Todi boasts a pilgrimage church; and a pilgrimage church, albeit
of the sixteenth century, is an acquisition not to be despised
by any city however ancient and picturesque. But in truth Santa
Maria della Consolazione is a lovely church, a _capolavoro_ of
architecture, and it soars up like a great golden gourd ripened
to perfection on the green hillside. We came to it through the
Porta Aurea along an avenue of flowering laurels, and its fair
proportions gave us a complete sense of satisfaction. As we drew
near, its clustered domes dwarfed the amphitheatre of hills.
Inside it was airy and gracious, a bubble of light; but its
sixteenth-century paganism, which is always the paganism of secular
buildings rather than of temples, and its overgrown apostles in
the niches that were meant for gods, spoilt its appeal, to the
Protestant mind at any rate, as a house of prayer. What is it,
I wonder, that makes it easy for the Protestant to worship in
Gothic or Romanesque churches, and to respond to the appeal of
basilicas like Santa Maria Maggiore or San Clemente in Rome, while
sixteenth-century churches still remain the ideal ecclesiastical
building to the majority of Roman Catholics? Is it that they all
bear the image of St. Peter's and the Vatican in their minds? They
argue that at least under the spacious cupolas of the renaissance
they have light and space. And it is logic, for Gothic cathedrals
are dim and full of shadows. But I could say my prayers more easily
in the baths of Caracalla, where the sun slanting over the broken
walls has a trick of making mist like floods of incense, and the
birds chant all day long, than in St. Peter's, for all its fragrant
services. And I doubt if any Catholics could be moved to such an
ecstasy of worship in the dusk of Milan Cathedral, when the organ
throbs through the aisles at Vespers, as we have seen them in many
of the late pilgrimage churches of Italy, like Santa Maria of Todi
or the great basilica of the Casa Santa at Loreto.
[Illustration: TODI: S. MARIA DELLA CONSOLAZIONE.]
Like all the hill-cities of Umbria, one of Todi's chief charms
is the beauty of her views. Below my bedroom window in the Hotel
Risorgimento the old brown roofs of Todi clambered so eagerly down
the slope that each one was at least two stories below the one
above. Here and there were little gardens full of tamarisks and
oleanders and morning glories. To the left rose San Fortunato, high
on its broken flight of steps, like a grim fortress; and below it
was the bastion of the public garden, with its round acacia trees
which were always vibrant with the song of cicalas. In the deep
valley were grey-towered farms with loggias and outside stairways,
and a great fortified convent with the stations of the Cross
climbing up to its gates in a cypress avenue. Through the midst the
Tiber wound very slowly like a ribbon, and now the sunlight caught
it, and we could see the blue water, and now we could only trace
it by its tall Lombard poplars. But always it turned towards the
distant hills which rose the one behind the other, fold on fold,
and full of changing lights, towards Rome. At night it was still
and mysterious. The steep hillside was wrapped in darkness. There
was no moon, and though the sky was powdered thickly with stars
they gave no light to see the valley by. Far below I could hear
the humming of the night crickets; they sounded sleepy too. And up
above, San Fortunato loomed almost transparently in the heavens,
and the Milky Way shone like a mist of stars.
We found Arcady again down in the valleys as we drove back to
Perugia across the Umbrian plain. There had been a fair at some
neighbouring village, and the road was full of peasants coming back
with cortèges of white oxen and calves, which had bells on their
throats, and collars of scarlet and brass, and crimson fillets.
Perugia lay before us all the way, with her towers and majestic
walls and the slim campanile of San Pietro, which looks like an
obelisk from the plain. As we drove along the straight white road
we saw the cities of the Valley of Spoleto rising like stars upon
their hills. At each turn fresh mountains were disclosed with fresh
cities on their skirts, pink in the evening sun. We were tired
after the heat of the day, and silent. The harness-bells and the
clipping sound of hoofs made an agreeable accompaniment to our
thoughts. We climbed up slowly through the sunset, looking now at
the hills, now at the olive-gardens that stretched away from the
road, their leaves as silver as a flight of butterflies in the
sunlight; now idly watching the long-legged shadows of the horses
on the flowery bank. And all the way the cicalas were singing by
the roadside, and we bore the memory of fragrant sunlit hours
in our hearts. Half unconsciously, and like a message from the
eternal hills, St. Paul's words came into my mind: 'Whatsoever
thing is good, whatsoever thing is pure, whatsoever thing is
lovely, whatsoever thing is of good report, if there be any virtue
or if there be any truth, think on these things.' They were like
an answer to the riddle which all men ask of Fate. But indeed in
this Umbrian garden they are the text of everyday life, for in its
byways it is easy to catch the spirit of St. Francis as he passed,
barefoot and meanly clad, singing the praise of God and all His
creatures.
As we drove up the last steep incline the plain was filled with
light. Overhead the clouds were growing rosy. Assisi was a city of
gold. And to the horizon rolled the Umbrian hills, purple and blue,
and very far away like jade, airy and transparent, in the luminous
space which Perugino loved to paint.
SIENA AND THE PALIO
It was the poet who persuaded us to go to Siena to see the Palio
run in honour of Our Lady of Mid-August. We were still in Perugia
enjoying the languid Umbrian summer, when he announced his
intention of leaving the next day for Siena.
'What _is_ the Palio?' asked the philosopher. 'August will be very
hot in Siena, and nothing could be more beautiful than this'--he
waved his hand towards the white walls of Assisi, and the great
dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli, floating like a lotus bud above
the morning mists, which filled the valley between Perugia and
Monte Subasio.
'It is so difficult to define,' said the poet. 'When you say, "What
is the Palio?" you give me the wherewithal to write a book. If I
told you that it was a race in honour of the Virgin Mary, ridden
bareback round the chief piazza of Siena, by jockeys in mediaeval
costume, who try to club each other off the course, you would
probably prefer to stay here in Perugia. If I told you that it was
a pageant you would be sure to say that you have seen better at
Olympia.'
He was silent for a moment.
'But it is more than that. Imagine a city of Gothic palaces,
a little flushed hill-city, sleeping among vineyards and
olive-gardens, sleeping and sleeping like a girl bewitched. And
then imagine the soul of her awaking for a few hours--a day
perhaps--in the summer of the year. That is Siena, dear gay Siena,
with her indomitable spirit and her fickle careless heart, with
her pageants and her saints, and her allegiance to Madonna. For
first and foremost Siena is the city of the Virgin Mary. There
they think of her not only as the Mother of God, but as their own
liege sovereign; even the Standard of the City, the black and white
Balzana, is emblematic "of the purity and humility of the Virgin,
or of those joyful and sorrowful mysteries whereby, as she told St.
Bridget, her life was ever divided between happiness and grief."
'As for the Palio, if you would appreciate it you must understand
something of the religion of the Middle Ages, which was at its best
an inspiration, capable of producing St. Francis and St. Catherine,
and at its worst a creed of superstitions which found vent in
wild orgies of penance, and countenanced the crusade against the
Albigenses. You must have thrilled to stories of wild games, like
the Florentine Giuoco del Calcio or Perugia's Battaglia de' Sassi,
in which the players lost their limbs and not infrequently their
lives. And lastly, you must appreciate the intense patriotism
which the men of Siena feel for their _contrade_, or divisions
of the city, which I can best describe as parishes; though it is
difficult to say whether, in the first place, the boundaries were
parochial or military.
'It is not merely a pageant, though as a pageant it is superlative;
it is the last flicker of the spirit of the Middle Ages. And for
my part I love it, because the Sienese are still so mediaeval
at heart. And that is why there is no city in Italy more fitted
to be illumined by the torch of the Middle Ages than Siena. For
Siena, notwithstanding the fact that she bred some of the greatest
Renaissance popes, was comparatively untouched by the wave of
paganism which swept over Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. She still has whole streets of Gothic palaces; her
saints are still reverenced with the almost child-like simplicity
of the Middle Ages; she still boasts the special protection of
the Blessed Virgin; and in the midst of all her fervour she still
nurses her old feuds, not only with her ancient enemies, the
Florentines, but between her own _contrade_.'
* * * * *
It was dark and the heavens were full of stars when we bade
good-bye to our kind host of the Perugian inn, and boarded the
electric tram that was to take us down to the station. We had
chosen an early train so as to avoid travelling in the heat of the
day, but we found the car already full of thrifty Italians bent on
making hay before the sun shone.
[Illustration: SIENA: BANNER-HOLDER.]
We left at dawn, in the clear pale light which floods the Umbrian
plain when the world is yet a little grey, and Perugia is nothing
but a lovely outline on the crest of her hill. This is the light
that Perugino loved, the shadowless herald of the day, full of
the mystery of the morning. The world woke slowly from her pale
slumber in the arms of night; the sky deepened from beryl to gold.
We found Thrasymene illumined with rosy morning fires, her hills
empurpled, and the towers of her little cities aflame with sunrise.
It seemed as though immortal memories, great desires, and burnt-out
passions struggled for utterance there. How Hannibal's tired eyes
must have ached to possess so fair a land! Yet it is likely that he
never saw the passionate dawn wooing the lake with plumes of rose
and gold, as we did; for we know that on the fateful day when he
waited to give battle to Flaminius by the shore of Thrasymene, the
mists which did him such signal service filled up the hollow like a
curtain hung from one range of mountains to the other.
So we came through Tuscany to Siena, and found her all agog with
excitement for the Palio, with pennons flying and music echoing
down her streets, and her inns already full to overflowing.
Ah, Siena, with your gaunt red palaces and your lily tower, and
your ineffectual walls which thread the vineyards like old men
dreaming life away in memories, it is you who are the heart of
Tuscany! You are not pale and beautiful like Florence, not such a
great lady; nor have you the silent grace of Pisa, but how lovable,
how intimate you are! Their dignity would ill become you with your
stormy and undignified past, of which De Commines said: 'La Ville
est de tout temps en partialité, et se gouverne plus follement
qu'aucune Ville d'Italie.'
[Illustration: SIENA: TORRE DEL MANGIA.]
But in no other place is the traveller welcomed with such song and
laughter as in Siena, when she holds high festival. I, who have
only seen her in her Palio days, cannot think that life is ever
dull or languid in her streets and _piazze_. I have peopled her
with mediaeval ghosts since that day in mid-August when I woke and
found them in possession. At every sound of music I look round
for silken banners, and pretty boys in doublet and hose escorting
steel-clad warriors, or the gay spendthrifts of whom Folgore of
San Gimignano sang. For on that day I caught a glimpse of the
Middle Ages, with their knights and pages and their companies of
men-at-arms. I heard the brave music of their drums, and saw the
old Siena, ruddy and black-browed, clamouring loud-voiced in the
Piazza del Campo--a happy child one moment, and the next a bundle
of conflicting passions, remembering century-old grievances, and
raking up dead feuds to make a Tuscan holiday.
[Illustration: SIENA: TORCH-REST.]
It was in the Piazza del Campo, or to give it its modern name which
does not please me half as much, the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele,
that I grew to know Siena best. Here she was the city of the
Quattrocento, of which I love to dream, fantastic and beautiful,
with untold possibilities lurking behind the walls of her tall red
palaces. The Campo lies in the hollow where the three hills of
Siena meet, and its shape is an irregular semi-circle. I can best
describe it by saying that it is like an enormous cockle, slightly
concave--rose-coloured, for it is paved with red brick--and with
ribs or flutings of grey stone which converge towards the deepest
hollow in front of the Palazzo Pubblico. Encircle this by a wide,
flagged roadway, and ring it round with noble palaces, many of
them of great beauty, with Gothic arch and lancet window. At the
deepest hollow of the shell build up a palace for the rulers of
the most unruly republic in the whole peninsula. Fashion it of
exceeding beauty with a façade which follows the curve of the
piazza. Build it of Siena's red brick; break its long lines with
Gothic windows cloven by slender columns; grace it with magnificent
arched doors; decorate it with scutcheons and crests; and high on
its wall place the golden monogram of Holy Flame which Bernardino,
Siena's gentlest saint, identified with his life. At its side
build an arcaded chapel of white marble, stained by time, filled
with the faded frescoes of Il Sodoma; and from this chapel picture
yourself a tower, not like the tower of any city out of Tuscany,
which springs up into the heavens with the natural grace of growing
things, so that you do not think of it as brick or stone, but as
some beautiful and splendid flower which grew up in one mediaeval
night while Siena slept, and has blossomed ever since.
Even Florence cannot show the like of this. It is so beautiful and
characteristic that it is worthy of mention beside the Piazzetta
of St. Mark's at Venice. And at night it is a revelation of the
Middle Ages to pass from the Via Cavour, with its lighted shops and
its gay streams of men and women, into the dim and romantic Campo.
Night covers the passing of time. The song and laughter of modern
Sienese life, flowing down to the Lizza to promenade, comes like an
echo across the years. It is very still in the Campo at night, and
empty except perhaps for Beppo, the seller of water-melons, whose
guttering candle suffices to show his pink and succulent wares. But
one evening while we stood in the shadow of the Palazzo Comunale we
heard some stray musicians singing an old choir-chant in the Via
del Casato. It was as though the ghosts of pilgrims were toiling
up the Via dei Pellegrini, just as they used to do, past the great
ruined palace of Il Magnifico, to lay their troubles at the feet
of the Queen of Sorrows. Overhead the Torre del Mangia, released
from the shadows of the battlemented court, soared up to the
stars more like a lily than ever with the moonlight silvering its
machicolations. And we remembered that in the morning we had seen
it with its head in the drifting clouds, and the sunlight below.
But it was not only for its mediaeval beauty that we loved the
Campo. This is Siena's heart. Here she has fought and loved and
hated and rejoiced, ay, and died too. And if her stones have been
too often stained with blood in civil warfare she has gentler
memories--here Provenzano Salvani, the victor of Monte Aperto,
cast all dignity aside 'when at his glory's topmost height,' and
begged for alms to ransom a friend who languished in some foreign
prison; here Bernardino preached so eloquently of Divine Love that
he almost moved the unregenerate young Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini,
afterwards Pius II., to repentance. And here, while the armies of
Spain were beleaguering their city, and they were faint for food,
the youths of Siena came to play their games till they were called
back to guard the city walls, to the joy and amazement of Blaise
de Montluc, the French Governor, who never tired of praising the
Sienese for their chivalry and the courage and beauty of their
women.
Here, too, in a few days' time, came Siena and all the strangers
that were within her gates to see the Palio!
[Illustration: A STREET IN SIENA.]
The _Prove_ were run first. Early in the week a sandtrack was
prepared, and as if by magic an amphitheatre of seats sprang
up round the piazza. There are six of these _prove_, or trial
races, for the selection of horses for the Palio; and they are
run on the evening of the 13th, the morning and evening of the
two following days, and the morning of the 16th of August.[7] The
Palio festivities really begin on the 13th of August, for although
the Sienese do not attend the _prove_ in great numbers there are
generally some thousand spectators who shout themselves hoarse with
excitement; and feeling sometimes runs high when there is rivalry
between ancient enemies like the _contrade_ of the Oca and the
Torre.
On that morning, too, the streets are full of peasants driving
their white oxen in pairs before them to the annual fair, which
is still held outside the Porta Camollia in honour of our Lady
of Mid-August. It has dwindled considerably from the seven days'
_fiera_ which marked the occasion in the Middle Ages, but it is
still a picturesque sight. The peasants drive standing up, like
Roman charioteers, behind their milk-white steers, whose heads are
bound with scarlet fillets, and their soft dewlaps girdled by
a bell. The sellers of water-melons do a thriving business with
the thirsty drovers, and the piazza is a sea of tossing horns and
smooth white backs from the battlemented city wall to the column
which marks the spot where Leonora of Portugal met her betrothed,
the Emperor Frederick III.
On Sunday Siena was comparatively quiet, although there were
_prove_ in the Piazza del Campo both morning and evening, and a
general air of merriment throughout the city. We heard mass in the
cathedral where the banners of the various _contrade_ hung from
the piers of the nave; and the wonderful graffito pavement which,
according to a seventeenth-century custom, is covered with boards
for the rest of the year to preserve it from injury, was laid bare.
And then we went down to Fontebranda to see how the _Contrada_ of
the Oca, Saint Catherine's _contrada_, was preparing for the Palio.
We found it delightfully confident of victory. The sacristan of
Saint Catherine's house took us into the chapel which was once her
father's workshop, and would not let us go until we had heard the
history of the many Palii which the victorious Oca had won in past
years--assisted no doubt by the prayers of Santa Caterina in heaven
to the holy Mother of God.
[Illustration: SIENA: S. DOMENICO AND THE VIA BENINCASA.]
The philosopher loves Fontebranda. To him it is the most romantic
spot in Siena. It is certainly one of the most picturesque, whether
you stand at the head of the steep Via Benincasa and see San
Domenico's gaunt red walls towering above its houses, or whether
you look towards the city from the church. A winding road leads up
through gardens from the Valley of Fontebranda to the city gate.
Above the wall tall, green-shuttered palaces rise tier on tier to
the cathedral, whose delicately arcaded dome and tower crown the
hill. To the right the loggia'd houses of the tanners sweep down
the Via Benincasa to Fontebranda's mediaeval fountain; and the
keen, unpleasant smell of the tanneries, which was one of the first
things we noticed in Siena, is everywhere. Fontebranda is changed
but little since the days when Saint Catherine lived there with
her parents. Then as now it was full of tanneries, then as now the
men worked half in their dark windowless shops and half out in the
street: in her day the loggia'd houses were here; the yellow skins
were drying in the road; and San Domenico, up whose hill she toiled
to prayer, was the same grim fortress-church as now.
But I do not love Saint Catherine, her warlike spirit
notwithstanding; nor do I love Sodoma's frescoes of her in the
great church on the hill. And the Sienese themselves, though they
give her great honour, do not seem to love her as they love the
simple Bernardino. Splendid as her chapel is, magnificent as are
her festas, she seems to be less in the imagination of Siena than
Saint Bernardino, whose gentle life followed closely on hers as
though the _genius loci_ dared not trust her unruly people through
that stormy century without a guiding spirit. See on how many
houses is his seal of holy Flame! And how brightly it burns on the
Palazzo Pubblico, especially towards nightfall, when the setting
sun gilds the façade and fires the sacred monogram.
'Respect is what we owe, love what we give.' And so I would leave
the philosopher to St. Catherine and his Fontebranda, and come to
San Francesco and the little chapel beside it where San Bernardino
prayed. The Sienese have lavished lovely things upon this oratory
of the ardent boy, who forsook all and followed Francis in the
love of Christ. Sodoma, Pacchia and Beccafumi have glorified it,
and peopled its walls with the beautiful and mystic-eyed women of
the Renaissance. But though they have enriched it, I am glad that
circumstance has kept St. Francis' great church as it was first
conceived--a bare and solemn building--a church for the followers
of the man who loved poverty and simplicity, because through them
he saw the way to God. Even now I would have it cleared of its
black and white Sienese stripings; but its wide empty nave, the
noble chapels of its transepts, its ruined islands of fresco, its
stillness and its great simplicity, make it beautiful.
San Francesco stands on the southern spur of the city, and from
the ancient Porta Ovile in the valley below, a country road
leads through gardens and cypress-woods to the Convent of the
Osservanza, in which Pandolfo Petrucci the Magnificent, one of
Siena's great failures, lies buried. The brother who took us over
the church showed us the cell of Bernardino with its ancient wooden
door nibbled almost to destruction by ardent pilgrims. And from a
window in the old monastery we looked across the valley of pines
and cypresses to Siena, painted against a glowing sunset sky.
Seen thus across the fruitful Tuscan vale she was still the City
Beautiful which inspired San Bernardino to a passion of eloquence
on that long-distant summer day, early in the fifteenth century,
when he climbed up into a tree and addressed the astonished
multitudes 'in words so inflamed with divine love, that while many
wept, there were some that deemed him mad.' Then as now her towers,
though there were many more in Bernardino's city, were like the
hands of suppliants held up to heaven; then as now the great dome
and Campanile of Santa Maria Assunta set the seal of Madonna over
her troubled people.
We looked long. In the church overhead the monks were intoning, and
the song of the cicalas floated up from the fragrant cypress-woods
as though they too were praising God. The sun went down, and little
white wraiths of mist rose from the valley. The air blew chill.
When we departed the monks had long ago ceased chanting, and the
insects had folded their wings. But as we hastened through the
vineyards where the mists fled from us like pale ghosts, the lights
of the city twinkled a welcome to us through the gathering dusk.
And so we came again into the warm heart of Siena.
* * * * *
Boom! Boom! Boom!
It was different from any other sound. At first I thought it was a
part of my dreams, for it vibrated over the city like an orchestra
of bells.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Then I remembered, and sprang out of bed. It was the 16th of
August, the day of the Palio, and that deep music whose echoes were
throbbing round the countryside was the voice of Siena waking from
her long slumber. It was the first time that I had heard it, and
my heart beat faster, for the tocsin of La Mangia is nearly always
silent now, although it played such a great part in the mediaeval
history of Siena when it used to call her citizens to arms in the
name of God and the Virgin Mary!