interesting than romantic now that the tomb has been dismantled,
which Signor Mancini used to show to the traveller, intact,
with the inmate lying on his rough bed, surrounded by his last
possessions. The sepulchres are not hollowed out of the living rock
like most Etruscan tombs, but are built in a sort of honey-comb of
rough masonry, back to back, with chambers about 12 ft. long by 8
ft. wide, and perhaps 10 ft. high. The round _cippi_ on the mounds
which cover them make them appear curiously like Oriental villages.
But it is to the student rather than to the pilgrim in the world
of Beauty that this sombre burial-place of the ancients will
appeal. We found more joy in the painted tombs on the hill of the
Cappuccini, where in the cavernous depths of the tufa rock we
caught a fleeting glimpse of Proserpine seated beside the Lord of
Hades, and heard the flutings of Etruscan slaves as their princes
drank libations to their own departed souls. And it is worth while
crossing the valley in the early morning to see the loveliness of
Orvieto, crowning her great rock in the heart of her wide pale
valley, with the sunlight gilding her towers and the jewelled face
of her cathedral.
[Illustration: ORVIETO: ETRUSCAN TOMB.]
It was very early when we emerged from the frowning gate of the
city and dipped down among the dewy vineyards. Beside the road
an aqueduct rose out of the earth, a crumbling mass of ancient
masonry. As we climbed down into the valley it towered above us,
spanning the ravine, but when we toiled over the penitential stones
of the Via dei Cappuccini, thankful for its shade as we mounted,
it sank again into the hillside, and the leaping green things
clambered upon it, eager to drag it back to the ditch. So we went
leisurely through the play of light and shade, and always as we
looked back we saw Orvieto rising sheer out of the valley like
a queen on her brown rock. The morning mist wove a magic beauty
round the spires of her Gothic cathedral and the giant pine-tree on
the edge of her precipice, until she seemed the very city Turner
immortalised.
And presently we came into a chestnut grove where the path was
hidden under a carpet of rustling autumn leaves; and a tangle of
wild flowers--harebell, cyclamen, saffron and fireweed--wove a
tapestry on the loom of the grass. Here were our nameless tombs,
sunk deep in the tufa rock, with over-arching trees above their
gates and Canterbury bells growing on their mossy paths. Within,
the damp had eaten away many of the beautiful forms about which
Dennis wrote. But we could trace the shapes of the Lords and Ladies
of Etruria as they sat like shadows before their eternal banquet
in the halls of Elysium; we could see the slaves preparing their
elaborate feast, here baking bread, there pounding meat to make it
tender. And on another wall, a young warrior, attended by a winged
genius, bearing in her hand a scroll inscribed with his good and
evil deeds, drove in his chariot to Judgement in the Unseen World.
In the midst of these wraiths there was one unspoiled fragment of
plaster, the head of a youth, beautiful and Greek, who gazed sadly
upon the ruin of his gods, shut from the world so fair, which he
had dreamt was made for his strong youth and beauty, in whose ears
even the faint, half-vanished music of the pipes will soon be
silenced, if it is true that when the pictured ghosts of things
have faded their soul is stilled.
Their melody rang in our ears when we stood once more in the
chequered shadow of the chestnut grove, already gilded with
autumnal gold, and looked across the wide pale valley to Orvieto.
It was the hour of Mass, a Sabbath day and wonderfully silent.
Again we seemed to hear that plaintive strain. But it was only the
humming of the insects, and the bells of the distant city calling
her people to prayer.
VITERBO
Though they are sisters in name--Urbs Vetus and Vetus Urbs--and
though their function in the mediaeval history of the Papacy was
the same, it would be difficult to find two cities so dissimilar as
Orvieto and Viterbo. The mystic sadness of Orvieto is foreshadowed
in the pale valley of the Paglia, strewn with the débris of
volcanic upheavals; but instinctively our spirits rose as we drew
near the gay and beautiful city of Viterbo, across the rolling
plains of Lazio, which have been trodden by the feet of all the
armies who sought to invade the sanctuary of Rome. It is a field of
history and romance, full of memories.
Far away upon our left the Appennines were piled like storm-clouds
on the horizon; and upon our right, over the valleys once guarded
by the strongholds of Etruria, rose the splendid outline of
Montefiascone, the shrine of the Goddess of the Etruscans--the
Fanum Voltumnae, to which they gathered in times of doubt or danger
to consult the oracles and appease the gods. Near at hand, black
against the blue Sabine mountains, was the mysterious Ciminian
Mount, whose terrors held the Roman legionaries in check until
the Consul Fabius Maximus in B.C. 310 plunged through its forests
into the great Etrurian Plain, to the terror of the Senate, whose
prohibition reached him too late.
[Illustration: OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF VITERBO.]
The sun was sinking behind the hill of Montefiascone when we
entered Viterbo. It was Sunday, and the passeggiata between the
station and the Porta Fiorentina was filled with a gay crowd of
citizens and soldiers. For unlike the other papal cities of refuge,
Orvieto and Anagni, which have fallen upon evil days, Viterbo,
always a natural centre, is becoming an important provincial
capital, one of the most prosperous towns in Italy, with a rapidly
increasing population. And to her honour be it said that her
municipal energy is making itself felt to great advantage in the
direction of stripping from her Gothic palaces and churches the
baroquetries which have veiled their beauties during the last three
centuries.
The origin of Viterbo is as mysterious as the source of the
Nile. An Etruscan city is known to have stood upon its site; it
contains positions of great strength, tongues of hill, guarded by
gorges, well suited to the Etruscan style of fortification; and
it stands at the Etrurian gate of the Great Ciminian Forest, the
chief obstacle which the Romans had to pierce for the subjugation
of Etruria. So, putting aside the stupid forgeries of Annio of
Viterbo, who 'claimed for his native city an antiquity greater than
that of Troy,' it is curious that the Vetus Urbs is not mentioned
before the eighth century, when the old chroniclers speak of an
ancient castle--castrum Viterbii--standing on the present site
of the cathedral. But from the year 773, when it attracted the
attention of Desiderius, the last King of the Lombards, who made it
the base of his intended conquest of the States of the Church, has
its history been interwoven with that of the Papacy.
Little is known of Viterbo in Lombard times, for all the grandeur
of her Lombard walls, which were many times thrown down and built
up again in her constant warfare with Rome. It was not until the
beginning of the twelfth century that she sprang into importance
in mediaeval history as the capital of the Patrimony, bequeathed
by the Countess Mathilda of Tuscany to the occupants of the
Chair of St. Peter, assuming the rôle of a fully-armed Minerva
springing from the brow of Jove, because her lofty position made
her a fortress for the Popes in time of peril from the sword, and
a sanatorium in seasons of pestilence. In the twelfth century
Eugenius III. summoned the vassals of the Church to assemble in
Viterbo, and in the thirteenth century five popes were elected
within her walls, and four popes died there; in 1240 Frederick
II. was living in peace in Viterbo; and five years later the city
inscribed the most glorious page in her annals when the great
Emperor was humiliated by her heroic defence against his onslaughts
and forced to retreat into Pisan territory. But her power decayed
from the end of the thirteenth century, when Honorius IV., in
removing the interdict which his predecessor had laid on the city
for the outrages committed in the papal elections, decreed that she
was to raze her fortifications, lose her jurisdiction, and yield
her rectorate to Rome. Later, we find Urban V. staying in the Rocca
when he returned from Avignon, the mediaeval Babylon, in answer
to the exhortations of Petrarch; and here died the great soldier
and statesman, Cardinal Gil d'Albornoz, before the Pope continued
his unwilling journey to Rome. But it is chiefly as a city of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries that we regard Viterbo to-day;
for in those stormy years which saw the rise and fall of the great
house of Hohenstaufen, the fate of Viterbo was synonymous with that
of the Papacy, and it is to this period that most of her mediaeval
monuments belong.
[Illustration: VITERBO: MEDIAEVAL HOUSE IN THE PIAZZA S. LORENZO.]
Coming from Orvieto we found Viterbo very gay and gracious, with
exquisite fountains making music in all her piazzas, and her
mediaeval streets full of the merry air of vintage time. Already
the great vats had been cleansed, and we had encountered enormous
barrels groaning and rumbling down the hills as they were rolled to
the fountains to be soused and sweetened by sun and air, or tumbled
back to their accustomed cellars. All day long the yoked oxen swung
slowly in through the ancient gates, drawing carts filled with
barrels of fruit; and in front of more than one humble osteria we
found a group of men and girls singing and laughing as they pressed
the grapes with bare white feet, up and down, up and down, while
the dark fluid flowed through a conduit into the vats below. This
alone would have made us love Viterbo, just as we still carry
gentle memories of Mantua, not so much for its great castles of the
Gonzaga, as for the beautiful simplicity of the vintage which we
watched being brought home to that city of arcades from the fields
round Virgil's home not many autumns ago.
[Illustration: VITERBO: THE MOAT OUTSIDE THE PORTA SAN PIETRO.]
But Viterbo, 'the Nuremberg of Italy,' is full of charm. She is
one of the most mediaeval cities in Italy; she has a whole quarter
of thirteenth-century houses cheek by jowl with barons' towers and
ancient churches; she has exquisite cloisters like that of Santa
Maria della Verità, where the recent Camorra trial was held; and on
the hill where the ancient castle of Viterbo stood she cherishes a
gem of Gothic architecture--the Palazzo Vescovile, which was once
the palace of the popes.
This was the stage on which the chief personages in the history of
Viterbo and the Papacy played their parts. Here came the Barbarossa
to pay his unwilling homage to proud Adrian IV., who thought of
lowering human dignity far more than any Latin would have done.
Here came Frederick II. in peace, because Viterbo had departed from
her loyalty to the Papacy for the time being, since the cause of
Gregory IX. had been espoused by her ancient enemy, Rome. Here was
elected Urban IV., the pope who never entered the Lateran or St.
Peter's. Here Charles of Anjou, and King Philip III. of France,
travelling from Tunis with the body of his father, Louis IX.,
waited for the election of Gregory X. in 1271; and the impatient
Charles, seeing that the cardinals were in no hurry to choose
a successor for Clement IV., took the roof from their council
chamber, confident that discomfort would hasten the decision of
those luxury-loving priests. That same year, in the presence of
the King of Sicily and the King of France, Henry, son of Richard,
Duke of Cornwall, who was on his way to England from the Tunisian
crusade, was done to death by Guido di Montfort, Charles' vicar
in Tuscany. 'The sight of the English prince awoke the fury of
this bloodthirsty warrior, and impelled him to avenge himself on
the royal house of England, by whom his great father, Simon of
Leicester and Montfort, had been slain in battle, and his remains
outraged in death. He stabbed the innocent Henry at the altar of a
church, dragged the corpse by the hair, and threw it down the steps
of the portal.'[29]
It is interesting to note that the murderer was not punished by
Charles, and that, as Gregorovius points out, only twelve years
later he was spoken of by Martin IV., who made him General in the
service of the Church, as his beloved son. But Dante places his
soul in hell among the tyrants who were given to blood and rapine,
where he commemorates the fact that Prince Henry's heart was
exposed before the sorrowing eyes of the English nation beside the
waters of the Thames.
'... He in God's bosom smote the heart
Which yet is honour'd on the bank of Thames.'
But it is difficult to realise such stirring scenes in Viterbo
to-day. For directly we left the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, with
its cheerful provincial bustle, behind us, and crossed the sunny
Piazza del Plebiscito, guarded by the lions of Viterbo, rampant on
columns below their heraldic palm-trees, we found her a gentle city
fallen upon sleep, full of stately mediaeval houses with outside
staircases, and ancient hospices for pilgrims, Gothic and grey,
with buttressed walls and cowl-like windows.
[Illustration: VITERBO: FROM A WINDOW IN THE PALACE OF THE POPES.]
[Illustration: VITERBO: THE STEMMA OF THE CITY.]
The Palace of the Popes, where there are memories for every stone,
stands with the cathedral in a sunny square beyond the Piazza della
Morte and the picturesque palace where the great Farnese Pope was
born. Thanks to Pedro Juliani, that most distinguished scholar, who
took the name of John XXI. when he was elected to the vacant chair
of St. Peter at Viterbo, the palace which was the home of so many
popes in the thirteenth century is one of the most beautiful Gothic
ruins in Italy. For it was the ill-fated John XXI. who built the
exquisite chamber supported by a single mighty column and an arch,
which is the chief glory of the Palazzo Vescovile. Legend has been
busy with the name of this pope, whose scientific studies made him
hated and feared by the ignorant and superstitious monks of his
day, and whose untimely death increased the popular belief that he
was a magician. He was killed by the falling ceiling of the very
room which he had taken such pride in adding to the papal palace,
and on the night of the catastrophe it is said that a monk roused
his companions from sleep by crying out that he had seen a huge
black man knocking with a hammer on the wall of the Pope's room--a
legend quite in keeping with the general belief circulated in Rome
more than two hundred years later, that the devil had called in
person at the Vatican to carry away the body of the wicked Borgia
Pope.
At the first glance the Palazzo Vescovile seemed nothing but a
gracious ruin, for the lovely Gothic chamber of John XXI. is only
a shell whose loggias frame the blue heavens, and whose fountain,
fallen into decay, is overgrown with weeds. It is open to the sky;
but the great Council Chamber, from which that impatient Prince,
Charles of Anjou, took the roof above the heads of the Papal
Conclave, has been closed in again, although the wind strays at
will through its beautiful trefoil windows. And here we loved to
sit looking through the empty Gothic frames at the great church of
the Trinità across a vine-clad slope, and the grey convents and
buttressed walls of Viterbo shimmering in the opal light of an
October morning, with the noble sky-line of Montefiascone upon the
horizon, and the misty blue hills of Umbria beyond. For we never
wearied of the mediaeval grace and the deliberate beauty of this
palace of the Popes with its silent fountain and its grass-grown
loggia; and one day, while we sat in the lofty Council Chamber
which has been witness to so many stirring scenes, a motor drove
up to the foot of its sweeping steps, oh, splendid anachronism!
and from the inner palace hastened a proper dignitary to meet the
ancient prelate who descended from it, and conduct him into the
presence of his master, reminding us that this stately ruin is
still the episcopal headquarters of Viterbo.
[Illustration: VITERBO: THE PALACE OF THE POPES.]
[Illustration: VITERBO: FOUNTAIN IN THE PALAZZO MUNICIPIO.]
'Città delle belle fontane e delle belle donne' was the boast
of the ancient chroniclers of Viterbo, but we did not see many
beautiful women in her streets, although the splendour of her
fountains is still a proverb. Every little piazza, no matter how
humble, is endowed with a fountain of exquisite grace, where
silver floods of water pour over lichened stones, or trickle from
the spouting mouths of the Guelph lions of the city; even Rome
cannot boast so many gracious fantasies of the fifteenth century.
They are as numerous as the beautiful outside staircases which are
to be found on more mediaeval houses in Viterbo than in any other
Italian city. Such an one is the Casa Poscia, half way up the Via
Cavour, which is turned to a humble use to-day, like all the great
palaces of Viterbo, having an osteria in its basement, but which is
a perfect specimen of the local domestic architecture of the Middle
Ages, still closed at night by ancient wooden doors. The Viterbesi
invariably point out this house as the Casa of the bella Galiana,
whose inscription in the Piazza del Plebiscito bears witness to
the mortality of that Helen of the Middle Ages, who was 'flos et
honor Patriae, species pulcherrima rerum.'
[Illustration: VITERBO: THE HOUSE OF BELLA GALIANA.]
But the chief glory of Viterbo is the romantic mediaeval city
which lies between the Via Principe Umberto and the gates of the
Carmine and San Pietro. Here even the names of the narrow and
mysterious streets have not been changed by the rise of the House
of Savoy. Would it not give a thrill even to the most unimaginative
of travellers to step from the Square of the Dead into the Via di
San Pellegrino with its grey thirteenth-century houses huddled on
either hand, now flowering into Gothic windows and elegant outside
staircases, now frowning defiance from square fighting towers with
evil slits for eyes, now opening a passage down the steep hillside
like the Street of a Hundred Bridges or the staircase street which
leads to the Bridge of the Paradox?
[Illustration: VITERBO: VIA DI S. PELLEGRINO.]
Here the Middle Ages come to life again; nor are the people
themselves greatly changed, for the women scrub their linen at
ancient fountains, and the men work in the dark _bassi_ at their
humble trades; here we saw a white-haired dame plying her distaff
in a little vine arbour at the head of her balcony staircase, and
there we met a man coming from the bakery with a plank of bread,
three and a half feet long on his head. As in Orvieto, there were
hooded owls on stands outside the doors to give another mediaeval
touch, and from the upper windows women looked down with the
languid curiosity of the Latin races. In the smaller streets
there were dirt and squalor unimaginable, broken fruit and flies,
unspeakable smells and the noise of screaming children, but in
their midst were serene-eyed mothers, with the mysterious calm
in their faces which has made the Italian woman the most subtle
type of Madonna, who seemed in some strange fashion to be exalted
above the impure atmosphere in which they lived, like the crimson
garofani, or the long sprays of Morning Glory which flowered in
their mediaeval windows. Though there was poverty it was the
poverty of the country rather than the destitution of a city, just
as the sheets and towels which fluttered from loggia and arch and
balustrade were threadbare in spite of their fine embroidery and
rich insertions of hand-made lace.
It was through these streets that we saw the vintage coming in
through the ancient Porta San Pietro under the shadow of the
magnificent palace which was the home of Donna Olimpia Pamphili,
the infamous sister-in-law of Innocent X., just as it was brought
in the days when the Vetus Urbs was a sanctuary for the princes of
the Church.
[Illustration: ONE OF VITERBO'S MANY FOUNTAINS.]
Una giornata di tempo bello we drove across the swelling plains of
Etruria to the ruined city of Ferentinum. It was the happiest of
days, the last, though we did not know it then, of our careless
pilgrimages, for the next morning came autumn with cold winds
and rain, and we were forced to hurry after our luggage which had
already gone to Rome. But on that day there was a special beauty
in the rolling plain which once was peopled by the vanished cities
of Etruria, and now is so like the Campagna with its ruined tombs
and scattered trees and lonely farmsteads. Here we found the same
enchantment that we remembered in the fields of Rome--the silence,
the gnats hanging in the air in glinting masses as though they
danced in an invisible net, the larks singing in the blue distance,
the song of a ploughman hidden in a fold of the plain. From our
feet stretched the dusty road losing itself in the valleys and
cresting the hills beyond. Far ahead rose Montefiascone with
its great dome soaring above its ilex wood, and to the right,
blue and mysterious in the early morning sunlight, was the dark
Ciminian Mount, misty with spreading columns of smoke as though the
shepherds or the woodcutters within the precincts of its haunted
forest were offering incense to the Gods.
And once we came upon a dozen yoke of oxen ploughing the heavy
brown earth, with the sunlight shining on their smoking flanks
and glistening on the freshly-turned clods of mould behind them.
How little it has altered, this immemorial plain, since the days
when Rome feared to plunge into the dark recesses of the Ciminian
forest, and the Lucumos of Etruria rioted their energies away in
the little cities below the mighty fane of Voltumna! For if mankind
has changed, Nature is still the same; those rolling oxen are on
the tombs of Thebes; the ancient poets have sung of these dark
woods and scented plains, and the husbandmen at work!
The way was long until we came, between hedges with a flower like
japonica, to an outpost of Ferentinum standing over the green
valley of the Acqua Rossa,--a disused tomb which had been a home
for the living long after the dust of the poor forgotten dead had
been scattered to the winds. Here we dismounted and climbed up a
path so thickly spread with soft brown dust that our feet sank into
it and made no sound. Here and there we saw the basalt _selce_,
which marked the direction of the Roman road. Among the tangled
brambles at the side were half-demolished tombs, now a columbarium
for cinerary urns, now a niche, now merely a heap of tumbled
stones. For the earth is taking this ancient city back to her heart
again, and though the summer drought had withered the flowers which
bloom where once the pitiful dust of humanity was laid, the empty
chambers were full of golden bracken and fantastic thistles, silver
with scattered seeds.
Still we wound up the hillside, and presently we came upon two
wind-blown oaks, the only watchers at that city's gates, beside
a rough stone wall, built by some shepherd to prevent his sheep
from breaking in upon the sleeping silence of Ferentinum. It was a
city of the dead, deserted save for the lizards fleeing from our
footsteps, and a few white butterflies dancing above the mullein
stalks.
At first it seemed as though no stone had been left standing on the
other, but on the crest of the hill, overlooking the wooded and
precipitous valley of the Acqua Rossa, and framing in its Royal
Gateway the misty forest of the Ciminian Mount, we came upon the
Theatre of Ferentinum, the only building in the ancient city which
retains any semblance of its former grandeur. So do our vanities
outlive us when our loves and homes are covered with the dust of
oblivion! Behind it the purple basalt of the road was worn into
deep ruts by the chariot wheels of the ancient peoples as they
drove by on pleasure bent, and the ground was jewelled with mosaics
and the iridescent dust of ancient glass, powdered by time. Here
and there we could trace fragments of the mediaeval town grafted on
to the city of Etruria, which in the days of its Roman occupation
was the birthplace of the Emperor Otho--like the remains of the
Byzantine church in the shadow of the Theatre--but for the most
part there was only ruin in the fallen city of the Etruscan Goddess
of Fortune.
[Illustration: THE RUINED THEATRE OF FERENTO.]