III.

At noon we started, four of us, in an open waggonette with a pair of

horses, for Monte Oliveto, the luggage heaped mountain-high and tied in

a top-heavy mass above us. After leaving the gateway, with its massive

fortifications and frescoed arches, the road passes into a dull earthy

country, very much like some parts--and not the best parts--of England.

The beauty of the Sienese contado is clearly on the sandstone, not upon

the clay. Hedges, haystacks, isolated farms--all were English in their

details. Only the vines, and mulberries, and wattled waggons drawn by

oxen, most Roman in aspect, reminded us we were in Tuscany. In such

_carpenta_ may the vestal virgins have ascended the Capitol. It is the

primitive war-chariot also, capable of holding four with ease; and

Romulus may have mounted with the images of Roman gods in even such a

vehicle to Latiarian Jove upon the Alban hill. Nothing changes in Italy.

The wooden ploughs are those which Virgil knew. The sight of one of

them would save an intelligent lad much trouble in mastering a certain

passage of the Georgics.

Siena is visible behind us nearly the whole way to Buonconvento, a

little town where the Emperor Henry VII. died, as it was supposed, of

poison, in 1313. It is still circled with the wall and gates built by

the Sienese in 1366, and is a fair specimen of an intact mediaeval

stronghold. Here we leave the main road, and break into a country-track

across a bed of sandstone, with the delicate volcanic lines of Monte

Amiata in front, and the aerial pile of Montalcino to our right. The

pyracanthus bushes in the hedge yield their clusters of bright yellow

berries, mingled with more glowing hues of red from haws and glossy

hips. On the pale grey earthen slopes men and women are plying the long

Sabellian hoes of their forefathers, and ploughmen are driving furrows

down steep hills. The labour of the husbandmen in Tuscany is very

graceful, partly, I think, because it is so primitive, but also because

the people have an eminently noble carriage, and are fashioned on the

lines of antique statues. I noticed two young contadini in one field,

whom Frederick Walker might have painted with the dignity of Pheidian

form. They were guiding their ploughs along a hedge of olive-trees,

slanting upwards, the white-horned oxen moving slowly through the marl,

and the lads bending to press the plough-shares home. It was a delicate

piece of colour--the grey mist of olive branches, the warm smoking

earth, the creamy flanks of the oxen, the brown limbs and dark eyes of

the men, who paused awhile to gaze at us, with shadows cast upon the

furrows from their tall straight figures. Then they turned to their

work again, and rhythmic movement was added to the picture. I wonder

when an Italian artist will condescend to pluck these flowers of beauty,

so abundantly offered by the simplest things in his own native land.

Each city has an Accademia delle Belle Arti, and there is no lack of

students. But the painters, having learned their trade, make copies ten

times distant from the truth of famous masterpieces for the American

market. Few seem to look beyond their picture galleries. Thus the

democratic art, the art of Millet, the art of life and nature and the

people, waits.

As we mount, the soil grows of a richer brown; and there are woods of

oak where herds of swine are feeding on the acorns. Monte Oliveto comes

in sight--a mass of red brick, backed up with cypresses, among

dishevelled earthy precipices, _balze_ as they are called--upon the hill

below the village of Chiusure. This Chiusure was once a promising town;

but the life was crushed out of it in the throes of mediaeval civil wars,

and since the thirteenth century it has been dwindling to a hamlet. The

struggle for existence, from which the larger communes of this district,

Siena and Montepulciano, emerged at the expense of their neighbours,

must have been tragical. The _balze_ now grow sterner, drier, more

dreadful. We see how deluges outpoured from thunderstorms bring down

their viscous streams of loam, destroying in an hour the terraces it

took a year to build, and spreading wasteful mud upon the scanty

cornfields. The people call this soil _creta_; but it seems to be less

like a chalk than a marl, or _marna_. It is always washing away into

ravines and gullies, exposing the roots of trees, and rendering the

tillage of the land a thankless labour. One marvels how any vegetation

has the faith to settle on its dreary waste, or how men have the

patience, generation after generation, to renew the industry, still

beginning, never ending, which reclaims such wildernesses. Comparing

Monte Oliveto with similar districts of cretaceous soil--with the

country, for example, between Pienza and San Quirico--we perceive how

much is owed to the monks whom Bernardo Tolomei planted here. So far as

it is clothed at all with crop and wood, this is their service.

At last we climb the crowning hill, emerge from a copse of oak, glide

along a terraced pathway through the broom, and find ourselves in front

of the convent gateway. A substantial tower of red brick, machicolated

at the top and pierced with small square windows, guards this portal,

reminding us that at some time or other the monks found it needful to

arm their solitude against a force descending from Chiusure. There is an

avenue of slender cypresses; and over the gate, protected by a jutting

roof, shines a fresco of Madonna and Child. Passing rapidly downwards,

we are in the courtyard of the monastery, among its stables, barns, and

out-houses, with the forlorn bulk of the huge red building spreading

wide, and towering up above us. As good luck ruled our arrival, we came

face to face with the Abbate de Negro, who administers the domain of

Monte Oliveto for the Government of Italy, and exercises a kindly

hospitality to chance-comers. He was standing near the church, which,

with its tall square campanile, breaks the long stern outline of the

convent. The whole edifice, it may be said, is composed of a red brick

inclining to purple in tone, which contrasts not unpleasantly with the

lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives.

Advantage has been taken of a steep crest; and the monastery, enlarged

from time to time through the last five centuries, has here and there

been reared upon gigantic buttresses, which jut upon the _balze_ at a

sometimes giddy height.

The Abbate received us with true courtesy, and gave us spacious rooms,

three cells apiece, facing Siena and the western mountains. There is

accommodation, he told us, for three hundred monks; but only three are

left in it. As this order was confined to members of the nobility, each

of the religious had his own apartment--not a cubicle such as the

uninstructed dream of when they read of monks, but separate chambers for

sleep and study and recreation.

In the middle of the vast sad landscape, the place is still, with a

silence that can be almost heard. The deserted state of those

innumerable cells, those echoing corridors and shadowy cloisters,

exercises overpowering tyranny over the imagination. Siena is so far

away, and Montalcino is so faintly outlined on its airy parapet, that

these cities only deepen our sense of desolation. It is a relief to mark

at no great distance on the hill-side a contadino guiding his oxen, and

from a lonely farm yon column of ascending smoke. At least the world

goes on, and life is somewhere resonant with song. But here there rests

a pall of silence among the oak-groves and the cypresses and _balze_. As

I leaned and mused, while Christian (my good friend and fellow-traveller

from the Grisons) made our beds, a melancholy sunset flamed up from a

rampart of cloud, built like a city of the air above the mountains of

Volterra--fire issuing from its battlements, and smiting the fretted

roof of heaven above. It was a conflagration of celestial rose upon the

saddest purples and cavernous recesses of intensest azure.

We had an excellent supper in the visitor's refectory--soup, good bread

and country wine, ham, a roast chicken with potatoes, a nice white

cheese made of sheep's milk, and grapes for dessert. The kind Abbate sat

by, and watched his four guests eat, tapping his tortoise-shell

snuff-box, and telling us many interesting things about the past and

present state of the convent. Our company was completed with Lupo, the

pet cat, and Pirro, a woolly Corsican dog, very good friends, and both

enormously voracious. Lupo in particular engraved himself upon the

memory of Christian, into whose large legs he thrust his claws, when the

cheese-parings and scraps were not supplied him with sufficient

promptitude. I never saw a hungrier and bolder cat. It made one fancy

that even the mice had been exiled from this solitude. And truly the

rule of the monastic order, no less than the habit of Italian gentlemen,

is frugal in the matter of the table, beyond the conception of northern

folk.

Monte Oliveto, the Superior told us, owned thirty-two _poderi_, or large

farms, of which five have recently been sold. They are worked on the

_mezzeria_ system; whereby peasants and proprietors divide the produce

of the soil; and which he thinks inferior for developing its resources

to that of _affito_, or lease-holding.

The contadini live in scattered houses; and he says the estate would be

greatly improved by doubling the number of these dwellings, and letting

the sub-divided farms to more energetic people. The village of Chiusure

is inhabited by labourers. The contadini are poor: a dower, for

instance, of fifty _lire_ is thought something: whereas near Genoa, upon

the leasehold system, a farmer may sometimes provide a dower of twenty

thousand _lire_. The country produces grain of different sorts,

excellent oil, and timber. It also yields a tolerable red wine. The

Government makes from eight to nine per cent upon the value of the land,

employing him and his two religious brethren as agents.

In such conversations the evening passed. We rested well in large hard

beds with dry rough sheets. But there was a fretful wind abroad, which

went wailing round the convent walls and rattling the doors in its

deserted corridors. One of our party had been placed by himself at the

end of a long suite of apartments, with balconies commanding the wide

sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. He confessed in the morning to

having passed a restless night, tormented by the ghostly noises of the

wind, a wanderer, "like the world's rejected guest," through those

untenanted chambers. The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight

underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as

eery as that of willows by some haunted mere.