steep, narrow lanes, where the strip of sky above our heads was
cut by bridges leading from one tall mediaeval mansion to another,
where there were shrines in the walls and Gothic doorways leading
to dark and mysterious courtyards, and Doors of the Dead, and,
to speak truth, unsavoury odours, which are the least pleasing
reminiscences of the Middle Ages. But for the most part Spoleto
is clean and modern, with wide streets and piazzas graced by
hanging gardens, in which her Roman fragments are stranded like
the skeletons of giants, where they are not buried beneath the
soil, like the wonderful subterranean bridge outside the Porta San
Gregorio; and the lower church of Sant'Ansano, on the foundations
of a Temple of the Sun; and the mosaiced house which is said to
have been the home of the mother of the Emperor Vespasian.
Among her treasures Spoleto holds the dust of Brother Philip in a
beautifully wrought casket of lapis lazuli and gold, for that was
how the façade of Santa Maria Assunta appeared to us as we rounded
the corner of the Episcopal Palace, and came upon it suddenly,
bathed in the yellow sunlight of late afternoon.
The Cathedral of Spoleto is set humbly on the hillside in the
shadow of the great Rocca of Nicholas V. So that we stood, as it
were, above the jewelled façade, and saw it rising in all its
glory at the bottom of a wide steep slope which opened out into
a green piazza between the sloping gardens of the Rocca and the
little Renaissance Chiesa della Manna d'Oro. Like the Cathedral
of Assisi, which its façade resembles, having the same triangular
tympanum enclosing grand Gothic arches corresponding to the naves
of the older building, it is externally one of the most gracious
churches in Umbria. The fifteenth century loggia of its portico
supports a Renaissance arabesque, and above it the central arch
of the tympanum is filled with gold and blue mosaics which glow
like jewels in their rich setting of mellowing stones. The glass
in the beautiful rose windows is the colour of lapis lazuli; two
little stone pulpits are built into the wall on either side of the
portico, and in its shadow is the frescoed chapel of Francesco
Eroli, Bishop of Spoleto.
But why attempt to reproduce with pen and ink and dull description
a picture more fitted to the golden brush of Fra Filippo Lippi, and
which indeed owes much of its charm to the beauty of the Umbrian
hills billowing away to the horizon, and the alchemy of sunlight
changing ancient stones to gold--the complete and lovely unity of
Art and Nature.
I hope the sun sometimes shines in upon the tomb of Lippo Lippi,
for I know he loved it, and the marble cenotaph which Lorenzo the
Magnificent raised in his honour, when the Spoletani refused to
let him carry away the body of the painter, because 'they were
badly provided with things of note,' is rather bald in spite of its
florid epitaph. But the tomb itself did not detain us long, for in
the apse we had caught sight of some of Brother Philip's loveliest
frescoes telling the story of the life of the Virgin, in four great
chapters--the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, her Death, and in
the vault above, her Coronation in the Courts of Heaven.
[Illustration: A STREET IN SPOLETO.]
According to Vasari, Fra Filippo, engaged as usual in a love
affair, was poisoned by the family of the lady whom he had seduced
while he was at work on the Cathedral. It is likely that the people
of Spoleto were not so complaisant as the Florentines, who had long
ago ceased even to shrug their shoulders at the amours of this
son of the Renaissance, although he had refused the offer of Pius
II. to legitimise his marriage with the beautiful nun Lucrezia.
But later writers have dismissed the idea as one of Vasari's
ill-founded scandals. In any case there were few men less worthy
of painting the sacred story of Madonna Mary, and few who could
have told it with such purity and tenderness, and intuition. For
not even the damp which has caused them to peel and discolour in
places, or the uninspired work of Fra Diamante who finished them,
when Lippo Lippi, 'that vagabond and joyous mortal,' had been laid
to rest, can rob these pale and sad Madonnas of their beauty, or
take away the spiritual loveliness of the angels, who with the sun
and the moon and all the constellations do homage to the Queen of
Heaven.
But these things are as nothing compared with the real glories of
Spoleto--the peculiar beauty of her landscape, and the magnificence
of the Ponte delle Torri, the great aqueduct of the Longobard
Dukes, which links the city to the sacred ilex groves of Monte Luco.
Nature has endowed Spoleto richly. She is built on the slopes of
an isolated bastion of the Appennines, which closes as it were the
Central Plain of Umbria. Behind her towers the broad shoulder of
Monte Luco, veiled in ilex woods. To the south the wild valley of
the Tessino opens a vista of rolling hills, mounting fold on fold
to the horizon. And from the windows of our inn, the picturesque
old Albergo Lucini, whose palatial rooms, sparsely furnished with
ancient grandeur, are such a luxury in the hot summer months, we
looked over the roofs of the lower town, and across the tranquil
country to Perugia, more than forty miles away.
[Illustration: A FOUNTAIN OF SPOLETO.]
Was it perhaps because we knew this soft and gracious valley,
sanctified by the footsteps of many saints, so well, that we
loved it even more dearly than we had loved it as we gazed from
the bulwarks of Perugia? Then these little towns sown along the
hillsides or crowning their miniature peaks, like Trevi, and
Montefalco, were nothing but names and points of beauty. But now
after many weeks spent on the eastern coast of Italy or among
the rugged Appennines, we had come back again to gentle Umbria,
to find that every little town was full of smiling memories, and
all the winding roads were pathways to romance. Who could forget
the classic grace of Clitumnus, when he saw the clustered poplars
soaring from the plain? Or the capers and the flowering rosemary,
which made a garden of the ancient walls of Trevi? Or the sweetness
of the olive woods below Assisi, where we wandered in the footsteps
of St. Francis gathering an imperishable bouquet of holy memories?
Or the subtle beauty of the Tiber, as it washed the skirts of
Perugia's hill?
Nor had long association lessened the miracle of the soft radiance
of the heavens, or made commonplace the clarity of atmosphere,
or dimmed the strange light which seems to float like an eternal
benediction between the mountains of this Mystic Land.
Early next morning we climbed up the hillside, past the Piazza
Mercato, where a blackbird, always singing in a wicker cage, in the
shadow of a Roman arch, is the personification of the joyous spirit
of Spoleto. A few steps from the Rocca, through a gate in the
ancient line of fortification, brought us into a small bastioned
piazza overlooking the deep ravine of the Tessino, and the aqueduct
which spans it.
In my notes, I have said nothing of the Ponte delle Torri except
to cry the wonder of it! Which is not surprising, for there are
no words to fit it, no words large, or grand, or ambitious, or
vigorous enough to describe this bridge of towers and colossal
arches, which bestrides the valley between Monte Luco and the
hill of Spoleto. It is the work of giants. It would be a worthy
testimony to the grandeur that was Rome's; to the energy and the
indomitable courage of the men who moulded an empire out of a
handful of earth, and ruled the world from seven little hills.
But the Ponte delle Torri is not the work of Rome. A mystery
surrounds its origin. Theodelapius, third Duke of Spoleto, is said
to have built it early in the seventh century, but it is at least
reasonable to suppose that the foundations were Roman--indeed the
local Guida di Spoleto claims that the actual conduits in use
to-day are Roman. And it is obvious that the pointed arches are
of mediaeval structure, probably contemporary with the ancient
fortress, now a water-mill, which guards the head of the aqueduct
on the slopes of Monte Luco. It is in fact a mosaic to which the
Spoletans of all ages have contributed their stones.
[Illustration: SPOLETO: THE AQUEDUCT.]
But it was not only the grandeur of this Leviathan which held us
spell-bound on the edge of the ravine; we were captivated by the
lavish beauty of its _mise en scène_. For the ilex groves of Monte
Luco, sacred to the ancients for their primeval forests, and to a
younger world for the mediaeval saints who dwelt therein, were full
of morning mists. Here and there some treetops illumined by the
rays of the sun, lately risen above the shoulder of the mountain,
stood out in clear relief against the dark hillside. The rest
was held in shadow. Little blue columns of smoke ascended on the
windless air from the bosky depths where charcoal-burners made
their fires; the far-away bells of the Franciscan Convent on its
crest were like the music of wind-bells under the roof-trees of
the Gods. Every now and then the chimney of a cottage, sunk in the
hillside below the level of the road on which we stood, wove a
transparent veil of fragrant wood-smoke between our profane eyes
and the sacred mount.
We came again in the evening when the aqueduct was bathed in the
declining sunlight, which threaded its great arches with slanting
bars of gold. And then we crossed that magic Bridge of the Giants
and plunged into the enchanted ilex woods of Monte Luco. The stony
way was sown with cyclamens, and the rocks were broidered with
bronze and emerald mosses. At our feet the hill sloped sharply
down the ravine and the slanting sunshine wove a web of light
between the trees. Above us a sea of sunlit ilexes rose to the blue
heavens. As we went deeper, the cool, scented breath of oak trees
came out to greet us. And across the valley we could see Spoleto
and her crested Rocca, with her ancient walls striding down the
hillside through her vineyards. From this point she seemed to be a
city of towers and _loggie_ and hanging gardens.
[Illustration: SPOLETO: SAN PIETRO.]
Presently we reached the beautiful and ancient church of San
Pietro, and found the strange Mediaeval carvings on its façade
gilded by the last rays of the setting sun. While we were spelling
out its fanciful devices the glow faded from its face, leaving it
old and grey at the head of its long flight of steps, as though it
had seen fear. And indeed time has dealt harshly with this shrine
since it was founded in the fifth century on the fragments of a
pagan building. Even the fading light sufficed to show us that
it held no treasures, beyond the twelfth-century fragments from
Byzantine Bestiaries on its façade, and the later reliefs dating
from its restoration in the fourteenth century, after it had been
wantonly destroyed by the Ghibelline wolf, seeking in vain to force
an entrance to the fold of Spoleto.
THE FALLS OF TERNI
At Terni the marvels of Nature have been transformed into the
marvels of electricity without changing the face of the landscape.
For the Velino, the swift black river which has its source deep in
the mountains of the Abruzzi, and hurls itself in three gigantic
columns over a precipice 600 feet high, takes to the mills of Terni
an electric current which does the work of 200,000 horses without
speeding the placid Nar as it washes the fantastic Gothic walls of
Interamna.
There are few waterfalls so unspoiled as Terni. The immense
power-station is almost out of sight, and though the leafy valley
which excited the admiration of the younger Pliny is blocked at
various points by great factories, there is not a single café or
restaurant to mar the savage splendour of the Cascate delle Marmore.
Early in the morning of a St. Martin's summer we set out from
Terni to see the famous cascades of the Velino, which, like the
falls of Tivoli, are the work of Roman hands.[26] The great
mountains closing the valley of the Nar were shadowy against the
sunlit mists. As we drew near, the clamour of the water grew and
gathered like the exultant roar of some primeval giant. The river
began to hurry in its deep channel below the road, and foam-white
torrents clambered down its banks, with bursts of laughter, to find
themselves escaped from the main waterfall. But still the mists
clung to the green hillsides so that we only saw their crests
silhouetted against the welkin.
Suddenly out of the tender half-tones a sunlit cloud loomed
silver in the heavens. I have seen the snowy turrets of a cumulus
illuminated by a burst of sunlight on many an April noon. I seemed
to see them now, shadowed against the blue Empyrean. But it was
no cloud. The growing clamour told me so. That fantastic outline,
clothed in the semblance of giant trees, was solid rock cleft with
a flood of leaping water, which caught the sunshine, like the
silver lining of a storm-cloud, as it topped the cliff, and then
vanished in a mist of mounting spray.
Sun and river poured together over the ilex-crested mountain, the
light in solid rays athwart the belching smoke of the falls, the
water like a living thing, an unchained element, which leapt again
in ecstasy to the blue heavens, winnowing the air with plumes of
wind-tossed spray. On either side the hills fell back before us,
their forests and terraces glistening with Byron's
'... unceasing shower, which round,
With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain,
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald....'
And in the midst, cleaving the ilex forest on the brink of the
precipice, the Velino hurled itself into the abyss with a mighty
shout of laughter. Sometimes it spent itself upon the rocks in
foaming passion, impotently desiring its consummation with the sea,
doomed to captivity upon the way, to lie in stagnant pools chained
for the service of humanity. Sometimes it trickled languidly over
the moss-grown crevices, engrossed in the delicate pleasure of
its own music. Sometimes it glissaded as transparently as glass,
seemingly motionless in its resistless speed, over the smooth
yellow boulders bearded with stalactites.
[Illustration: THE FALLS OF TERNI.]
It was profoundly exciting--the voice of Nature, a real
and primitive thing. Only a little way up the valley great
manufactories choked up the banks of the Nera; but here the
clamorous voices, mad with the delirium of motion, sang to the
heavens in unbridled joy. It was a great song of labour, a gigantic
Wagnerian strain, in which we could distinguish the lilting song
of the Rhine daughters above the thunder of the giants, telling
the happy innocence of earth before her stolen gold became a
passion to gods and men. Or in another mood we heard the laughter
of water-gods as they leapt into the boiling chasm, and the dryads
and the naiads calling to their sisters, the 'wind-enchanted shapes
of wandering mist,' and clapping their hands to see their great
comrade come hurtling from the heavens careless, in his mad race,
of the defeat to come. Only the mists, the tiger-striped mists,
leapt up to warn the silver giant, and lost themselves under the
melting kiss of the sun. We never could have wearied of watching
these maenads dancing before their lord.
But time pressed. We were to be in Narni that night, and we had yet
to climb to the head of the fall, through its enchanted ilex-wood,
where ferns and flowers, all wet with glancing spray, grow round
the lips of overhanging caves, and dock leaves wave huge fans in
the wind of rushing waters.
Sometimes through an opening in the trees we caught sight of a
moving curtain of white mist; sometimes the path led on to a
narrow ledge overhanging the main fall, where we could stand in
the shelter of a hollowed cave and watch the water leaping down in
Gothic points of spume, plunging into the smoking cauldron to rise
again in Iris clouds of spray. A butterfly which had ventured from
the green shadows of the music-haunted wood fluttered an instant in
the wild wet breath of the fall, and was drawn remorselessly into
the vortex. Here, indeed, with the thunder of the Velino shaking
the hillside, there was a savage and awful beauty in the scene.
Here we could recognise the landscape where Virgil's Fury, leaving
'the high places of the world,' fled to the mansions of Cocytus.
'A place of high renown, and celebrated by fame in many regions
... the side of a grove, gloomy with thick boughs, hems it in on
either hand, and in the midst a torrent, in hoarse murmurs and with
whirling eddies, roars along the rocks....'
[Illustration: THE LOWER FALL OF TERNI.]
We lunched in a cottage a little way from the bottom of the fall,
which seemed to be a restaurant for the humble needs of the workmen
in a neighbouring carburet factory. At least its landlady was
greatly distressed because she had nothing for the signori. 'Non è
basta! non è basta!' she cried, although we discovered four roast
chickens and some excellent potato salad as well as a huge cauldron
of _minestre_ on her stove. Later, when the factory bell had rung
for _mezzogiorno_, and all the employés crowded in, we found there
really was not enough to go round. But the courtesy and charming
manners of the workmen were a revelation. Although there was no
soup for some of them, and certainly we had eaten one of their
chickens, they treated the whole affair as a joke, and heaped their
plates contentedly with _pasti_.
But to us the biggest joke was the price of the good lunch we had
so unwittingly stolen from the regular patrons of the inn. For the
bill for the wine was threepence-halfpenny for all, and the potato
salad was a penny each, and a plate of chicken was sixpence, and
a plate of soup twopence only. Truly, as the poet said, 'Italy has
everything: climate, scenery, art, antiquities, history, romance,
beautiful people, fruit and wine and cheapness.'
NARNI
From the first moment that we saw her, a jewelled hill-top set
high among the stars, there was a touch of magic about Narni. As
we drove through the valley tall black cypress spires showed us
our path, and the starry heavens were as luminous as though Diana
had already lit her lamp below the hills. Dimly we glimpsed a
battlemented gate rising gaunt above the road, and the ghostly form
of the broken bridge of Augustus striding amid the reflections of
the Nar. We climbed up into the hooded night between great hedges
where the frogs shrilled softly to each other. The Pleiades hung
low upon the mists of the horizon like the phosphorescence of a
tropic sea, and above us the lights of Narni were gold against the
silvered canopy of stars.
The way was long although it was so beautiful, and lonely, too,
when the town was hidden from us by a fold of the hill and we
could see nothing but the towers of the Rocca upon its crest, a
shade of the Middle Ages among the imperishable stars. So that we
welcomed the cheery beams of a shepherd's lantern set by chance
in the window of a white-walled farm, like a beacon on the dark
hillside. And soon afterwards we passed under the beetling
Trecento gate of Narni, and found ourselves in a piazza where the
driver pointed out thousands of earthenware pots spread on the
ground beneath the trees. 'For the festa to-morrow, Signori,' he
said. And that was the first we heard of any festa. But not the
last, for all the inns were crowded, and it was only by dint of a
great deal of talking, and through the courtesy of a young Italian
girl who had travelled by the same train as ourselves, and who
volunteered to sleep in the village, that we were able to find two
beds and a sofa in the Albergo del Angelo.
[Illustration]
We woke to find ourselves in Arcady. The smiling sunshine called me
early out of bed. Below my windows came the music of passing herds
and flocks--the lowing of kine and the tinkling of their bells, the
clipping hoofs of mules and asses, the pattering feet of sheep,
like summer rainfall on the broad-leaved trees. And, strangest
sound of all, the clear high song of larks, so rarely heard in
Italy, where the native, as in Dante's age, still 'throws away his
days in idle chase of the diminutive birds.'[27]
There were two windows in my room. The one to which the dulcet
singing of the larks called my attention looked from the wall of
Narni's precipice into the deep valley of the Nera, a magnificent
and awe-inspiring view, for the Angelo is perched upon a crest of
beetling rocks with a sheer drop of a hundred feet towards the
river. But from the other I looked on one of the loveliest pastoral
pageants I have ever seen in Umbria. For down the old Flaminian Way
which Popes and Emperors, and Caesar with an army, trod, and up a
winding pathway such as Gentile da Fabriano loved to paint, which
led from the valley to the hill of Narni and joined the main road
at our very door, came neat-herds driving before them snow-white
oxen, and peasant women with brightly flowered kerchiefs riding
a-pillion on mules and asses, or walking behind flocks of sheep
with wide flat baskets of poultry and fruit and vegetables on their
heads. Barefoot children helped to guide the calves; and here a
shaggy farmer rode up the hill a-horseback in sheepskin trousers,
with a wallet and flask of wine slung across his mediaeval wooden
saddle; and there some happy youths led in their heifers with
scarlet fillets hanging on their brows.
[Illustration]
They might have been processions of the Magi bringing their gifts
to the Infant Christ in the dawn of the Nativity. Or, better still,
these joyful husbandmen and shepherds bringing the first-fruits of
their harvest into this little hill-town for the ox-fair of St.
Michael, might have been the votaries of Apollo coming to celebrate
the Pyanepsia with offerings and invocations.
We dressed in haste and hurried to join them as they flowed along
the streets and out through Narni's mediaeval gate to their Forum
Boarium beyond the city walls. And it was Arcady we found below the
silver olives. For the road looped a natural theatre, such as the
Greeks loved to terrace and face with marble, where the citizens
might sit gazing over the glittering stage, on which Gods and
Heroes spoke the dialogues of Aeschylus and Sophocles, at one of
Nature's masterpieces--Etna, rising above the Strait of Messina, or
the isle-girt sea of Salamis.
Here the olive-clad slopes were steep and the curves of the bay
were bold, and the flat area which they enclosed was commanded on
one side by the towering bastions of Narni and on the other by a
great Dominican Convent with all its ancient splendour revived by
the Royal House of France. And here we looked across a market in
the hollow of the theatre, where thousands of white oxen, their
foreheads bound with Roman fillets, scarlet and blue, stood below
the twisted olives in a mist of slanting sunlight, which threw a
tracery of blue-veined shadows on their snowy flanks. Beyond them
in the open champaign we could see the towered bridge over the
Nera, and the green pasture land characteristic of lower Umbria
which makes it so different to the vine-engarlanded plains of the
Valley of Spoleto.
[Illustration: THE CATTLE FAIR AT NARNI.]
On the hill above, the mules and asses, still bearing their wooden
pack-saddles picked out in brass and scarlet cloth, were tethered
in the shade of the army of olives, which swept up to the walls of
the grim old Rocca. And before us lay the winding road, with its
gay stalls and booths and its moving crowd of peasants, looking for
all the world like a brightly-coloured ribbon threading the grey
wood.
[Illustration]
Surely the gay Hermes, the god of markets, the beneficent patron
of pastures and herds, smiled on this gracious fête champêtre, so
pagan in its simplicity and lavish beauty. Perhaps he lingered down
in the ox-fair where a charming patriarchal custom was observed
every time a bargain was concluded, when the bystanders joined
the hands of the two farmers concerned, and held them while they
shook in token of good-will. Or likelier still he wandered on
the causeway with Corydon and Thyrsis, or, in more jovial mood,
searched among the pretty peasant girls, for Amaryllis and fair
Delia, whose thoughts to-day were all for market wares, displayed
by plausible auctioneers below the laurel avenue.
[Illustration]