I.

At Rimini, one spring, the impulse came upon my wife and me to make our

way across San Marino to Urbino. In the Piazza, called apocryphally

after Julius Caesar, I found a proper _vetturino_, with a good carriage

and two indefatigable horses. He was a splendid fellow, and bore a great

historic name, as I discovered when our bargain was completed. "What are

you called?" I asked him. "_Filippo Visconti, per servirla!_" was the

prompt reply. Brimming over with the darkest memories of the Italian

Renaissance, I hesitated when I heard this answer. The associations

seemed too ominous. And yet the man himself was so attractive--tall,

stalwart, and well-looking--no feature of his face or limb of his

athletic form recalling the gross tyrant who concealed worse than

Caligula's ugliness from sight in secret chambers--that I shook this

preconception from my mind. As it turned out, Filippo Visconti had

nothing in common with his infamous namesake but the name. On a long and

trying journey, he showed neither sullen nor yet ferocious tempers; nor,

at the end of it, did he attempt by any masterstroke of craft to wheedle

from me more than his fair pay; but took the meerschaum pipe I gave him

for a keepsake, with the frank good-will of an accomplished gentleman.

The only exhibition of his hot Italian blood which I remember did his

humanity credit. While we were ascending a steep hillside, he jumped

from his box to thrash a ruffian by the roadside for brutal treatment to

a little boy. He broke his whip, it is true, in this encounter; risked a

dangerous quarrel; and left his carriage, with myself and wife inside

it, to the mercy of his horses in a somewhat perilous position. But when

he came back, hot and glowing, from this deed of justice, I could only

applaud his zeal.

An Italian of this type, handsome as an antique statue, with the

refinement of a modern gentleman and that intelligence which is innate

in a race of immemorial culture, is a fascinating being. He may be

absolutely ignorant in all book-learning. He may be as ignorant as a

Bersagliere from Montalcino with whom I once conversed at Rimini, who

gravely said that he could walk in three months to North America, and

thought of doing it when his term of service was accomplished. But he

will display, as this young soldier did, a grace and ease of address

which are rare in London drawing-rooms; and by his shrewd remarks upon

the cities he has visited, will show that he possesses a fine natural

taste for things of beauty. The speech of such men, drawn from the

common stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial sayings,

the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion

fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the

motive of a poem by phrases pregnant with imagery.

For the first stage of the journey out of Rimini, Filippo's two horses

sufficed. The road led almost straight across the level between quickset

hedges in white bloom. But when we reached the long steep hill which

ascends to San Marino, the inevitable oxen were called out, and we

toiled upwards leisurely through cornfields bright with red anemones and

sweet narcissus. At this point pomegranate hedges replaced the

May-thorns of the plain. In course of time our _bovi_ brought us to the

Borgo, or lower town, whence there is a further ascent of seven hundred

feet to the topmost hawk's-nest or acropolis of the republic. These we

climbed on foot, watching the view expand around us and beneath. Crags

of limestone here break down abruptly to the rolling hills, which go to

lose themselves in field and shore. Misty reaches of the Adriatic close

the world to eastward. Cesena, Rimini, Verucchio, and countless hill-set

villages, each isolated on its tract of verdure conquered from the stern

grey soil, define the points where Montefeltri wrestled with Malatestas

in long bygone years. Around are marly mountain-flanks in wrinkles and

gnarled convolutions like some giant's brain, furrowed by rivers

crawling through dry wasteful beds of shingle. Interminable ranges of

gaunt Apennines stretch, tier by tier, beyond; and over all this

landscape, a grey-green mist of rising crops and new-fledged oak-trees

lies like a veil upon the nakedness of Nature's ruins.

Nothing in Europe conveys a more striking sense of geological antiquity

than such a prospect. The denudation and abrasion of innumerable ages,

wrought by slow persistent action of weather and water on an upheaved

mountain mass, are here made visible. Every wave in that vast sea of

hills, every furrow in their worn flanks, tells its tale of a continuous

corrosion still in progress. The dominant impression is one of

melancholy. We forget how Romans, countermarching Carthaginians, trod

the land beneath us. The marvel of San Marino, retaining independence

through the drums and tramplings of the last seven centuries, is

swallowed in a deeper sense of wonder. We turn instinctively in thought

to Leopardi's musings on man's destiny at war with unknown nature-forces

and malignant rulers of the universe.

Omai disprezza

Te, la natura, il brutto

Poter che, ascoso, a comun danno impera,

E l'infinita vanita dell tutto.

And then, straining our eyes southward, we sweep the dim blue distance

for Recanati, and remember that the poet of modern despair and

discouragement was reared in even such a scene as this.

The town of San Marino is grey, narrow-streeted, simple; with a great,

new, decent, Greek-porticoed cathedral, dedicated to the eponymous

saint. A certain austerity defines it from more picturesque hill-cities

with a less uniform history. There is a marble statue of S. Marino in

the choir of his church; and in his cell is shown the stone bed and

pillow on which he took austere repose. One narrow window near the

saint's abode commands a proud but melancholy landscape of distant hills

and seaboard. To this, the great absorbing charm of San Marino, our eyes

instinctively, recurrently, take flight. It is a landscape which by

variety and beauty thralls attention, but which by its interminable

sameness might grow almost overpowering. There is no relief. The

gladness shed upon far humbler Northern lands in May is ever absent

here. The German word _Gemuethlichkeit_, the English phrase "a home of

ancient peace," are here alike by art and nature untranslated into

visibilities. And yet (as we who gaze upon it thus are fain to think) if

peradventure the intolerable _ennui_ of this panorama should drive a

citizen of San Marino into outlands, the same view would haunt him

whithersoever he went--the swallows of his native eyrie would shrill

through his sleep--he would yearn to breathe its fine keen air in

winter, and to watch its iris-hedges deck themselves with blue in

spring;--like Virgil's hero, dying, he would think of San Marino:

_Aspicit, et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos_. Even a passing stranger

may feel the mingled fascination and oppression of this prospect--the

monotony which maddens, the charm which at a distance grows upon the

mind, environing it with memories.

Descending to the Borgo, we found that Filippo Visconti had ordered a

luncheon of excellent white bread, pigeons, and omelette, with the best

red muscat wine I ever drank, unless the sharp air of the hills deceived

my appetite. An Italian history of San Marino, including its statutes,

in three volumes, furnished intellectual food. But I confess to having

learned from these pages little else than this: first, that the survival

of the Commonwealth through all phases of European politics had been

semi-miraculous; secondly, that the most eminent San Marinesi had been

lawyers. It is possible on a hasty deduction from these two propositions

(to which, however, I am far from wishing to commit myself), that the

latter is a sufficient explanation of the former.

From San Marino the road plunges at a break-neck pace. We are now in the

true Feltrian highlands, whence the Counts of Montefeltro issued in the

twelfth century. Yonder eyrie is San Leo, which formed the key of

entrance to the duchy of Urbino in campaigns fought many hundred years

ago. Perched on the crest of a precipitous rock, this fortress looks as

though it might defy all enemies but famine. And yet San Leo was taken

and re-taken by strategy and fraud, when Montefeltro, Borgia, Malatesta,

Rovere, contended for dominion in these valleys. Yonder is Sta. Agata,

the village to which Guidobaldo fled by night when Valentino drove him

from his dukedom. A little farther towers Carpegna, where one branch of

the Montefeltro house maintained a countship through seven centuries,

and only sold their fief to Rome in 1815. Monte Coppiolo lies behind,

Pietra Rubia in front: two other eagle's-nests of the same brood. What a

road it is! It beats the tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of

Devonshire scorns compromise or mitigation by _detour_ and zigzag. But

here geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far

worse metalled than with us in England--knotty masses of talc and nodes

of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings--that only Dante's words

describe the journey:--

Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli,

Montasi su Bismantova in cacume

Con esso i pie; ma qui convien ch'uom voli.

Of a truth, our horses seemed rather to fly than scramble up and down

these rugged precipices; Visconti cheerily animating them with the brave

spirit that was in him, and lending them his wary driver's help of hand

and voice at need.

We were soon upon a cornice-road between the mountains and the

Adriatic: following the curves of gulch and cleft ravine: winding round

ruined castles set on points of vantage; the sea-line high above their

grass-grown battlements, the shadow-dappled champaign girdling their

bastions mortised on the naked rock. Except for the blue lights across

the distance, and the ever-present sea, these earthy Apennines would be

too grim. Infinite air and this spare veil of spring-tide greenery on

field and forest soothe their sternness. Two rivers, swollen by late

rains, had to be forded. Through one of these, the Foglia, bare-legged

peasants led the way. The horses waded to their bellies in the tawny

water. Then more hills and vales; green nooks with rippling corn-crops;

secular oaks attired in golden leafage. The clear afternoon air rang

with the voices of a thousand larks overhead. The whole world seemed

quivering with light and delicate ethereal sound. And yet my mind turned

irresistibly to thoughts of war, violence, and pillage. How often has

this intermediate land been fought over by Montefeltro and Brancaleoni,

by Borgia and Malatesta, by Medici and Della Rovere! Its _contadini_ are

robust men, almost statuesque in build, and beautiful of feature. No

wonder that the Princes of Urbino, with such materials to draw from,

sold their service and their troops to Florence, Rome, S. Mark, and

Milan. The bearing of these peasants is still soldierly and proud. Yet

they are not sullen or forbidding like the Sicilians, whose habits of

life, for the rest, much resemble theirs. The villages, there as here,

are few and far between, perched high on rocks, from which the folk

descend to till the ground and reap the harvest. But the southern

_brusquerie_ and brutality are absent from this district. The men have

something of the dignity and slow-eyed mildness of their own huge oxen.

As evening fell, more solemn Apennines upreared themselves to southward.

The Monte d'Asdrubale, Monte Nerone, and Monte Catria hove into sight.

At last, when light was dim, a tower rose above the neighbouring ridge,

a broken outline of some city barred the sky-line. Urbino stood before

us. Our long day's march was at an end.

The sunset was almost spent, and a four days' moon hung above the

western Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace. It is a

fancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like some

castle reared by Atlante's magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero, or palace

sought in fairyland by Astolf winding his enchanted horn. Where shall we

find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressed battlemented bulk

of mediaeval strongholds with the airy balconies, suspended gardens, and

fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses? This unique blending of

the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of the time when it was

built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--or more exactly with

Boiardo's epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace at Urbino just at the

moment when the Count of Scandiano had began to chaunt his lays of

Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian

genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of

art. The men-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded

hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their

surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing

legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet

yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer's pike. The fatal

age of foreign invasions had not begun for Italy. Within a few years

Charles VIII.'s holiday excursion would reveal the internal rottenness

and weakness of her rival states, and the peninsula for half a century

to come would be drenched in the blood of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards,

fighting for her cities as their prey. But now Lorenzo de' Medici was

still alive. The famous policy which bears his name held Italy suspended

for a golden time in false tranquillity and independence. The princes

who shared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing into

modern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of more virile

centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments. The castles were

becoming courts, and despotisms won by force were settling into

dynasties.

It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at Urbino.

One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one of the

best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined in himself

the qualities which mark that period of transition. And these he

impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to the mediaeval

fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it the just

embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect analogue of

the _Orlando Innamorato_. By comparing it with the castle of the Estes

at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas at Mantua, we place it

in its right position between mediaeval and Renaissance Italy, between

the age when principalities arose upon the ruins of commercial

independence and the age when they became dynastic under Spain.

The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to give the

building an irregular outline. The fine facade, with its embayed _logge_

and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city ramparts for its

due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep ravine which separates it

from a lower quarter of the town, and take our station near the Oratory

of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can appreciate the beauty of its

design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome

and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this

peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of

its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the

verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of

vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There

is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the

Duchess's apartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria.

A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, which

Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his

_Cortegiano_. To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular how

the slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring back

the antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint, perhaps,

for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies of the court

had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of

mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them

exclaimed, "The day has broken!" "He pointed to the light which was

beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon we flung

the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks toward the

high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosy hue was born

already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had vanished except the

sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the borderlands of day

and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though a gentle wind were

breathing, filling the air with eager freshness, and waking among the

numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the sweet-toned symphonies of

joyous birds."