because she is such an admirable headquarters both by rail and road
for seeing Central Umbria. The courtyards of her ancient palaces
have lovely well-heads of wrought iron, and many of their doors
have quaint and interesting epigrams over the lintel. She has a
little Venice on the banks of a canal, half dammed by docks and
water weeds, crossed by a Roman bridge; and a water mill, where the
women wash their linen in a long arcade of red brick overhanging
the brown millstream. Her churches are full of golden pictures by
the greatest exponents of the Foligno school, Niccolò d'Alunno,
and Pier Antonio Mesastris, a painter little known outside his
native town, whose beautiful Angels and Madonnas, combining an
ideal tenderness and sweetness of conception with a real depth of
feeling, have earned, in the language of the people, the name of
_Maestà Bella_.
Speaking of the Foligno school of painting, which was characterised
by an earnestness not to be found in every branch of Umbrian art,
whether it is the grace and delicate spirituality of Mesastris or
the tragic intensity of Niccolò d'Alunno, brings me to Foligno's
modern school of art, of which she is justly proud. It is housed in
the old cloisters of San Niccolò where Canova once had his studio,
and where he left many of his plaster casts. And it is under the
direction of Professor Arturo Tradardi, a delightful enthusiast
who never wearies of studying the glories of his native town, or
seeking to recreate them. In the beautiful cloistered garden of the
Scuola di Arti e Mestieri he has gathered together reproductions
in plaster, toned to the exact colour of the originals, of all the
most beautiful monuments in Umbria. A labour of love which may be
responsible for some of the extraordinary energy to be found in
Foligno, which with Viterbo leads the way among the smaller towns
of Italy in the glorious work of freeing ancient monuments from
the plaster prisons in which they have lain hidden from the world
during the last three centuries.
It goes without saying that Foligno, which lies low in the heart
of Umbria, not more than ten miles from Assisi, the cradle of
the Franciscan legend, should be the birthplace of a saint. But,
notwithstanding the picturesque legend of the Blessed Angela, which
tells us that as she walked through the fields of Umbria, wearied
by her struggles, and despairing of overcoming the burden of her
sins, she heard the voice of Christ bidding her be of good cheer
because He loved her better than any other woman in the Valley of
Spoleto, we hear more of the Blessed Angelina within Foligno than
of Sant'Angela, who lies buried in the church of San Francesco.
For it was the Blessed Angelina, Countess of Civitella and
Montegiove, who founded the Convento delle Contesse, that quiet
retreat in a forgotten corner of Foligno where noble women have
continued to work and pray unceasingly since its foundation towards
the end of the fourteenth century. Just as it was the Blessed
Angelina's chapel in the church of the Franciscans which sweated
blood seventeen years after her death because, as she related in a
vision, the Christians had lost Constantinople.
But it is not so much for her miracles and wonders that this
saintly woman is held in veneration as for her holiness and
chastity. And indeed her calm spirit seems to linger in the quiet
cloisters and gardens of the Convento delle Contesse, in which she
died after she had founded no less than sixteen Convents of the
Tertiary Order of St. Francis. It is an oasis of peace and rest,
an oasis which is too easily passed by in the maze of Foligno's
streets, for its walls are high and bare, and give no hint of the
gardens they enclose, unless perchance the outer gate be left
unbarred, as it was when we stumbled upon it and stopped to wonder
at the beauty of a picture disclosed under a wide pent-house roof
within. For over the doorway of this Holy House which was the first
home of that much-travelled picture, the Madonna del Foligno,
Mesastris painted one of his lovely golden-haired Madonnas,
enthroned among angels and virgin-saints, while in the background
little Loves gather the delicate pied wind-flowers, limned against
the sky, and heap them up in baskets to scatter, maybe, with song
and praise upon the courts of Heaven.
[Illustration: FOLIGNO: THE WASHING PLACE.]
Here too, if anywhere, the liberal spirit of the Middle Ages
lingers. We knocked, and the door was opened as it was wont to open
in the bountiful fifteenth century before the old Order trembled.
And within we saw the Lady Abbess of a bygone day ruling a little
company of noble dames amid the serenest spells of art and nature,
with the beauty and the holiness of their lives setting an ensample
to the world instead of being lost in mortification of the flesh
behind closed gateways. Signor Tradardi made us acquainted with
the beautiful Mother Superior, who came with us, telling her beads
and smiling at our enthusiasm as each step revealed unsuspected
charms, for nowhere else in Italy had we gained such free admission
to a nunnery, nowhere else had we found the ancient loveliness of
fresco and Gothic loggia untouched in any convent possession as
in the little courts and pleasaunces of this Garden of the Lord.
Two black-robed sisters were walking among the flowers with their
pupils, but when the gentle Abbess called for candles to take us
to the frescoed cell of the Blessed Angelina, they were brought by
a slender boy, whose curiously intense beauty made a break in the
calm and holy atmosphere of this quiet retreat. He was very much at
home, and evidently did not seem to think that we should feel it
unnatural to find him in that _galère_.
We learned that he was the nephew of the Lady Abbess--the professor
of music for the convent. And that he lived in Umbria, but next
week was going to Ancona. We had lately come from there? Then
perhaps we had heard the opera _Thaïs_, recently produced so
excellently in Ancona, which he was making the journey on purpose
to hear!
* * * * *
We drove to Spello on a September day of vagrant sunshine, when
the earth was musical with running waters and the heavens, tinted
mother-o'-pearl, were spread with tearful clouds. The rugged crests
of Nocera's pyramidal hills in the van of the great Appennines
were shadowed with cobalt. The vines were brown, the hedges full
of berries, the scent of wild mint sweetened the air. A rippling
stream was singing in its rocky bed beside the road, and long
grasses were still lying against the muddy banks as they were
pressed by the rush of storm-rain the day before. And Spello lay
before us in the sunshine like a cluster of yellowing roses on the
spur of Monte Subasio.
But first we drove between the vineyards to the little church of
San Giovanni Profiamma which marks the site of the ancient town of
Forum Flaminii, built by the Consul Flaminius on his Roman road
before it left the Umbrian Vale and plunged into the passes of the
Appennines. Like all the thirteenth century churches of this part
of Umbria, it is built of the lovely pink limestone of Subasio
which gives such a peculiar beauty to the streets of Spello and
Assisi. Its ancient rose window is broken, and two white houses hem
in the façade on either side.
The Romanesque doorway stood wide open, because a knot of villagers
were busied in putting up a gilt and paper baldacchino for a festa.
Some children and a black goat had strayed in to watch; the priest
was giving directions, and every now and then lending a shoulder
when the whole affair threatened to fall over. But what simplicity,
what unspoiled mediaeval grace we found in this tiny chapel in the
fields, which is the only relic of a long-forgotten city. It has
been restored, almost rebuilt, by the parish priest, who to his
honour has preserved every ancient stone, and arch, and bifora;
even the altar he has left in mediaeval simplicity, a slab of
marble on a worn and battered fragment of granite column, all that
remains of the pagan city of Flaminius.
They are a splendid people, these country priests of Umbria, with
their ambition to beautify their little churches, and their merry
good-nature in the face of hardships. We met so many of them in
Foligno,--one who had written a book about his church, and toiled
to rescue the faded frescoes veiled in plaster on its walls, taking
the same pleasure in their beauty as a gardener in the first
blossoms of the year; another who had made a museum of his sacristy
and cloisters. But the priest of San Giovanni Profiamma has
preserved some precious pages in the history of art. We watched him
scramble into his ramshackle cart, shouting some last instructions
to his villagers before he drove off at full gallop over the rough
road with a huge sack of fodder tied on behind. And we remembered
another country priest whom we had seen at Todi leading his saddle
horse down the hill to say Mass in some roadside chapel, singing as
he went, as Brother Francis might have sung, with no thought of the
morrow, but only joy in the present, and faith for the life to come.
* * * * *
We found Spello gay with the bells of her ox-carts, and as busy as
a good housewife, her men bringing in bundles of fire-wood against
the winter, or getting ready for the vintage by rolling the pipes
and hogs-heads down the hill to be cleansed at the fountain below
the old bell-tower; and her women washing their linen with song and
laughter outside the Roman gate.
Spello, the old Hispellum, which claims to have been the birthplace
of Propertius, notwithstanding the stress that poet laid upon the
neighbouring city of Mevania as his home, is one of the loveliest
cities in the Valley of Spoleto. She is as pink as a rose. Her
houses are all ancient, many of them with Gothic doors and windows;
her arches are threaded with vines and Morning Glories; she
clambers up the hillside in narrow streets which turn naturally
into steps when they are too steep even for the nimble mule; her
people dress in bright-coloured linens, and the women cover their
burnished hair with the gayest of flowered kerchiefs. As we drew
near we saw her Gothic gate bestriding the road as fiercely as
though it feared the Trinci might still come riding from Foligno,
but close behind it, on the tower of some fighting baron which has
been turned into a belfry, a full-grown olive tree stretched out
its arms, welcoming strangers with the branch of peace.
[Illustration: SPELLO.]
We went up through the ancient Porta Consolare, whose Roman
statues, toga'd ghosts of old Hispellum, stare down upon the snowy
flanks of the yoked oxen bringing in the fresh-picked grapes just
as they did in the years before Hannibal laid waste the Valley
of Spoleto on his march down to Campania. In Spello's climbing
streets, though she is poor and broken, we found treasures worthy
of great temples, heirlooms stranded in the shipwreck of her
wealth, like Santa Maria Maggiore's rich Renaissance doorway and
thirteenth-century portal, and the exquisite holy water stoup in
the nave, which was once a pagan altar.
But most of all Spello is Pinturicchio's city. Her peasants are
the ghosts of his old people; in her streets we met the lovely
fair-haired girls whom he was never weary of crowning as Madonna
Mary. He painted many pictures in her churches, in San Girolamo and
Sant'Andrea, and a whole chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, where he
left his own portrait hanging from the Virgin's shelf of books in
the scene of the Annunciation, as it hung perhaps from the shelf
of some woman whom he loved. In this church too are many altar
pictures, and an exquisite Madonna hidden away in the sacristy
among the tawdry paraphernalia of saints' days, and an angel,
lost for three hundred years in a dark cupboard, which, when the
sacristan illuminates it with a candle, shines like a vision of the
angel Gabriel coming in the dawn of day to Mary.
The chapel, which was painted for one of the Baglioni of Perugia,
is faded and defaced like the Borgia room in the Vatican, and needs
bright sunshine to bring out its dim rich colours. But it is full
of gracious Pinturicchio figures who play their parts in the drama
of the birth of Christ against a luminous background in which we
glimpse the life of the Quattrocento as it flows in and out of
distant cities. And the floor is covered with gold and blue Deruta
tiles, made for the Brothers in 1565, and so worn that we were sad
to walk on them, although the sacristan dragged chairs across them
with the utmost unconcern.
Then it rained, and because we had seen all Spello's churches we
had to seek shelter and lunch. The only inn was down the hill
outside the Porta Consolare, but we found both food and refuge
in a humble cottage where the family were just sitting down to
their meal of steaming pottage. They gave us a plate of that, and
dressed some raw tomatoes with oil and vinegar, at our suggestion,
for Italians seldom eat raw tomatoes, which they do not think
are healthy. And we were content with this and some good wine
and excellent rough bread, although the coffee which our smiling
hostess prepared so carefully was spoilt by its too liberal dash of
methylated cognac.
But the rain drove us from our little hill-city. We tried to brave
it, as we searched in vain for the Porta Venere; nor could the old
country women climbing the hill in the shelter of their enormous
green umbrellas, who were the only people out in the storm beside
ourselves, tell us the whereabouts of anything.
CLITUMNUS
We drove to Spoleto along the Roman road which threads the rich
green valley of the Clitumnus, skirting the hill of Trevi and the
olive-groves which crowd round the ruined fortress of Le Vene,
and dipping at last into an oak wood where the crystal springs,
far-famed in ancient days, leap from the rocky hillside.
It is the loveliest drive in Umbria. Not only for the beauty
of the way, for here all ways are beautiful, and lie through
gardens, where milk-white oxen labour with wooden ploughs beneath
the classic olive, and vineyards where the vines usurp the trees
and clothe the valley in luxuriant festoons; not only for the
loggia'd farms scattered among the fields, or for the towered
castles frowning upon the road like mediaeval Sant'Eraclio; not
only for the sight of Trevi, the steepest town in Italy, a queen
upon her hill-top, with her face towards Spoleto and her yellow
skirts trailing down into an olive-grove. All these we had seen a
hundred times before from other Umbrian towns. But nowhere else
had we found such unspoiled pastoral loveliness as in this soft
wide valley whose glory Virgil sang, and all the ancients praised,
the latest home of gods, where snowy bulls, victims for the Roman
sacrifice, were bred beside the waters of a sacred stream.
'Thou, gay Clitumnus, where thy currents glide
There bleating flocks thy flow'ry borders hide;
There snow-white bulls, the greatest sacrifice
Design'd for Jove, who rules the deities,
First wash'd and sprinkled with thy sacred flood
Pay for the Roman triumphs with their blood.'
Though she looks like a queen on her hill-top, Trevi is at
heart a simple country maid, with nothing to offer to the
traveller but a few pictures by Perugino and his pupils, and an
exquisite Renaissance altar by Rocco da Vicenza. She is the most
disappointing of all the mountain fastnesses which have defied
the assaults of change, but she stands like a sentinel before a
landscape of surpassing beauty, peopled with classic memories.
For here, below the crumbling walls and towers of Le Vene, at the
foot of olive-wooded hills, we walked beside the crystal waters of
Clitumnus, through scenes immortalised by Virgil in the Georgics.
'Unbounded plains with endless riches blest;
Yet caves and living springs, and airy glades,
And the soft low of kine, and sleepy shades
Are never wanting ...'
Here by the roadside we found the little temple which some say is
one of those chapels of the god Clitumnus that Pliny wrote of to
his friend Romanus when he adjured him to visit this so-lovely
spot. And others, because of the Christian symbolism carved on its
walls, claim to be a Christian fane built of pagan fragments in the
fourth century. In any case it is deserted of its gods to-day, for
if no incense is offered to old Clitumnus, neither is Mass said
now before its altar, for the honour of San Salvatore. And yet I
do not think the oracle, whom Caligula as well as Honorius came
to consult, is far away; for the sun and rain have mellowed the
old stones, giving them a rare and perfect beauty, and the birds
nesting beneath its tympanum chant praises in the dawn, while from
below ascends the song of the sacred stream as its flows by to
mingle with the Tiber on its way to Rome. Nay, Pan himself, weary
of making music in the reeds, might stray into this temple, to
wonder at the faded saints who looked so coldly on him from their
niches, before he leapt back again at break of day to the oak-woods
on the hill above, where the goat-herds tend their flocks.
A little further on we reached the source of the Clitunno, where
many crystal streams gush from the hillside or bubble up from the
ground, uniting in a wide lake before the river can escape along
the valley. The air was full of the merry music of lapping waters
and the ecstatic shrilling of the frogs. Tall poplars swayed upon
the shallow banks, and giant willows trailed their branches in the
stream like the long hair of water-nymphs. Little white bridges
led from one green island to another, but the lush grass sloped
so gradually to the clear waters that we could hardly tell where
it first mingled with its own reflections. The crystal pools were
underworlds of emerald waterweeds, now dark, now light, and in
their mysterious depths were springs whose shafts of cyanite blue
gleamed phosphorescent through the swaying plants. And here small
fishes darted in and out with watchful eyes, and speckled trout
swam slowly to and fro.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS.]
Surely if anywhere the old gods linger here. And when the valley is
silent, but for the distant shepherd piping to his flocks, surely
the naiads resting on the emerald sward call to their sisters, the
Hamadryads and the Oreads, to leave their oak-woods and the hills
above and dance down to join them in the clear cool water. Half
unconsciously we looked and listened for them. And in a moment the
youth of Arcady seemed to be born again. The babbling of the many
little streams was like the echo of mocking laughter. I felt as
though I had strayed into a court of water-nymphs and heard them
making merry as they hid among the reeds. I could have sworn I saw
one once; but it was only a darting fish. Then a kingfisher flying
low took cover in the sedges just where the glinting sunshine
dazzled my eyes. And I thought I heard them laugh again.
SPOLETO
Too few have sung the splendour and beauty of Spoleto, the proud
white city whose towers breathe a message of peace to-day, where
they once blazoned war down the wide green valley to Perugia. For
Spoleto, like Perugia, has been a queen among cities. Like Perugia
she has kept ward through the ages upon the valleys of Umbria,
gazing down from her sacred ilex groves on lesser cities riding the
encircling hills--towered Montefalco upon the ridge which shuts
off the valley of the Tiber; Trevi on its steep olive-girt mount;
Foligno and Bevagna down in the plain; little Spello; Assisi, very
beautiful as she kneels before the mighty temple she has raised to
San Francesco on the slopes of Monte Subasio; Santa Maria degli
Angeli and Ponte San Giovanni. And in one proud memory at least she
is greater even than Perugia, for she alone withstood the tidal
wave of Hannibal in the second Punic War, so that he turned from
her walls dismayed, nor dared to march on Rome, seeing that this
small colony could hold his force in check.
If she had faded out of history after that, her name would have
been heroic among the Umbrian towns. But though she suffered in
the civil war of Marius and Sulla, we know that she continued
to flourish even in the dark years between the fall of Rome and
the growth of mediaevalism. Totila destroyed her as Frederick
Barbarossa was to destroy her in the middle of the twelfth century;
but Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and after him Narses, the Exarch,
built her up. Under the Longobards she became an independent duchy;
after the fall of the Carlovingians her Dukes were for a short time
Emperors of Italy.
Ah! Spoleto, it is little wonder that you are proud to-day, that
your bells ring so joyously down the valleys, that you hold high
festival to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of United Italy.
What does it profit Perugia that her name was splendid in the
Middle Ages, and that she is still the Queen of Umbria, 'the
Empress of hill-set cities'? Yours was the greatness of a more
heroic day. Her lords were savage beasts, her people slaves,
her streets were noisome with slaughter, her name a proverb for
ferocity, while the Baglioni spread their pestilence across the
valleys, seeking ignoble victories, and fighting unending little
wars for self-aggrandisement. Because the Barbarossa laid you low
the star of Perugia rose clear upon your horizon. Already in 1198,
when you with all the other Umbrian towns paid tribute to Innocent
III., she was the capital of Umbria. But you, the champion of
Rome, the Knight-errant of the Papacy, had nobler ambitions. Your
Dukes were heroes before the lords of Perugia were even robbers.
Were they not Emperors too? Guido, with his pretentious claim to
the kingship of France, and poor young Lambert, the chivalrous and
beautiful Knight of Spoleto, with whose ill-timed death, on the
very spot where the great battle of Marengo was fought nearly a
thousand years after, perished the hope of a united and independent
kingdom within the Italian[25] frontier.
[Illustration: SPOLETO: PORTA D'ANNIBALE.]
Spoleto was truly in a jubilant mood when we climbed up her winding
streets, past the beautiful but ruined apse of San Niccolò, and
the magnificent prehistoric wall below its convent. An Industrial
Exhibition was being held in the Piazza Bernardino Campello, and
the Merry Widow--'nuovissima per Spoleto'--was to be played that
night in the Teatro Nuovo, 'con richissima messa in scena!'
But at all times we found the quality of joy in Spoleto. Long long
ago she wept perhaps when she waited, as Elaine for Lancelot, while
her lover, the beautiful and splendid Lambert, was in the toils of
his insatiable mistress, Rome. Widowed, she trimmed a lamp before
his shrine and turned her eyes towards the Papacy, seeking to build
up an Italian Empire, through the temporal kingdom of the Pope. But
now she has opened her gates to welcome the new era, and, having
doffed her mourning garments, sits enthroned at the head of her
magnificent valley, welcoming the world with the gracious dignity
of one who for a few short years was the mother of United Italy.
Spoleto does not clamber up the hillside like rosy little Spello.
She is tall and stately, pale as a lily, silent as a girl who
dreams of love. More than any other of the hill-set cities of
Umbria she bears the stamp of Rome, in arches and half-buried
houses, in walls and ancient temples long since turned to the
worship of other gods, and most of all in the inspiration of the
great aqueduct which spans the ravine between her Rocca and the
ilex-woods of Monte Luco.
[Illustration: SPOLETO: SAN GREGORIO.]
In Spoleto Rome and modernity walk hand in hand. Spoleto is not
mediaeval in character like other Umbrian towns. Her hill is
crowned by the imposing Castello which Cardinal Albornoz and
Nicholas v. built on the site of the Rocca of Theodoric, and she
has many gracious churches which flowered from the eleventh to the
thirteenth century, like the cathedral and San Gregorio Maggiore;
or, more ancient still, San Salvatore, that exquisite relic of
the fourth century, which contains the nucleus of a Roman temple;
and San Pietro, on the lower slopes of Monte Luco, which was
built in the fifth century and restored in 1320, after it had
been practically destroyed by the Ghibellines. It is true that
the splendid roofless apse of San Niccolò soars above the main
street with broken lancet windows framing the heavens, like the
windows of Tintern, but it is built over the ancient circuit of
the city walls; and though its slender Gothic grace beautifies
the hillside, it was the rugged stones of Spoleto's prehistoric
fortifications which claimed our eyes. For it was against these
walls, which the Unknown People, and later the Pelasgians and the
Romans, built round the foot of their city, that Hannibal threw his
Punic troops in vain before he retired to the rich territory of
Picenum, where he fortified his soldiers after the rigors of their
journey through Northern Italy and the Alps.