Todi, the author of _Stabat
Mater Dolorosa_, is said to be buried in this church, but though we
looked for it we could not find his tomb.