The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur above
Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of Luni. This
is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and still in the possession
of the Marquis of that name.
The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue of
plane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves. It then takes to the
open fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on either
hand, where grapes are hanging to the vines. The country-folk allow
their vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are a
great ornament to the grey branches. The berries on the trees are still
quite green, and it is a good olive season. Leaving the main road, we
pass a villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thickets of sweet bay
and ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan. Here may you see just
such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellini painted, inch by
inch, in his Peter Martyr picture. The place is neglected now; the
semicircular seats of white Carrara marble are stained with green mosses,
the altars chipped, the fountains choked with bay leaves; and the rose
trees, escaped from what were once trim garden alleys, have gone wandering
a-riot into country hedges. There is no demarcation between the great
man's villa and the neighbouring farms. From this point the path rises,
and the barren hill-side is a-bloom with late-flowering myrtles. Why did
the Greeks consecrate these myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra
complained that her father's tomb had not received the honour of the
myrtle branch; and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in
memory of Harmodius. Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember
lines of Greek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of
myrtle wands:
+kai prospeson eklaus' eremias tychon
spondas te lysas askon on phero zenois
espeisa tymbo d' amphetheka mursinas.+
As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the
prospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the widening bay
of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still capable of
partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state in which a ruin
looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce
this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such
antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild
cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never
missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals,
where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the
gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina--a
barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision of heraldic
irony.
Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view
to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the guest
of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the "Inferno."
There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a
rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail canker-roses and
yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat with ladies--for this
was the Marchesa's pleasance; or may have watched through a short
summer's night, until he saw that _tremolar della marina_, portending
dawn, which afterwards he painted in the "Purgatory."
From Fosdinovo one can trace the Magra work its way out seaward, not
into the plain where once the _candentia moenia Lunae_ flashed sunrise
from their battlements, but close beside the little hills which back the
the southern arm of the Spezzian gulf. At the extreme end of that
promontory, called Del Corvo, stood the Benedictine convent of S. Croce;
and it was here in 1309, if we may trust to tradition, that Dante, before
his projected journey into France, appeared and left the first part of
his poem with the Prior. Fra Ilario, such was the good father's name,
received commission to transmit the "Inferno" to Uguccione della
Faggiuola; and he subsequently recorded the fact of Dante's visit in a
letter which, though its genuineness has been called in question, is far
too interesting to be left without allusion. The writer says that on
occasion of a journey into lands beyond the Riviera, Dante visited this
convent, appearing silent and unknown among the monks. To the Prior's
question what he wanted, he gazed upon the brotherhood, and only answered,
"Peace!" Afterwards, in private conversation, he communicated his name and
spoke about his poem. A portion of the "Divine Comedy" composed in the
Italian tongue aroused Ilario's wonder, and led him to inquire why his
guest had not followed the usual course of learned poets by committing his
thoughts to Latin. Dante replied that he had first intended to write in
that language, and that he had gone so far as to begin the poem in
Virgilian hexameters. Reflection upon the altered conditions of society in
that age led him, however, to reconsider the matter; and he was resolved
to tune another lyre, "suited to the sense of modern men." "For," said he,
"it is idle to set solid food before the lips of sucklings."
If we can trust Fra Ilario's letter as a genuine record, which is
unhappily a matter of some doubt, we have in this narration not only a
picturesque, almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of the poet's
apparition to those quiet monks in their seagirt house of peace, but
also an interesting record of the destiny which presided over the first
great work of literary art in a distinctly modern language.