It was very early in the morning when I came into Tuscany. Leaving
Spezia overnight, I had slept at Lerici, and, waking in the earliest
still dawn, I had set out over the hills, hoping to cross the Macra
before breakfast.
In this tremulous and joyful hour, full of the profound gravity of youth
hesitating on the threshold of life, the day rose out of the sea; so, a
lily opening in a garden while we sleep transfigures it with its joy.
As I climbed the winding hill among the olives, while still a cool
twilight hung about the streets of Lerici, the sun stood up over the
sea, awakening it to the whole long day of love to come. Far away in the
early light, over a sea mysterious of blue and silver and full of
ecstasy, the coast curved with infinite beauty into the golden crest of
Porto Venere. Spezia, like a broken flower, seemed deserted on the
seashore, and Lerici itself, far below me, waking at morning, watched
the sleeping ships, the deep breathing of the sea, the shy and yet proud
gesture of the day.
Then as I crossed the ridge of the hill and began to follow the road
downward towards Tuscany between the still olives, where as yet the
world had not seen the sun, suddenly all that beautiful world, about to
be so splendid, was hidden from me, and instead I saw the delta of a
great river, the uplifted peaks of the marble mountains, and there was
Tuscany.
Past Arcola, that triumphal arch of the middle age, built on high like a
city on an aqueduct, I went into the plain; then far away in the
growing day I saw the ancient strongholds of the hills, the fortresses
of the Malaspina, the castles of the Lunigiana, the eyries of the eagles
of old time. There they lay before me on the hills like _le grandi
ombre_ of which Dante speaks, Castelnuovo di Magra, Fosdinovo of the
Malaspina, Niccola over the woods. Then at a turning of the way at the
foot of the hills I had traversed, under that long and lofty bridge that
has known so well the hasty footstep of the fugitive, flowed Magra.
... Macra, che, per cammin corto
Lo genovese parte dal Toscano.
Thus with Dante's verses in my mouth I came into Tuscany.
Now the way from Macra to Sarzana lies straight across that great delta
which hides behind the eastern horn of the Gulf of Spezia. At the Macra
bridge you meet the old road from Genoa to Pisa, and entering Tuscany
thus, Sarzana is the first Tuscan city you will see. Luna Nova the
Romans called the place, for it was built to replace the older city
close to the sea, the ruins of which you may still find beside the road
on the way southward, but of Roman days there is nothing left in the new
city.
It was a fortress of Castruccio Castracani, the birthplace of a great
Pope. Of Castruccio, that intolerant great man, I shall speak later, in
Lucca, for that was the rose in his shield. Here I wish only to remind
the reader who wanders among the ruins of his great castle, that
Castracani took Sarzana by force and held it against any; and perhaps to
recall the words of Machiavelli, where he tells us that the capture of
Sarzana was a feat of daring done to impress the Lucchesi with the
splendour of their liberated tyrant. For when the citizens had freed him
from the prison of Uguccione della Faggiuola, who had seized the
government of Lucca, Castruccio, finding himself accompanied by a great
number of his friends, which encouraged him, and by the whole body of
the people, which flattered his ambition, caused himself to be chosen
Captain-General of all their forces for a twelvemonth; and resolving to
perform some eminent action that might justify their choice, he
undertook the reduction of several places which had revolted following
the example of Uguccione. Having for this purpose entered into strict
alliance with the city of Pisa, she sent him supplies, and he marched
with them to besiege Sarzana; but the place being very strong, before he
could carry it, he was obliged to build a fortress as near it as he
could. This new fort in two months' time rendered him master of the
whole country, and is the same fort that at this day is called
Sarzanella, repaired since and much enlarged by the Florentines.
Supported by the credit of so glorious an exploit, he reduced Massa,
Carrara, and Lavenza very easily: he seized likewise upon the whole
country of Lunigiana ... so that, full of glory, he returned to Lucca,
where the people thronged to meet him, and received him with all
possible demonstrations of joy.
It is, however, rather as the home of Nicholas V, I think, that Sarzana
appeals to us to-day, than as the stronghold of Castruccio. The tyrant
held so many places, as we shall see, his prowess is everywhere, but
Tommaso Parentucelli is like to be forgotten, for his glory is not
written in sword-cuts or in any violated city, but in the forgotten
pages of the humanists, the beautiful life of Vespasiano da Bisticci.
And was not Nicholas V. the first of the Renaissance Popes, the
librarian of Cosimo de' Medici, the tutor of the sons of Rinaldo degli
Albizzi and of Palla Strozzi? Certainly his great glory was the care he
had of learning and the arts: he made Rome once more the capital of the
world, he began the Vatican, and the basilica of S. Pietro, yet he was
not content till he should have transformed the whole city into order
and beauty. In him the enthusiasm and impulse of the Renaissance are
simple and full of freshness. Finding Rome still the city of the
Emperors and their superstition, he made it the city of man. He was the
friend of Alberti, the Patron of all men of learning and poets. "Greece
has not fallen," said Filelfo, in remembering him, "but seems to have
migrated to Italy, which of old was called Magna Graecia." Yet Tommaso
Parentucelli[11] was sprung of poor parent and even though they may have
been _nobili_ as Manetti tells us, _De nobili Parentucellorum
progenie_,[12] that certainly was of but little assistance to him in his
youth.
"Maestro Tomaso da Serezano," says Vespasiano the serene bookseller of
Florence, with something of Walton's charm--"Maestro Tomaso da Serezano,
who was afterwards Pope Nicholas V, was born at Pisa of humble parents.
Later on account of discord in that city, his father was imprisoned, so
that he went to Sarzana, and there gave to his little son in his tender
years lessons in grammar, which, through the excellence of his
understanding, he quickly learned. His father died, however, when he who
was to come to such eminence was but nine years old, leaving two sons,
our Maestro Tomaso, and Maestro Filippo, who later was Cardinal of
Bologna. Now Maestro Tomaso fell sick at that time, and his mother,
seeing him thus ailing, being a widow and having all her great hope in
her sons, was in the greatest anxiety and sorrow, and prayed God
unweariedly to spare her little son. Thus intent in prayer, hoping that
he would not die, she fell asleep about dawn, when One called to her and
said: 'Andreola (for that was her name), doubt nothing that thy son
shall live.' And it seemed in her vision that she saw her son in a
bishop's robe, and One said to her that he would be Pope. Waking then
from this dream, immediately she went to her little son and found him
already better, and to all those in the house she told the vision she
had had. Now, when the child was well, because of the steadfast hope
which the vision had given her, she at once begged him to pursue his
studies; which he did, so that when he was sixteen he had a very good
knowledge of grammar and the Latin tongue, and began to work at logic,
in order later to come at philosophy and theology. Then he left Sarzana
and went to Bologna, so that he might the better pursue his studies in
every faculty. At Bologna he studied in logic and in philosophy with
great success. In a short time he became learned in all the seven
Liberal Arts. Staying at Bologna still he was eighteen, and Master of
Arts, lacking money, it was necessary for him to go to Sarzana to his
mother, who had remarried, in order to have money to furnish his
expenses. She was poor and her husband not very rich, and then Tomaso
was not his son, but a stepson: he could not obtain money from them.
Determined to follow his studies, he thought to go to Florence, the
mother of studies and every virtue at that time. So he went thither, and
found Messer Rinaldo degli Albizzi, a most exceptional man, who carried
him off to instruct his sons, giving him a good salary as a young man of
great virtue. At the end of a year Messer Rinaldo left Florence, and
Maestro Tomaso wishing to remain in the city, he arranged for him to
enter the service of Messer Palla di Nofri Strozzi; and from him he had
a very good salary. At the end of another year he had gained so much
from these two citizens that he had enough to return to Bologna to his
studies, though in Florence he had not lost his time, for he read in
every faculty."
Such were the early years of one of the most cultured and princely of
the Popes. Born in 1398, he was himself one of the sons of the early
Renaissance. Not altogether without pedantry, he yet by his learning, by
his patronage of scholars and artists (and indeed he was perhaps the
first Pope who preferred them to monks and friars), secured for the
Renaissance the allegiance of the Church. He died in a moment of
misfortune for Europe in 1455, just after the fall of Constantinople,
being succeeded on the throne of Christendom by Pius II, Pius Aeneas as
he called himself in a moment of enthusiasm, one of the most human of
all those men of the world who have become the vicegerent of Jesus.
Nicholas V was not a man of the world, he was a scholar, full of the
enthusiasm of his day. As a statesman, while he pacified Italy, he saw
Byzantium fall into the hands of the barbarians. He was a Pagan in whom
there was no guile. His enthusiasm was rather for Apollo and the Muses
than for Jesus and the Saints. With a simplicity touching and
delightful, he watched Sigismondo Malatesta build his temple at Rimini,
and was his friend and loved him well. Pius II, with all his love of
nature and the classics, though his own life was full of unfortunate
secrets and his pride and vanity truly Sienese, could not look on
unmoved while Malatesta built a temple to the old gods in the States of
the Church. But then Pius had not lived all the long years of his youth
at Luna Nova. Who can tell what half-forgotten deity may have found
Maestro Tomaso asleep in the woods, that magician Virgil in his
hands,--for on this coast the gods wander even yet,--and, creeping
behind him, finding him so fair, may have kissed him on the ears, as the
snakes kissed Cassandra when she lay asleep at noon in Troy of old.
Certainly their habitations, their old places may still be found. We are
not so far from Porto Venere, and then on the highway towards Massa, not
long after you have come out of the beautiful avenue of plane trees,
itself like some great temple, through which the road leaves Sarzana,
you come upon the little city of Luna, or the bright fragments of it,
among the sand of what must once have been the seashore, with here a
fold of the old amphitheatre, there the curve of the circus, while
scattered on the grass softer than sleep, you may find perhaps the
carved name of a goddess, the empty pedestal of a statue.
Lying there on a summer day in the everlasting quietness, unbroken even
by a wandering wind or the ripple of a stream, some inkling of that old
Roman life, always at its best in such country places as this, comes to
you, yes, from the time when Juno was yet a little maid among the mossy
fountains and the noise of the brooks. Tacitus in his _Agricola_, that
consoling book, tells us of those homes of a refined and severe
simplicity in Frejus and Como, but it is to Rutilius, with his strange
gift of impressionism, you must go for a glimpse of Luna. In his
perfect verses[13] we may see the place as he found it when, gliding
swiftly on the waves, perhaps on a day like this, he came to those walls
of glistening marble, which got their name from the planet that borrows
her light from the sun, her brother. The country itself furnished those
stones which shamed with their whiteness the laughing lilies, while
their polished surface with its veins threw forth shining rays. For this
is a land rich in marbles which defy, sure of their victory, the virgin
whiteness of the snow itself.
Well, there is but little left of that shining city, and yet, as I lay
dreaming in the grass-grown theatre, it seemed to be a festal day, and
there among the excited and noisy throng of holiday-makers, just for a
moment I caught sight of the aediles in their white tunics, and then,
far away, the terrified face of a little child, frightened at the
hideous masks of the actors. Then, the performance over, I followed home
some simple old centurion was it?--who, returned from the wars on the
far frontier, had given the city a shady walk and that shrine of
Neptune. We came at last to a country house of "pale red and yellow
marble," half farm, half villa, lying away from the white road at the
point where it begins to decline somewhat sharply to the marshland
below. It is close to the sea. Large enough for all requirements, and
not expensive to keep in repair, my host explains. At its entrance is a
modest but beautiful hall; then come the cloisters, which are rounded
into the likeness of the letter D, and these enclose a small and pretty
courtyard. These cloisters, I am told, are a fine refuge in a storm, for
they are protected by windows and deep over-hanging eaves. Facing the
cloisters is a cheerful inner court, then the dining-room towards the
seashore, fine enough for anyone, as my host asserts, and when the
south-west wind is blowing the room is just scattered by the spray of
the spent waves. On all sides are folding doors, or windows quite as
large as doors, so that from two sides and the front you command a
prospect of three seas as it were; while at the back, as he shows me,
one can see through the inner court to the woods or the distant hills.
Just then the young mistress of the place comes to greet me, bidden by
my host her father, and in a moment I see the nobility of this life,
full of pure and honourable things, together with a certain simplicity
and sweetness. Seeing my admiration, my host speaks of his daughter, of
her love for him, of her delight in his speeches,--for he is of
authority in the city,--of how on such occasions she will sit screened
from the audience by a curtain, drinking in what people say to his
credit. He smiles as he tells me this, adding she has a sharp wit, is
wonderfully economical, and loves him well; and indeed she is worthy of
him, and doubtless, as he says, of her grandfather. Then my proud old
centurion leads me down the alleys of his garden full of figs and
mulberries, with roses and a few violets, till in the perfect stillness
of this retreat we come to the seashore, and there lies the white city
of Luna glistening in the sun. As I take my leave, reluctantly, for, I
would stay longer, my hostess is so sweet, my host so charming, I catch
sight of the name of the villa cut into the rosy marble of the gates:
"Ad Vigilias Albas" I read, and then and then ... Why, what is this? I
must have fallen asleep in that old theatre among the débris and the
fine grass. Ad Vigilias Albas--"White Nights," nights not of quite blank
forgetfulness, certainly. But it is with the ancestors of Marius I seem
to have been talking in the old city of Luna, that in his day had
already passed away.[14]
It was sunset when I found myself at the door of the Inn in Sarzana.