AGAIN IN ITALY
My sister and I tarried at Genoa on our way to Castagnolo where we were
to have again the joys of a Tuscan vintage. But between Genoa and
Florence lay our well-loved Porto Fino and, having an invitation from
our old friend Monty Brown, the English Consul and his young wife, to
stay at their castello there, we spent a week at that Eden. We were
alone for part of the time and thoroughly relished the situation, with
only old Caterina, the cook, and the dog, “Bismarck,” as company. Two
Marianas in a moated grange, with a difference. “He” came not, and so
allowed us to clasp to our hearts our chief delights--the sky, the sea,
the olives and the joyous vines. In those early days many of the deep
windows had no glass, and one night, when a staggering Mediterranean
thunderstorm crashed down upon us, we really didn’t like it and hid the
knives under the table at dinner. Caterina was saying her Rosary very
loud in the kitchen. As we went up the winding stairs to bed I carried
the lamp, and was full of talk, when a gust of wind blew the lamp out,
and Alice laughed at my complete silence, more eloquent than any words
of alarm. We had every evening to expel curious specimens of the lizard
tribe that had come in, and turn over our pillows, remembering the
habits of the scorpion.
But that storm was the only one, and as to the sea, which three-parts
enveloped our little Promontory, its blue utterly baffled my poor
paints. But paint I did, on those little panels that we owe to Fortuny,
so nicely fitting into the box he invented. There was a little cape,
crowned with a shrine to Our Lady--“the Madonnetta” it was called--where
I used to go daily to inhale the ozone off the sea which thundered down
below amongst the brown “pudding-stone” rocks, at the base of a sheer
precipice. The “sounding deep.” Oh, the freshness, the health, the joy
of that haunt of mine! Our walks were perilous sometimes, the paths
which almost overhung the deep foaming sea being slippery with the
sheddings of the pines. At the “nasty bits” we had to hold on by shrubs
and twigs, and haul ourselves along by these always aromatic supports.
Admirable is the industry of the peasants all over Italy. Here on the
extreme point of Porto Fino wherever there was a tiny “pocket” of clay,
a cabbage or two or a vine with its black clusters of grapes toppling
over the abyss found foot-hold. We came one day upon a pretty girl on
the very verge of destruction, “holding on by her eyelids,” gathering
figs with a hooked stick, a demure pussy keeping her company by dozing
calmly on a branch of the fig tree. The walls built to support these
handfuls of clay on the face of the rock are a puzzle to me. Where did
the men stand to build them? It makes me giddy to think of it.
Paragi, the lovely rival of Monty’s robber stronghold, belonged to his
brother, and a fairer thing I never saw than Fred’s loggia with the
slender white marble columns, between which one saw the coast trending
away to La Spezzia. But “goodbye,” Porto Fino! On our way to
Castagnolo, at lovely Lastre a Signa, we paused at Pisa for a night.
“Pisa is a _bald Florence_, if I may say so; beautiful, but so empty and
lifeless. There are houses there quite peculiar, however, to Pisa, most
interesting for their local style. Very broad in effect are those flat
blank surfaces without mouldings. The frescoes on them, alas! are now
merely very beautiful blotches and stains of colour. We had ample time
for a good survey of the Duomo, Baptistery, Camposanto and Leaning
Tower, all vividly remembered from when I saw them as a little child.
But I get very tired by sight-seeing and don’t enjoy it much. What I
like is to sit by the hour in a place, sketching or meditating. Besides,
I had been kept nearly all night awake at the Albergo Minerva by railway
whistles, ducks, parrots, cats, dogs, cocks and hens, so that I was only
at half power and I slept most of the way to Signa.
“At the station a carriage fitted, for the heat, with cool-looking brown
holland curtains was awaiting us on the chance of our coming, and we
were soon greeted at dear Castagnolo by Mrs. Ross. Very good of her to
show so much happy welcome seeing we had been expected the evening
before, not to say for many days, and only our luggage had turned up!
The Marchese, who had to go into Florence this morning for the day, had
gone down to meet us last evening, and returned with the disconcerting
announcement that, whereas we had arrived last year without our luggage,
this year the luggage had arrived without us. ‘_I bauli sono giunti ma
le bambine--Chè!_’”
Here follows the record of the same delights as those of the year
before. We had been long expected, and Mrs. Ross told me that the
peaches had been kept back for us in a most tantalising way by the
_padrone_, and that everything was threatening over-ripeness by our
delay. The light-hearted life was in full force. There were great
numbers of doves and pigeons at Castagnolo which shared in the general
hilarity, swirling in the sunshine and swooping down on the grain
scattered for them with little cries of pleasure. I don’t know whether I
should find a socialistic blight appearing here and there, if I returned
to those haunts of my youth, over that patriarchal life, but it seemed
to me that the relations between the _padrone_ and his splendid
_contadini_ showed how suitable the system obtaining in Tuscany was
then. The labourers were the _fanciulli_ (the children) of the master,
and without the least approach to servility these men stood up to him in
all the pride of their own station. But what deference they showed to
him! Always the uncovered head and the respectful and dignified attitude
when spoken to or speaking. I mustn’t forget the frank smile and the
pleasant white teeth. It was a smiling life; every one caught the
smiling habit. Oh, that we could keep it up through a London winter! And
to a London winter we returned, for my friends in England were getting
fidgety about “Inkermann.” One more extract, however, from the
Castagnolo Diary must find a place before the veil is drawn. The
Marchese took us to Siena for two days.
“_September 29th._--We got up by candlelight at 5 a.m. and had a fresh
drive in the phaeton to the station, whence we took train to the
fascinating Etruscan city, whose very name is magic. The weather, as a
matter of course, was splendid, and Siena dwells in my mind all tender
brown-gold in a flood of sunshine. Small as the city is, and hard as we
worked for those two days, we could only see a portion of its treasures.
The result of my observation in the churches and picture galleries shows
me that the art there, as regards painting, is very inferior; and,
indeed, after Florence, with its most exquisite examples of painting and
drawing, these works of art are not taking. I suppose Florence has
spoilt me. Here and there one picks out a plum, such as the ‘Svenimento
of St. Catherine’ in San Domenico, by Sodoma, the only thing by him that
I could look at with pleasure; also, of course, the famous Perugino in
Sant’ Agostino, which I beheld with delight, and a lovely gem of a Holy
Family by Palma Vecchio in the Academy--such a jewel of Venetian colour.
“The frescoes, however, in the sacristy of the cathedral are things
apart, and such as I have never seen anywhere else, for the very dry air
of Siena has preserved them since Pinturicchio’s time quite intact, and
there one sees, as one can see nowhere else, ancient frescoes as they
were when freshly painted. And very different they are from one’s
notions of old frescoes; certainly not so pleasing if looked at as bits
of colour staining old walls in mellow broken tints, but intensely
interesting and beautiful as pictures. Here one sees what frescoes were
meant to be: deep in colour, exceedingly forcible, with positive
illusion in linear and aërial perspective, the latter being most
unexpected and surprising. One’s usual notion of frescoes is that they
must be flat and airless, and modern artists who go in for fresco
decorative art paint accordingly, judging from the faded examples of
what were once evidently such as one sees here--forcible pictures.
“Certainly these wall spaces, looking like apertures through which one
sees crowds of figures and gorgeous halls or airy landscapes, do not
please the eye when looking at the room _as_ a room. One would prefer to
feel the solidity of the walls; but taking each fresco and looking at it
for its own sake only, one feels the keenest pleasure. They are
magnificent pictures, full of individual character and realistic action,
unsurpassable by any modern.
“I cannot attempt to put into words my impression of the cathedral
itself. Certainly, I never felt the beauty of a church more. It being
St. Michael’s Day, we heard Mass in the midst of our wanderings, and we
were much struck by the devotion of the people, the men especially--very
unlike what we saw in Genoa. In the afternoon we had a glorious drive
through a perfect pre-Raphaelite landscape to Belcaro, a fortress-villa
about six miles outside Siena, every turn in the road giving us a new
aspect of the golden-brown city behind us on its steep hill. Perhaps the
most beautiful view of Siena is from near Belcaro, where you get the
dark pine trees in the immediate foreground. The owner of the villa took
us all over it, the Marchese gushing outrageously to him about the
beauties of the dreadful frescoes on walls and ceilings, painted by the
man himself. We had been warned, Alice and I, to express our admiration,
but I regret to say we had our hearts so scooped out of us on seeing
those things in the midst of such true loveliness that we couldn’t say a
thing, but only murmured. So the poor Marchese had to do
triple-distilled gush to serve for three, and said everything was
‘_portentoso_.’
“In the evening we all three went out again and, in the bright
moonlight, strolled about the streets, the piazza, and round the
cathedral, which shone in the full light which fell upon it. The deep
sky was throbbing with stars, and all the essence of an Italian
September moonlight night was there. Oh, sweet, restful Siena dream!
Like a dream, and yet such a precious reality, to be gratefully kept in
memory to the end.”
Back at Castagnolo on October 1st. “Went for my _solita passeggiata_ up
to the hill of lavender and dwarf oak and other mountain shrubs, where I
made a study of an oak bush on the only wet day we have had, for my
‘Inkermann’ foreground. Mrs. Ross, a fearless rider, went on with the
breaking in of the Arab colt ‘Pascià’ to-day. Old Maso, one of the
_habitués_ of the villa, whooped and screamed every time the colt bucked
or reared, and he waddled away as fast as he could, groaning in terror,
only to creep back again to venture another look. And he had been an
officer in the army! I have secured some water-colour sketches of the
vintage for the ‘Institute’ and knocked off another panel or two, and
sketched Mrs. Ross in her Turkish dress, so I have not been idle.” Janet
Ross seemed to have assimilated the sunshine of Egypt and Italy into her
buoyant nature, and to see the vigour with which she conducted the
vintage at Castagnolo acted as a tonic on us all; so did the deep
contralto voice and the guitar, and the racy talk.
We left on October 14th, on a golden day, with the thermometer at 90
degrees in the shade, to return to the icy smoke-twilight of London,
where we groped, as the Diary says, in sealskins and ulsters. Castagnolo
has our thanks. How could we have had the fulness of Italian delights
which our kind hosts afforded us in some pension or hotel in Florence?
And what hospitality theirs was! We tried to sing some of the
“_Stornelli_” in the hansom that took us home from Victoria Station. One
of our favourites, “_M’affaccio alla finestra e vedo Stelle_,” had to be
modified, as we looked through the glass of the cab, into “_Ma non vedo
Stelle_,” sung in the minor, for nothing but the murk of a foggy night
was there. What but the stern necessity of beginning “Inkermann” could
have brought me back? My dear sister cannot have rejoiced, and may have
wished to tarry, but when did she ever “put a spoke in my wheel”?