In the landscape of Raphael's votive picture, known as the Madonna di
Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain at
the edge of some blue hills. Allowing for that license as to details
which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of subordinate
importance, Raphael's sketch is still true to Foligno. The place has not
materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Indeed
relatively to the state of Italy at large, it is still the same as in
the days of ancient Rome. Foligno forms a station of commanding interest
between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great Flaminian Way. At Foligno
the passes of the Apennines debouch into the Umbrian plain, which slopes
gradually toward the valley of the Tiber, and from it the valley of the
Nera is reached by an easy ascent beneath the walls of Spoleto. An army
advancing from the north by the Metaurus and the Furlo Pass must find
itself at Foligno; and the level champaign round the city is well
adapted to the maintenance and exercises of a garrison. In the days of
the Republic and the Empire, the value of this position was well
understood; but Foligno's importance, as the key to the Flaminian Way,
was eclipsed by two flourishing cities in its immediate vicinity,
Hispellum and Mevania, the modern Spello and Bevagna. We might hazard a
conjecture that the Lombards, when they ruled the Duchy of Spoleto,
following their usual policy of opposing new military centres to the
ancient Roman municipia, encouraged Fulginium at the expense of her two
neighbours. But of this there is no certainty to build upon. All that
can be affirmed with accuracy is that in the Middle Ages, while Spello
and Bevagna declined into the inferiority of dependent burghs, Foligno
grew in power and became the chief commune of this part of Umbria. It
was famous during the last centuries of struggle between the Italian
burghers and their native despots, for peculiar ferocity in civil
strife. Some of the bloodiest pages in mediaeval Italian history are
those which relate the vicissitudes of the Trinci family, the exhaustion
of Foligno by internal discord, and its final submission to the Papal
power. Since railways have been carried from Rome through Narni and
Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno has gained considerably in
commercial and military status. It is the point of intersection for
three lines; the Italian government has made it a great cavalry depot,
and there are signs of reviving traffic in its decayed streets. Whether
the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or
whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal
institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediaeval
period, it is difficult to say. Yet the impression left by Foligno upon
the mind is different from that of Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which
are distinguished for a certain grace and gentleness in their
inhabitants.
My window in the city wall looks southward across the plain to Spoleto,
with Montefalco perched aloft upon the right, and Trevi on its
mountain-bracket to the left. From the topmost peaks of the Sabine
Apennines, gradual tender sloping lines descend to find their quiet in
the valley of Clitumnus. The space between me and that distance is
infinitely rich with every sort of greenery, dotted here and there with
towers and relics of baronial houses. The little town is in commotion;
for the working-men of Foligno and its neighbourhood have resolved to
spend their earnings on a splendid festa--horse-races, and two nights of
fireworks. The acacias and pawlonias on the ramparts are in full bloom
of creamy white and lilac. In the glare of Bengal lights these trees,
with all their pendulous blossoms, surpassed the most fantastic of
artificial decorations. The rockets sent aloft into the sky amid that
solemn Umbrian landscape were nowise out of harmony with nature. I never
sympathised with critics who resent the intrusion of fireworks upon
scenes of natural beauty. The Giessbach, lighted up at so much per head
on stated evenings, with a band playing and a crowd of cockneys staring,
presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle. But where, as here at
Foligno, a whole city has made itself a festival, where there are
multitudes of citizens and soldiers and country-people slowly moving and
gravely admiring, with the decency and order characteristic of an
Italian crowd, I have nothing but a sense of satisfaction.
It is sometimes the traveller's good fortune in some remote place to
meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the
_genius loci_ as he has conceived it. Though his own subjectivity will
assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring to
his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and connecting
this personality in some purely imaginative manner with thoughts derived
from study, or impressions made by nature; yet the stranger will
henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the central figure
in a composition which derives from him its vividness. Unconsciously and
innocently he has lent himself to the creation of a picture, and round
him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments
of which he had himself no knowledge. On one of these nights I had been
threading the aisles of acacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the
Bengal lights kept changing. My mind instinctively went back to scenes
of treachery and bloodshed in the olden time, when Corrado Trinci
paraded the mangled remnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on
muleback, through Foligno, for a warning to the citizens. As the
procession moved along the ramparts, I found myself in contact with a
young man, who readily fell into conversation. He was very tall, with
enormous breadth of shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo's
favourite models. His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair.
Low forehead, and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely
bright fierce eyes. The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a
statue of Hadrian's age. The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate
above a firm round chin. He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers,
and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a
peasant's slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed
panther. He told me that he was just about to join a cavalry regiment;
and I could well imagine, when military dignity was added to that gait,
how grandly he would go. This young man, of whom I heard nothing more
after our half-hour's conversation among the crackling fireworks and
roaring cannon, left upon my mind an indescribable impression of
dangerousness--of "something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst
forth." Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure
who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the
fifteenth century. Gattamelata, who began life as a baker's boy at Narni
and ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in
Padua, was of this breed. Like this were the Trinci and their bands of
murderers. Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at
Venice. Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of
Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being "perfettamente
tristo." Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but
rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason;
how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her
into servitude! Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and
with a nobler national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies. Of
such stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries. When will the
Italians learn to use these men as Fabius or as Caesar, not as the
Vitelli and the Trinci used them? In such meditations, deeply stirred by
the meeting of my own reflections with one who seemed to represent for
me in life and blood the spirit of the place which had provoked them, I
said farewell to Cavallucci, and returned to my bed-room on the
city-wall. The last rockets had whizzed and the last cannons had
thundered ere I fell asleep.