of a wide arcaded street lit with electric lights and hung with
hundreds of little coloured globes, red and white and green, for
the festa of the Venti Settembre. It was so gay and homely after
the moonlit silence of the mountains, and the inn we found upon
that lonely hill-top was so unexpectedly good, with airy rooms and
clean red tiles and snowy bed-linen, that we loved Urbino from the
first hour we knew her. When we woke next morning to the music of
Sabbath bells and saw the towers of Federigo's palace shutting out
our horizon eastwards; and westwards, across a valley, the white
houses of Urbino climbing up through their gardens towards the
broken walls of her fortezza, we knew that she was to be one of our
cities of happy memories. Nor were we disappointed. For in Urbino
with her crisp morning air tempering the sunshine, and her vistas
of wide valleys and deep-bosomed hills rolling away towards the
magnificent crags of the Appennines, we spent some precious days
forgetful of the world, which toils and sweats in busy marts and
narrow self-made prisons, so far removed in spirit from the hills
and all the sweetness that appertains thereto.
[Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE DUKES OF URBINO.]
We had read in books that Urbino was decayed and lifeless, the true
ensample of Leopardi's tragic words:--
'O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi,
E le colonne, e i simulacri, e l'erme
Torri degli avi nostri
Ma la gloria non vedo.'
So we went out expecting to find her a mere ghost, pathetic in her
faded grandeur, like beautiful San Gimignano or the wind-swept home
of Perugino. It is true that grass was growing in the climbing
street which leads up the hill past the house of Giovanni Santi,
and we were to find out soon enough that the great castle of
Federigo, where Castiglione wrote his Golden Book, was falling
to decay like his palace at Gubbio. But it was easy to forget
these things on a sunny morning in September, when the Piazza
Otto Settembre was filled with a crowd of stalwart men, in their
national costume of wide velvet breeches and black wide-awake
hats, and lovely dark-eyed women, kerchief'd or wearing the
fringed mantillas of Eastern Italy,--the descendants of the brave
mountaineers who made the arms of Duke Frederic respected even by
the redoubtable Francesco Sforza.
As it was Sunday, the day on which country people come into their
hill-towns all over Italy for Mass and market, there were booths of
haberdashery and flowered kerchiefs in the piazza below the ruddy
old church of San Francesco, and pottery, not of Urbino, was spread
out in the roadway of the two streets which descend so swiftly to
the valley. The fruit and poultry market was in the little piazza
full of pollard acacias behind the Franciscan church. The passive
hens of Italy, which spend so much of their lives being carried
head-downwards to and from market that they never give way to
hysteria like the fowls of other countries, were ranged below the
trees on one side of the square, and golden pears and peaches were
heaped with purple grapes in the cool shade of the other. 'And may
you have salvation!' cried the merry old dame from whom we bought
more than we could carry of her luscious wares for a few soldi.
Close by, in the very heart of the gay little city, stands the
house of Giovanni Santi, a brown fifteenth-century palace, with
broad eaves and bricked-up arches, which bends like an aged man
over the lichened pavement of the Contrada Raffaello. A white dove
was bowing on the sill of the room in which Raphael was born, and
through the opened panes of another window we could see the broad
plastered beams of the low-ceiling living room within.
Urbino cherishes the memory of Raphael. The house in which he
spent the spring of his short life is swept and garnished, empty
except for framed engravings of his pictures and some antique
chairs and high-backed stools old enough to have been there in
his father's day. The rooms are low, with panelled ceilings and
decent red-bricked floors. One of them has a Madonna and Child by
Giovanni Santi which is said to be a portrait of Magia and the baby
Raphael, and in the other is a bust of Morris Moore of London,
who gave the money, needed to buy the house, to the Società Reale
Accademia Raffaello in 1872. But to me the place was somewhat
disappointing; it lacked the spirit of the happy boy who carried
with him to the courts of Rome and Florence the breath of sunlight
and fresh mountain air. Urbino itself is just the home one would
imagine for Raphael, a city of the Renaissance, golden, full of
gardens, in which the culture and refinement engendered by the
Montefeltro Dukes still lingers. But there is nothing of Raphael
in his father's house. Perhaps because he was there so little,
for, like the lovely curly-headed children of Urbino to-day, he
probably spent most of his time out in the streets when he was
not working with his father, now waiting to see Duke Guidobaldo,
and the knights and ladies of his court riding up the hill from
their hunting and hawking, now playing with clay, as Gigi of the
golden curls and petulant mouth plays still, a little higher up the
Contrada Raffaello, with a world of great mountains lying below his
feet.
When we first saw him, Gigi was sitting on the doorstep of a house
close beside the palace of Timoteo Viti, one of Raphael's greatest
pupils, who for love of his aged mother left his studio in Rome
and came back to his native town. Gigi was three years old, with
a shock of golden hair, and grey eyes, thickly-lashed and full of
dreams. He was barefoot, very dirty and happy, modelling childish
fancies out of a morsel of wet clay, and he was so beautiful that
we stopped to speak to him. But Gigi was adamant. He frowned and
went on making unintelligible daubs with his slim brown fingers.
Later, when we passed again, his mother had dressed him in boots
and socks, his face and hands were washed, his clay was forfeit.
But when she tried to make him beg for soldi from the _forestieri_,
he wept and hid his face against the wall. Poor little Gigi! We
often tried to make acquaintance with him, but he would have none
of us. Nor did he play with the other children, who seemed to laugh
at him.
But one evening when the sun was sinking low behind the Appennines,
filling the valleys with a sea of rosy mists, from which the
fantastic rocks of San Marino and San Leo emerged far away to the
right, and the great head of Monte Catria, Dante's asylum, to the
left, Gigi crept from his hiding-place behind a bramble bush and
came to stand beside the Philosopher. It was the 20th of September,
the anniversary of United Italy, and all the other children had
long ago fled laughing to the piazza where the police band was
to celebrate the festive occasion with music. But Gigi, with his
golden head thrust forward and his little arms behind his back,
stood rapt in wonder before the glory of the sun. We watched them
stand together, those two, both worshippers in their unconscious
pose, both dreamers, till Gigi, proud and silent Gigi, who would
neither smile nor beg, stretched out his hand and took the
Philosopher's in silent sympathy. So they stood linked together,
man and child, inarticulate before the glory of earth and sky,
until night began to hang her purple veils along the valleys and
Venus was shining softly in the West.
'Among other laudable actions Federigo erected on the rugged
heights of Urbino a residence, by many regarded as the most
beautiful in all Italy, and so amply did he provide it with every
convenience that it appeared rather a palatial city than a palace.'
So spake that courtly gentleman Baldassare Castiglione, friend of
Raphael, honoured guest in Guidobaldo's brilliant assembly, and
ambassador from Urbino to the English Court in 1503, when Henry
VII. of England invested the Duke with the Order of the Garter as
his father Frederic, the most distinguished soldier of his day, had
been invested by Edward IV. And seen by moonlight, as we climbed
Urbino's hill, it was a fairy palace, with towers and loggias
soaring up to the stars above dark ilex groves, once gardens where
the lovely ladies of Elisabetta's court dallied with love.
[Illustration: URBINO: SAN FRANCESCO.]
But if you wish to carry with you unimpaired this vision of
ethereal loveliness it is wiser to let your imagination, and the
flowery epithets of Castiglione, Sanzio, Baldi and Vasari, fill up
the blanks, nor seek to find inspiration in the deserted halls of
Federigo. Come rather, across the cleft in Urbino's hill, and climb
towards the height of the Fortezza. There you will see a panorama
of great hills unfold itself, Monte Catria and lovely Monte del
Cavallo, Monte Nerone and Carpegna, the cradle of the Montefeltrian
race. At your feet across the brown roofs of the Città Inferiore
you will see the mighty walls and bastions of Urbino encircling
Federigo's palace, with the dome-crowned bulk of the Cathedral on
the one hand and a gracious ilex-wood upon the other; and in the
midst, enshrined as it were in the panoply of war, a pleasure-house
for princes, white and gold, with airy loggias opening out towards
the mountains, and hanging gardens and slim tourelles, like a
mediaeval castle of the Troubadour land. For the spirit of the
Renaissance was in Urbino when Frederic and his Dalmatian architect
Laurana built this palace. Though Italy was still racked by civil
wars, though she was yet to tremble before the foreign armies,
which poured through her defenceless passes from the day that
Charles VIII'S. mad escapade showed that the way was open, to the
invasion of Napoleon in 1796, Federigo the man of war and letters
chose to build a pleasure palace for himself and his descendants
upon Urbino's hill.
No one else but Federigo would have dared. The Sforza trembled in
the fortress they had wrested from the Visconti in the heart of
Milan; many years later the Medici had need of a covered passage
connecting the Pitti with the Palazzo Vecchio, as the Popes had,
to cover their retreat from the Vatican to Sant'Angelo; the
palace of the Dukes of Ferrara was armed at every point; even the
courtly Lords of Mantua could flee at a moment's notice from their
exquisite summer-house outside the city gates to their stronghold
in the Castello Gonzaga. But it is not likely that Federigo, the
great soldier who had led the armies of kings and Popes to victory,
and whose fame had crossed the Alps and earned him laurels in the
far-off Court of England, depended only on the strength of his
mountain home or the loyalty of the sturdy citizens of Urbino, when
he planned the first unfortified mansion which an Italian dared to
build since the Villas of the Roman Empire were destroyed by the
barbarian. He knew well enough that they could be trusted. Had he
not left his beloved Countess Battista to their care while he was
carrying on his wars in Tuscany and the Campagna, although his
life-long enemy, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini, was harrying his
borders and seeking to inflame his people to revolt?
There was another weapon in his armoury, stronger than precipices,
more trustworthy than the shifting humour of a crowd. He may have
learnt to use it as a boy in the brilliant Court of Mantua, where
he was taught philosophy and science and literature and oratory by
the famous Vittorino da Feltre, while he was becoming one of the
most skilful swordsmen and military tacticians of the day. No doubt
the liberality of Nicholas V., the great little man of Sarzana, and
his own intercourse with Pius II. the Humanist Pope, and Lorenzo
the Magnificent, augmented his enthusiasm. For the Renaissance
was at hand. The lamp of learning hurled by the Saracens from the
shores of the Bosphorus had thrown its beams across the Adriatic
just in time. Already Petrarch and Boccaccio had kindled the sparks
of their wit and humour at its flame. Manuel Chrysoloras, the
Byzantine, had already filled the Greek chair in the University of
Florence; Gemistos Plethon, the Platonist, had already attacked
the roots of Christianity; the famous Academy of Florence had been
founded by Cosimo de' Medici.
And nowhere did the torch of culture burn more brightly than
in Urbino, where Federigo, and after him Guidobaldo, and that
exquisite lady Elisabetta Gonzaga his wife, stored up the treasures
bought by Federigo's hard-earned and honourable wealth--rare
translations, rarer autographs, sculpture and bronze and
paintings, choicest intarsia, delicate instruments of music, all
the curious and beautiful fruits of the Renaissance. This little
hill town, almost unheard of until the Montefeltro dynasty raised
it to dignity, became a beacon among the Appennines, a city of
fair fame to which poets, philosophers, artists and musicians,
humanists, scholars, knights and ladies gathered from all the
courts of Italy.
'It was scholarship which revealed to men the wealth of their
own minds, the dignity of human thought, the value of human
speculation, the importance of human life.' Gone was the need for
barred and shuttered gates, for secret night raids, for bravoes
waiting in the narrow ill-lit streets. The doors of Federigo's
palace were thrown wide open, and while the duke sat in his great
hall for dinner all those who wished could come and go; or, if they
sought an audience of their lord, gain easy access. It is only when
we remember how, many years later, the Baglioni were to bathe the
streets of Perugia in blood, and the fair cities of Tuscany,--Siena
and Pisa and Lucca, were to sweat under the yoke of tyrants, that
we realise how much the airy grace of this premature flower of the
Renaissance stands for in the history of Italy.
All this was clear to us as we looked across the valley and saw the
towers of Federigo's palace golden in the late September sunshine.
But as we had come so far to see its long-deserted halls, we turned
back and climbed the Via Puccinotti to the piazza where Raphael,
the Adonais for whom Rome wept, is immortalised in bronze between
the House of God and the House of Urbino.
The battered crown of Italy's Iron Duke is not a whited sepulchre.
Behind its cracked walls and perishing windows are many precious
carvings, doors of rich intarsia, and gracious stucchi, not
plundered from other palaces but designed for the salons where the
Montefeltro, and after him the Delia Rovere, held his court.
But how the spirit of the place has flown! How shrunken are the
glories chronicled by Santi and the philosophers and historians who
were attracted to Urbino in the zenith of its glory! Here and there
some trace of human use conjured up the ghostly past--a marble
balustrade polished like glass by hands long since forgotten in
death; the yellow stories of fireplaces where pages and men-at-arms
once leant to warm themselves beside the cheery blaze; the worn-out
tiles before the dais of Federigo's great hall, with its windows
overlooking the piazza, where he watched his workmen building a
worthy house for his God. And sometimes we caught a glimpse of the
inner character of these sons of history, in the rich study lined
with fine intarsia and hung with tapestry where Federigo rested
from cares of state with his beloved books; or the exquisite little
chapel in which the cipher of Guidobaldo is entwined with the
delicate carvings and arabesques which cover vault and walls.
It would be a mournful place if it were not that the Renaissance,
flowering so graciously within these silent halls, has left a world
of fantasy to people them, satyrs and fauns, and little laughing
loves who make music with pipe and tabor, and dance along the
chimneys of the Sala degli Angeli above the roses and carnations,
tipped with gold, which bloom upon its panels. For almost all the
treasures, which Lucrezia Borgia wondered over when she passed
through Urbino on her way to wed the Marquis of Ferarra, were
rifled some months later by her terrible brother Cesare, who broke
into the territory by sword and treachery where she had come in
peace. And what was left when the Borgia fled and Guidobaldo
returned, and all that Guidobaldo and his successors, the della
Roveri, garnered together, were bequeathed to the Papacy by the
last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., in 1624, only one hundred
and fifty years after Sixtus IV. had placed the ducal cap upon the
head of Federigo, creating him at the same time Knight of St. Peter
and Gonfaloniere of the Holy Roman Church.
FOLIGNO
In Foligno it still rained. From my bed I could see the indigo
clouds which had pursued us with such a mighty storm-song all the
way from Urbino. Every now and then great splots of water fell from
the wide eaves on the paved street, with a pleasant sound like the
intermittent music of a fountain.
I was in no hurry to get up. We had arrived late the night before,
in such a downpour of rain that we knew nothing of Foligno except
that we had driven through a wide avenue of plane trees to the city
barrier, where the douane insisted on opening our luggage; and that
the Albergo della Posta, whose charming host, Signor Cherubino
Pinelli, had made us welcome, was one of the most comfortable
hospices in Umbria.
But we were back in Umbria, mystical Umbria, where ancient gods
walk hand in hand with saints along the banks of gently flowing
streams; where life goes slowly to the tune of bells slung round
the dewlaps of snow-white oxen, bred by the waters of Clitumnus
and praised by Virgil, Pliny and Propertius; where the soft beauty
of the hills and sky forms worthy backgrounds for a gentle
people, whose stately and unconscious grace has been immortalised
by artists of the Quattrocento--an age in which, we learn from
Matarazzo, the human form was worshipped with a touch of the old
passion which was mother to the genius of Greece.
And that was enough to take me out of bed and to the window, where
I found the wings of the storm sweeping across the bleak blue hills
towards Nocera as it fled back to the Appennines, and the sun
already shining through the rain upon the white towers of Spoleto,
while Trevi, near at hand, rose out of the plain on the top of her
conical hill.
In the road below, the men of the octroi, with their long blue
cloaks wrapped round them, waited, rapier in hand, to prod the bags
and bundles of the peasants as they entered the city gates. And
along the fair white road which links the little townships of this
Umbrian vale together--Perugia, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi,
Spello, Foligno, Trevi, Spoleto--I saw a stream of people flowing
towards the Porta Romana. Some had burdens on their heads, and
others were riding pannier-wise on mules; here they walked with
free step beside their milk-white oxen, there they rode on wooden
tumbrils among their heaped-up fruits and vegetables. Far away
where the slim poplars rose up like banners upon the horizon I saw
them, mere specks upon the long white ribbon of the road. Below my
window they streamed into Foligno through the modern barrier which
has taken the place of the old Porta Romana, running the gauntlet
of the facetious or overbearing octroi-men, who prodded everything
with their long skewers in search of illicit wares.
It was a rare comedy to watch. The gay Lothario, whose cloak
thrown well over his left shoulder gave him a swashbuckling
appearance, lingered in conversation with the pretty kerchiefed
girls, though often they carried nothing in their hands at all;
and dare-devil boys fled laughing by on their bicycles, with
diminutive dinner-bags tied to the handle-bars, nor slackened speed
for the surly old octroi-man who bade them stop, and who, I wager,
suspected every one of them.
Foligno, which many people only remember as the little city low
in the background of Raphael's Madonna del Foligno, is to-day as
it has always been, one of the most important commercial towns
in Umbria. Its position down in the plain three miles from Forum
Flaminii, the junction between the great Flaminian Road from
Rome to the Adriatic, and its loop branch by Interamna, Spoleto,
Trevi and Foligno, made the Fulginium of Imperial Rome a city of
considerable importance. The proximity of Mevania and Hispellum
probably prevented its growth during the Roman Empire; but after
the destruction of Forum Flaminii by the Longobards in the eighth
century, its scattered inhabitants settled in the then flourishing
town of Foligno, which became one of the chief communes in Umbria.
Was it not in the market of Foligno that young Francesco Bernardone
came to sell his father's bales of cloth before he gave the money
to the old priest of San Damiano? And is it not the proud boast of
Foligno that in 1472 the earliest copy of the _Divina Commedia_ was
printed within her walls, a fact which her citizens claim to prove
not only her industrial but her artistic energy?
Standing at the junction of the railways from Rome and Florence to
Ancona she is of considerable commercial importance to-day, with
numerous sugar refineries and paper mills, and a large carburet
factory on the banks of the Topino. But never did a city so
small and compact hide the cloven foot of commercialism as well
as Foligno. It is true that looking down on her from Perugia or
Spoleto, she is seen, lying like a bride in the green valley, below
a veil of fine white dust or smoke from the carburet factory;
but outside the walls she is still the city Raphael painted for
Sigismondo Conti; and in her byways she is the same town which
ran with blood when the terrible Corrado Trinci paraded through
her streets with the three hundred dead who were the price of his
Vendetta.
For when Ser Pietro da Rasiglia, the Governor of Nocera, whose
wife Niccolò Trinci had dishonoured, lured Niccolò and his brother
Bartolomeo to Nocera and slew them on a hunting expedition, Corrado
killed three hundred 'souls' and brought them back heaped up on
mules to show his vengeance to the people of Foligno.
[Illustration: FOLIGNO: SAN DOMENICO.]
Foligno is full of ancient churches, some with their ruddy
mediaeval grace unspoiled, like beautiful Santa Maria Infra Portas,
a little Romanesque building of rose-coloured Subasian stone with a
gracious porch and a square bell-tower, which is a treasure-house
of frescoes, and contains an interesting Byzantine chapel. And
others like San Feliciano, the Cathedral, modernised within, but
still one of the chief glories of Foligno with its exquisite
_facciata minore_ in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, rich with the
art of the Comacine Masters, and the beautiful reconstruction of
the western front by the Scuola di Arti e Mestieri.
[Illustration: FOLIGNO: WELL IN THE CASA NOCCHI.]
But it is the fruit of her mightiest days that makes Foligno rich
in monuments--the years between 1305 and 1439 in which the Trinci,
having finally driven the Ghibellines out of the city, were its
despots, until Eugenius IV., to whom the memory of Corrado's
terrible vendetta had an evil savour, deprived him of power, and
put him and his family to death. For to this period Foligno owes
the vast church of San Domenico, whose picturesque campanile Mr.
Markino has sketched rising over the trees of Signor Tradardi's
garden; and little San Giovanni dell'Acqua with its gracious
doorway; and San Francesco and San Salvatore, and the dismantled
church of Santa Caterina, and many another façade of rose and
white Subasian stone, on which the years have wrought a tender
bloom as of fruit ripened in the sun. And not churches only, for
to the Trinci she owes the stately Palazzo Trinci long since
fallen to decay, but still linked to San Feliciano by a covered
archway, still preserving its great processional stairway, still
decorated with the frescoes which Ottaviano Nelli painted for the
bloodthirsty Corrado.