It was only after many days spent in the Pineta, those pinewoods that go
down to the sea at Gombo, where the silent, deserted shore, strewn with
sea-shells and whispering with grass, stretches far away to the Carrara
hills, that very early one morning I set out for Livorno, that port
which has taken the place of the old Porto Pisano,[82] so famous through
the world of old. Leaving Pisa by the Porta a Mare, I soon came to S.
Pietro a Grado, a lonely church among the marshes, that once, as I
suppose, stood on the seashore. It was here St. Peter, swept out of his
course by a storm on his way from Antioch, came ashore before setting
out again for Naples, entering Italy first, then, on the shores of
Etruria. So the tale goes; but the present church seems to be a building
of the twelfth century. Its simple beauty, which the seawind and the sun
have kissed for seven hundred years, seems to give character to the
whole plain, so ample and green, beyond the wont of Italy; but, indeed,
here we are on the threshold of the Maremma, that beautiful, wild,
deserted country that man has not yet reclaimed from Death, where the
summer is still and treacherous in its loveliness, where in winter for a
little while the herdsmen come down with their cattle from the
Garfagnana, and the hills musical with love songs. On the threshold of
that treacherous summer, as it were, this lonely church stands on guard.
Within, she is beautiful, in the old manner, splendid with antique
pillars caught about now with iron; but it is perhaps the frescoes, that
have faded on the walls till they are scarcely more than the shadows of
a thousand forgotten sunsets, that you will care for most. They are the
work of Giunta Pisano, or if, indeed, they are not his they are of his
school,--a school already decadent, splendid with the beauty that has
looked on death and can never be quite sane again. No one, I think, can
ever deny the beauty of Giunta's work; it is full of a strange subtilty
that is ready to deny life over and over again. He is concerned not with
life, but chiefly with religion, and with certain bitter yet altogether
lovely colours which evoke for him, and for us too, if we will lend
ourselves to their influence, all the misery and pessimism of the end of
the Middle Age, its restlessness and ennui, that find consolation only
in the memory of the grotesque frailty of the body which one day Jesus
will raise up. All the anarchy and discontent of our own time seems to
me to be expressed in such work as this, in which ugliness, as we might
say, has as much right as beauty. It is, I think, the mistake of much
popular criticism in our time to assert that these "primitive" painters
were beginners, and could not achieve what they wished. They were not
beginners, rather they were the most subtle artists of a convention--and
all art is a convention--that was about to die. If one can see their
work aright, it is beautiful; but it has lost touch with life, or is a
mere satirical comment upon it, that Giotto, with his simplicity, his
eager delight in natural things and in man, will supersede and banish.
In him, Europe seems to shake off the art and fatality of the East,
under whose shadow Christianity had grown up, to be altogether
transformed and humanised by Rome, when she at the head really of
humanism and art should once more give to the world the thoughts and
life of another people full of joy and temperance--things so hard for
the Christian to understand. And it is really with such a painter as
Giunta Pisano that Christian art pure and simple comes to end. Some
divinity altogether different has touched those who came after: Giotto,
who is enamoured of life which the Christian must deny; Angelico, whose
world is full of a music that is about to become pagan; Botticelli, who
has mingled the tears of Mary with the salt of the sea, and has seen a
new star in heaven, and proclaimed the birth not of the Nazarene, but
the Cyprian.
But it is not such thoughts as these you will find in Livorno, one of
the busiest towns in Italy, full of modern business life; material in
the manner of the Latin people that by reason of some inherent purity of
heart never becomes sordid in our fashion.
"There is absolutely nothing to see in Leghorn," says Mr. Hare. Well,
but that depends on what you seek, does it not? If you would see a
Tuscan city that is absolutely free from the tourist, I think you must
go to Livorno. It is true, works of art are not many there; but the
statue of Grand Duke Ferdinand, with four Moors in bronze chained to his
feet, a work of Piero Jacopo Tacca, made in 1617-1625, is something;
though I confess those chained robbers at the feet of a petty tyrant who
was as great a robber, he and his forebears, as any among them, are in
this age of sentimental liberalism, from which who can escape, a little
disconcerting. Ferdinand has his best monument in the city itself, which
he founded to take the place of Porto Pisano, that in the course of
centuries had silted up. In order to populate the new port, he
proclaimed there a religious liberty he denied to his Duchy at large.
His policy was splendidly successful. Every sort of outcast made Livorno
his home--especially the Jews, for whom Ferdinando had a great respect;
but there were there Greeks also, and _nuovi christiani_, Moors
converted to Christianity. These last, I think, indeed, must have been
worth seeing; for no doubt Ferdinand's politic grant of religious
liberty did not include Moors who had not been "converted to
Christianity."
But the great days of Livorno are over; though who may say if a new
prosperity does not await her in the near future, she is so busy a
place. Livorno la cara, they call her, and no doubt of old she endeared
herself to her outcasts. To-day, however, it is to the Italian summer
visitor that she is dear. There he comes for sea-bathing, and it is
difficult to imagine a more delightful seaside. For you may live on the
hills and yet have the sea. Beyond Livorno rises the first high ground
of the Maremma, Montenero, holy long ago with its marvellous picture of
the Madonna, which, as I know, still works wonders. Here Byron lived,
and not far away Shelley wrote the principal part of _The Cenci_.
Passing out by tramway by the Porta Maremmana, you come to Byron's
villa, almost at the foot of the hills, on a sloping ground on your
right. Entering by the great iron gates of what looks like a neglected
park, you climb by a stony road up to the great villa itself, among the
broken statues and the stone pines, where is one of the most beautiful
views of the Pisan country and seashore, with the islands of Gorgona,
Capraja, Elba, and Corsica in the distance. Villa Dupoy, as it was
called in Byron's day, is now in the summer months used as a girls'
school: and, indeed, it would be easy to house a regiment in its vast
rooms, where here and there a seventeenth century fresco is still
gorgeous on the walls, and the mirrors are dim with age. From here the
walk up to Our Lady of Montenero is delightful; and once there, on the
hills above the church, the rolling downs towards Maremma lie before you
without a single habitation, almost without a road, a country of heath
and fierce rock, desolate and silent, splendid with the wind and the
sun.
The Church of Madonna lies just under the crest of the hill, and is even
to-day a place of many pilgrimages: for the whole place is strewn and
hung with thank-offerings, silver hearts, shoes, crutches, and I know
not what else, among the pathetic pictures of her kindly works. The
picture itself, loaded now with jewellery, is apparently a work of the
thirteenth century; but it is said to have been miraculously brought
hither from Negroponte. It was found at Ardenza close by, by a shepherd,
who carried it to Montenero, where, as I suppose, he lived; but just
before he won the top of the hill it grew so heavy he had to set it
down. So the peasants built a shrine for it; and the affair getting
known, the Church inquired into it, with the result that certainly by
the fifteenth century the shrine was in charge of a Religious Order;
to-day the monks of the Vallombrosan Benedictines serve the church.
One returns always, I think, with regret from Montenero to Livorno; yet,
after all, not with more sadness than that which always accompanies us
in returning from the country to any city, howsoever fair and lovely.
God made the country; man made the town; and though in Italy both God
and man have laboured with joy and done better here than anywhere else
in the world, who would not leave the loveliest picture to look once
more on the sky, or neglect the sweetest music if he might always hear
the sea, or give up praising a statue, if he might always look on his
beloved? So it is in Italy, where all the cities are fair; flowers they
are among the flowers; yet any Tuscan rose is fairer far than ever Pisa
was, and the lilies of Madonna in the gardens of Settignano are more
lovely than the City of Flowers: come, then, let us leave the city for
the wayside, for the sun and the dust and the hills, the flowers beside
the river, the villages among the flowers. For if you love Italy you
will follow the road.