The charm of this view is composed of so many different elements, so
subtly blent, appealing to so many separate sensibilities; the sense of
grandeur, the sense of space, the sense of natural beauty, and the sense
of human pathos; that deep internal faculty we call historic sense; that
it cannot be defined. First comes the immense surrounding space--a space
measured in each arc of the circumference by sections of at least fifty
miles, limited by points of exquisitely picturesque beauty, including
distant cloud-like mountain ranges and crystals of sky-blue Apennines,
circumscribing landscapes of refined loveliness in detail, always
varied, always marked by objects of peculiar interest where the eye or
memory may linger. Next in importance to this immensity of space, so
powerfully affecting the imagination by its mere extent, and by the
breadth of atmosphere attuning all varieties of form and colour to one
harmony beneath illimitable heaven, may be reckoned the episodes of
rivers, lakes, hills, cities, with old historic names. For there spreads
the lordly length of Thrasymene, islanded and citadelled, in hazy
morning mist, still dreaming of the shock of Roman hosts with
Carthaginian legions. There is the lake of Chiusi, set like a jewel
underneath the copse-clad hills which hide the dust of a dead Tuscan
nation. The streams of Arno start far far away, where Arezzo lies
enfolded in bare uplands. And there at our feet rolls Tiber's largest
affluent, the Chiana. And there is the canal which joins their fountains
in the marsh that Lionardo would have drained. Monte Cetona is yonder
height which rears its bristling ridge defiantly from neighbouring
Chiusi. And there springs Radicofani, the eagle's eyrie of a brigand
brood. Next, Monte Amiata stretches the long lines of her antique
volcano; the swelling mountain flanks, descending gently from her
cloud-capped top, are russet with autumnal oak and chestnut woods. On
them our eyes rest lovingly; imagination wanders for a moment through
those mossy glades, where cyclamens are growing now, and primroses in
spring will peep amid anemones from rustling foliage strewn by winter's
winds. The heights of Casentino, the Perugian highlands, Volterra, far
withdrawn amid a wilderness of rolling hills, and solemn snow-touched
ranges of the Spolentino, Sibyl-haunted fastnesses of Norcia, form the
most distant horizon-lines of this unending panorama. And then there are
the cities, placed each upon a point of vantage: Siena; olive-mantled
Chiusi; Cortona, white upon her spreading throne; poetic Montalcino,
lifted aloft against the vaporous sky; San Quirico, nestling in pastoral
tranquillity; Pienza, where AEneas Sylvius built palaces and called his
birthplace after his own Papal name. Still closer to the town itself of
Montepulciano, stretching along the irregular ridge which gave it
building ground, and trending out on spurs above deep orchards, come the
lovely details of oak-copses, blending with grey tilth and fields rich
with olive and vine. The gaze, exhausted with immensity, pierces those
deeply cloven valleys, sheltered from wind and open to the
sun--undulating folds of brown earth, where Bacchus, when he visited
Tuscany, found the grape-juice that pleased him best, and crowned the
wine of Montepulciano king. Here from our eyrie we can trace white oxen
on the furrows, guided by brown-limbed, white-shirted contadini.
The morning glory of this view from Montepulciano, though irrecoverable
by words, abides in the memory, and draws one back by its unique
attractiveness. On a subsequent visit to the town in spring time, my
wife and I took a twilight walk, just after our arrival, through its
gloomy fortress streets, up to the piazza, where the impendent houses
lowered like bastions, and all the masses of their mighty architecture
stood revealed in shadow and dim lamplight. Far and wide, the country
round us gleamed with bonfires; for it was the eve of the Ascension,
when every contadino lights a beacon of chestnut logs and straw and
piled-up leaves. Each castello on the plain, each village on the hills,
each lonely farmhouse at the skirt of forest or the edge of lake,
smouldered like a red Cyclopean eye beneath the vault of stars. The
flames waxed and waned, leapt into tongues, or disappeared. As they
passed from gloom to brilliancy and died away again, they seemed almost
to move. The twilight scene was like that of a vast city, filling the
plain and climbing the heights in terraces. Is this custom, I thought, a
relic of old Pales-worship?