they by no means scorn the cafés. After sunset the little tables that
are all over the great square are surrounded by an entire population of
men and women. How gay and amusing those Italian cafés are! full of
sound and color, with their red and blue striped awnings, their advance
guard of little tables under the shade of the orange-trees, and their
babbling, stirring, gesticulating company. The waiters, in black vests
and leather slippers, a corner of their apron tucked up in their belt,
run with the speed of kangaroos, carrying on metal plates syrups of
every shade, ices, sweets in red, yellow, or green pyramids. Between
seven and nine o'clock the whole society of Lugano defiles before you.
There are lawyers with their wives, doctors with their daughters,
bankers, professors, merchants, public officials, with whom are
sometimes misted stout, comfortable, jovial-looking canons, wrapping
themselves in the bitter smoke of a regalia, as in a cloud of incense.
LAKE COMO[21]
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
We have been to Como, looking for a house. This lake exceeds anything I
ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the arbutus islands of
Killarney. It is long and narrow, and has the appearance of a mighty
river winding among the mountains and the forests. We sailed from the
town of Como to a tract of country called the Tremezina, and saw the
various aspects presented by that part of the lake. The mountains
between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are
covered on high with chestnut forests (the eating chestnuts, on which
the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which
sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with
their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is
composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig-trees, and
olives which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the
caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing
light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I can not name,
grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white
among the dark forests.
Beyond, on the opposite shore, which faces the south, the mountains
descend less precipitously to the lake, and altho they are much higher,
and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and
the lake a range of lower hills, which have glens and rifts opening to
the other, such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here
are plantations of olive, and orange, and lemon trees, which are now so
loaded with fruit, that there is more fruit than leaves--and vineyards.
This shore of the lake is one continued village, and the Milanese
nobility have their villas here. The union of culture and the untameable
profusion and loveliness of nature is here so close, that the line where
they are divided can hardly be discovered.
But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana; so called from a
fountain which ebbs and flows every three hours, described by the
younger Pliny, which is in the courtyard. This house, which was once a
magnificent palace, and is now half in ruins, we are endeavoring to
procure. It is built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake,
together with its garden, at the foot of a semicircular precipice,
overshadowed by profound forests of chestnut. The scene from the
colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that
eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you
are clusters of cypress-trees, of an astonishing height, which seem to
pierce the sky.
Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of
immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the
lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the
mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the
Pliniana are immensely large, but ill-furnished and antique. The
terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such
immense laurel-trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, are most
delightful.
BELLAGIO ON LAKE COMO[22]
BY W. D. M'CRACKEN
The picture of the promontory of Bellagio is so beautiful as a whole
that the traveler had better stand off for awhile to admire it at a
distance and at his leisure. Indeed it is a question whether the lasting
impressions which we treasure of Bellagio are not, after all, those
derived from across the lake, from the shore-fronts of Tremezzo,
Cadenabbia, Menaggio, or Varenna.
A colossal, conquering geological lion appears to have come up from the
south in times immemorial, bound for the north, and finding further
progress stopt by the great sheet of water in front of him, seems to
have halted and to be now crouching there with his noble head between
his paws and his eyes fixt on the snow-covered Alps. The big white house
on the lion's neck is the Villa Serbelloni, now used as the annex of a
hotel, and the park of noble trees belonging to the villa forms the
lion's mane. Hotels, both large and small, line the quay at the water's
edge; then comes a break in the houses, and stately Villa Melzi is seen
to stand off at one side. Villa Trotti gleams from among its bowers
farther south; on the slope Villa Trivulzio, formerly Poldi, shows
bravely, and Villa Giulia has cut for itself a wide prospect over both
arms of the lake. At the back of this lion couchant, in the middle
ground, sheer mountain walls tower protectingly, culminating in Monte
Grigna.
The picture varies from hour to hour, from day to day, and from season
to season. Its color-scheme changes with wind and sun, its sparkle comes
and goes from sunrise to sunset; only its form remains untouched through
the night and lives to delight us another day. As the evening wears on,
lights appear one by one on the quay of Bellagio, until there is a line
of fire along the base of the dark peninsula. The hotel windows catch
the glare, the villas light their storied corridors, and presently
Bellagio, all aglow, presents the spectacle of a Venetian night mirrored
in the lake.
By this time the mountains have turned black and the sky has faded. It
grows so still on the water that the tinkle of a little Italian band
reaches across the lake to Cadenabbia, a laugh rings out into the quiet
air from one of the merry little rowboats, and even the slight clatter
made by the fishermen, in putting their boats to rights for the night
and in carrying their nets indoors, can be distinguished as one of many
indications that the day is done.
When we land at Bellagio by daylight, we find it to be very much of a
bazaar of souvenirs along the water-front, and everybody determined to
carry away a keepsake. There is so much to buy--ornamental olive wood
and tortoise-shell articles, Como blankets, lace, and what may be
described in general terms as modern antiquities. These abound from shop
to shop; even English groceries are available. Bellagio's principal
street is suddenly converted at its northern end into a delightful
arcade, after the arrangement which constitutes a characteristic charm
of the villages and smaller towns on the Italian lakes; moreover, the
vista up its side street is distinctly original. This mounts steeply
from the waterside, like the streets of Algiers, is narrow and
constructed in long steps to break the incline.
THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO[23]
BY JOSEPH ADDISON
The town and republic of St. Marino stands on the top of a very high and
craggy mountain. It is generally hid among the clouds, and lay under
snow when I saw it, though it was clear and warm weather in all the
country about it. There is not a spring or fountain, that I could hear
of, in the whole dominions; but they are always well provided with huge
cisterns and reservoirs of rain and snow water. The wine that grows on
the sides of their mountain is extraordinarily good, much better than
any I met with on the cold side of the Apennines.
This mountain, and a few neighboring hillocks that lie scattered about
the bottom of it, is the whole circuit of these dominions. They have
what they call three castles, three convents, and five churches and can
reckon about five thousand souls in their community.[24] The
inhabitants, as well as the historians who mention this little republic,
give the following account of its origin. St. Marino was its founder, a
Dalmatian by birth, and by trade a mason. He was employed above thirteen
hundred years ago in the reparation of Rimini, and after he had finished
his work, retired to this solitary mountain, as finding it very proper
for the life of a hermit, which he led in the greatest rigors and
austerities of religion. He had not been long here before he wrought a
reputed miracle, which, joined with his extraordinary sanctity, gained
him so great an esteem, that the princess of the country made him a
present of the mountain, to dispose of at his own discretion. His
reputation quickly peopled it, and gave rise to the republic which calls
itself after his name.
So that the commonwealth of Marino may boast, at least, of a nobler
original than that of Rome, the one having been at first an asylum for
robbers and murderers, and the other a resort of persons eminent for
their piety and devotion. The best of their churches is dedicated to the
saint, and holds his ashes. His statue stands over the high altar, with
the figure of a mountain in its hands, crowned with three castles, which
is likewise the arms of the commonwealth. They attribute to his
protection the long duration of their state, and look on him as the
greatest saint next the blessed virgin. I saw in their statute-book a
law against such as speak disrespectfully of him, who are to be punished
in the same manner as those convicted of blasphemy.
This petty republic has now lasted thirteen hundred years,[25] while all
the other states of Italy have several times changed their masters and
forms of government. Their whole history is comprised in two purchases,
which they made of a neighboring prince, and in a war in which they
assisted the pope against a lord of Rimini. In the year 1100 they bought
a castle in the neighborhood, as they did another in the year 1170. The
papers of the conditions are preserved in their archives, where it is
very remarkable that the name of the agent for the commonwealth, of the
seller, of the notary, and the witnesses, are the same in both the
instruments, tho drawn up at seventy years' distance from each other.
Nor can it be any mistake in the date, because the popes' and emperors'
names, with the year of their respective reigns, are both punctually set
down. About two hundred and ninety years after this they assisted Pope
Pius the Second against one of the Malatestas, who was then, lord of
Rimini; and when they had helped to conquer him, received from the pope,
as a reward for their assistance, four little castles. This they
represent as the flourishing time of the commonwealth, when their
dominions reached half-way up a neighboring hill; but at present they
are reduced to their old extent....
The chief officers of the commonwealth are the two capitaneos, who have
such a power as the old Roman consuls had, but are chosen every six
months. I talked with some that had been capitaneos six or seven times,
tho the office is never to be continued to the same persons twice
successively. The third officer is the commissary, who judges in all
civil and criminal matters. But because the many alliances, friendships,
and intermarriages, as well as the personal feuds and animosities, that
happen among so small a people might obstruct the course of justice, if
one of their own number had the distribution of it, they have always a
foreigner for this employ, whom they choose for three years, and
maintain out of the public stock. He must be a doctor of law, and a man
of known integrity. He is joined in commission with the capitaneos, and
acts something like the recorder of London under the lord mayor. The
commonwealth of Genoa was forced to make use of a foreign judge for many
years, while their republic was torn into the divisions of Guelphs and
Ghibelines. The fourth man in the state is the physician, who must
likewise be a stranger, and is maintained by a public salary. He is
obliged to keep a horse, to visit the sick, and to inspect all drugs
that are imported. He must be at least thirty-five years old, a doctor
of the faculty, and eminent for his religion and honesty, that his
rashness or ignorance may not unpeople the commonwealth. And, that they
may not suffer long under any bad choice, he is elected only for three
years.
The people are esteemed very honest and rigorous in the execution of
justice, and seem to live more happy and contented among their rocks and
snows, than others of the Italians do in the pleasantest valleys of the
world. Nothing, indeed, can be a greater instance of the natural love
that mankind has for liberty, and of their aversion to an arbitrary
government, than such a savage mountain covered with people, and the
Campania of Rome, which lies in the same country, almost destitute of
inhabitants.
PERUGIA[26]
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
We pursued our way, and came, by and by, to the foot of the high hill on
which stands Perugia, and which is so long and steep that Gaetano took a
yoke of oxen to aid his horses in the ascent. We all, except my wife,
walked a part of the way up, and I myself, with J----[27] for my
companion, kept on even to the city gate, a distance, I should think, of
two or three miles, at least. The lower part of the road was on the edge
of the hill, with a narrow valley on our left; and as the sun had now
broken out, its verdure and fertility, its foliage and cultivation,
shone forth in miraculous beauty, as green as England, as bright as only
Italy.
Perugia appeared above us, crowning a mighty hill, the most picturesque
of cities; and the higher we ascended, the more the view opened before
us, as we looked back on the course that we had traversed, and saw the
wide valley, sweeping down and spreading out, bounded afar by mountains,
and sleeping in sun and shadow. No language nor any art of the pencil
can give an idea of the scene....
We plunged from the upper city down through some of the strangest
passages that ever were called streets; some of them, indeed, being
arched all over, and, going down into the unknown darkness, looked like
caverns; and we followed one of them doubtfully, till it opened, out
upon the light. The houses on each side were divided only by a pace or
two, and communicated with one another, here and there, by arched
passages. They looked very ancient, and may have been inhabited by
Etruscan princes, judging from the massiveness of some of the foundation
stones. The present inhabitants, nevertheless, are by no means princely,
shabby men, and the careworn wives and mothers of the people, one of
whom was guiding a child in leading-strings through these antique
alleys, where hundreds of generations have trod before those little
feet. Finally we came out through a gateway, the same gateway at which
we entered last night.
The best part of Perugia, that in which the grand piazzas and the
principal public edifices stand, seems to be a nearly level plateau on
the summit of the hill; but it is of no very great extent, and the
streets rapidly run downward on either side. J---- and I followed one of
these descending streets, and were led a long way by it, till we at last
emerged from one of the gates of the city, and had another view of the
mountains and valleys, the fertile and sunny wilderness in which this
ancient civilization stands.
On the right of the gate there was a rude country path, partly overgrown
with grass, bordered by a hedge on one side, and on the other by the
gray city wall, at the base of which the tract kept onward. We followed
it, hoping that it would lead us to some other gate by which we might
reenter the city; but it soon grew so indistinct and broken, that it was
evidently on the point of melting into somebody's olive-orchard or
wheat-fields or vineyards, all of which lay on the other side of the
hedge; and a kindly old woman of whom I inquired told me (if I rightly
understood her Italian) that I should find no further passage in that
direction. So we turned back, much broiled in the hot sun, and only now
and then relieved by the shadow of an angle or a tower.
SIENA[28]
BY MR. AND MRS. EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD
That admirers of minute designs and florid detail could appreciate
grandeur as well, no one can doubt who has seen the plans of the Sienese
cathedral. Its history is one of a grand result, and of far grander, tho
thwarted endeavor, and it is hard to realize to-day, that the church as
it stands is but a fragment, the transept only, of what Siena willed.
From the state of the existing works no one can doubt that the brave
little republic would have finished it had she not met an enemy before
whom the sword of Monteaperto was useless. The plague of 1348 stalked
across Tuscany, and the chill of thirty thousand Sienese graves numbed
the hand of master and workman, sweeping away the architect who planned,
the masons who built, the magistrates who ordered, it left but the
yellowed parchment in the archives which conferred upon Maestro Lorenzo
Maitani the superintendence of the works.
The façade of the present church is amazing in its richness, undoubtedly
possesses some grand and much lovely detail, and is as undoubtedly
suggestive, with its white marble ornaments upon a pink marble ground,
of a huge, sugared cake. It is impossible to look at this restored
whiteness with the sun upon it; the dazzled eyes close involuntarily and
one sees in retrospect the great, gray church front at Rheims, or the
solemn façade of Notre Dame de Paris. It is like remembering an organ
burst of Handel after hearing the florid roulades of the mass within the
cathedral.
The interior is rich in color and fine in effect, but the northerner is
painfully imprest by the black and white horizontal stripes which,
running from vaulting to pavement, seem to blur and confuse the vision,
and the closely set bars of the piers are positively irritating. In the
hexagonal lantern, however, they are less offensive than elsewhere,
because the fan-like radiation of the bars above the great gilded
statues breaks up the horizontal effect. The decoration of the
stone-work is not happy; the use of cold red and cold blue with gilt
bosses in relief does much to vulgarize, and there is constant sally in
small masses which belittles the general effect. It is evident that the
Sienese tendency to floridity is answerable for much of this, and that
having added some piece of big and bad decoration, the cornice of papal
head, for instance, they felt forced to do away with it or continue it
throughout.
But this fault and many others are forgotten when we examine the detail
with which later men have filled the church. Other Italian cathedrals
possess art-objects of a higher order; perhaps no other one is so rich
in these treasures. The great masters are disappointing here. Raphael,
as the co-laborer of Pinturicchio, is dainty, rather than great, and
Michelangelo passes unnoticed in the huge and coldly elaborate
altar-front of the Piccolomini. But Marrina, with his doors of the
library; Barili, with his marvelous casing of the choir-stalls;
Beccafumi, with his bronze and neillo--these are the artists whom one
wonders at; these wood-carvers and bronze-founders, creators of the
microcosmic detail of the Renaissance which had at last burst
triumphantly into Siena.
This treasure is cumulative, as we walk eastward from the main door,
where the pillars are a maze of scroll-work in deepest cutting, and by
the time we reach the choir the head fairly swims with the play of light
and color. We wander from point to point, we finger and caress the
lustrous stalls of Barili, and turn with a kind of confusion of vision
from panel to panel; above our heads the tabernacle of Vecchietta, the
lamp bearing angels of Beccafumi make spots of bituminous color, with
glittering high-lights, strangely emphasizing their modeling; from these
youths, who might be pages to some Roman prefect, the eye travels upward
still further, along the golden convolutions of the heavily stuccoed
pilasters to the huge, gilded cherubs' heads that frame the eastern
rose....
It is incredible that these frescoes are four hundred years old. Surely
Pinturicchio came down from his scaffolding but yesterday. This is how
the hardly dried plaster must have looked to pope and cardinal and
princes when the boards were removed, and when the very figures on these
walls--smart youths in tights and slashes, bright-robed scholars,
ecclesiastics caped in ermine, ladies with long braids bound in nets of
silk--crowded to see themselves embalmed in tempera for curious
after-centuries to gaze upon.
THE ASSISSI OF ST. FRANCIS[29]
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
On the summit of an abrupt height, over a double row of arcades, appears
the monastery; at its base a torrent plows the soil, winding off in the
distance between banks of boulders; beyond is the old town prolonging
itself on the ridge of the mountain. We ascend slowly under the burning
sun, and suddenly, at the end of a court surrounded by slender columns,
enter within the obscurity of the cathedral. It is unequalled; before
having seen it one has no idea of the art and the genius of the Middle
Ages. Append to it Dante and the "Fioretti" of St. Francis, and it
becomes the masterpiece of mystic Christianity.
There are three churches, one above the other, all of them arranged
around the tomb of St. Francis. Over this venerated body, which the
people regard as ever living and absorbed in prayer at the bottom of an
inaccessible cave, the edifice has arisen and gloriously flowered like
an architectural shrine. The lowest is a crypt, dark as a sepulcher,
into which the visitors descend with torches; pilgrims keep close to the
dripping walls and grope along in order to reach the grating.
Here is the tomb, in a pale, dim light, similar to that of limbo. A few
brass lamps, almost without lights, burn here eternally like stars lost
in mournful obscurity. The ascending smoke clings to the arches, and the
heavy odor of the tapers mingles with that of the cave. The guide trims
his torch; and the sudden flash in this horrible darkness, above the
bones of a corpse, is like one of Dante's visions. Here is the mystic
grave of a saint who, in the midst of corruption and worms, beholds his
slimy dungeon of earth filled with the supernatural radiance of the
Savior.
But that which can not be represented by words is the middle church, a
long, low spiracle supported by small, round arches curving in the
half-shadow, and whose voluntary depression makes one instinctively
bend his knees. A coating of somber blue and of reddish bands starred
with gold, a marvelous embroidery of ornaments, wreaths, delicate
scroll-work, leaves, and painted figures, covers the arches and ceilings
with its harmonious multitude; the eye is overwhelmed by it; a
population of forms and tints lives on its vaults; I would not exchange
this cavern for all the churches of Rome!
On the summit, the upper church shoots up as brilliant, as aerial, as
triumphant, as this is low and grave. Really, if one were to give way to
conjecture, he might suppose that in these three sanctuaries the
architect meant to represent the three worlds; below, the gloom of death
and the horrors of the infernal tomb; in the middle, the impassioned
anxiety of the beseeching Christian who strives and hopes in this world
of trial; aloft, the bliss and dazzling glory of Paradise.
RAVENNA[30]
BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN
With exceptions, all the monuments of Ravenna belong to the days of
transition from Roman to Medieval times, and the greater part of them
come within the fifth and sixth centuries. It was then that Ravenna
became, for a season, the head of Italy and of the Western world. The
sea had made Ravenna a great haven: the falling back of the sea made her
the ruling city of the earth. Augustus had called into being the port of
Caesarea as the Peiraieus of the Old Thessalian or Umbrian Ravenna.
Haven and city grew and became one; but the faithless element again fell
back; the haven of Augustus became dry land covered by orchards, and
Classis arose as the third station, leaving Ravenna itself an inland
city.