In former days the traveller had choice of two old hostelries in the
chief street of Siena. Here, if he was fortunate, he might secure a
prophet's chamber, with a view across tiled house-roofs to the distant
Tuscan champaign--glimpses of russet field and olive-garden framed by
jutting city walls, which in some measure compensated for much
discomfort. He now betakes himself to the more modern Albergo di Siena,
overlooking the public promenade La Lizza. Horse-chestnuts and acacias
make a pleasant foreground to a prospect of considerable extent. The
front of the house is turned toward Belcaro and the mountains between
Grosseto and Volterra. Sideways its windows command the brown bulk of
San Domenico, and the Duomo, set like a marble coronet upon the forehead
of the town. When we arrived there one October afternoon the sun was
setting amid flying clouds and watery yellow spaces of pure sky, with a
wind blowing soft and humid from the sea. Long after he had sunk below
the hills, a fading chord of golden and rose-coloured tints burned on
the city. The cathedral bell-tower was glistening with recent rain, and
we could see right through its lancet windows to the clear blue heavens
beyond. Then, as the day descended into evening, the autumn trees
assumed that wonderful effect of luminousness self-evolved, and the red
brick walls that crimson after-glow, which Tuscan twilight takes from
singular transparency of atmosphere.
It is hardly possible to define the specific character of each Italian
city, assigning its proper share to natural circumstances, to the temper
of the population, and to the monuments of art in which these elements
of nature and of human qualities are blended. The fusion is too delicate
and subtle for complete analysis; and the total effect in each
particular case may best be compared to that impressed on us by a strong
personality, making itself felt in the minutest details. Climate,
situation, ethnological conditions, the political vicissitudes of past
ages, the bias of the people to certain industries and occupations, the
emergence of distinguished men at critical epochs, have all contributed
their quota to the composition of an individuality which abides long
after the locality has lost its ancient vigour.
Since the year 1557, when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country of
Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her
famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this
town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which
was given to her in her days of glory, the title of "Fair Soft Siena,"
still describes the city. She claims it by right of the gentle manners,
joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the grace of their pure Tuscan
speech, and by the unique delicacy of her architecture. Those palaces of
brick, with finely-moulded lancet windows, and the lovely use of
sculptured marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for the
nobles who reared them five centuries ago, of whose refined and costly
living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And
though the necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the
dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an
independent state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large
signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese
are not unworthy of their courteous ancestry.
Superficially, much of the present charm of Siena consists in the soft
opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile
country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the
slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in
olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the city
into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not peculiar to
Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in Montepulciano, in nearly all
the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often
tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend
here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness which
stirs melancholy.
The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena lies
westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is a region of
deep lanes and golden-green oak-woods, with cypresses and stone-pines,
and little streams in all directions flowing over the brown sandstone.
The country is like some parts of rural England--Devonshire or Sussex.
Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but
the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleen-wort, primroses, and
broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut.
This is the landscape which the two sixteenth century novelists of
Siena, Fortini and Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of
literature absorbing in itself the specific character of a country, and
conveying it to the reader less by description than by sustained quality
of style, I know none to surpass Fortini's sketches. The prospect from
Belcaro is one of the finest to be seen in Tuscany. The villa stands at
a considerable elevation, and commands an immense extent of hill and
dale. Nowhere, except Maremma-wards, a level plain. The Tuscan
mountains, from Monte Amiata westward to Volterra, round Valdelsa, down
to Montepulciano and Radicofani, with their innumerable windings and
intricacies of descending valleys, are dappled with light and shade from
flying storm-clouds, sunshine here and there cloud-shadows. Girdling the
villa stands a grove of ilex-trees, cut so as to embrace its high-built
walls with dark continuous green. In the courtyard are lemon-trees and
pomegranates laden with fruit. From a terrace on the roof the whole wide
view is seen; and here upon a parapet, from which we leaned one autumn
afternoon, my friend discovered this _graffito_: "_E vidi e piansi il
fato amaro!_"--"I gazed, and gazing, wept the bitterness of fate."