... Cortona lifts to heaven
Her diadem of towers.
If the journey be made on a market or fair day, the space between the
walls and the station at Arezzo may be seen crowded with white oxen,
suggesting the thought of triumphs and triumphal sacrifices. Their
race, it was said, prayed to the gods that Marcus and Julian might not
win victories which would lead to their destruction. And the prayer
seems to have been answered, as the breed specially connected with
Clitumnus has clearly not died out, even by the banks of Clanis. The
journey is not a long one; yet, if we had time to see everything, we
might well wish to break it, as we pass by the hill of Castiglione
Fiorentino, with its walls and towers. That strong and stern
hill-fortress comes in well between Arezzo and Cortona. Arezzo covers
a hill, but it can hardly be said to stand on a hill-top; Castiglione
distinctly does stand on a hill-top; Cortona sits enthroned on a height
which it would hardly be straining language to speak of as a mountain.
We have now come to a site of the oldest class, the stronghold on the
height, like Akrokorinthos and the Larissa of Argos. But at Argos and
Corinth the mountain-fortress became, at a later stage, the citadel of
the younger city which grew up at the mountain's foot. But at Cortona,
as at greater Perugia, the city still abides on the height; it has
never come down into the plain. So it has remained at Laon; so it has
become at Girgenti, where the vast lower space of the later Akragas
is forsaken, and the modern town has shrunk up within the lines of
the ancient acropolis. From the ground below Cortona we look up to a
city like those of old, great and fenced up to heaven; the "diadem
of towers" is there still, though it is now made up of a group of
towers, ecclesiastical, municipal, and military, none of them of any
account in itself, but each of which joins with its fellows to make
up an effective whole. At Cortona indeed, as at Argos and Corinth,
there is an upper and a lower city, and the upper city is pretty well
forsaken. But while at Argos and Corinth the lower city stands in the
plain, and the acropolis soars far above it, at Cortona the lower city
itself stands so high up the hill that it is only when we reach it
that we fully understand that there is a higher city still. The site
itself belongs so thoroughly to the oldest days of our European world
that there is a certain kind of satisfaction in finding that the main
interest of the place belongs to those oldest days. We are well pleased
that everything of later times is of quite a secondary character, and
that the distinctive character of Cortona is to be the city of the
Etruscan walls.
In truth, a certain degree of wonder is awakened by the fact that
Cortona exists at all. It would have been by no means amazing if we had
found only its ruins, as on so many other old-world sites for which
later times have found no use. Great in its earliest days, foremost
among the Etruscan cities of the mountains, Cortona has never been
great in any later age. As a Roman city and colony it was of so little
account that, even in Italy, where bishops are so thick upon the
ground, it did not become a bishopric till the fourteenth century. Just
at that time came its short period of anything like importance among
the cities of mediæval Italy. Sold to Florence early in the fifteenth
century, it has ever since followed the fortunes of the ruling city.
Yet through all these changes Cortona has managed to live on, though
we can hardly say to flourish. It still keeps the character of a
city, though a small and mean one, inhabited by a race of whom the
younger sort seem to have nothing to do but to run after the occasional
visitor. One ragged urchin offers to accompany him to the cathedral;
another persists in following him round nearly the whole circuit of the
ancient walls. This last is too bad; a walk round the walls of Cortona
is emphatically one of those things which are best enjoyed in one's own
company.
As an Italian city which has lived, though in rather a feeble way,
through the regular stages of Roman colony and mediæval commonwealth,
Cortona has of course its monuments which record those periods of
its being. There are some small fragments of Roman work, but nothing
that can be called a Roman building. There is a crowd of churches and
monasteries, but none of any great architectural value, though some
contain works of importance in the history of painting. It perhaps
marks the position of Cortona as a comparatively modern bishopric that
its cathedral church is in no sort the crowning building of the city.
The _duomo_ stands about half-way up the height within the town, on
a corner of the walls. Its elegant _Renaissance_ interior has been
already spoken of; it seems to have supplanted a Romanesque building
the columns of which may have been used again. The point in the upper
city where we should have looked for the _duomo_ is occupied by the
Church of St. Margaret, that is, Margaret of Cortona, described over
her portal as "pœnitens Margarita," marked off thereby alike from
the virgin of Antioch and from the matron of Scotland. The municipal
buildings are not remarkable, though one wall of the Palazzo Pretorio
must be a treasure-house for students of Italian heraldry, thickly
coated as it is with the arms of successive _podestas_. Of private
palaces the steep and narrow streets contain one or two; but it is not
on its street architecture that Cortona can rest its claim to fame.
From the lower city, with its labyrinth of streets, we may climb to the
acropolis. Here, around the Church of St. Margaret, all seems desolate.
The Franciscan convent on the slope below it lies in ruins--not an
usual state for an Italian building. The castle above, fenced in by its
ditch, seems as desolate as everything around, save the new or renewed
fabric of St. Margaret's. This height is the point of view to which
the visitor to Cortona will be first taken, if he listens to local
importunity. A noble outlook it is; but the traveller can find points
of view equally noble in the course of the work which should be done
first of all--that of compassing the mighty wall which is the thing
that makes Cortona what it is.
The process of going to the back of the city, which may be done in
some measure at Arezzo, may be done in all its fulness at Cortona.
Happily, very nearly the whole wall can be compassed without, and in
by far the greater part of its course more or less of the old Etruscan
rampart remains. In many places the mighty stones still stand to no
small height, patched of course and raised with work of later times,
but still standing firmly fixed as they were laid when Cortona stood
in the first rank among the cities of the Rasena. Not that there is
reason to attribute any amazing antiquity to these walls. We must
remember that the Etruscan cities kept their local freedom till the
days of Sulla, and that some Etruscan works are later than some Roman
works. The masonry is by no means of the rough and early kind; yet the
one remaining gate, unluckily blocked, is square-headed, and might
almost have stood at Mykênê. On the highest point, the hindermost
point, the wildest and most desolate point, where, though just outside
an inhabited city, we feel as if we were in a land forsaken of men,
the Etruscan wall has largely given way to the mediæval fortress whose
present aspect dates from Medicean days. But it has given way only
to leave one of the grandest pieces of the whole wall standing as an
outpost in the rear of the city, overhanging the steepest point of
the whole hill. The Etruscan wall, the Medicean castle, one seeming
to stand as forsaken and useless as the other, form a summary of the
history of Cortona in stone and brick.
From the walls we may well turn to the Museum, to see the tombs and
the other relics of the men who reared them. Pre-eminent among them,
the glory of the Cortonese collection, as the Chimæra is the glory
of the Florentine collection, is a magnificent bronze lamp, wrought
with endless mythological figures. Near it stands the painting of a
female head, which we might at first take for the work of _Renaissance_
hands, and in which those who are skilled in such matters profess to
recognize the existing type of Cortonese beauty. The painting however
dates from the days when Cortona was still Etruscan. Perugia keeps
her ancient inhabitants themselves, in the shape at least of their
skulls and skeletons. At Cortona the remote mothers, it may be, of her
present people live more vividly in the form of the Muse whose features
were copied, it may be nineteen hundred years back, from the living
countenance of one of them.
Perugia.
The hill-city of Perugia supplies an instructive contrast with the
hill-city of Cortona. The obvious contrast in the matter of modern
prosperity and importance is an essential part of the comparative
history. Cortona has through all ages lived on, but not much more
than lived on. Perugia has, through all ages, kept, if not a place
in the first rank of Italian cities, yet at any rate a high place in
the second rank. She never had the European importance of Venice,
Genoa, Florence, Naples, and Milan, or of Pisa in her great days.
But in the purely Italian history of all ages Perugia keeps herself
before our eyes, as a city of mark, from the wars of the growing Roman
commonwealth down to the struggle which in our own days freed her from
a second Roman yoke. In the civil wars of the old Rome, in the wars
between the Goth and the New Rome, in the long tale of the troubled
greatness of mediæval Italy, Etruscan Perusia, Roman Augusta Perusia,
mediæval and modern Perugia, holds no mean place. And the last act
in the long drama is not the least notable. It sounds like a bit out
of Plutarch's "Life of Timoleôn," when we read or when we remember
how, twice within our own days, little more than twenty and thirty
years back, the fortress of the tyrants was swept away, as the great
symbolic act which crowned the winning back of freedom in its newest
form. When a city has such a tale as this to tell, we do not expect, we
do not wish, that its only or its chief interest should gather round
the monuments of an early and almost præhistoric day of greatness. At
Cortona we are glad that things Etruscan are undoubtedly uppermost.
At Perugia we are glad that things Etruscan are there to be seen in
abundance; but we also welcome the monuments of Roman days, pagan
and Christian; we welcome the streets, the churches, and palaces of
mediæval times, and even the works of recent times indeed. The Place of
Victor Emmanuel with the modern buildings which crown it, supplanting
the fortress of Pope Paul, as that supplanted the houses, churches, and
palaces of earlier times, is as much a part of the history of Perugia
as the Arch of Augustus or the Etruscan wall itself.
The difference between the abiding greatness of Perugia and the
abiding littleness of Cortona is no doubt largely due to the physical
difference of their sites. Both are hill-cities, mountain-cities, if
we will; but they sit upon hills of quite different kinds. The hill of
Perugia is better fitted for growth than the hill of Cortona. Cortona
sits on a single hill-top. Perugia sits, not indeed on seven hills, but
on a hill of complicated outline, which throws out several--possibly
seven--outlying, mostly lower, spurs, with deep valleys between them.
The Etruscan and Roman city took in only the central height, itself of
a very irregular shape and at some points very narrow. The lower and
outlying spurs were taken within the city in later times. Hence it is
only in a small part of their circuit that the original walls remain
the present external walls; it is only on part of its western side that
we can at all go behind Perugia. But the lower city is still thoroughly
a hill-city. The hill of Perugia is lower than the hill of Cortona,
while the city of Perugia is vastly greater than the city of Cortona.
But Perugia is as far removed as Cortona from coming down into the
plain. On the little hill of Arezzo such a process could happen, and it
has happened. Not so with the loftier seats of its neighbours. Cortona
is not likely to grow; Perugia very likely may. But it will take a long
period of downward growth before unbroken dwellings of men stretch all
the way from its railway station to its municipal palace.
At Perugia, as becomes its history, no one class of monuments draws
to itself exclusive, or even predominant, attention. Perhaps, on the
whole, the municipal element is the most striking. The vast pile of the
public palace, its grand portal, its bold ranges of windows, its worthy
satellites, the Exchange, and the great fountain with its marvels of
sculpture, utterly outdo, as the central points of the city, the lofty
but shapeless and unfinished cathedral which stands opposite to them.
And at this point, the Church and the commonwealth are the only rivals;
the remains of earlier times do not come into view. For them we must
seek, but at no great distance. Go down from the central height, and
stand on the bridge which spans the _Via Appia_ of Perugia, a strange
namesake for the _Via Appia_ of Rome. There the walls of the Etruscan
city, rising on the one side above the houses, on the other above one
of the deep valleys, form the main feature. And, if they lose in effect
from the modern houses built upon them, the very incongruity has a
kind of attractiveness, as binding the two ends of the story together.
From this point of view, Perugia is specially Perugian. And, if the
walls are less perfect than those of Cortona, they have something
that Cortona has not. The Arch of Augustus, the barrier between the
older and the newer city, spans the steep and narrow street fittingly
known as _Via Vecchia_. At Perugia the name of Augustus suggests the
thought whether he really made the bloody sacrifice to the _manes_ of
his uncle with which some reports charge him. The gate at least makes
no answer, save that we see that the Roman built on the foundations
of the Etruscan, save that the legend of "Augusta Perusia" is itself a
record of destruction and revival. The gateway, tall, narrow, gloomy,
the Roman arch springing from two vast Etruscan towers, is a contrast
indeed to such strictly architectural designs as the two gates of
Autun. The Roman builder was evidently cramped by the presence of the
older work. In fact the general character of the gateway has more in
common with the endless mediæval gateways and arches which span the
streets of Perugia. Of really better design, though blocked and in a
less favourable position, is the other gateway, the _Porta Martis_,
which now makes part of the substructure of the new piazza, as it once
did of that of the papal fortress. And he who looks curiously will find
out, not indeed any more Roman gateways, but the jambs from which at
least two other arches, either Roman or Etruscan, once sprang.
The walls and gateways of a city can hardly be called its skeleton,
but they are in some sort its shell. And at Perugia the body within
the shell was of no mean kind. Take away every great public building,
church, or palace, and Perugia itself, its mere streets and houses,
would have a great deal to show. With no grand street arcades like
Bologna, few or no striking private palaces like Venice and Verona,
Perugia once had streets after streets--the small and narrow streets
not the least conspicuously--of a thoroughly good and simple style of
street architecture. Arched doors and arched windows are all, and they
are quite enough. Some are round, some are pointed; some are of brick,
some of stone; and those of brick with round arches are decidedly
the best. But never were buildings more mercilessly spoiled than the
Perugian houses. As in England mediæval houses are spoiled to make
bigger windows, so at Perugia they are spoiled to make smaller windows.
Most of the doorways and windows are cut through and blocked, and an
ugly square hole is bored to do the duty of the artistic feature which
is destroyed. No land has more to show in the way of various forms of
beauty than Italy; but when an Italian does go in for ugliness he beats
all other nations in carrying out his object.
Perugia, we need hardly say, is a city of paintings, and it is as
receptacles for paintings that its churches seem mainly to be looked
on. But some of them deserve no small attention on other grounds. At
the two ends of the city are two churches which follow naturally on
the Etruscan and Roman walls and gates. At one end, the Church of St.
Angelo, circular within, sixteen-sided without, forms one of the long
series of round and polygonal churches which stretch from Jerusalem to
Ludlow. And this, clearly a building of Christian Roman times, with
its beautiful marble and granite Corinthian columns, though not one
of the greatest in size, holds no mean place among them. At the other
end, the Abbey of Saint Peter, amid many changes, still keeps two noble
ranges of Ionic columns, the spoils doubtless of some Pagan building
at its first erection in the eleventh century. Nor must the _duomo_
itself be judged of by its outside. The work of a German architect, it
shows a German character in the three bodies of the same height, and
its pillars consequently of amazing height. But at Perugia it is not
churches or palaces or earlier remains which we study, each apart from
other things. Here they all unite to form a whole greater than any one
class alone--Augusta Perusia itself.
The Volumnian Tomb.
The ancient Etruscans have some points of analogy with the modern
Freemasons. This last familiar and yet mysterious body seems to let the
outer world know everything about itself, except what it is. We have
read various books by Freemasons about Freemasonry, about its history,
its constitution, its ritual. On all these points they seem to give us
the fullest particulars: we have only to complain that the historical
part is a little vague, and its evidence a little uncertain. We should
not like rashly to decide whether Freemasonry was already ancient
in the days of Solomon or whether it cannot be traced with certainty
any further back than the eighteenth century. But we know the exact
duties of a Tyler, and we know that at the end of a Masonic prayer we
should answer, not "Amen," but "So mote it be." Still, what Freemasonry
is, how a man becomes a Freemason, or what really distinguishes a
Freemason from other people, are points about which the Masonic books
leave us wholly in the dark. So it is with the Etruscans. We seem to
know everything about them, except who they were. As far as we can
know a people from their arts and monuments, there is no people whom
we seem to know better. We have full and clear monumental evidence as
to the people themselves, as to many points in their ways, thoughts,
and belief. We know how they built, carved, and painted, and their
buildings, sculptures, and paintings, tell us in many points how they
lived, and what was their faith and worship. We have indeed no Etruscan
books; but their language still lives, at least it abides, in endless
inscriptions. But who the Etruscans were, and what their language
was, remain unsolved puzzles. The ordinary scholar is half-amused,
half-provoked, at long lines of alphabetic writing, of which, as far as
the mere letters go, he can read a great deal, but of which, save here
and there a proper name, he cannot understand a word. He knows that one
ingenious man has read it all into good German and another into good
Turkish. He curses every Lucumo whose image he sees for sticking like
a Frenchman to his own tongue. Why could they not write up everything
in three or four languages? How happy he would be if he could light
on a Latin or Greek crib which would give life to the dead letter. For
surely nothing in the world so truly answers the description of a dead
letter, as words after words, most of which it is not hard to spell,
but at the meaning of which we cannot even guess.
It is natural that in the museums of the Etruscan cities the monuments
of a kind whose interest is specially local should form a chief part
of the show. At Florence, at Arezzo, at Cortona, at Perugia, the
collections which each city has brought together make us familiar, if
we are not so already, with much of Etruscan art and Etruscan life. Or
shall we say that what they really make us familiar with is more truly
Etruscan death? Our knowledge of most nations of remote times comes
largely from their tombs and from the contents of their tombs, and this
must specially be the case with a people who, like the Etruscans, have
left no literature behind them. The last distinction makes it hardly
fair to attempt any comparison between the Etruscans and nations like
the Greeks or the Romans, with whose writings we are familiar. But
suppose we had no Greek or Roman literature, suppose we had, as we have
in the case of the Etruscans, no means of learning anything of Greek
or Roman life, except from Greek and Roman monuments. The sepulchral
element would be very important; but it would hardly be so distinctly
dominant as it is in the Etruscan case. At all events, it would not be
so distinctly forced upon the thoughts as it is in the Etruscan case.
Take a Roman sarcophagus: we know it to be sepulchral, but it does
not of itself proclaim its use; there often is no distinct reference
to the deceased person; at all events, his whole figure is not graven
on the top of the chest which contains his bones or his ashes. But in
the Etruscan museums it is the sepulchral figures which draw the eye
and the thoughts towards them far more than anything else, more than
even the chimæra, the bronze lamp, and the painted muse. Of various
sizes, of various degrees of art, they all keep one general likeness.
The departed Lucumo leans on his elbow, his hand holding what the
uninitiated are tempted to take for a dish symbolizing his admittance
to divine banquets in the other world, but which the learned tell us is
designed to catch the tears of those who mourn for him. Sometimes the
_Lucumonissa_--if we may coin so mediæval a form--lies apart, sometimes
along with her husband. On the whole, these Etruscan sculptures seem to
bring us personally nearer to the men of a distant age and a mysterious
race than is done by anything in either Greek or Roman art.
But if these works can teach us thus much when set in rows in a place
where they were never meant to be set up, how much more plainly do they
speak to us when we see them at home, untouched, in the place and in
the state in which the first artist set them! The Volumnian tomb near
Perugia is one of the sights which, when once seen, is not likely to
be forgotten. The caution does not bear on Etruscan art; but it is
well to walk to it from St. Peter's Abbey; going by the railway is a
roundabout business, and the walk downwards commands a glorious and
ever-shifting view over the plain and the mountains, with the towns
of Assisi, Spello, and a third further on--can it be distant Trevi?
Foligno lies down in the plain--each seated on its hill. The tomb is
reached; a small collection from other places has been formed on each
side of the door. This is all very well; but we doubt the wisdom of
putting, as we understood had been done, some things from other places
in the tomb itself. But this is not a moment at which we are inclined
to find fault. We rejoice at finding that what ought to be there is so
happily and wisely left in its place, and are not greatly disturbed
if a few things are put inside which had better have been left
outside. The stone doorway of the lintelled entrance--moved doubtless
only when another member of the house was literally gathered to his
fathers--stands by the side; it was too cumbrous to be kept in its old
place now that the tomb stands ready to be entered by all whose tastes
lead them that way. We go in; the mind goes back to ruder sepulchres
at Uleybury and New Grange, of sepulchres at least as highly finished
in their own way at Mykênê. But those were built, piled up of stones;
here the dwelling of the dead Lucumos is hewn in the native tufa.
The top is not, as we might have looked for, domical; it imitates the
forms of a wooden roof. From it still hang the lamps; on its surface
are carved the heads of the sun-god and of the ever-recurring Medusa.
Nor is the sun-god's own presence utterly shut out from the home of
the dead. It is a strange feeling when a burst of sunshine through the
open door kindles the eyes of the Gorgon with a strange brilliancy, and
lights up the innermost recess, almost as when the sinking rays light
up the apses of Rheims and of St. Mark's. In that innermost recess,
fronting us as we enter, lies on his _kistwaen_--may we transfer
the barbarian name to so delicate a work of art?--the father of the
household gathered around him. He is doubtless very far from being the
first _Felimna_, but the first Felimna whose ashes rest here. The name
of the family can be spelled out easily by those who, without boasting
any special Etruscan lore, are used to the oldest Greek writing from
right to left. Children and grandchildren are grouped around the
patriarch; and here comes what, from a strictly historical view, is the
most speaking thing in the whole tomb. The name of Avle Felimna can be
easily read on a chest on the right hand. On the left hand opposite
to it is another chest which has forsaken the Etruscan type. Here is
no figure, no legend in mysterious characters. We have instead one of
those sepulchral chests which imitate the figure of a house with doors.
The legend, in every-day Latin, announces that the ashes within it
are those of P. Volumnius A. F. That is, the Etruscan Avle Felimna was
the father of the Roman Publius Volumnius. We are in the first century
before our æra, when the old Etruscan life ended after the Social War,
and when the Lucumos of Arretium and Perusia became Roman Clinii and
Volumnii. To an English scholar the change comes home with a special
force. He has an analogy in the change of nomenclature in his own land
under Norman influences in the twelfth century. Publius Volumnius, son
of Avle Felimna, is the exact parallel to Robert the son of Godwin, and
a crowd of others in his days, Norman-named sons of English fathers.
We are not describing at length what may be found described at length
elsewhere. But there is another point in these Etruscan sculptures
which gives them a strange and special interest. This is their
strangely Christian look. The genii are wonderfully like angels; but
so are many Roman figures also, say those in the spandrils of the arch
of Severus. But Roman art has nothing to set alongside of the Lucumo
reclining on his tomb, not exactly like a strictly mediæval recumbent
figure, but very like a tomb of the type not uncommon a little later,
say in the time of Elizabeth and James the First. And in the sculptures
on the chests, wherever, instead of familiar Greek legends, they give
us living pictures of Etruscan life, we often see the sons of the
Rasena clearly receiving a kind of baptism. There is no kind of ancient
works which need a greater effort to believe in their antiquity.
And nowhere do the sculptures look fresher--almost modern--than when
seen in contrast with the walls and roof above and beside them, the
sepulchre hewn in the rock, with the great stone rolled to its door.
Præ-Franciscan Assisi.
There is a certain satisfaction, a satisfaction which has a spice of
mischief in it, in dwelling on some feature in a place which is quite
different from that which makes the place famous with the world in
general. So to do is sometimes needful as a protest against serious
error. When so many members of Parliament showed a few years back,
and when the _Times_ showed only a very little time back, that they
believed that the University of Oxford was founded by somebody--Alfred
will do as well as anybody else--and that the city of Oxford somehow
grew up around the University, it became, and it remains, a duty to
historic truth to point out the importance of Oxford, geographical and
therefore political and military, for some ages before the University
was heard of. When the _Times_ thought that Oxford was left to the
scholars, because "thanes and barons" did not think it worth struggling
for, the _Times_ clearly did not know that schools grew up at Oxford
then, just as schools have grown up at Manchester since, because
Oxford was already, according to the standard of the time, a great,
flourishing, and central town, and therefore fittingly chosen as a seat
of councils and parliaments. Here there is real error to fight against;
in other cases there is simply a kind of pleasure in pointing out that,
while the received object of attraction in a place is often perfectly
worthy of its fame, the place contains other, and often older, objects
which are worthy of some measure of fame also. It is quite possible
that some people may think that the town of Assisi grew up round the
church and monastery of Saint Francis. If anyone does think so, the
error is of exactly the same kind as the error of thinking that the
city of Oxford grew up around the University. It is Saint Francis
and his church which have made Assisi a place of world-wide fame and
world-wide pilgrimage, and Saint Francis and his church are fully
worthy of their fame. Yet Assisi had been a city of men for ages on
ages before Saint Francis was born, and Assisi would still be a place
well worthy of a visit, though Saint Francis had never been born, and
though his church had therefore never been built. It is perhaps a light
matter that Assisi had eminent citizens besides Saint Francis and very
unlike Saint Francis, that it was the birthplace of Propertius before
him and of Metastasio after him. But before Assisi, as the birthplace
of the seraphic doctor, had earned a right to be itself called
"seraphica civitas," before one of its later churches came to rank with
the patriarchal basilicas of Rome, Assisi had, as a Roman and an early
mediæval city, covered its soil with monuments of which not a few still
exist and which are well worthy of study. And in one way they have a
kind of connexion with Saint Francis which his own church has not. The
saint never saw his own monument; it would have vexed his soul could
he have known that such a monument was to be. But in his youth he saw,
and doubtless mused, as on the bleak mountain of Subasio and the yellow
stream of Chiaschio, so also on the campanile and apse of the cathedral
church of St. Rufino and on the columns of the converted temple of the
Great Twin Brethren.
Assisi is one of the hill-cities; but the hill-cities supply endless
varieties among themselves. Assisi does not, like the others which
we have spoken of, occupy a hill which is wholly its own; the hill on
which it stands, though very distinct, is still only a spur of a huge
mountain. As at Mykênê, while the akropolis is high enough, there is
something far higher rising immediately above it. And the akropolis
of Assisi is a mere fortress; even if it was the primitive place of
shelter, it cannot have been inhabited for many ages. The _duomo_
stands, very far certainly from the top of the hill, but at the top
of the really inhabited city with its continuous streets, and that is
no small height from the lowest line of them. Above the church are the
remains of the theatre, of the amphitheatre; the distant tower beyond
it, and soaring over all, the fortress of Rocco Grande with no dwelling
of man near it, or for some way below it. To go behind Assisi is almost
more needful than in the case of any of the other hill-cities, not
only for the mediæval walls, for the slight traces which seem to mark
an outer and earlier wall; but yet more for the view over the narrow
valley, the bleak hills scattered with houses, the winding river at
their feet, soon to become yet more winding in the plain, and the
glimpse far away of Perugia on its hill. But Assisi has a spot only
less wild within the city walls, the ground namely over which we climb
from the inhabited streets to the fortress. So it is at Cortona; but
there the presence of the church and monastery of St. Margaret makes
all the difference. The general view of Assisi, as seen from below,
gives us the church of Saint Francis with the great arched substructure
to the left, the mountain to the right; between them is a hill with a
city running along it at about half its height, sending up a forest of
bell-towers, some really good in themselves, all joining in the general
effect. Above all this is the hill-top, partly grassy, partly rocky,
crowned by the towers of the fortress which looks down on all, except
the steep of the mountain itself.
Of particular objects older than the church of Saint Francis, a
restriction which of course also cuts out the church of his friend,
Saint Clara, there can be no doubt that the monument of greatest
interest is the temple in the forum--now _Piazza grande_--with its
Corinthian columns strangely hemmed in by a house on one side and on
the other by the bell-tower which was added when the temple was turned
into a church. But it is surely not, as it is locally called, a temple
of Minerva, but rather of Castor and Pollux. Not the least interesting
part of its belongings lies below ground; for the level of the forum at
Assisi has risen as though it had been at Rome or at Trier. The temple
must have risen on a bold flight of steps, of which some of the upper
ones still remain. In front of it, below the steps, was a great altar,
with the drains for the blood of the victims, just as we see them on
the Athenian akropolis. Such drains always bring to our mind those
comments of Dean Stanley on this repulsive feature of pagan and ancient
Jewish worship, which has passed away alike from the church, from the
synagogue, and from the mosque, save only at Mecca. In front again is
the dedicatory inscription with the name of the founder of the temple,
and the record of the dedication-feast which he made to the magistrates
and people. His name can doubtless be turned to in Mommsen's great
collection; we are not sure that in the underground gloom we took it
down quite correctly, and it is better not to be wrong. Anyhow the
dedication is not to Minerva but to the twin heroes. A great number
of inscriptions are built up in the wall of the church. As usual,
there are more freedmen than sons; and among the freedmen the one best
worth notice is Publius Decimius Eros Merula, physician, surgeon, and
oculist, who bought his freedom for so much, his magistracy as one of
the _Sexviri_ for so much, who spent so much on mending the roads,
and left so much behind him. Here the state of things is vividly
brought home to us in which a man could buy, not only his cook and his
coachman, but also his architect and his medical adviser. And we are
set thinking on the one hand how great must be the physical infusion of
foreign blood, Greek and barbarian, in the actual people of Italy, and
on the other hand how thoroughly and speedily all such foreign elements
were practically Romanized. The son of the slave-born magistrate of
Assisi would look on himself, and be looked on by others, as no less
good a Roman than any Fabius or Cornelius who might still linger on.
The temple above ground and its appurtenances underground are the most
memorable things in Præ-Franciscan Assisi; but there are other things
besides, both Roman and mediæval. The lower church of _Sta. Maria
Maggiore_, close by the bishop's palace, and which is said to have been
the original cathedral, is a Romanesque building of rather a German
look, with masses of wall instead of columns. The thought comes into
the mind that it is the _cella_ of a temple with arches cut through
its walls. But it hardly can be; the arrangement seems to be a local
fashion; it is found also in the later and larger church of St. Peter
hard by. Besides, at _Sta. Maria Maggiore_ there are the clear remains
of a Roman building, seemingly a house, with columns and mosaic floors,
underneath the present church of St. Rufino. The later cathedral has
been sadly disfigured within; but it keeps its apse of the twelfth
century, its west front of the thirteenth, using up older sculptures,
and it has the best bell-tower in Assisi. And below it remains the
crypt of the older church of 1028, with ancient Ionic columns used up,
and Corinthian capitals imitated as they might be in 1028. Just above
are scanty remains of the theatre; above again are still scantier
remains of the amphitheatre; but its shape is impressed on the
surrounding buildings, just as the four arms of the Roman _chester_
abide unchanged in many an English town where every actual house is
modern. A piece of Roman wall, and a wide arch in the _Via San Paolo_
leading out of the forum, complete the remains of ancient Assisi above
ground. It is doubtless altogether against rule, but among so many
memorials of earlier gods and earlier saints, it is quite possible, in
climbing the steep and narrow streets of Assisi, to forget for a while
both Saint Francis and Saint Clara.
Spello.
The Umbrian town which takes care to blazon over one of its many
gates its full description as "Ispello Colonia Giulia, Citta Flavia
Costante," is hardly of any great fame, either as ancient Hispellum
or as modern Spello. It must have some visitors, drawn thither most
likely by two or three pictures by famous masters which remain in
one of its churches. Somebody must come to see them, or their keepers
would not have learned the common, but shabby, trick of keeping them
covered, in hopes of earning a _lira_ by uncovering them. May we make
the confession that we became aware--or, to speak more delicately,
that we were reminded--of the existence of the colony at once Julian
and Flavian by the description in the generally excellent German
guide-book of Gsell-fels? And may we further add that, though we feel
thoroughly thankful to its author for sending us to Spello at all,
yet his description is not quite so orderly as is usual with him, and
that, though he is perfectly accurate in his enumeration of the Roman
monuments, yet his account led us to expect to find them in a more
perfect state than they actually are? On the whole, except for the
wonderful prospect which Spello shares with Perugia and Assisi, we
should hardly send anybody to Spello except a very zealous antiquary;
but a very zealous antiquary we certainly should send thither. There is
no one object of first-rate importance of any date in the place; but
there are the remains of a crowd of objects which have been of some
importance. There is also the site; there is the general look of the
place, which is akin to that of the other hill-towns, but which, as
Spello is the smallest and least frequented of the group, is there less
untouched and modernized in any way than even at Cortona or Assisi.
We except of course the fashion of mercilessly spoiling the mediæval
houses which has gone on as merrily at Spello as at Perugia and Assisi.
But that is no fashion of yesterday. The general old-world air, strong
in some parts of Perugia, stronger at Assisi, is strongest of all at
Spello, while at Spello there seems less eagerness than at Cortona to
seize the stranger and make a prey of him. The look-out is perhaps the
finest of all; it takes in as prominent objects sharp-peaked mountains
and ranges deep with snow, which barely come into the other views,
and the long series of hill-towns is pleasantly broken by the towers
and cupolas of Foligno in the plain. The mediæval walls and towers,
at all events on the south-eastern side, form a line which is not
easily surpassed; the walk outside Spello, though it lacks both the
antiquity and the wildness of the walk outside Cortona, outdoes it in
mere picturesque effect. The particular objects at Spello are perhaps
a little disappointing: Spello itself, as a whole, is certainly not
disappointing.
At Spello we have reached an Italian town which is not a bishop's see;
even in Italy it was not likely to be so, with Assisi so close on one
hand and Foligno on the other. There is therefore no _duomo_, nor is
there any other church of much architectural importance. The best are
two small forsaken Romanesque churches outside the walls, one on each
side of the town. One of them, that of St. Claudius, forms one building
of a group by which we pass on the road from Assisi to Spello, a group
lying in the plain, with Spello on its height rising above them. There
is a large modern villa which seems to be built on Roman foundations;
by its side lies the little Romanesque church; nearly opposite is the
amphitheatre of Hispellum, keeping some fragments of its walls and with
its marked shape deeply impressed on the ground. Here the amphitheatre
is down in the plain; at Assisi it stands in the higher part of the
present city; in both it lies, according to rule, outside the original
Roman enclosure. It shows the passionate love for these sports wherever
the influence of Rome spread, that two amphitheatres could be needed
with so small a distance between them as that which parts Assisi from
Spello. More nearly opposite to the villa are other Roman fragments
which are said to have been part of a theatre; but the form of the
building is certainly not so clearly stamped on the ground as that of
its bloodier neighbour. Indeed we are in a region of Roman remains;
other fragments lie by the roadside between Assisi and Spello, and when
we reach the latter town, we find that, next to its general effect, it
is its Roman remains which form its chief attraction.
As we draw near from Assisi, the Julian colony of Hispellum, the Flavia
Constans of a later day, is becomingly entered by a Roman gateway which
bears the name of Porta Consolare. But on the road from Foligno the
consular gate is reached only through a mediæval one, which bears, as
we have said, all the names of the town prominently set forth for the
stranger's benefit. The consular gate stands at the bottom of the hill:
for Spello thoroughly occupies the whole of its hill; there is plenty
of climbing to be done in its streets; but it has all to be done in
continuous streets within the town walls. The consular gate has been
patched in later times; but the Roman arch is perfect. It is a single
simple arch, plain enough, and of no great height, a marked contrast to
the lofty arch of Perugia. Another gateway on the side towards Assisi,
known as _Porta Veneris_, must have been a far more elaborate design.
But the whole is imperfect and broken down; one arch of the double
entrance is blocked, and the other is supplanted by a later arch. Yet
there is a good effect about the whole, owing to the bold polygonal
towers of later date which flank the Roman gateway. Another gateway,
higher up on the same side, is cut down to the mere stones of an arch
hanging in the air. This is locally known as the _arco di trionfo_. Of
the _arco di Augusto_ within the town, said to be a triumphal arch of
Macrinus, there is nothing left but a single jamb. In short the Roman
remains of Hispellum, though considerable in number, are slight and
fragmentary in actual extent. Yet there is a pleasure in tracing them
out. Conceive them perfect, and Hispellum would come near to rival
Verona, not as it was, but as it is. But, after all, there is a certain
perverse turn of thought which is better pleased with tracing out what
has been than with simply admiring what still is. Spello will make the
end of a mid-Italian series seen after the great snow-tide to match
the mid-French series seen before it. Everything cannot be seen in one
journey. All roads lead to Rome; but thirty-seven days are enough to
spend on any one of them. From the colony of Hispellum then we must
hurry on to _aurea Roma_ herself, even though we have to rush by many a
town and fortress on its hill-top, by Trevi and Spoleto, and, proudest
of all, by
... that grey crag where, girt with towers,
The fortress of Nequinum lowers
O'er the pale waves of Nar.
Marry, Narni is somewhat; but Rome is more. Rome, too, at each visit,
presents fresh objects, old and new. The oldest and the newest seem to
have come together, when one set of placards on the wall invites the
Roman people to meet on the Capitol, and when the Quæstor Bacchus--it
is taking a liberty with a living man and magistrate, but we cannot
help Latinizing the _Questore Bacco_--puts out another set of placards
to forbid the meeting. We are inclined to turn to others among
our memories, to others among our lays. We might almost look for a
secession; we might almost expect to see once more
... the tents which in old time whitened the Sacred Hill.
But those who were forbidden to meet on the Capitol did not secede
even to the Aventine; the secession was done within doors, in the _Sala
Dante_.
Veii.
The student of what M. Ampère calls "L'Histoire Romaine à Rome" must
take care not to confine his studies to Rome only. The local history
of Rome--and the local history of Rome is no small part of the
œcumenical history--is not fully understood unless we fully take in
the history and position of the elder sites among which Rome arose.
With Rome we must compare and contrast the cities of her enemies and
her allies, the cities which she swept away, the cities which she made
part of herself, the cities which simply withered away before her. And
first on the list may well come the city which was before all others
the rival of Rome, and where she did indeed sweep with the besom of
destruction. A short journey from the Flaminian Gate, a journey through
a country which might almost pass for a border shire of England, with
the heights of Wales in the distance, brings us to a city which has
utterly perished, where no permanent human dwelling-place is left
within the ancient circuit. In a basin, as it were, unseen until we
are close beneath or above it, hedged in by surrounding hills as by
a rampart, stands all that is left of the first great rival of Rome,
an inland Carthage on the soil of Etruria. There once was Veii, the
first great conquest of Rome, the Italian Troy, round whose ten years'
siege wonders have gathered almost as round the Achaian warfare by the
Hellespont. There are no monuments of the departed life of Veii such
as are left of not a few cities which have passed out of the list of
living things no less utterly. Of the greatest city of southern Etruria
nothing remains beyond a site which can never be wiped out but by some
convulsion of nature, a few scraps to show that man once dwelled there,
and tombs not a few to show that those who dwelled there belonged to a
race with whom death counted for more than life.
A sight of the spot which once was Veii makes us better understand
some points in early Italian history. We see why Veii was the rival
of Rome, and why she was the unsuccessful rival of Rome. Above all,
we understand better than anywhere else how deep must have been the
hatred with which the old-established cities of Italy must have looked
on the upstart settlement by the Tiber, which grew up to so strange
a greatness and threatened to devour them one by one. Veii, the
great border city of Etruria, was the only one among Rome's immediate
neighbours which could contend with her on equal terms. Elsewhere, in
her early history, Rome, as a single city, is of equal weight in peace
or war with whole confederations.
The happy position of certain hills by the Tiber had enabled one lucky
group of Latin settlements to coalesce into a single city as great
as all the others put together. But at Veii we see the marks of what
clearly was a great city, a city fully equal in extent to Rome. And
when the ancient writers tell us that, in riches and splendour, in the
character of its public and private buildings, Veii far surpassed Rome,
it is only what we should expect from a great and ancient Etruscan city
which had entered on the stage of decline when Rome was entering on the
stage of youthful greatness. There was little fear of Veii overthrowing
Rome; but both sides must have felt that a day would come when Rome
would be very likely to overthrow Veii. Two cities so great and so near
together could not go on together. Two cities, very great according
to the standard of those times, considerable according even to a
modern standard, cities of nations differing in blood, language, and
everything else which can keep nations asunder, stood so near that the
modern inquirer can drive from one to the other, spend several hours
on its site, and drive back again, between an ordinary breakfast and
dinner. Rivalry and bitter hatred were unavoidable. Veii must have felt
all the deadly grief of being outstripped by a younger rival, while
Rome must have felt that Veii was the great hindrance to any advance of
her dominion on the right bank of her own river. No form of alliance,
confederation, or dependence was possible; a death struggle must come
sooner or later between the old Etruscan and the newer Latin city.
The site of Veii is that of a great city, a strong city, but not a city
made, like Rome, for rule. We go far and wide, and we find nothing
like the "great group of village communities by the Tiber." Veii is
not a group, and she has no Tiber. The city stood high on the rocks,
yet it can hardly be called a hill-city. A peninsular site rises above
the steep and craggy banks of two small streams which make up the
fateful Cremera; but the peninsula itself is nearly a table-land, a
table-land surrounded by hills. The stream supplied the walls with an
admirable natural fosse, and that was all. The vast space enclosed by
the walls makes us naturally ask whether the city could have been laid
out on so great a scale from the beginning. We may believe that, as
in so many cases, the _arx_, a peninsula within a peninsula, was the
original city, and that the rest was taken in afterwards. But, if so,
it would seem as if it must have been taken in at a blow, as if Veii
took a single leap from littleness to greatness, unlike the gradual
growth of Rome or Syracuse. At all events, there is the undoubted
extent of a great city, a city clearly of an earlier type than Rome, a
city which may well have reached its present extent while Rome had not
spread beyond the Palatine. Such a site marks a great advance on the
occupation of inaccessible hill-tops; but Veii itself must have seemed
an old-world city in the eyes of those who had the highway of the Tiber
below their walls.
It is strange to step out the traces of a city whose position and
extent are so unmistakably marked, but of which nothing is left which
can be called a building, or even a ruin. The most memorable work in
the circuit of Veii is a work not of building but of boring--the Ponte
Sodo, hewn in the rock for the better passage of the guardian stream.
Besides these, some small fragments of the Etruscan wall, the signs
of a double gate, some masonry of the small Roman tower which in after
times arose within the forsaken walls, are pretty well all that remains
of the life of Veii. The remains of its death are more plentiful.
There is the Roman _columbarium_, within the Etruscan site; there
are the Etruscan tombs bored deep in all the surrounding hills. There
is, above all, the famous painted tomb, shielding no such sculptures
and inscriptions as those on which we gaze in the great Volumnian
sepulchre, but within which one lucky eye was privileged for a moment
to see the Lucumo himself, as he crumbled away at the entrance of the
unaccustomed air. A scrap or two of his harness is there still; the
arms are there; the strange-shaped beasts are there, in their primitive
form and colouring; the guardian lions keep the door; but we have no
written ænigma even to guess at. We can only feel our way to a date by
marking the imperfect attempt at an arch, an earlier and ruder stage
by far than the roof of Rome's _Tullianum_ or its fellow at Tusculum.
In the Volumnian tomb the main interest comes from the fact that it
belongs to the very latest Etruscan times, to the transition from
Etruscan to Roman life. In the Veientine tomb the main interest comes
from the fact that it cannot be later than an early stage in Roman
history, and that it may be as much earlier as we choose to think
it. It is the same with all the little that is left of Veii. We know
that, except the palpable remains of the Roman _municipium_, nothing
can be later than B.C. 396, and that anything may be vastly earlier.
In the history of Italy, the date when Rome doubled her territory by
conquering a city a dozen miles from her gates passes for an early
stage. The life of Rome is still before her. In Greece at the same
date, the greatness of Athens, the truest greatness of Sparta, is past;
the only fresh life that is to come is that of ephemeral Thebes and
half-Hellenic Macedonia.
We turn from Veii, feeling how thoroughly true in its main outline, how
utterly untrustworthy in its detail, is what passes for early Roman
history. The legend of Veii counts for less than the legend of Troy,
inasmuch as invention and combination are hardly genuine legend at all.
But that Veii was and is not, that her fall was the rising point in
Rome's destiny, that it was needful for the course of things which has
stretched from that day to this that Veii should cease to be--all this
we understand ten times the better when we turn from the living tale of
Livy to the yet more living witness of the forsaken site.
Fidenæ.
From the villa of the White Hens we looked across to the _arx_ of
Fidenæ as one of the main points in the view. The hill of Castel
Giubeleo seems planted there by the hand of nature as a border-defence
of Latium against Etruscan attacks. Yet both strong sites and other
things sometimes fail to discharge the exact functions which seem to
have been laid upon them by the hand of nature. The post which seems
designed as the Latin bulwark against the Etruscan does, as a matter
of fact, play its chief part in history in the character of an Etruscan
outpost on Latin soil. Whether Fidenæ was really such an outpost in the
strict sense, whether it was a remnant of the wider Etruscan dominion
of the days when the Tiber was not a border-stream, or whether it was
a Latin town which, from whatever cause, chose to throw itself on the
Etruscan side, it is not only as the enemy of Rome, but as the ally
of Veii, that Fidenæ made itself memorable. If we accept the received
story, the war which brought about the ruin of Fidenæ was caused
because its people slew the envoys of Rome in obedience to the hasty,
perhaps misinterpreted, words of a Veientine king. The king who thus
took so little heed of the law of nations of course paid his forfeit,
and the Royal spoils won from Lars Tolumnius by Aulus Cornelius Cossus
formed one of the most cherished relics of the early days of Rome. We
may believe the details of the story or not; but the spoils at least
were real, if the witness of Augustus Cæsar is to be believed.
Each of the roads which lead out of Rome--since the railway came,
there is practically only one way which leads into Rome--has its own
special interest, and the Salarian way is certainly not inferior to
the Cassian or the Flaminian. We leave the city by that which in
its material fabric is the most modern, which in its associations
is perhaps the most historic, of all the gates of Rome. The Salarian
gate in the wall of Aurelian may be looked at as in some sort drawing
to itself the memories of the neighbouring Colline gate in the wall
of Servius. He who fought before the Colline gate, he who entered by
the Colline gate, could hardly fail to march over the ground where in
the new system of defence the Salarian gate was to arise. The Colline
gate on the high ground of the Quirinal hill was the weakest point of
Rome; it was therefore specially strengthened in the Servian line of
defence. It was the point by which most of the early invaders of Rome
marched in or strove to march in. There the revolted troops entered to
put down the tyranny of the decemvirs; there the Gauls came in after
the slaughter of the Allia; to that gate Hannibal drew near, and those
who did not understand Hannibal said that he hurled his spear over it.
Before the Colline gate Rome had for the last time to struggle for the
dominion of Italy in the fight between Sulla and Pontius Telesinus.
And when the Colline gate had given way to the Salarian, it was at the
new entrance to Rome that the enemy came in whose coming declared that
her political dominion over the world had ceased, but that her moral
dominion was stronger than ever. "At midnight the Salarian gate was
silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous
sound of the Gothic trumpet." And if these gates were a centre of
fighting, they were also, in a strange and special way, a centre of
burying. Along this road, as along others, we mark the broken tombs
here and there, two pre-eminently just outside the present gate; but
this quarter supplies one strange contrast in the matter of burials
which is not to be found elsewhere. Outside the Colline gate was the
living tomb of unchaste vestals; not far beyond the Salarian we come
to the Christian _cœmeterium Priscillae_. We go on; we descend the
hill, the northern slope of the Quirinal, and find ourselves in the
alluvial ground of Tiber and Anio. We have now come near to the meeting
of the streams; Anio is spanned by a bridge which at first sight might
seem to be wholly a thing of yesterday, but which in truth has lived
and gone through much from the earliest times to the latest. Broken
down and rebuilt over and over again, from the wars of Narses to those
of Garibaldi, its main arch is indeed of the newest workmanship; but
if we go down to the banks we see the smaller side arches, which must
have been ancient when they were crossed by Hannibal, perhaps hardly
new when they were crossed by Cossus. A few steps further, and we come
to another record of change; an ancient tomb has grown into a mediæval
tower; the mediæval tower now proclaims itself as an "osteria"; but
we feel hardly tempted to try its powers of entertainment. We are now
fairly in the low ground; the hills of Rome lie behind us; the hills
beyond Tiber which skirt the Flaminian way rise to our left; the hills
of Fidenæ are before us. To the right lies the ground between the
Salarian and the Nomentane road where Phaon had his villa and where his
master Nero came by his end. Presently the road, and its companion the
railway, pass close under hills to the right and, at one point, with
Tiber close by them to the left. A little further on they pass between
hills on either side, a loftier and isolated height to the left, a
range of lower hills, broken by more than one stream and its valley to
the right. We are in the heart of forsaken Fidenæ, in the pass which
divides its soaring akropolis by the river from the body of the city on
the inland side.
The _arx_ of Fidenæ, now the hill of Castel Giubeleo, is not, indeed,
a height like that of Tusculum or that of Cortona; but it comes nearer
to them than anything to be found at Veii or Rome. A bend of the river
leaves a rich alluvial flat between its bank and a hill which on that
side rises steeply enough. Here the men of the faithless Latin city
could look out to their friends beyond the river, over the mouth of
the small but famous stream of Cremera, over the hills on either side,
the Fabian outpost, the future home of Livia, far away, if not to Veii
itself, yet to points further off than Veii. The view from the _arx_
of Fidenæ and the view from the hill of Livia complete one another.
Inland we see Rome on its hills; but we must again remark that when
Fidenæ was, Rome sent up no lofty towers and cupolas to mark its place
against the horizon. At our feet we see the lower hills occupied by the
rest of the town, surely a modern settlement compared with the original
_arx_. We go over its site and round its site, we mark its tombs, its
_cloaca_, the place where its gates once were. The walk in the valley
by the brook between the lower hill of Fidenæ and the hill which lies
between Fidenæ and Rome brings the features of the place well out. It
was no small gain for Veii to have such a confederate on Latin ground
as the strong post which we are compassing. We can well understand
why Rome on the first opportunity swept Fidenæ utterly away, while the
existence of Veii had to be endured for a generation longer.
As at Veii, so at Fidenæ, the traces of the living are gone--yet more
utterly at Fidenæ than at Veii. The traces of the dead are far more
plentiful, though Fidenæ has nothing to set against the painted tomb of
Veii. The city, doubtless, perished after the war in which Cossus won
the spoils of Tolumnius. Strabo speaks of Fidenæ as a deserted place,
the possession of a single man. Yet the _potestas_ of Fidenæ--perhaps
its dictator--may have lingered on, as such dignitaries have lingered
on in the boroughs once threatened by Sir Charles Dilke.
Antemnæ.