For here in Umbria, down in these fields where Francis' 'Camp of
the Lord' set up their wattle huts, faith is a real and potent
thing. They do not doubt, these people, these rugged-faced men,
these Madonna-like women--they never will doubt. To them the
mysteries of the Incarnation and Ascension are accepted facts. In
simplicity and faith they rise up in the morning and lie down again
at night, never fearing that their prayers at dawn and evening,
their hastily uttered petitions at a roadside cross, have not
winged their way straight to heaven. I too would fain believe it
when I am walking in their olive-groves and vineyards, for it is a
lovely thing, as dreams are lovely, and young ambitions and young
hope. And it is here perhaps that the secret of the intangible
beauty of Assisi may be found--because it is a shrine; no matter
of St. Francis, or of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the older gods. Out
of the wreck of time the flame of worship and faith has been kept
burning; the stones upon this altar have never darkened and grown
cold.
It was the season of the husking of the maize, and a happy harvest
air hung over everything. Each farm had its pile of fragrant white
husks outside its door ready to replenish the mattresses of the
household, and the corn was spread out on the threshing-floors like
a golden carpet. Sometimes we saw the family gathered there to
shell the cobs, and sometimes we came upon them sitting below their
olive-trees, separating the yellow corn from its white sheaths, and
heaping them up on either side the gold and silver largesse of the
Great Mother.
It was in the midst of all this pastoral loveliness that we came to
Rivo Torto, which is so bare and ugly and un-Franciscan in feeling.
Poor and humble, but far richer in the spirit of St. Francis than
the great church of Rivo Torto, are the two chapels of Santa Maria
Maddalena and San Rufino d'Arce, which may mark the approximate
site of the hut in which the saint dwelt while he was ministering
to the lepers. We found Santa Maria Maddalena in a field of hemp,
whose tall slender stalks and green tassels veiled the ancient apse
and narrow lancet windows. Golden pumpkins were piled shoulder-high
outside its wall, drying in the sun; and the interior, when at last
it was unlocked, proved to be a potato store. Even more dilapidated
is San Rufino d'Arce, which stands further from the road near
the threshing-floor of a neighbouring farm. Nor could the lovely
peasant woman, who brought its key and walked like a queen barefoot
among her golden corn-cobs, tell us anything of its miraculous well
in which, tradition says, a young boy saint was drowned.
[Illustration: ASSISI: THE PORZIUNCULA.]
But now, as we drew near it, along the dusty white road which links
Perugia to Rome, the dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli towered above
the plain. This is the holiest place in Umbria, the Little Portion,
beloved of St. Francis and his brethren, in which they lived and
worked, and from which they issued forth to preach the gospel of
love and repentance to the world. It is sanctified by miracles
and the frequent presence of the saint, and is pregnant with the
romance of the Franciscan order, which the writer of the _Fioretti_
has set forth so admirably. But overmuch devotion has robbed it of
simplicity and nullified many of its gentler associations. It is a
pathetic sight to see the little church, consecrated by centuries
of prayer, in the centre of the sixteenth-century Leviathan. It
looks like an imprisoned thing, a dim unspoken reproach. I wish
they could have left it in its fields, where the wild sweet wind
would have sung praises through door and window, and the ardent
sun have shamed the candles on the altar. But just as the papacy
swept away Francis himself, so this great church has swallowed up
the Little Portion which was all-sufficing for so many saints.
A gentle, white-haired friar took us round the church. 'Here by
this pier,' he said, 'Francis dined with Clare. And this is where
he died. You know he wished to die here. He loved the Porziuncula
better than any other place in the world.'
And then we saw the thornless roses of St. Francis, and his cell,
and the garden where he bade the brothers put cabbages into the
earth upside down to test their obedience, and the fig-tree which
the brothers lately planted at the request of two Englishwomen,
to take the place of the tree wherein the cicala praised God
continuously with Francis until the saint begged him to rest
because he had edified him enough.
He was a simple, dear old man, our guide, who told his stories
smilingly and yet with reverence and faith, very different from the
unkempt and cynical monk at Rivo Torto. And when he had finished he
took us into the sacristy and gave us a little book he had written
about Saint Mary of the Angels, and a rose sprig from the bush
which lost its thorns when St. Francis threw himself into it. And
so we parted, he to his prayers, we to climb up through the fields
to Assisi.
GUBBIO
I shall always think of Gubbio as I saw her first, in the magic
sunset of a cold grey day, on which summer had been hidden by the
jealous clouds, and the wind blew bleakly from the Appennines.
September had come in the night before with storm and wind. When we
left Assisi the sky was clear and rain-swept, blue as the heavens
of Giotto's frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco, and
there was a glint of sunshine lighting her Gothic towers between
the racing cumuli. But all day the mountains of Nocera and Gualdo
'mourned for their heavy yoke,' hiding their crests in wind-blown
veils of cloud; and the rocky stream-beds at their feet, which had
lain mute and parched since the last rains of spring, gave voice in
swirling torrents.
So we came to the heart of the Appennines, to the broad Valley of
the Chiaggio, which is so rich with maize and vineyards. Here in
the north three mountains lift their great heads to the sky, and
in the hollow where their three slopes meet lies Gubbio, a fairy
citadel such as poets dream of. Indeed, Gubbio might well be the
home of dreams, for I can think of no place where their gossamer
threads could be so lightly spun as in the long, fantastic arcade
of the Mercato Vecchio, in the shadow of her Gothic palaces.
As we drew near, the sun slipped from below her mantle of cloud,
and in a seeming passion of desire bathed the whole world in flame.
Seen by the ruddy torch of this wild sunset Gubbio was all rose, a
city of fair dreams, unforgettably lovely. Her towers, palaces and
loggias were illuminated, and the bare slopes of Monte Calvo were
flooded with roseate light save where the folds of the hill made
cobalt shadows. Even the peasants walking in the Piazza del Mercato
were caught in the same radiance, which made a glory round the
humblest implements of toil. It was so fair a sight that I stood
as one enchanted and feared to take my eyes away from it, lest it
should vanish like the fairy cities of our childhood, and I should
find myself once more upon the bleak hillside of life.
O little town, with the name whose quaintness has made it familiar,
do you still sleep at the foot of your mountains under the shadow
of your holy houses? Can it be that I have dreamt of you, seeing
some picture of a mediaeval city in a psalter? Or does your
lamp-lighter still light your ancient swing-lamps in the dusk, with
old-world grace and disregard of time, setting out on his slow
rounds long before the sunset glow has faded from your brow? I must
come back to see if it is true; if your barren hills have really
blossomed into shrines and monasteries; if you have still the
wistful charm that I remember; if you will greet me after the long
journey with that same rosy blush at eve!
[Illustration: GUBBIO: THE LAMPLIGHTER.]
And yet, I do not know why I should question, for I have many
gentle memories of Gubbio--of steep, quiet streets whose ends are
closed by solemn mountains; of Gothic palaces and loggias; of
ancient churches full of faded pictures; of saints and Madonnas
brooding over city gates; of peasants streaming into Mass of a
morning; of women in black mantillas or the graceful fringed shawls
of Venice and the March. Nor have I forgotten the hospitality that
she extended to us. Gubbio was always famous for her hospitality.
There is a story that in the olden days the nobles of Gubbio fought
so fiercely for the right of entertaining visitors to their town
that to avoid the really serious conflicts which resulted from this
rivalry a pillar was erected in the Mercato with rings attached to
it, 'each belonging to some separate aristocratic house, and to
whosesoever ring a traveller chanced to fasten his horse, to him
belonged the right of entertainment.'[18]
Though our inn was humble, even rough, we were lodged in the
ancient convent of San Marco, and we took our meals in a vine
arbour full of hanging grapes, where the sunlight piercing the
leafy roof flecked the snowy table-cloth with silver, and made the
floor an arabesque of dappled light and shade. A few yards away
among the vines the Carmignano foamed along its rocky bed. And here
we were content with simple fare, but of the best--macaroni spread
with pomidoro, _misto fritto_, golden eggs, fruit and honey, washed
down with amber-coloured _vino del paese_.
Whatever may be the facts about the grandson of Noah, to whom local
tradition loves to assign the foundation of Gubbio, there can be
no doubt that she is of Umbrian antiquity. Unlike most of the
so-called Umbrian cities Gubbio has ample proof of her importance
as a city of the older race, which was displaced by the Etruscans;
for besides the number of prehistoric utensils discovered in the
caves of her mountains, and a short course of Cyclopean wall on
Monte Calvo, which point to a remote civilisation, there are
certain pieces of money in existence bearing the Umbrian name
Ikuvini; and, most conclusive evidence of all, there are the
world-famous Eugubian Tables.
These tables of bronze, which have been of such inestimable
value to the student of ancient languages, are Gubbio's greatest
treasure. They are housed in her Palazzo Pubblico, in her little
shrunken museum, which has so few precious things left to-day,
except a solitary tazza by the immortal Maestro Giorgio. It would
be useless for me to write of them at length, for it is impossible
to treat of them scientifically in a short chapter, and only those
who come to see them can gauge the romance and mystery which hang
about them. There are seven tables in all, four written in Etruscan
characters, two in Latin, and one partly in Etruscan and partly
in Latin characters. Yet the language that they have immortalised
is neither Latin nor Etruscan, but the tongue of that mysterious
people, the Umbrians, who have left us so few traces of their
civilisation, whose origin is lost in the misty ages.
Since the discovery of these tables in 1444 students and scholars
have sought to read their riddle, and it is by the fruit of their
labours that we know what an interesting clue they afford to the
character of Gubbio. For these fine letters traced by the scribes
of long ago are sacerdotal inscriptions, dealing with the religious
rites of the Attidian brethren, who paid homage to a strange
pantheon of gods--Umbrian, Roman and Greek--and whose headquarters,
according to many students, were in the temple of Jupiter
Appenninus, eight miles away, at Scheggia, on the old Flaminian
way. M. Bréal, however, does not hold this theory, claiming that
Jupiter Appenninus is not mentioned in the text; and urging
the plea that as the tablets were discovered in a subterranean
vault, near the ancient theatre of Iguvium, the college of the
confraternity was likely to be found within the city itself.
It would be difficult to say, for necessarily the reading of the
tablets is but vague; the only point we can be certain of is
that this ghostly echo of a vanished city is one of prayer and
invocation, occupied with sacrifices and propitiations rather
than with laws or ceremonies, as the inscriptions of Rome and
Etruria have been. And this is typical of the city, for the real
characteristic of Gubbio to-day is her gentle air of sanctity, just
as the most vivid memories of her Middle Ages are concerned with
saints and bishops. For the bishops of Gubbio, the saintly Ubaldo,
whose name the people of Gubbio venerate in the yearly festival
of the Ceri on the 15th of May, the blessed Teobaldo who succeeded
him, and Villano, that man 'of pure and saintly life who was,
besides, the friend of St. Francis of Assisi,' are only a few of
the many holy men who steered her helm through the stormy waves of
Time.
[Illustration: GUBBIO: SAN FRANCESCO.]
And here, as you remember, St. Francis came with song and
thanksgiving, although he had been but a short time before stripped
naked to the world, to see his friend Giacomello Spada, who clothed
him and sheltered him, and whose garden covered the ground where
the picturesque Gothic church of San Francesco stands to-day.
Nor is there any more familiar story told by their nurses to the
breathless children of the Latin countries than the legend of St.
Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which is commemorated to this day
in the little chapel of S. Francesco della Pace; built, so it is
said, on the site of the cave wherein the wolf dwelt after he had
been tamed by the brotherly love of Francis. It was to Gubbio
Francis came in the first glow of his renunciation, for we read
that he was confident of finding shelter and the bare necessaries
of clothing with his friends there, but I think there was another
reason. Perhaps as he lay on the bleak side of Subasio he thought
with longing of the gentle city of Ubaldo, cradled at the foot of
its bare mountain, which soared towards the heavens, offering, as
it were, upon an altar, the body of its saintly bishop.
Gubbio is a city of vanished splendours, a ghost of her old
glory. So that we were amazed on entering Santa Maria Nuova to
see anything so brilliant and full of vivid beauty as the Madonna
della Belvedere, which Ottaviano Nelli painted there. Like
Sant'Agostino and San Pietro, Santa Maria has her share of faded
fresco; but this Madonna in her splendid robes, in the midst of
her gracious court of angels and saints and kneeling donors, is
a vision of the glories of that Gubbio which once raised a proud
head among the principalities of the Quattrocento. Yet not even
Nelli has succeeded in colouring the past of Gubbio. For nearly
all her treasures have been stolen from her, and her tired old
walls toppling to their decay enclose more gardens and smiling
vineyards than streets and squares. If she had not been so poor and
so ready to sell herself for a few _soldi_ to the passing stranger
she might have been a museum of lovely things. As it is she has
been stripped of everything which could be carried away, from the
exquisite majolica of Maestro Giorgio (whose ruby glaze made him as
much the glory of sixteenth-century Gubbio as Oderigi was of the
city visited by Dante) to the intarsia cabinets in the Palace of
Federigo of Urbino.
How typical of Gubbio, the shrunken city, is the ruined palace
full of lovely crumbling stones, where Federigo and his beloved
wife Battista lived. It is fallen into decay; it has become a mere
barrack; a more desolate spot could not well be imagined. And yet
it is a fitting symbol of the house of Montefeltro; for Guidobaldo,
the weakling son of the great condottiere, was born here, in the
house which Federigo built so proudly in his birthplace among the
loyal people of Gubbio. And it was the scene of a great tragedy.
For here Battista died.
After her death Federigo came here less often, for we read that
he loved Battista very dearly. She had inherited the wit and
ready sympathy of her great grandmother, Battista da Montefeltro;
she was a scholar, and a woman of resource and courage, capable
of defending the duchy while Federigo was absent on his long
campaigns. And withal she loved him. It was for this reason,
knowing his disappointment because she had given him no heir
to succeed to his hard-won estate, that this great woman, the
grandmother of Vittoria Colonna, listened for her lord's sake to an
old wife's tale, and making a pilgrimage to Gubbio vowed to Saint
Ubaldo that if a son was vouchsafed to her she would be willing to
die for his sake. A curious story. But she did bear a son, here at
Gubbio, whither she had come to be under the special protection of
the saint. Federigo was away in Tuscany, gaining more laurels by
his great victory over the Volterrans. He came back to her as soon
as he could, riding swiftly through the Appennines with his honours
fresh upon him. And here is the strangest part of the story. For
when he was but a few hours away Battista, who had been progressing
so well, fell ill, and died soon after his arrival, thus expiating
her vow. Federigo's heartbroken letters to the Senate of Siena and
the Pope testify his grief. Nor did her love and sacrifice avail
him anything, for Guidobaldo was the last of his race to sit upon
the throne of Urbino.
[Illustration: GUBBIO: PIAZZA VITTORIO EMANUELE.]
But neither Time, nor the wanton hand of strangers, can rob Gubbio
of her beauty. She is a dream-city within whose walls we grew
forgetful of the world. It is not the imperishable grandeur of
her mountains or her monuments which constitute her special charm
so much as her Gothic grace and her gentle blending of art and
nature. See what a fraction of old Iguvium is left--a theatre,
with its memories of vanished pomps and vanities, and some broken
tombs standing in the corn-fields, with twisted vines veiling their
ragged cores, and brambles tossing wide arms over their crests. And
yet I carry with me the memory of a golden hour in that ancient
Umbro-Roman theatre of Iguvium, not so much for its importance as
a monument as for its beauty; although the vandalism of the last
century, which allowed the people of Gubbio to strip it of its
marble columns, has left it many interesting fragments, such as a
perfect doorway with its jambs complete, and the unspoilt sloping
pavement of the wings by which the actors entered the stage. For
we approached it through a vineyard below the city walls: its
auditorium was a deep semi-circle of grassy steps, broidered with
little flowers, and in its proscenium the apples dropped from
neighbouring orchards.
We stepped through the vineyard gate on to the raised platform of
the stage, denuded of everything except some stumps of masonry and
some few feet of pavement. Three blocks of marble served as rough
steps from the proscenium to the orchestra, and here a lizard
sunned himself, and a happy golden butterfly fluttered, as though
these old worn stones were their familiar playground. As we climbed
up the seats where once the Romans sat, and perhaps the Umbri, for
the theatre was repaired in the lifetime of Augustus, the scent
of crushed thyme filled the air. It was very quiet. There were
not even cicalas, only the distant bells of Gubbio calling her
people to prayer. We sat on the highest circle of the mossy steps,
and looked across the vineyards to the little city, asleep in the
golden noon below her arid hills.
The poet was deep in _opus reticulatum_ and cornices and friezes,
but I could only love the silence and the scented air, the little
flowers which starred the ground, the grasses pencilled lightly
against the sky on the chain of arches, the lizards sunning
themselves on broken marbles, the butterflies dancing above them.
And when I raised my eyes Gubbio lay before me with olive-gardens
enclosed in her broken walls, and her old grey houses piled one
above the other round her lovely Gothic Palazzo dei Consoli, which
soars above the lesser roofs, arcaded and battlemented, a crown
of beauty on the hillside. Behind rose her three mountains, Monte
Calvo, Monte Ingino, and Monte S. Girolamo, barren of everything
but lonely cypresses pointing the way to monasteries on high.
[Illustration: GUBBIO: THE MEDIAEVAL AQUEDUCT.]
Gubbio has the indefinably wistful charm of a city built in the
shadow of great mountains, for though she has conquered the three
giants which hem her in, and left her monasteries as out-posts
on their slopes, and solemn crucifixes as her ensign on their
brows, she has not tamed their wildness. It needs only a few steps
through the picturesque old Porta Metauro to prove this, for out
in that rugged pass which leads to Scheggia, and the Old Flaminian
Road, and Cagli, and Urbino we were hemmed in between the hungry
mountains, whose sides are scarred by torrents, curiously seamed,
and richly coloured.
Along this road the Dukes of Urbino rode in splendid state. How
little it is altered from their day! Here you are face to face
with Nature, who changes slowly. The strata on the frowning cliffs
are a little worn; the road is a little better, though it is a
poor _strada_ even now for motors; perhaps there was no wall then
between the road and the deep gully where the green Carmignano
stirs up its sandy bed. But the peasants rode up the hilly pass
then as now with their women riding astride and a-pillion on
mules or donkeys, and the traveller in that day would hear as we
did the forlorn music of their bells still floating back, long
after they were out of sight. On the hillside above was one of
Gubbio's wonders--the mediaeval aqueduct which creeps perilously
round the shoulder of Monte Calvo, and dips down the hillside to
the Bottaccione, which I can best describe by saying that it is a
thick wall which joins Monte Calvo to Monte Ingino, and dams the
Carmignano, making a reservoir from which water can flow at will
into the town for use in mills and fountains. If the Eugubian
Tablets testify to the importance of ancient Iguvium, these vast
engineering feats testify to her mediaeval greatness. For though
they are not as imposing as Roman Monuments, and are built of small
poor stones, they are a splendid testimony of the energy of this
little hill-girt city in the twelfth and fourteenth[19] centuries,
when most principalities were too occupied in petty wars to think
of such stupendous work.
[Illustration: GUBBIO: VIA CARMIGNANO.]
It would be unfair to Gubbio to take leave of her without saying
one word about the Via Carmignano, which is not only one of the
most picturesque streets to be seen anywhere in Italy, but which
represents a sphere of life in which Gubbio was extremely active
from the twelfth century to comparatively recent years--her woollen
industry. It is rather astonishing that Gubbio, who had so many
trades and arts, should be so poor to-day. Her school of painting
which was mainly of the miniature type--for Ottaviano Nelli was as
much a miniature-painter as the mysterious Oderisi, whose name,
like Francesca da Rimini's, has been handed down to posterity by
Dante--was famous throughout Italy.
I have already spoken of her renown as the home of Master George,
the great majolica-maker; she sheltered a school of mosaic-workers
from early times; and her wood-carvers, who have left splendid work
in her old Church of San Pietro, were reckoned so important that a
certain Niccolò was commissioned to carve the great doors of San
Francesco at Assisi. But it was by her wool industry that Gubbio
built up her wealth; and it was to turn their wool mills that the
Eugubians built the Bottaccione out in the pass between Scheggia
and Gubbio, and diverted the course of the Carmignano, which till
the twelfth century had been a moat round the city walls.
To-day this little mountain torrent still runs through the heart
of Gubbio, but the mills are silent. For the woollen trade, which
was so prosperous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the
nobles passed a law forbidding any of their class to enter its
ranks under penalty of forfeiting his title, has been slowly killed
by the suppression of the monasteries, which has robbed it of its
staple support, the making of habits for religious houses.