the prayers of an aged hermit. The second was found in a prophecy
of St. Francis, who had foretold the coming of the Holy House. The
third was vouchsafed to St. Nicholas of Tolentino who, filled with
the prophetic spirit, often walked towards the sea, and fixed his
gaze on the azure distance with a presentiment that from there he
would receive a precious treasure. Which he did. For it was from
the Virgin, in person, that the Holy Monk had the announcement that
her house was no longer to be found at Nazareth, or at Tersatto in
Dalmatia, but in the fresh and whispering wood of Lauretum.
Loreto the town is dependent upon Loreto the church. It is a mere
growth, which has sprung up round the miraculous shrine of the
Santa Casa, as the tents of the servants of God sprang up round
the Holy Tabernacle in the wilderness. If by another miracle the
Santa Casa, and with it the mother church and the apostolical
palace, were to change its abode again, Loreto would be nothing
but a cluster of peasant cottages with a mediaeval clock-tower and
a picturesque city gate. It consists mainly of one long street,
leading from the Porta della Città to the church, lined with humble
shops, which on feast days empty themselves into the road in
gaily decked booths of rosaries, medals, peasant jewellery, bright
kerchiefs, and all the semi-religious paraphernalia dear to the
heart of the Italian holiday-maker.
[Illustration: PEASANTS AT LORETO.]
Loreto is the Lourdes of Italy. The prevalence of cholera in
Apulia, in the autumn of 1910, caused the Government to issue an
edict forbidding the annual fair of the Feast of the Nativity of
the Virgin, which brings more than a quarter of a million peasants
from all parts of Italy; but although the festa lost much in
picturesqueness by the absence of the southern Italians, we drove
up the hillside, in the company of a host of pilgrims.
As we went all eyes were turned towards Loreto, the little
village, white as any city of the Orient, which enshrines one of
the greatest treasures of the Roman Catholic Church, the humble
cottage, built of rough stones, which half Christendom believes to
have been the home of the Holy Family on their return from Egypt,
as well as the scene of the Annunciation and the Incarnation. For
in its midst loomed the towers and bastions of the Chiesa della
Santa Casa, with its many apses spreading out on the crest of the
hill like the petals of a flower, golden-hued, and crowned by a
dome bearing aloft a gilded image of the Virgin. We approached it
through an avenue of tinselled merry-go-rounds, and rifle ranges,
and red and white striped theatre-booths,--the mushroom-growths of
all European festas; but it was not until we passed through the
city gates that the real business of the day began. Here it was
impossible to hurry. The stream of pilgrims in that narrow and
crowded thoroughfare, stopping at every stall to chaffer and bid,
flowed but slowly towards the shrine, although the great bell was
booming from the campanile like the voice of a temple, calling its
devotees to prayer.
It was a scene of indescribable noise and gaiety, but from the
picturesque point of view it was disappointing, for the peasants
of the March are not beautiful like the peasants of Umbria and
Tuscany, nor do they wear the gay kerchiefs and costumes of the
southern Italians, seeming to prefer white silk and wool kerchiefs
to the brilliant flowered _tovagliette_ of the women of the
Campagna.
When at last we did emerge from the narrow, crowded thoroughfare we
found ourselves in a wide piazza surrounded by elegant Renaissance
arcades, and saw before us the Chiesa della Santa Casa, towering
above a broad flight of steps. And straightway, although the gay
stalls with their fluttering kerchiefs and strings of rosaries and
images flowed down one side of the square, we forgot the noise and
bustle of the street; heard only the deep-toned bell calling the
world to worship on that sunny hill-top overlooking the Adriatic;
saw only the pilgrims streaming up the stairs on either side of the
statue of Pope Sixtus V., and into those exquisite bronze doors
which are among the chief glories of Loreto's treasury of art.
For here in Loreto the legend of the Holy House is told with the
simple faith of the age of Rudolph of Hapsburg, the founder of
the Austrian dynasty, and St. Nicholas of Tolentino, in whose
life-time it took place. And whether the stranger comes to Loreto
as a pilgrim or a sight-seer it is impossible for him not to be
stirred by the simple piety and devotion of the multitudes which
throng this shrine. When I remember that for five centuries the
world has journeyed here to pray and worship, to me it makes no
difference that the dimensions of the foundations of the Holy House
in Nazareth do not tally with the dimensions of the Santa Casa of
Loreto, or that none of the pilgrims to Nazareth between the fourth
and the sixteenth centuries made mention of the house of Joseph
in Palestine. It stands for so much in the history of the world.
For we have all waited on the shore of the Sea of Doubt, like St.
Nicholas upon the shore of the Adriatic, and searched the horizon
for the treasure which we dreamt lay beyond it. And though many of
us have had some message, faint and fluttering maybe, which has
nevertheless grown clearer as we strained towards it, for how few
of us has the miracle come safely through the breakers and blessed
our eyes as the Santa Casa of Loreto blessed the eyes of the
shepherds of Recanati!
In comparison with its splendid fortified apses, whose
fifteenth-century fighting galleries are still intact, and pierced
by holes for dropping hot lead on to the heads of besiegers, the
façade which Sixtus v. built for the Chiesa della Santa Casa is
unimposing. But it is graced by three bronze doors worthy of
comparison with Ghiberti's wonderful gates in the baptistery at
Florence. They are the work of the sons of Girolamo Lombardo and
his pupils; and the panels of the central door, with their story
of the Creation, the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the
murder of Abel, are masterpieces of the Renaissance, so godlike
are the figures of Adam, as he tills the soil, and of the slayer
Cain, fleeing from wrath to come. They are surrounded by a daring
and frankly pagan arabesque of fauns and mermen and foliage. Nor
are the side doors less beautiful, with their lives of Abraham and
Moses, and their smiling cherubs holding up medallions and lockets
in which are figures of Virgins and Saints, and miniature scenes in
delicate low relief.
While we stayed to look at those exquisite panels of the oldest
story in the world, there came two shaggy-haired men, with the dust
of long journeys on their hob-nailed boots, who doffed their hats
and knelt there on the pavement in the midst of the shifting crowd
of worshippers, praying before their Lord with unconscious grace,
as Abel prayed before the God of Israel, ere they ventured to
approach the holy shrine.
And here we paused, for this was what we had come out to see. We
had no meed of worship to offer to Madonna through that strange
Byzantine doll, loaded with jewels like an Indian totem, who smiles
so enigmatically, over her glittering lamps and tapers, at the
kneeling people. To us the story of the Santa Casa was a legend
only beautiful in the faith which can believe it. Nor were we drawn
hither to see the treasures worth the ransoms of many kings which
Popes and Emperors have lavished on the shrine, or the exquisite
frescoes of Melozzo da Forli and Luca Signorelli in its sacristies.
For greater than any of these are the humble and lowly of heart who
worship in the magnificent temples which princes and prelates have
built to their gods. They are indeed the salt of the earth, the
shining light which cannot be hid. They are like the hills and the
valleys in which they live; in their eyes are the shadows born of
century-long communion with Nature; being meek they have inherited
the earth; being pure in heart they have seen God.
[Illustration: PILGRIMS AT LORETO.]
Come in with me then to this great rich church and see these little
ones at prayer. See how they press into the Santa Casa. Are not
their simple faith, their gentle humility, the tears and sighs of
the women, the bent heads of the men, more beautiful than the rich
marble screen on which Sansovino and five other great sculptors of
the fifteenth century lavished their art to make a worthy casket
for the House of the Virgin? Its stair is worn into two deep
furrows by pilgrims journeying round it on their knees. Do you not
think that the great Mother of Pity loves this rough sculpture
best? Look how they pray before the hearth, how eagerly they place
their rosaries and medals in the little bowl which legend relates
was found in the Holy House after its miraculous journey. They do
not doubt that the hands of Madonna Mary, nay, of Christ Himself,
have touched it.
We, too, were borne by the crowd into the Santa Casa. It was quite
full of kneeling people. The altar was ablaze with candles, and
lamps were pendant all round the walls, so that we saw them as it
were through a mist of light. Here we could discern the window,
blocked up now, through which the Angel Gabriel entered the
cottage; there the little cupboard in which were found the humble
bowls, such as poor people use to-day for cooking. And on the
altar, clad in the rich robe presented by Maria Teresa and valued
at 4,000,000 lire, stood the little cedar-wood statue of the
Madonna and Child, which the Virgin is stated to have claimed as
her authentic portrait.
Mass was being celebrated at the High Altar when we came out again,
and the body of the church presented a charming patriarchal effect.
All the men were clustered in the aisles, and the women gathered
together in the nave, looking like a garden of flowers, with row
after row of serious girlish faces under fair white kerchiefs,
broken here by a group of black mantillas, there by the stray
bright _tovagliette_ of a southern contadina. The gilt and frescoed
apses were misty with incense and sunlight; and here pilgrims,
fresh from their visit to the Santa Casa, were kneeling with rapt
faces before the altars. And in the midst of all this piety and
worship, with the organ pealing music down the aisles, we found
old crones asleep, or taking snuff as they rested in confessional
boxes, and children playing hide-and-seek round them. All very
reverently, however, not forgetting that they were in the house of
their Father; nor were the dogs which had strayed in with the crowd
turned away.
Later, when most of the pilgrims were enjoying a hard-earned
siesta, or marketing in Loreto's single street, we sat in the
cool nave and watched the people trooping in like sheep coming
confidently into the fold. The great bell tolled overhead and
in they streamed, all with their newly-bought treasures--now an
umbrella, bright emerald or scarlet, wrapped clumsily in paper,
now with some baking-pans, now with a household lamp. And all of
them with some gewgaw to be blessed in the Virgin's bowl.
The basins of holy water were so lofty that many of the women could
not reach them, and some passing pilgrim would dip his fingers in
and touch their hands. Now it was a group of barefooted girls with
kerchiefed heads and sunburned faces who went up to the shrine;
now an old old man who dipped his hand into the holy water and
then knelt down in the middle of the nave, passing wet fingers
across his tired eyes, and praying there awhile before he kissed
the floor, and wearily stumbled out of those glorious bronze doors
into the sunshine again. Here a whole family knelt together round
their rugged-faced father, with their bright kerchiefs looking like
a homely flower-garden; there a man going out with his two little
sons dipped his fingers in the high bowl, and moistened the hands
of first one awe-struck child and then the other.
So it went on all day. Nor does it matter that the Casa is of
mediaeval construction; that it is not built of the grey limestone
with which all the houses of Nazareth are built, and that it does
not fit its ascribed foundations in Palestine. For the gods have
ever been secret. Did Ceres weep at Enna? Did the rosy feet of
Aphrodite ever press the sands of Paphos? Is it the blood of Adonis
which makes the stream of Carmel red?
And listen to the words of the prophet: 'The workman melteth a
graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and
casteth silver chains. He that is so impoverished that he hath no
oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a
cunning workman to prepare a graven image that shall not be moved.
Have ye not known? Have ye not heard? Hath it not been told you
from the beginning? Have ye not understood from the foundations of
the earth? _It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth_,
and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth
out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to
dwell in' (Isaiah xl. 19).
RAVENNA
Who could dream of anything but love as they drew near to Rimini
and Ravenna, those cities of romance whose names are as knit with
lovers' tales as Rome's with Caesar and Macedon's with Alexander!
They are foremost in the troubadour land of Italy, their scroll of
history is gracious with the names of knights and ladies. With the
word Rimini upon the signboard of the train our thoughts leap back
at once across the gulf of years, and in imagination we hear again
the oft-repeated plaint of pale Francesca--
'No greater grief than to remember days
Of joy, when mis'ry is at hand!
* * * * *
One day
For our delight we read of Lancelot,
How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no
Suspicion near us. Ofttimes by that reading
Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue
Fled from our alter'd cheek. But at one point
Alone we fell. When of that smile we read,
The wished smile, so rapturously kiss'd
By one so deep in love; then he, who ne'er
From me shall separate, at once my lips
All trembling kiss'd. The book and writer both
Were love's purveyors. In its leaves that day
We read no more.'[20]
Nor is it only of Francesca whose griefs were sung by Dante that
we think, but of those greater lovers of the same ill-fated
house--Sigismondo and the divine Isotta; of Galla Placidia,
the Cleopatra of Imperial Rome; of the poor child Honoria, who
chose the terrible Attila to be her knight-errant; and of the
Gothic Queens, Amalasuntha and Matasuntha, whose lives seemed
as foredoomed to tragedy as those of the beautiful women of the
Polentani. But the marshes of Ravenna, at once her stronghold
and her weakness, seemed to have bred distemper; for almost all
the stories end in sadness whether they tell of Francesca and
her lovely sister Samaritana, or of the Beatrice Dante loved and
lost and found again in visions, walking in the vast Pineta; or
of Boccaccio's Nastagio degli Onesti; or of the weeping bride of
Gaston de Foix, the flower of French chivalry, who was mown down by
the scythe of war outside Ravenna's gates.
There is a peculiar and vagrant charm about the Adriatic, different
from the exquisite beauty of the Ligurian Riviera with its rounded
bays and vine-clad hills, but worthy of a sea which washes the
golden shore of Greece as well as the most romantic coast in
Italy. The Appennines tower upon the horizon, and many mountain
rivers rush from them to the ocean, and flood the sapphire water
at their mouths with opaque gold churned from their sandy beds.
Flowers grow upon the shore only separated from the sea by a
strip of shingle,--tamarisks and sea-holly, mallows and yellow
mulleins. And all the way from Ancona to Ravenna, save where
the line runs through the famous pine-woods, are ancient cities
strung like jewels along the shore of the Adriatic, with their
river-harbours full of the gold and copper-coloured sails of
fishing-boats--Senigallia, which Pompey devastated; Fano, Fortune's
fane, linked to Rome by the Flaminian Way; Pesaro, a city of the
Sikels; Gradara up on the mountains with a perfect mediaeval castle
and a flight of towered walls; and Rimini, Caesar's first footing
after he had crossed the Rubicon. They are all more or less blatant
seaside resorts, especially Rimini, whose _plage_ rivals that of
Livorno.
[Illustration: RAVENNA: THE PINETA.]
Of them all Ravenna only is unspoiled. She is a jewelled city
where East and West, Christian and Pagan, Rome and Byzantium met
and commingled and immortalised themselves in the service of
Architecture.
Ravenna is a place in which one is instinctively happy. _Ravenna
Felix_ is the name she bears upon her ancient coins. And even
to-day, notwithstanding her years of poverty, she has an air of
subdued gaiety as though in spite of herself she must be happy.
She is like a gentle convalescent who goes softly in recovering
her strength. For, after many centuries of waiting, Ravenna, the
Imperial City who proudly offered shelter both to Roman emperors
and Gothic kings, and who was the handmaiden of Byzantium long
after the Western Empire had ceased to exist, is beginning to live
again. The spectre of fever has fled from her marshes; the people
no longer wander palely through her streets; she is in fact the
centre of a prosperous agricultural district; under the hand of
science even Classis, long regarded as a hot-bed of malaria, is
being revivified.
Just as her history is of special interest to lovers of romance,
because the fate of the city was so often held in balance by the
lovely women who were queens within her walls, so are her monuments
of special interest alike to the historian and the student of art,
as representing a period little touched upon elsewhere in Italy.
For almost all the ancient buildings still standing in Ravenna
were raised in the centuries which saw the Fall of Rome, the Gothic
Occupation of Italy, the Invasion of the Lombards, and the final
administration of the Empire through the Exarchs from the court of
Byzantium in Constantinople. Through all these vicissitudes Ravenna
was the seat of government, from the day when Honorius fled before
the barbarians to the marsh-girt city, until the coming of Pepin of
France, who invested the Papacy with Temporal Power.
Of the triple city of the Augustan era nothing remains. Where
Aeolus once filled the sails of galleys in the vast harbour that
Octavian built three miles from old Ravenna, he strays to-day like
a vagrant musician singing strange songs of the sea among the stems
of the Pineta. Classis, the ancient port, has vanished underground,
and flowers bloom above the stones of Caesarea, the suburb which
linked the seaport of Augustus to Ravenna.
It is not before the period when the weakling Honorius transferred
his court from Rome to Ravenna that we find any traces of the
city's glorious past. But here are four treasures which by
themselves are worthy of a visit to Ravenna--the little church
of Sant'Agata, rebuilt in the fifteenth century, but preserving
some of its outer wall intact, and containing twenty-four columns
of precious marbles; the chapel of San Piero Crisologo in the
Episcopal palace; the Baptistery, once the thermal chamber of some
Roman bath, still lined with rare mosaics of the fifth century; and
the tomb of Galla Placidia, the regent of the Western Empire.
[Illustration: RAVENNA: SANT'AGATA.]
The story of Galla Placidia is one long romance.
We cannot doubt that she was beautiful since she was desired of so
many men. Daughter of Theodosius and sister of Honorius she fell
into the hands of Alaric the Goth in the Sack of Rome when she was
but twenty, and was taken prisoner by him to Calabria. There she
won the love of Athaulf, the brother-in-law of the Gothic king;
and, after many delays caused by the hesitancy of Honorius, who
would not give his assent to the marriage, she became his wife at
the price of peace for Rome. Alaric was dead, and Athaulf was King
of the Goths when the nuptials were celebrated with great splendour
in Narbonne; but before many months had elapsed Fate once more
changed the course of Placidia's life. Athaulf was assassinated;
their infant child died; and the daughter of Roman Emperors found
herself at the mercy of a barbarian who, to mark his ill-gained
triumph, made her walk in chains through the streets of Barcelona.
Within a few days, however, Singarich the murderer was slain, and
the fallen Empress was restored to the Roman army, which came to
meet her at the foot of the Pyrenees under the command of the
greatest general of the time, Constantius the Illyrian. Constantius
loved Placidia. Often before her capture by the Visigoths he had
sought to win her hand and failed; but now, aided by the prayers
of the people, who regarded him as a worthy successor of Honorius,
he gained his desire, much against the will, it is said, of the
Emperor's beautiful sister.
Even so the Fates were not satisfied with their web. Constantius
died and Honorius, 'credited but a short time before by evil
report with criminal desires towards his sister, now turned from
love to hatred, and banished the unhappy woman with her children
to Byzantium.'[21] In the same year Honorius himself died; and
Placidia, supported by the armies of her nephew Theodosius II., the
Eastern Emperor, came back to Ravenna where she reigned with her
son for twenty-five years, first as his regent, and later as his
adviser.
Her tomb, in the shadow of the great church of San Vitale, built
many years later when the Western Empire had been absorbed
by the emperors of the East, is the most perfect example of
Roman-Byzantine art in Italy. It is like a rich casket of Oriental
splendour encrusted with gems. It has walls of yellow marble, and
alabaster windows, through which a golden light is shed upon the
gleaming mosaics which cover every inch of vault and arch. And
here, under a sapphire sky sown with gold stars and illumined by
the gilded beasts of the evangelists, with white-robed saints
walking under date-palms among the doves and lambs of Christian
symbolism, are the three great sarcophagi which enclosed the bones
of Galla Placidia and of her husband Constantius, and Valentinian
her son.[22]
Thus did the last great Empress of the Western Empire order her
resting-place, and when we realise that this jewelled casket has
lain open to a rapacious world for fifteen centuries, it is little
short of miraculous that it has come down to us so perfect. All
praise to Theodoric, the King of the Ostrogoths, the lover of
ancient arts, who presented in his person the great anomaly of a
Gothic king who was the protector of temples as well as the founder
of some of the most lovely churches standing in the city to-day.
The name of Theodoric the Ostrogoth is great in Ravenna.
Notwithstanding the fact that many of his buildings, notably his
palace, have almost disappeared at the hands of the Orthodox
Church, which regarded him as a heretic because he professed the
Arian Creed, Ravenna still possesses four of his monuments--San
Teodoro, now called Santo Spirito; the Arian baptistery, its
cupola still covered with sixth-century mosaics; his palace, his
sepulchre, and Sant'Apollinare Nuovo.
The stately tomb of Theodoric, round which mediaeval imagination
wove legends, as the flowers and the fruits of the earth weave
a web of beauty to-day, rises at the end of a wide turf avenue
enclosed in hedges of acacia. It stands in a rose-garden with a
background of firs and flowering yews; round its sunken pronaos
are fruit-trees laden with pomegranates and purple figs; and
wistaria and yellow roses have hidden the steps which lead to
its upper chamber. Externally, the tomb, which the unfortunate
Amalasuntha built for her father, is as unspoiled as the mausoleum
of Galla Placidia; its solid masonry of grey limestone has defied
the years; and the gaping crevice in its marvellous dome, composed
of one huge block of Istrian marble, only serves to give point to
mediaeval legends. But inside it has been devastated by his enemies
and robbed even of his sarcophagus. Mr. Symonds says, 'in spite
of many trials, it seems that human art is unable to pump out the
pond and clear the frogs and efts from the chamber where the great
Goth was laid by Amalasuntha.' But on the damp September day when
we visited the mausoleum its stones were dry, although the little
spotted frogs, which fled below the rose-trees at our approach,
were shrilling a chorus of mockery at the vanity of tombs.