mountain torrent as it approaches the Porta Metauro. Behind the
arcaded loggia del Mercato, where it runs at the foot of the
cypress garden of San Giovanni Battista, a picturesque and ancient
church on the site of the early cathedral, the ravine is spanned by
as many bridges as a Venetian waterway, mediaeval erections of the
maddest shapes, full of fantastic angles, which sometimes only lead
to the barred doors of some Merchant of Gubbio's private house.
Here are Gothic palaces with gardens pouring over their walls,
and coats of arms by their doors like the house near the Via dei
Consoli, which has the Lamb of the Templars over its portal. But
as the road creeps up towards the Porta Metauro they are replaced
by thirteenth-century houses, mere cottages of rough grey stone
such as you might find in any mountain village--only these were
built in the time of St. Francis. Between the street and the deep
river gully is a breast-high parapet with wide-eaved shrines whose
hanging lamps are always lit at night; and beyond and above are the
everlasting hills, towering overhead, blocking every vista with
their rocks and gullies and stony water-courses, lifting their
tawny heads up to the soft sky and crowned with giant crucifixes,
as though they shouted in triumph to an unheeding world the old
war-cry of the Lord, '_In hoc signo vinces!_'
ANCONA
We caught our first glimpse of the shimmering Adriatic across
a richly-farmed plain full of the fruit-trees which Horace and
Juvenal extolled; and soon afterwards we saw the Eastern Gate of
Italy, beautiful Ancona, rising like a city of white marble above
its blue, sickle-shaped bay.
The history of the origin of Ancona is unique among the cities of
the Adriatic, for she was founded by a colony of Sicilian Greeks
who came to the shores of Picenum about 380 B.C., seeking refuge
from the tyrant Dionysius. Ancona is a typical Greek site, a
natural harbour well adapted to the use of commerce, with a steep
hill overhanging the 'elbow' bay. From the earliest times she was
rich and prosperous, for besides being the only port on the eastern
coast before the growth of Venice and Ravenna she was situated in
the fertile fields of Picenum, which were noted for the excellence
of their olives and fruits, as well as for their wine and corn. She
also had a wonderful purple dye which was said to equal that of
Phoenicia, whence came the garments immortalised by Macaulay.
'Woven in the land of sunrise
By Syria's dark-browed daughters,
And by the sails of Carthage brought
Far o'er the southern waters.'
She was one of the first cities to hold out friendly hands to
Caesar after he had crossed the Rubicon on his march on Rome, and
in the life-time of Pliny she was raised to the rank of a Roman
colony. Later when the Emperors and after them the Exarchs held
their courts at Ravenna, Ancona was of even more importance than
Ravenna as the natural trading port with the Byzantine Empire.
To-day she is a large and prosperous city, with broad streets and
boulevards given over to the tyranny of electric trams. She is
like Alexandria, or Marseilles, with her busy wharf life on the
one hand and her _piazze_ with their fountains and bandstands and
their alfresco cafés under avenues of plane trees on the other. Her
restaurants are dear, and her inns bad; her inhabitants are the
most disagreeable people we met in Italy--with all the taciturnity
of the Venetians and none of their picturesqueness; but we were
able to forgive her everything for the beauty of her cathedral, and
for the first view of her wide bay with the pictured sails of her
fishing-boats poised like a flight of butterflies on its mirroring
waters.
In Ancona, while I am down in the noisy streets, my heart is
always up on the grassy hill above the Mole of Trajan, where
the Cathedral of San Ciriaco is set like a jewel on the crest
of Monte Guasco. Truly it is on their hills that you may know
the cities of Italy. For up there, far removed from the unlovely
bustle of her streets with their clanging tramways, their painted
kiosks, their matter-of-fact commercialism, we seemed to creep
unawares right into the heart of Ancona. Coming straight from the
peace and breadth and quiet of Umbria we had found her peculiarly
unattractive. We had pictured a city of romance, for Ancona has
ever been Italy's link with the Orient; the wealth of Byzantium
has been unloaded in her harbour; the merchandise of the East
has stood upon her quays. And in the first flush of our arrival,
when we stood upon the wharf and saw the brilliant wings of her
fishing-boats drifting in from the Adriatic, she seemed for a
moment to be the city of our imaginings--a fleeting fancy, not
easily recaptured on the boulevards of the modern city. But on the
hill of San Ciriaco, far above the noisy town, with the Adriatic
filling the horizon, and the soft bells of the incomparably lovely
church of the first bishop of Ancona wafting a benediction to the
fishing fleet as it sailed into the sunset, she became once more
our Port of Romance, true sister to Venice, the beautiful bride of
Italy's Eastern Waters.
There was nothing to prepare us for the exquisite vista which
unfolded itself before us on the crest of Monte Guasco as we
toiled up the steep stair-streets which scale the Cathedral hill.
The houses were old but undistinguished, the homes of the very
poor, who do not even have windows in Italy, but live behind stable
doors in _bassi_. Nor did we realise the moment at which we emerged
from them, for our eyes were blocked by the bell-tower of age
unknown which stands like a sentinel before Ancona's Cathedral.
There is no church in Christendom so enthroned. It is built between
two tideless seas on a wind-swept hill, which was once the seat of
the white temple of the laughing Goddess of Eryx--Aphrodite, who
was born of the foam.
Beside it is the old Episcopal Palace in which Aeneas Sylvius,
the last of the crusaders, waited for the false Patriarch of
Venice to set sail with him against the Turks. Poor Pius II., with
his quixotic and splendid dream of reconquering Jerusalem for
the Papacy, how often must he have stood on the bulwark of San
Ciriaco's hill watching for the galleys of the Venetian to come
into sight. And when at last they did sweep down upon Ancona he was
no longer waiting; he had embarked alone upon a longer journey; the
last and most incomprehensible of the crusades had failed!
We, too, stood upon the crest of Monte Guasco behind its bulwark of
acacia trees, on our first evening by the Adriatic, and looked down
upon the busy wharf, with the long arm of Trajan's Mole encircling
the harbour, and the white crescent of Ancona stretching round the
bay to Monte Astagno. It was nearing the hour of sunset. Across the
sunlit water we could see the great Appennines towering towards
heaven, aerial as clouds upon the horizon. There Rimini lay, on
that fair coast, and Venice and Ravenna, the homes of Poetry and
Romance. But near at hand Ancona's fleet of bright-winged boats was
spread across the bay. We stood and watched them sailing out into
the west, slowly, for there was little wind to fill their gold and
copper sails. They looked like argosies of Love journeying into a
land of sunset mists across a painted sea. Surely they must come
back to-morrow with dreams below their wings, and little lovely
treasures from the land whither they were sailing to-night! Slowly
they crossed the bar--now a crimson wing tapering to gold with a
black griffin rampant; now an orange Gonfalon bearing a lion and
anchor; now one of black and gold, now one of Venetian brown. We
watched them drifting out, and always the west grew more golden and
the distant mountains more aerial until the sea was a path of flame
from the far-off coast to Trajan's Mole, where the sunset gilded
the black hulks of the coal-ships in the harbour. Ere the last of
those fantastic birds had winged its way out to the deep waters,
the lights of Ancona had begun to twinkle in the dusk, and the
bells of San Ciriaco were stilled.
[Illustration: ANCONA: THE FISHING FLEET.]
San Ciriaco is worthy of its site. Begun a thousand years ago in
the form of the earliest Christian temples, half Byzantine, half
Romanesque, it preserves the original Greek cross of nave and
transept, and is crowned by an antique dome, one of the oldest in
Italy, which time and the salt breath of the Adriatic have painted
a wonderful green, the despair of artists. The exterior of San
Ciriaco is of almost Eastern simplicity, but sun and wind have
mellowed the dazzling white marbles of its walls to such gracious
tints that it is like a perfect fruit ripened slowly to perfection
through the centuries. Its chief glory is the Gothic portico of
rose-red Verona marble which tradition and Vasari assign to the
hand of Margheritone d'Arezzo, the sombre painter of crucifixes,
who was so jealous of Giotto that he died of spleen. Two couchant
lions at the head of a flight of steps support its outer columns,
and within it is blush-hued, with slender columns, alternate rose
and white, wrought with a delicate frieze of the heads of saints
and the grotesques of mediaeval fancy.
Nor has the interior of this noble church suffered much from the
hands of the restorer. It is a granary of rare and interesting
Byzantine fragments, and its choir is graced by ten of the marble
columns which once stood in the temple of Aphrodite.
Ancona of to-day is a garden where the beautiful flowers of an
ancient architecture are still flourishing among the energetic
weeds and herbs of everyday life. Between the two horns of her
crescent bay, Monte Astagno, crowned by the Spanish bastions of the
Fortezza, and Monte Guasco, which enthrones the lovely church of
San Ciriaco, there is a network of streets. Let us for the sake of
the metaphor suppose that these streets are paths in the garden of
Ancona; and let us walk in them, searching in the tangle of hardy
commercial upshoots for the delicate blossoms which graced the
pleasances of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. More than this,
for down in the crowded port we shall discover the ancient growths
of the Roman city in many a broken arch on whose blackened stones
a Gothic spandril has been grafted, and in the glorious Triumphal
Arch which the Imperial Plotina and her sister-in-law raised in
honour of Trajan.
Between the shrieking railway station and the Porta Pia there is
nothing to detain us; this is more or less a modern suburb which
has sprung up since the foundation of the railway; but at the
Porta Pia, which stands at the foot of Monte Astagno, we enter
the old harbour. To our left is the picturesque Lazzaretto built
by Clement XII. in 1732, now used as a sugar refinery; and in
front we see before us the curving bay of Ancona, with its grand
new quay or Banchina, of which the Anconans are so proud. The Via
Ventinove Settembre, whose name like the ubiquitous Venti Settembre
commemorates the expulsion of the Papal troops in 1860, takes us
into the heart of the modern city; but it is not in her wide Corso
Giuseppe Mazzini, or Vittorio Emanuele, or Piazza Cavour that we
shall find anything of the old Ancona. Here she is as modern as
her names betoken, although the fruit-market in a curious uphill
square and the fish-market below the picturesque sixteenth-century
fountain of the Corso Giuseppe Mazzini are as picturesque and
irrelevant as any market in Italy.
It is in the southern wing of the city that we shall find the
flowers we seek, in the steep Strada delle Scuole which runs
through the centre of the graceful arcaded Court of the Prefettura,
and the Via Aurelio Saffi, the most characteristic and romantic
street in Ancona. In the Strada delle Scuole we see the great
church of San Domenico with the colossal statue of Clement XII.
upon its steps, and San Francesco with its riotous Gothic façade
towering over the narrow street from its lofty stairs, and the
Palazzo del Comune built by Margheritone d'Arezzo, and much
restored and modernised in the seventeenth century.
But it is in the Via Aurelio Saffi that Ancona flowers best; for
in this centre of the busy wharf life, which has been given up
to the merchants and bankers of the eastern port, we find such
gracious little basilicas, enriched with carvings from Byzantine
bestiaries, and Gothic porches and façades flowering into the
Renaissance under the Oriental touch of Giorgio da Sebenico, the
last Gothic architect of Italy. Here is the Loggia dei Mercanti,
very florid and flamboyant, with its tilting knight a-horseback;
and close beside it Napoleon's home in Ancona, the Palazzo
Benincasa, with fifteenth-century Gothic-Renaissance windows; and
here, standing a little back from the rattle of the modern port
traffic, with pigeons resting on its many little arches, is Santa
Maria della Piazza, with a Pisan-romanesque façade, soft and eaten
by the years, encrusted with ancient sculptures and dusty majolica
plaques. Opposite this ancient and beautiful church a gateway with
another relief of a knight on horseback, like the splendid gilt
knight of the Loggia dei Mercanti, leads into the big docks; but
it is better to go down the Via Aurelio Saffi, though at the first
glance it seems to be given up to shipping agents and barbers. For
here, in the shadow of the old old Palazzo del Comune, which is
carried up on gigantic arches to the level of the road above, we
find the little church of Santa Maria della Misericordia, with its
curious Renaissance portal, its one Byzantine ambo, and its elegant
mosque-like interior of brick with stone cornices, pillars and
groinings only thinly disguised by plaster. A little further up is
a doorway of Roman masonry, and two ancient arches, with uncemented
blocks up to the cornice but Gothic work above. And soon afterwards
the narrow street debouches on to the wharf.
Not in all Italy is there such a quay, or such a blaze of colour!
A long line of mediaeval wall, of burnt red brick machicolated,
runs down the Mole, and in its shadow are some low trattorie
covered with Morning Glories. High above these, raised on a flight
of steps, the arch of Trajan, with its marble painted grey and
gold by rain and the years, is framed in the blue Italian sky.
Beside it the bronze and copper sails of the fishing-boats are
massed together among the black colliers, and above and behind are
the green hills of Ancona, with her red-roofed houses climbing up
their wide slopes, and Monte Guasco crowned by the white jewel of
her cathedral. It has been said that Trajan's arch is the most
beautiful and perfect Roman arch in Italy. I do not know. It is
wonderfully unspoiled and graceful, extremely simple in design,
plainer even than the arch of Titus on the brow of the Velian. But
surely there is no other Roman monument which has so rich a setting!
Though we spent a long morning down in the harbour, hemmed in by
the amphitheatre of Ancona's hills, now watching the fishermen
mending their big brown nets, now engrossed with the picturesque
wharf life--the sailors clad in bright blue linen at work among
the black hulks of the coaling ships, the oxen toiling over the
stones, their snowy flanks grey with dust and dirt, the lascars of
ocean-going steamers whose scarlet turbans lent a fresh note of
colour to the animated scene--our first and last thoughts of Ancona
were with her fishing-boats. For when we left her they fluttered
after us like butterflies out of a garden as far as Falconara, just
as they had come to meet us when we drew near her sickle bay.
To watch the boats of Ancona drift into the little harbour at
sundown, furling their sails, is to find oneself taken back to
the Age of Beautiful Things when the ideal form and colour were
as natural as sunlight and shadow. It was for this reason that we
took rooms in the Albergo Milano, which is a bad and cheerless inn,
for below our windows lay the whole fleet of graceful craft, with
up-curved bows like ancient galleys, and sails emblazoned with
devices, flaunting gay colours--old gold and purple, and Venetian
browns and reds at dawn and sunset.
Although her white temple has long since vanished from Monte
Guasco, Aphrodite, the goddess of fair and prosperous journeys,
still keeps watch over Ancona's bay. In these halcyon-days we
forgot that the vines of Umbria were already yellowing under the
autumn rains; we hardly realised that these smiling waters were of
an eastern sea.
Think of the coast of Norfolk in the cold wet days of an English
September, when the North Sea thunders along the shore as though
Poseidon shook his head in wrath! If you have stood upon the timber
pier at Lowestoft, its wooden sides green with sea-wrack, and
watched the deep-sea fishermen lurching out in heavy grey rollers
to wrest their living from an angry sea, you will find it hard
to reconcile their perilous existence with the gracious beauty of
Ancona's fishing-fleet. There life is full of the grandeur and
bitterness of toil, salt with the kiss of the sea and the tears
of the women weeping for those who never come back; here there is
song and sunshine; here you could set sail for dreamland in these
painted ships upon the mirroring Adriatic.
We were never weary of watching the boat-life from our windows.
In the still dawn the arms of the harbour were like gold bars
encircling a sapphire, and in the distance we could see the little
towns along the sea-board shining rosily from their misty hills.
Sometimes the bay was sown with boats, like azure embroidery with
butterflies, and sometimes below the windows the cargo of a felucca
with gold and bronze sails was being unloaded on the wharf. The
sailors were clad in white and blue, or stripped to the waist, with
scarlet sashes girding up their short white drawers. How Brangwyn
could have caught that vivid colour against the pearly dawn! Then
the sun rose and the fleet began to drift slowly out to sea,
trailing their bright reflections in the water.
But I loved them best when they came in at night, furling their
yellow wings or drooping their tired pinions to the west, laden
with who knows what treasures from the caves of sea-gods! Some
were blended into a soft harmony of colour, copper and red and
gold; others had strange devices painted on them, griffins and
black dragons, elephants and mermen; some were like tiger moths,
black and emblazoned. And there was one crimson sail with a white
horse, a gallant beast like the fiery steeds of an ancient frieze,
who sank to his knees when the fishers reached the quay, and then
vanished in its rich red folds.
Aeneas Sylvius must have looked upon such sails; so might the wings
of the Venetian Antonio's ships have been wrought. All the gold of
the East seemed to be pouring into the harbour as those boats came
in. We watched them tacking into port, passing one another again
and again, like the figures in a stately dance--far off at first,
then nearer, then just outside the bar, then looming large below
the windows as they trailed by to tie up at the quay--drooping
their pennons and folding their wings like dream-ships, the
fantastic heralds of the night.
LORETO
Loreto, the hill of laurels, which tradition has made the most
sacred spot in Italy, has more than a legendary antiquity. For on
its sunny slopes, overlooking the battle-field of Castelfidardo and
the still Adriatic, the mysterious Picenians, contemporaries of
the Umbrians and the Etruscans, left traces of a perished history
in graves which have yielded the highest native art of prehistoric
Italy.
They are charnelled in the museum of Ancona. But the vast cathedral
built over the Holy House of Loreto is of a solidity which stands
well for eternity. As we approached it on the sunny autumn morning
of the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, we thought we saw not a
church but a castle, built with the robust towers of the fifteenth
century. It is in fact a castle built to protect from the Saracens
the treasures laid by the potentates and peoples of the Middle
Ages on the threshold of the Holy House, which the hands of angels
transported in the thirteenth century first from Palestine to
Dalmatia; and then, when Dalmatia was no longer secure, to the hill
above Recanati in the March of Ancona.
One May morning in the year 1291 some peasants of Rauniza, a little
town situated on the Dalmatian coast between Tersatto and Fiume,
saw a spectacle which filled their souls with wonder as they went
out to work in their fields before dawn. On a hill, which the night
before had been bare and solitary, they beheld a strange building,
which, even to their unaccustomed eyes, was of great antiquity.
Drawing near they found that it had no foundations, although it
stood miraculously upright; and while they were wondering at the
phenomenon they saw a multitude approaching from Tersatto, from
Rauniza, and from Fiume. Summoning up courage they entered, and
discovered that it was formed of a single chamber whose ceiling was
made of wood painted blue, and illumined with small gold stars. The
rough walls were covered with plaster on which was frescoed the
story of the life of Christ, and a large open door in one of the
side walls gave access to the mysterious dwelling. To the right
was a long narrow window with an altar surmounted by a painted
crucifix, and near by a little cupboard contained some vases of
rough pottery. On the left of this they discovered a chimney
hearth, and a statue of the Holy Virgin holding the Infant Christ
in her arms.
[Illustration: LORETO.]
In that serene and far-distant dawn all the world was spell-bound
in the contemplation of the prodigy. But the explanation of the
mystery was not far off, for the venerable pastor of the church of
St. George, Bishop Alexander of Modruria, who had been lying on a
bed of sickness, came into their midst crying out that the Blessed
Virgin herself had appeared to him during the night, saying in
the sweetest voice: 'My house at Nazareth is now transferred to
these lands. This is the very altar erected by the apostle Peter:
the statue of cedar-wood is my authentic portrait carved by Luke
the evangelist. Arise from thy bed of pain! I restore you to your
health because I wish that the miracle of your cure may breed faith
in the crowd in what you may relate to them.' Upon which he rose
up full of joy and strength and ran to render thanks. The people
united their prayers night and day with the prayers of the Holy
Bishop, while the Miraculous Intelligence spread rapidly, and
carried by the winds, the clouds and the light, it crossed the seas
and mountains to fill all western Christendom with happiness and
wonder.
At that time Nicholas Frangipani, the Governor of Dalmatia, was
accompanying his sovereign the Emperor Rudolph of Hapsburg in
a military expedition. Warned by a courier of the arrival of
the Holy House he came to Tersatto, where he could not at first
believe his eyes. However, he gave permission to four wise men to
go immediately to Nazareth to examine and check the facts of this
extraordinary occurrence. The mission was accomplished with danger,
because the Saracens under the Sultan Khalil were in possession of
the Holy Land, having driven the crusaders from their stronghold in
Acre. But the evidence was altogether convincing. At Nazareth the
House of the Virgin was no more to be found; a mysterious power had
torn it from its foundations, which were still there to show that
their dimensions and materials tallied with those of the house thus
suddenly transferred to Dalmatia.
Every doubt having disappeared, the facts of the translation were
made public, and religion took advantage to reap a good harvest of
faith from the miraculous seed which had taken root on the shores
of Dalmatia.
But the rejoicing was not for long. On the 10th of December 1294
the Holy House of the Virgin disappeared as suddenly as it arrived,
and the pilgrims sought for it in vain on the little hill of
Tersatto which had become so celebrated.
One whole day the Sanctuary was upon the waters of the Adriatic.
At ten o'clock at night it appeared on the other coast, in the
neighbourhood of Recanati, where it deposited itself in a laurel
wood (lauretum), to the terror of some shepherds who were tending
their flocks, and saw the wonderful edifice approach surrounded by
a halo.
At Loreto the same thing happened as at Rauniza. In a few days the
place became celebrated. Crowds of pilgrims flocked to it, and
from dawn to sunset the echo of their prayers mingled with the song
of the woodland birds.