Stia is a picturesque little city with a curious arcaded Piazza, a
church that within is almost beautiful; yet it is certainly not for
anything to be found there that one comes to so ancient and yet so
disappointing a place, but because from thence one may go most easily to
Falterona to see the sun rise or to find out the springs of Arno, or to
visit Porciano, S. Maria delle Grazie, Papiano, and the rest in the
hills that shut in this little town at the head of the long valley.
Through the great endless sheepfolds you go to Falterona where the girls
are singing their endless chants all day long guarded by great
sheep-dogs, not the most peacable of companions. All the summer long
these pastures nourish the sheep, poor enough beasts at the best. One
recalls that in the great days the Guild of Wool got its material from
Flanders and from England, because the Tuscan fleece was too hard and
poor. Through these lonely pastures you climb with your guide, through
forests of oak and chestnut, by many a winding path, not without
difficulty, to the steeper sides of the mountain covered with brushwood,
into the silence where there is no voice but the voice of the streams.
Here in a cleft, under the very summit of Falterona, Arno rises, gushing
endlessly from the rock in seven springs of water, that will presently
gather to themselves a thousand other streams and spread through
Casentino:
"Botoli trova poi, venendo giuso
Ringhiosi più che non chiede lor possa
Ed, a lor, disdegnosa, torce il muso"
at the end of the valley.
Climbing above that sacred source to the summit of Falterona itself, you
may see, if the dawn be clear, the Tyrrhene sea and the Adriatic, the
one but a tremor of light far and far away, the other a sheet of silver
beyond the famous cities of Romagna. It is from this summit that your
way through Casentino should begin.
It was there I waited the dawn. For long in the soft darkness and
silence I had watched the mountains sleeping under the few summer stars.
Suddenly the earth seemed to stir in her sleep, in every valley the dew
was falling, in all forests there was a rumour, and among the rocks
where I lay I caught a flutter of wings. The east grew rosy; out of the
mysterious sea rose a golden ghost hidden in glory, till suddenly across
the world a sunbeam fell. It touched the mountains one by one; higher
and higher crept the tremulous joy of light, confident and ever more
confident, opening like a flower, filling the world with gladness and
light. It was the dawn: out of the east once more had crept the beauty
of the world.
Then in that clear and joyful hour God spread out all the breadth of
Italy before me: the plains, the valleys, and the mountains. Far and far
away, shining in the sun, Ravenna lay, and lean Rimini and bartered
Pesaro. There, the mountains rose over Siena, in that valley Gubbio
slept, on that hill stood S. Marino, and there, like a golden angel
bearing the Annunciation of Day, S. Leo folded her wings on her
mountain. Southward, Arezzo smiled like a flower, Monte Amiata was
already glorious; northward lay a sea of mountains, named and nameless,
restless with light, about to break in the sun. While to the west
Florence lay sleeping yet in the cusp of her hills, her towers, her
domes, perfect and fresh in the purity of dawn that had renewed her
beauty.
It was an altogether different impression, an impression of sadness, of
some tragic thing, that I received when at evening I stood above the
Castle of Porciano on a hill a little way off, and looked down the
valley. It was not any joyful thing that I saw, splendid though it was,
but the ruined castles, blind and broken, of the Counts Guidi: Porciano
itself, line a jagged menace, rises across Arno, which is heard but not
seen; farther, on the crest of a blue hill, round which evening gathers
out of the woods, rises the great ruin of Romena like a broken oath;
while farther still, far away on its hill in a fold of the valley, Poppi
thrusts its fierce tower into the sky, a cruel boast that came to
nothing. They are but the ghosts of a forgotten barbarism these gaunt
towers of war; they are nothing now, less than nothing, unreconciled
though they be with the hills; they have been crumbling for hundreds of
years: one day the last stone will fall. For around them is life; the
children of Stia, laughing about the fountain, will never know that
their ancestors went in fear of some barbarian who held Porciano by
murder and took toll of the weak. These shepherd girls, these
_contadini_ and their wives and children, they have outlived the Conti
Guidi, they have outlasted the greatest of the lords; like the flowers,
they run among the stones without a thought of that brutal greatness
that would have enslaved them if it could. Not by violence have they
conquered, but by love; not by death, but by life. It is just this which
I see round every ruin in the Casentino. Force, brute force, is the only
futile thing in the world. Why has La Verna remained when Romena is
swept away, that strong place, when Porciano is a ruin, when the castle
of Poppi is brought low, but that life which is love has beaten hate,
and that a kiss is more terrible than a thousand blows.
Yes, as one wanders about these hills where life itself is so hard a
master, it is just that which one understands in almost every village.
You go to S. Maria delle Grazie--Vallombrosella, they call it, since it
was a daughter of the monastery of Vallombrosa--and there in that
beautiful fifteenth-century church you still find the simple things of
life, of love; work of the della Robbia; pictures, too, cheerful
flowerlike things, with Madonna like a rose in the midst. Well, not far
away across Arno, where it is little, the ruins of Castel Castagnajo and
of Campo Lombardo are huddled, though Vallucciole, that tiny village, is
laughing with children. It is the same at Romena, where the church still
lives, though the castle is ruined. You pass to Pratovecchio; it is the
same story, ruins of the Guidi towers, walls, fortifications; but in the
convent church of the Dominican sisters they still sing Magnificat:
Deposuit potentes de sede: et exaltavit humiles.
So on the road to Poppi you come to Campaldino, where Dante fought,
where Corso Donati saved the day, where Buonconte fell, and died with
the fog in his throat in the still morning air after the battle. Well,
that famous field is now a vineyard; you may see the girls gathering the
grapes there any morning in early October. Where the horses of the
Aretines thundered away, the great patient oxen draw the plough; or a
man walks, singing beside his wife, her first-born in her arms. It is
the victory of the meek; here, at least, they have inherited the earth.
And Certomondo, as of old, sings of our sister the earth. Poppi
again--ah, but that fierce old place, how splendid it is, it and its
daughter! Like all the rest of these Guidi strongholds, the Rocca of
Poppi stands on a hill; it can be seen for miles up and down the valley:
and indeed the whole town is like a fortress on a hill, subject only to
the ever-changing sky, the great tide of light ebbing and flowing in the
valley between the mountains. Poppi is the greatest of the Guidi
fortresses; built by Arnolfo, it has much of the nobility of its
daughter the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Of all these castles it is the
only one that is not a ruin. It is true it has been restored, But you
may still find frescoes on its walls in the chapel and in the great
hall, work, it is said, of Jacopo da Casentino: and then it has one of
the loveliest courtyards in Italy.
It is from Poppi one may go very easily in a summer day to Camaldoli,
some eight miles or so to the north-west, where the valley comes up in a
long arm into the mountains. On that lovely road you pass many an old
ruin of the Guidi before you come at last to that monastery of the
Camaldolese Order "so beloved of Dante," which was confiscated with the
rest in 1866. The monks now hire their own house from the Government,
which has let out their hospice for an hotel. About an hour above the
monastery, among the pine trees, is the Sacro Eremo, the Holy Hermitage,
where in some twenty separate cells the Hermits of Camaldoli live; for,
as their arms go to show, the Order is divided into two parts,
consisting of monks who live in community, and hermits who live alone.
S. Romuald, the founder of the Order, of the family of the Dukes of
Ravenna called Honesti, was born in that city in 956. He seems to have
grown up amid a certain splendour, and to have been caught by it, but by
a love of nature no less; so that often when he was hunting, and found a
beautiful or lonely place in the woods away from his companions, he
would almost cry out, "How happy were the old hermits, who lived always
in such places!" The romance of just that: it seems to have struck him
from the first. Not long after, when he was but twenty years old, his
father, deciding a dispute with a relation by fighting, fell, and
Romuald, who had been compelled to witness this dreadful scene, was so
overwhelmed by the result that he retired for a time to the Benedictine
Monastery at Classis, not far from Ravenna. After some difficulties had
been disposed of, for he was his father's heir, he spent seven years in
that monastery; but his sincerity does not appear to have pleased
certain of the fathers, so that we find him at last obliged to retire to
Venice, where, in fulfilment of his earliest wishes, he placed himself
under the guidance of Marinus, a hermit. After many years, in which he
seems to have gone to Spain, he returned at last, and took up his hermit
life in a marsh near Classis, where the monks of his old monastery
sought him, and with the help of Otho III made him their Abbot. This
office, however, he did not long retain, for he found it useless to try
to reform them. He seems to have wandered about, famous all over Italy,
founding many houses, but the most famous of all is this house of
Camaldoli, which he founded in 1009. The land was given him by a certain
Conte Maldolo, it is said, an Aretine, by whose name the place was ever
after known, Campus Maldoli; while another gift, Campus Arrabile, the
gift of the same man, is that place where the Hermitage stands. There,
in Camaldoli, Romuald built a monastery, "and by several observances he
added to St. Benedict's rule, gave birth to a new Order, in which he
united the cenobite and eremetical life." It is said that it was after a
vision, in which he saw his monks mounting up into heaven dressed in
white, that he changed their habit from black to white--the habit they
still wear.
Whether it be that the hills and valley are indeed more lovely here
than anywhere else in Casentino, and that the monks and the hermits lure
some indefinable sweet charm to the place, I know not; yet I know that
I, who came for a day, stayed a month, returning here again and again
from less lovely, less quiet places. Camaldoli is one of the loveliest
places in Tuscany in which to spend a summer. Here are mountains, woods,
streams, valleys, a monastery, and a hermitage; to desire more might
seem churlish, to be content with less when these may be had in quiet,
stupid.