Hannibal, but for the pleasure of its beauty. For I am sick of the
petty wars of hill-towns, and am wearied for the moment of Etruscan
tombs and Gothic palaces and churches. Let us go forth into the
field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the
vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender
grape appear and the pomegranates bud forth!'
So we came to Thrasymene and Passignano, which is a mere handful
of brown houses pushed into the water at the foot of a rocky hill.
Passignano has a flavour of its own. To begin with, its inn is
different from any other albergo in Italy. It has an old-fashioned
kitchen with a cowl chimney and rows of shining brass saucepans,
and it opens on to the village street, where the people sit to
gossip while the evening meal is cooking. Its low cottage windows
look over the wide expanse of water to towered Castiglione, and
the wooded islands of Thrasymene; but it is built so close into
the hillside at the back that you can stretch your hand from an
upper room and pluck the creepers which pour in a green cascade
over the rocks. It is extremely primitive: the menu consists of
soup, macaroni, eggs, fresh fish from the lake, and very lean
chickens, supplemented by rough country bread, plenty of honey and
fresh fruit, and cheese if the proprietor has lately been to market
in Perugia. Meat there is none, at any rate in August, nor tea.
But the rooms are spotlessly clean, with snowy beds, dainty white
valances, curtains edged with hand-made lace, and the finest of
linen towels; the daughter of the buxom landlady is as charming as
she is elegant, and the serving girl is a beautiful Murillo.
Passignano is full of beautiful women; they form two-thirds of the
population of this little lake-side town. There are hardly any men
in it except the old fishermen, and a few young lads, apprentices
to bootmakers and saddlers. All the rest have drifted away to the
towns, or have farms out in the _paese_. And the women, from the
pretty French wife of Signor Arturo of the Albergo Balducci, with
her freshly laundered cotton dresses, to the little bareheaded
girls whose mothers call to them at night, bidding them bathe their
dusty feet in the lake before they come to bed, are all lovely.
They are noted for it.
The only other visitor in Passignano that August was a young
Apollo--so beautifully dressed in pale grey riding-clothes that he
looked as if he must have slipped out of a George Edwards musical
comedy. He was, according to the landlady, a student from the
University of Perugia, spending his vacation in Passignano because
the girls were so beautiful! Oh, young Italy! How natural and
unaffected you are! I loved to see him strolling down the village
street with a lordly air of indifference, running the gauntlet
of eyes as the pretty girls, linked in groups like bouquets of
flowers, passed him demurely; while their mothers, sitting on the
doorsteps of their cottages, scanned the handsome boy with kindly
humour.
Everybody lives out of doors in Passignano. The women are always
sitting outside their houses; and their children, half-naked in the
summer heat, with halos of sunburned curls, pillow their heads on
the rough cobbles of the hilly streets, and sleep after their play,
as baby angels might sleep in paradise, tired out with singing.
The stables and bakeries and workshops are open to the road, and
above them the shabby brown houses clamber up the hillside to the
Fortezza, which rears its shaggy head above the highest of their
pagoda-like chimneys.
'If we stay here we shall prolong our lives for always,' cried the
philosopher. 'Already I have forgotten the world!'
And he fell to imitating the song of the cicalas.
Indeed for us the world was standing still. We were caught in a
mesh of beauty as in a summer daydream. The waves of Time seemed
to retreat, leaving us like swimmers resting on a golden shore
after struggle and turmoil. It might have been Lethe whose waters
sang to the stones at our feet: for we forgot the world: its voice
became a dream; we found ourselves content to watch the changing
lights as the hours drifted away.
[Illustration: CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO.]
We ate our meals in the unfinished dining-room which Signor
Balducci is building out over the lake--a mere shell of white
plaster with empty doors and windows through which the little
breezes strayed. There were flowers on the cloth beside our plates,
and a great bowl of oleanders, geraniums and white asters on the
table. We breakfasted off golden bread and honey, and the pretty
waiting girl brought tuberoses with our coffee. Outside, the lake
was a tender morning blue; its surface rippled to the cool breath
of the mountains, and sparkled in the sunlight. The bent and
twisted sticks of the fishermen cast fantastic reflections in the
water, and were beautified, as all humble and work-a-day things are
beautified in Italy, by the magic of the sun. Further out two men
in a rickety sampan were hauling in their nets.
It was a scene of infinite romance. The towers of Castiglione shone
like ivory out of the violet mists, and many of the hills which
rose above them bore turreted towns upon their crests. Behind them
we knew lay Siena, Montepulciano and Chiusi, and to the right
Cortona and Arezzo, and there Perugia, and Assisi there. History
swept down upon us too. Thrasymene and its vine-clad slopes are
full of memories of Hannibal, the stormy petrel who beat his wings
round Rome in vain. Nor does it lack for gentler associations,
for Saint Francis of Assisi, who had been preaching in one of the
lake-side towns, was inspired, according to the author of the
_Fioretti_, to spend Lent on an island in its midst. Which he
did, in solitary prayer and meditation, eating only the half of
one small loaf of bread, 'from reverence for the fast of Christ
the blessed one, Who fasted forty days and forty nights without
partaking any earthly food; but in this manner, with that half a
loaf, chased far the venom of vain glory from him.'
Towards the hour of sunset, when the shadowed hills grew blue and
misty, and the lake was a mirror of pale gold, we walked along the
reedy shore of Thrasymene. The wind rustled in the silken leaves
of the maize, and made a music like far-off singing in the emerald
reeds. We went down to the edge of the water where the gardens
sloped to the lake, and we found flowers there and herbs--mint and
thyme and rosemary that scented the air, and purple vetches and
clover, and the beautiful cow-parsley whose blossoms float like
butterflies over every hedge and waste ground. And there we waited
while the sky glowed from gold to rose, and Thrasymene seemed
aflame with Hannibal's desire for Rome.
We dined in our alfresco dining-room, and afterwards we walked
again by the still waters, where the frogs were shrilling a chorus
to the night-crickets, whose song in the grass is like the sound of
a curb-chain being rubbed in the hand. Except for these the world
was still. There were no lights along that mysterious country road
except the stars, and rarely have I seen them brighter, even in
Africa.
'In a town we never see such stars as these,' said the philosopher.
We never do. The Milky Way stretched like a girdle across the
heavens, and was reflected in the lake like a pale moon. We stayed
to watch it, and to listen to the voices of the night.
A train glared out of the tunnel which pierces the hill below
Passignano, and tore along in the darkness beside the road,
lightening our starlit gloom for a moment before its meteoric tail
of windows was swallowed up by the night. Then we saw a glow-worm
in a hole below the wall, and because in Italy you are pleased
with little things, we stopped to look at it, and watch it turn
round like a light-house lamp, now glowing clear as a star, now an
indistinguishable mass of phosphorescence. And all the time the sky
was growing lighter, and the mountains darker in the east.
It was the moon.
Slowly it rose. The Milky Way grew pale in the lake, and one great
star which had twinkled like a will-o'-the-wisp among the reeds
went out. The light grew and gathered behind the hills, and at last
the miracle of moonrise came to us as we waited in the scented
darkness of Thrasymene's shore, as it came to the young world on
the eve of its creation. First the rim, and then the pulsing globe
leaping from the shadows. For a moment it hung upon the hillside
while two fantastic stone-pines, a fraction of an inch in height,
swayed within its circle like neophytes bowing before Diana; then
it rose into the heavens,--a stately ship steering among the
stars.
[Illustration: LAKE THRASYMENE.]
A miracle no less because our darkness has been lightened thus
since the beginning of the world. There are so many miracles
every day, if we but knew them,--the scent of flowers, the webs
of spiders, the subtle fragrance of the earth, a wayside weed,
and, most beautiful of all, the sunrise and the moon. For sunsets,
though they may fill a grey world with rose and gold, and though
they are always so magnificent that words are pallid pictures and
artists' colours impotent, never have the beauty of the dawn. A
sunset may turn our joy to melancholy, so tender is it, so pregnant
with regret for the vanished day, so full of splendours. But we are
always happy in the dawn. What of the night? It is over and gone. A
new world lies at our feet; a new beauty fills our eyes; the breath
of the morning in our nostrils is as a flower after rain. For in
the dawn we step from the valley of the Shadow of Death on to the
rosy mountains of Hope.
And because you are in Italy you have time to notice these miracles
of every day, time to be happy, time to watch things grow. The
hours do not matter, for to-morrow is as yesterday, and to-day is
but a little minute in a garden. If it should rain the butterflies
will only seek their shelter, the cicalas will be still, and the
pores of the thirsty earth will open. To-morrow the sun will shine
again. Or the day after that.
Nor is Passignano devoid of interest for the sightseer whose
pleasure is not to be found in green pastures or beside still
waters. Magione, with its three mediaeval castles and its memory of
the Baglioni, is within a drive. Picturesque Castiglione del Lago
is well worth a visit. There is the island of St. Francis, with
its ruined convent, now the villeggiatura of an Italian nobleman,
and its exquisite views of Montepulciano. And lastly, there is
the battle-field where Hannibal, the 'furious youth' of Publius
Cornelius Scipio, defeated Flaminius, the maker of roads.
We did not go to Magione, but we let two old men of Passignano row
us to St. Francis' Island in their weather-beaten fishing-boats. In
an acacia grove down by the water's edge they showed us the block
of stone whose surface was worn into two hollows by the knees of
St. Francis. So they would have us believe. '_Ma, è vero!_' they
exclaimed, as though they feared that we should doubt them; and we
could but smile as they told us an old legend of the saint sailing
miraculously across Thrasymene on his mantle, bearing a lighted
candle in his hand, because the boatmen dared not put out in the
tramontana which was lashing the waters to fury.
We almost missed seeing the battle-field of Hannibal, because we
had left it to our last afternoon, and discovered too late that the
only carriage in Passignano had been already commandeered.
It was Fortunato Rosso who came to our rescue, dear old man, with
his dilapidated vehicle, which was no larger than a riksha, and so
broken down that we expected the back to fall away every minute.
The step did break when we tried to use it, and the axle bar was
tied up with string. Fortunato Rosso is one of the characters of
Passignano. He is a veteran of the Venti Settembre. As he has lost
his teeth his conversation is difficult to follow, though he is an
intelligent guide, having a soldier's eye for the possibilities of
the land: his clothes are almost as dilapidated as his carriage,
but he has a string of medal ribbons sewn across his scrupulously
clean white waistcoat. The medals themselves are kept in a dirty
scrap of paper in his pocket. He persisted in showing them to
us before we started, and the villagers stood round and laughed
indulgently. While he was eagerly pulling them out a cheap crucifix
fell to the ground. A small boy picked it up, and pressed it to his
lips as he handed it back, and Rosso himself gave it a resounding
kiss before he put it into his pocket.
The spot where Hannibal entrapped the Roman army is as distinct
as stage scenery. There is a semi-circle of mountains coming down
to the lake at each end. Passignano clambers into the water at
the southern extremity; and on the northern spur, close to the
lake, there is an ancient road climbing between bluffs in an
olive-garden. It is below the modern strada; and Fortunato Rosso,
who takes a delight in propounding the stratagems of Hannibal,
insists that Flaminius must have entered the plain through this
pass. Half-way between the semi-circle and the lake is the hill of
Tuoro, on which Hannibal's centre was conspicuously drawn up.
For the Punic general with his genius for guerilla warfare no
better place for an ambuscade could be imagined. The Consul
Flaminius lay at Arretium some miles to the north; and Hannibal,
knowing his impetuous temper, determined to draw him out by
laying waste the countryside from Cortona to Thrasymene under the
very eyes of the Roman legions. As he anticipated, Flaminius,
exasperated beyond endurance, left Arezzo and marched down to
Thrasymene, paying no heed to the ill-omens which attended his
setting forth. As a consequence his army had no enthusiasm. The
name of Hannibal had turned even the heart of Rome to water, so
that she spent her days in making sacrifices to the gods and
consulting the oracles, but the fiery Flaminius would not allow his
legions to make propitiation. 'Nay, rather,' said he with bitter
sarcasm, 'let us lie before the walls of Arretium, for here is our
country, here our household gods. Let Hannibal, slipping through
our fingers, waste Italy through and through; and, ravaging and
burning everything, let him arrive at the walls of Rome; nor let
us move hence till the fathers shall have summoned Flaminius from
Arretium, as they did Camillus of old from Veii.'[16]
Everything befell as Hannibal desired. Flaminius entered the pass.
Seeing the Carthaginian army on the hill of Tuoro he advanced to
give battle, not noticing the Baliares and light troops posted
round the mountains, and unconscious of the fact that the Numidian
cavalry had blocked his retreat by holding the pass when the last
detachment of his army had come through. To add to his discomfiture
a mist rose up from the lake and enveloped the lowlands, while the
hills were in the sunlight above, and the enemy could watch for the
preconcerted signal of attack.
It was given, and they poured down upon the Romans from all sides,
taking them by surprise, and terrifying them by the unexpectedness
of the assault. Even so the day might not have been lost if
Flaminius had not fallen early in the engagement. After that it was
a slaughter. There was no order. Each man fought for his own life,
and when the legions attempted to escape by water, the only way
left open to them, they were either drowned, or cut to pieces by
the Carthaginian cavalry which followed them into the shallows. A
band of some six thousand did indeed force their way to the hills,
where they waited for the mist to rise, not being able to see how
the day was going. And when at last the sun pierced through to the
plain, and they could view the slaughter, they fled, taking their
standards with them, only to fall prisoners on 'the following day
when, Maharbal, who had followed them during the night with the
whole body of cavalry, pledging his honour that he would let them
depart with single garments if they would deliver up their arms,
they surrendered themselves: which promise was kept by Hannibal
with Punic fidelity, and he threw them all into chains' (Livy,
xxii. 6).
So much for the battle, but the old tragedy that was enacted on
these vine-clad plains has been forgotten. Many of the peasants
have not even heard of the name of Hannibal, nor dream that where
they gather their purple vintage to-day the earth was reddened
once by Roman blood. The broad smooth road led us between ancient
olives. White oxen yoked to clumsy wooden tumbrils rolled on and
on towards us in a mist of sunlit dust; peasants in gay kerchiefs
and skirts were working in the bearded corn which rose higher than
their heads, so that we looked at them through a veil of stalks; a
herd of black swine were nosing the yellow earth under the olives,
with a little girl-child to keep them. And when we reached the
summit of the pass above the turquoise lake we could see the road
to Arezzo in a gap of the mountains, across a sea of vines. There
was nothing to disturb the air of peace; the mediaeval towers and
castles which crowned the hills were farms; and the Sanguinetto,
whose sinister name is the one memento of that day of slaughter,
was a river of stones agape for the September rains.
'Far other scene is Thrasymene now;
Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plain
Rent by no ravage save the gentle plough;
Her aged trees rise thick as once the slain
Lay where their roots are; but a brook hath ta'en--
A little rill of scanty stream and bed--
A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain;
And Sanguinetto tells you where the dead
Made the earth wet, and turn'd the unwilling waters red.'
CHILDE HAROLD.
ASSISI
Almost the first thing we noticed in Assisi was the Biblical
simplicity of life. This little city, rose and white, upon the
lower slopes of Subasio would be like a picture out of the Bible
if it were not so Gothic. Its steep and rough-paved streets have
grasses growing in between their stones; its grim and silent
houses, built of Subasian rock, are as unresponsive as the East;
at their barred gates stand mules and asses tethered, with
clumsy wooden saddles on their backs, or sacks of grain thrown
pannier-wise. It is not only Francis and his companions that you
might see walking in this poor and humble town, but Jesus of
Nazareth.
For Assisi still wears the thread-bare garment of her poverty,
notwithstanding the great basilica on the hillside, which is rich
out of all comparison with the poor little city of St. Francis.
Long, long ago in the thirteenth century she dedicated her life to
him, giving up her worldly vanities and espousing Lady Poverty,
'that Dame to whom none openeth pleasure's gate.' So that the story
of the splendid young men of Assisi, whose magnificent equipages
drew the eyes of Rome in the seventeenth century, comes as an echo
of another place. I think she loved him from the first, when he
was still gay Cecco of the midnight revels, Lord of Love, the boon
companion of her merry youths. She listened to his songs--the soft
Provençal songs which he had learnt from the lips of Madonna Pica,
his mother--and smiled at his caprices, pleading his youth when
others shook their heads. Later, when the world made a jest of the
penitent, and his friends scorned him, and the hand of the people
was against him, she wept for him, and gazed with wistful eyes down
to the valleys where he ministered to her outcasts, and garnered in
his soul that Peace of the Lord which passeth all understanding.
She is like the bride of whom the poet of the Israelites sang,
looking and listening for the voice of her beloved.
'The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh, leaping upon the
mountains, skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like the roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth
behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself
through the lattice.
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair
one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds
is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the
tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and
come away.'
But if there had been no Saint Francis to raise her to the
foremost rank of shrines, and sanctify her with a special crown
of holiness, Assisi would still be one of the most lovely cities
in the garden of Umbria. She has grown like a fair white flower
upon the brown slope of Monte Subasio, whose shoulder is a bulwark
between the ragged Appennines and the soft valleys of Umbria.
It is a sudden revelation, as though the landscape foreshadowed
the history of Assisi, to stand on the windy height of her Rocca,
and first to look down on the rolling Umbrian hills, clothed with
the tender green of vines and olives, which have gentle streams
meandering at their feet, and then to turn to the eastern slope of
Subasio and see the brown and barren mountains ravening away to the
horizon, like an angry sea, now towering into broken peaks, now
falling back with steep, scarred sides, red as wounds where the
ruddy limestone has been torn from them. On the one hand there is
that Peace of God which St. Francis scattered through the turbulent
thirteenth century, and which has lingered in the grass-grown
streets of his native city; and, on the other, the bloody wars and
revolutions which racked Assisi from the day that Rome first put
its yoke upon her, to the sixteenth century, when she surrendered
a second time to the Imperial city, and yielded up her keys to
Paul III. For her history is one long tale of disasters. She fell
a victim to so many conquerors--Totila, Charlemagne, Frederick
Barbarossa, and the condottieri of her enemy Perugia--Biordo
Michelotti, Braccio Fortebraccio, and Niccolò Piccinino. And
from the sack of the terrible little man, Niccolò, Assisi never
recovered: to this day there is a spacious olive-garden between the
Rocca and the town itself, on which the disheartened Assisans had
not the spirit to rebuild their ravished homes.
Assisi is full of forgotten charms. No other city in Umbria, except
proud Spoleto, can boast as many traces of her Roman greatness.
Though her amphitheatre has vanished underground, its lines are
clearly preserved by the houses which are built above it; there is
a wonderful Roman cistern below the cathedral; there are fragments
of a theatre, and a drain of excellent masonry in the Canon's
garden; and in the Piazza Vittore Emanuele is the exquisite portico
of the Temple of Minerva, which, legend says, was built by Dardanus
of Troy. Be that as it may, this temple of the Goddess of Wisdom,
which was long ago dedicated to the Mother of Christ, and on whose
steps St. Francis often stood to preach, is one of the most perfect
Roman temple-façades extant, notwithstanding the mass of mediaeval
buildings which crowd in upon it, or the foreshortening of its
pronaos, half sunk below the pavement of the piazza.
It would be difficult to find a more completely Gothic place
than Assisi. Except for the great hotels near San Francesco, the
sixteenth-century church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the
palaces of the Via Superba, in which the spendthrift nobles of the
seventeenth century entertained Queen Christina of Sweden, there is
hardly anything in Assisi that is not of the Gothic age. If all the
bricked-up loggias and windows of Assisi were opened out, she would
look like a city frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli.