ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS
[Illustration:
_Group from the Crucifixion
San Vivaldo_
]
ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS
BY
EDITH WHARTON
ILLUSTRATED BY E. C. PEIXOTTO
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
MCMV
Copyright, 1905, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_Published April, 1905_
THE DE VINNE PRESS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
AN ALPINE POSTING-INN 1
A MIDSUMMER WEEK’S DREAM 15
THE SANCTUARIES OF THE PENNINE ALPS 39
WHAT THE HERMITS SAW 63
A TUSCAN SHRINE 83
SUB UMBRA LILIORUM 107
MARCH IN ITALY 125
PICTURESQUE MILAN 153
ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS 171
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GROUP FROM THE CRUCIFIXION--SAN VIVALDO _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
BY THE PORT OF LOVERE 20
THE MUNICIPIO--BRESCIA 28
CHIESA DEI MIRACOLI--BRESCIA 36
THE INNER QUADRANGLE AT OROPA 46
THE MAIN COURT OF THE SACRO MONTE AT VARALLO 56
A CHARACTERISTIC STREET 110
THE “LITTLE PALACE OF THE GARDEN” 116
THE WORN RED LIONS OF THE ANCIENT PORCH 120
AN ITALIAN SKY IN MARCH 140
COURT OF THE PALAZZO MARINO, NOW THE MUNICIPIO 156
THE TOWER OF S. STEFANO 162
THE CHURCH AT SARONNO 168
AN ALPINE POSTING-INN
To the mind curious in contrasts--surely one of the chief pleasures of
travel--there can be no better preparation for a descent into Italy
than a sojourn among the upper Swiss valleys. To pass from the region
of the obviously picturesque--the country contrived, it would seem, for
the delectation of the _cœur à poésie facile_--to that sophisticated
landscape where the face of nature seems moulded by the passions and
imaginings of man, is one of the most suggestive transitions in the
rapidly diminishing range of such experiences.
Nowhere is this contrast more acutely felt than in one of the upper
Grisons villages. The anecdotic Switzerland of the lakes is too
remote from Italy, geographically and morally, to evoke a comparison.
The toy chalet, with its air of self-conscious neatness, making one
feel that if one lifted the roof it would disclose a row of tapes
and scissors, or the shining cylinders of a musical box, suggests
cabinet-work rather than architecture; the swept and garnished streets,
the precise gardens, the subjugated vines, present the image of an
old maid’s paradise that would be thrown into hopeless disarray by
the introduction of anything so irregular as a work of art. In the
Grisons, however, where only a bald grey pass divides one from Italy,
its influence is felt, in a negative sense, in the very untidiness of
the streets, the rank growth of weeds along the base of rough glaring
walls, the drone of flies about candidly-exposed manure-heaps. More
agreeably, the same influence shows itself in the rude old centaur-like
houses, with their wrought-iron window-grilles and stone escutcheons
surmounting the odorous darkness of a stable. These are the houses
of people conscious of Italy, who have transplanted to their bleak
heights, either from poverty of invention, or an impulse as sentimental
as our modern habit of “collecting,” the thick walls, the small
windows, the jutting eaves of dwellings designed under a sultry sky.
So vivid is the reminiscence that one almost expects to see a cypress
leaning against the bruised-peach-coloured walls of the village
_douane_; but it is just here that the contrast accentuates itself.
The cypress, with all it stands for, is missing.
It is not easy, in the height of the Swiss season, to light on a nook
neglected by the tourist; but at Splügen he still sweeps by in a cloud
of diligence dust, or pauses only to gulp a flask of Paradiso and a
rosy trout from the Suretta lakes. One’s enjoyment of the place is
thus enhanced by the pleasing spectacle of the misguided hundreds who
pass it by, and from the vantage of the solitary meadows above the
village one may watch the throngs descending on Thusis or Chiavenna
with something of the satisfaction that mediæval schoolmen believed to
be the portion of angels looking down upon the damned. Splügen abounds
in such points of observation. On all sides one may climb from the
alder-fringed shores of the Rhine, through larch-thickets tremulous
with the leap of water, to grassy levels far above, whence the valley
is seen lengthening southward to a great concourse of peaks. In the
morning these upper meadows are hot and bright, and one is glad of the
red-aisled pines and the onyx-coloured torrents cooling the dusk; but
toward sunset, when the shadows make the slopes of turf look like an
expanse of tumbled velvet, it is pleasant to pace the open ledges,
watching the sun recede from the valley, where mowers are still
sweeping the grass into long curved lines like ridges of the sea, while
the pine-woods on the eastern slopes grow black and the upper snows
fade to the colour of cold ashes.
The landscape is simple, spacious and serene. The fields suggest the
tranquil rumination of generations of cattle, the woods offer cool
security to sylvan life, the mountains present blunt weather-beaten
surfaces rather than the subtle contours, wrinkled as by meditation, of
the Italian Alps. One feels that it is a scene in which _nothing has
ever happened_; the haunting adjective is that which Whitman applies to
the American landscape--“the large _unconscious_ scenery of my native
land.”
Switzerland is like a dinner served in the old-fashioned way, with
all the dishes put on the table at once: every valley has its flowery
mead, its “horrid” gorge, its chamois-haunted peaks, its wood and
water-fall. In Italy, the effects are brought on in courses, and
memory is thus able to differentiate the landscapes, even without the
help of that touch of human individuality to which, after all, the
best Italian scenery is but a setting. At Splügen, as in most Swiss
landscapes, the human interest--the evidences of man’s presence--are
an interruption rather than a climax. The village of Splügen, huddled
on a ledge above the Rhine, sheepishly turns the backs of its houses
on the view, as though conscious of making a poor show compared to
the tremendous performance of nature. Between these houses, set at
unconsidered angles, like boxes hastily piled on a shelf, cobble-stone
streets ramble up the hill; but after a few yards they lapse into
mountain paths, and the pastures stoop unabashed to the back doors of
the village. Agriculture seems, in fact, the little town’s excuse for
being. The whole of Splügen, in midsummer, is as one arm at the end of
a scythe. All day long the lines of stooping figures--men, women and
children, grandfathers and industrious babes--spread themselves over
the hill-sides in an ever-widening radius, interminably cutting, raking
and stacking the grass. The lower slopes are first laid bare; then, to
the sheer upper zone of pines, the long grass, thick with larkspur,
mountain pink and orchis, gradually recedes before the rising tide of
mowers. Even in the graveyard of the high-perched church, the scythes
swing between mounds overgrown with campanulas and martagon lilies;
so that one may fancy the dust of generations of thrifty villagers
enriching the harvests of posterity.
This, indeed, is the only destiny one can imagine for them. The past
of such a place must have been as bucolic as its present: the mediæval
keep, crumbling on its wooded spur above the Rhine, was surely perched
there that the lords of the valley might have an eye to the grazing
cattle and command the manœuvres of the mowers. The noble Georgiis who
lived in the escutcheoned houses of Splügen, and now lie under such
a wealth of quarterings in the church and graveyard, must have been
experts in fertilizers and stock-raising; nor can one figure, even for
the seventeenth-century mercenary of the name, whose epitaph declares
him to have been “captain of his Spanish Majesty’s cohorts,” emotions
more poignant, when he came home from the wars, than that evoked by the
tinkle of cow-bells in the pasture, and the vision of a table groaning
with smoked beef and cyclopean cheeses.
So completely are the peasants in the fields a part of the soil they
cultivate, that during the day one may be said to have the whole
of Splügen to one’s self, from the topmost peaks to the deserted
high-road. In the evening the scene changes; and the transformation is
not unintentionally described in theatrical terms, since the square
which, after sunset, becomes the centre of life in Splügen, has an
absurd resemblance to a stage-setting. One side of this square is
bounded by the long weather-beaten front of the posting-inn--but the
inn deserves a parenthesis. Built long ago, and then abandoned, so the
village tradition runs, by a “great Italian family,” its exterior shows
the thick walls, projecting eaves and oval attic openings of an old
Tuscan house; while within, a monastic ramification of stone-vaulted
corridors leads to rooms ceiled and panelled with sixteenth-century
woodwork. The stone terrace before this impressive dwelling forms the
proscenium where, after dinner, the spectators assemble. To the right
of the square stands the pale pink “Post and Telegraph Bureau.” Beyond,
closing in the right wing at a stage-angle, is a mysterious yellowish
house with an arched entrance. Facing these, on the left, are the
_dépendance_ of the inn and the custom-house; in the left background,
the village street is seen winding down, between houses that look
like “studies” in old-fashioned drawing-books (with the cracks in
the plaster done in very black lead), to the bridge across the Rhine
and the first loops of the post-road over the Splügen pass. Opposite
the inn is the obligatory village fountain, the rallying-point of
the chorus; beneath a stone parapet flows the torrent which acts as
an invisible orchestra; and beyond the parapet, snow peaks fill the
background of the stage.
Dinner over, the eager spectators, hastening to the terrace (with
a glimpse, as they pass the vaulted kitchen, of the Italian _chef_
oiling his bicycle amid the débris of an admirable meal), find active
preparations afoot for the event of the evening--the arrival of the
diligences. Already the orchestra is tuning its instruments, and the
chorus, recruited from the hay-fields, are gathering in the wings. A
dozen of them straggle in and squat on the jutting stone basement of
the post-office; others hang picturesquely about the fountain, or hover
up the steep street, awaiting the prompter’s call. Presently some of
the subordinate characters stroll across the stage: the owner of the
saw-mill on the Rhine, a tall man in homespun, deferentially saluted by
the chorus; two personages in black coats, with walking-sticks, who
always appear together, and have the air of being joint syndics of the
village; a gentleman of leisure, in a white cap with a visor, smoking
a long Italian cigar and attended by an inquisitive Pomeranian dog; a
citizen in white socks and carpet slippers, giving his arm to his wife,
and preceded by a Bewickian little boy with a green butterfly-box over
his shoulder; the gold-braided custom-house officer hurrying up rather
late for his cue; two or three local ladies in sunburnt millinery and
spectacles, who drop in to see the postmistress; and a showy young man,
with the look of having seen life at Chur or Bellinzona, who emerges
from the post-office conspicuously reading a letter, to the undisguised
interest of the chorus, the ladies and the Pomeranian. As these figures
pass and repass in a kind of social silence, they suggest the leisurely
opening of some play composed before the unities were abolished, and
peopled by types with generic names--the Innkeeper, the Postmistress,
the Syndic--some comedy of Goldoni’s, perhaps, but void even of
Goldoni’s simple malice.
Meanwhile the porter has lit the oil-lanterns hanging by a chain over
the door of the inn; a celestial hand has performed a similar office
for the evening star above the peaks; and through the hush that has
settled on the square comes a distant sound of bells.... Instantly
the action begins; the innkeeper appears, supported by the porter
and the waiter; a wave of acclamation runs through the chorus; the
Pomeranian trots down the road; and presently the fagged leaders
of the Thusis diligence turn their heads round the corner of the
square. The preposterous yellow coach--a landau attached to a glass
“clarence”--crosses the cobble-paved stage, swinging round with a grand
curve to the inn door; vague figures, detaching themselves from the
chorus, flit about the horses or help the guard to lift the luggage
down; the two syndics, critically aloof, lean on their sticks to watch
the scene; the Pomeranian bustles between the tired horses’ legs; and
the diligence doors let out a menagerie of the strange folk whom one
sees only on one’s travels. Here they come, familiar as the figures
in a Noah’s ark: Germans first--the little triple-chinned man with a
dachshund, out of “Fliegende Blätter,” the slippered Hercules with a
face like that at the end of a meerschaum pipe, and their sentimental
females; shrill and vivid Italians, a pleasant pig-faced priest.
Americans going “right through,” with their city and state writ large
upon their luggage; English girls like navvies, and Frenchmen like
girls; the arched doorway absorbs them, and another jingle of bells,
and a flash of lamps on the bridge, proclaim that the Chiavenna
diligence is coming.
The same ceremony repeats itself; and another detachment of the
travelling menagerie descends. This time there is a family of rodents,
who look as though they ought to be enclosed in wire netting and
judiciously nourished on lettuce; there is a small fierce man in
knickerbockers and a sash, conducting a large submissive wife and two
hypocritical little boys who might have stepped out of “The Mirror of
the Mind”; there is an unfortunate lady in spectacles, who looks like
one of the Creator’s rejected experiments, and carries a grey linen bag
embroidered with forget-me-nots; there is the inevitable youth with
an alpenstock, who sends home a bunch of edelweiss to his awe-struck
family.... These, too, disappear; the horses are led away; the chorus
disperses, the lights go out, the performance is over. Only one
spectator lingers, a thoughtful man in a snuff-coloured overcoat, who
gives the measure of the social resources of Splügen by the deliberate
way in which, evening after evening, he walks around the empty
diligences, looks into their windows, examines the wheels and poles,
and then mournfully vanishes into darkness.
At last the two diligences have the silent square to themselves. There
they stand, side by side in dusty slumber, till the morning cow-bells
wake them to departure. One goes back to Thusis; to the region of
good hotels, pure air and scenic platitudes. It may go empty for all
we care. But the other ... the other wakes from its Alpine sleep to
climb the cold pass at sunrise and descend by hot windings into the
land where the church steeples turn into _campanili_, where the vine,
breaking from perpendicular bondage, flings a liberated embrace about
the mulberries, and far off, beyond the plain, the mirage of domes and
spires, of painted walls and sculptured altars, beckons across the
dustiest tracts of memory. In that diligence our seats are taken.
A MIDSUMMER WEEK’S DREAM
AUGUST IN ITALY
_.... Un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques._
I
For ten days we had not known what ailed us. We had fled from the
August heat and crowd of the Vorderrheinthal to the posting-inn below
the Splügen pass; and here fortune had given us all the midsummer
tourist can hope for--solitude, cool air and fine scenery. A dozen
times a day we counted our mercies, but still privately felt them to be
insufficient. As we walked through the larch-groves beside the Rhine,
or climbed the grassy heights above the valley, we were oppressed by
the didactic quality of our surroundings--by the aggressive salubrity
and repose of this _bergerie de Florian_. We seemed to be living in
the landscape of a sanatorium prospectus. It was all pleasant enough,
according to Schopenhauer’s definition of pleasure. We had none of the
things we did not want; but then we did not particularly want any of
the things we had. We had fancied we did till we got them; and as we
had to own that they did their part in fulfilling our anticipations, we
were driven to conclude that the fault was in ourselves. Then suddenly
we found out what was wrong. Splügen was charming, but it was too near
Italy.
One can forgive a place three thousand miles from Italy for not being
Italian; but that a village on the very border should remain stolidly,
immovably Swiss was a constant source of exasperation. Even the
landscape had neglected its opportunities. A few miles off it became
the accomplice of man’s most exquisite imaginings; but here we could
see in it only endless material for Swiss clocks and fodder.
The trouble began with our watching the diligences. Every evening we
saw one toiling up the pass from Chiavenna, with dusty horses and
perspiring passengers. How we pitied those passengers! We walked among
them puffed up with all the good air in our lungs. We felt fresh and
cool and enviable, and moralized on the plaintive lot of those whose
scant holidays compelled them to visit Italy in August. But already the
poison was at work. We pictured what our less fortunate brothers had
seen till we began to wonder if, after all, they were less fortunate.
At least they had _been there_; and what drawbacks could qualify that
fact? Was it better to be cool and look at a water-fall, or to be hot
and look at Saint Mark’s? Was it better to walk on gentians or on
mosaic, to smell fir-needles or incense? Was it, in short, ever well to
be elsewhere when one might be in Italy?
We tried to quell the rising madness by interrogating the travellers.
Was it very hot on the lakes and in Milan? “Terribly!” they answered,
and mopped their brows. “Unimaginative idiots!” we grumbled, and
forbore to question the next batch. Of course it was hot there--but
what of that? Think of the compensations! To take it on the lowest
plane, think of the empty hotels and railway carriages, the absence
of tourists and Baedekers! Even the Italians were away, among the
Apennines and in the Engadine; we should have the best part of the
country to ourselves. Gradually we began to picture our sensations
should we take seats in the diligence on its return journey. From that
moment we were lost. We did not say much to each other, but one morning
at sunrise we found a travelling-carriage at the door. No one seemed
to know who had ordered it, but we noticed that our luggage was being
strapped on behind. We took our seats and the driver turned his horses
toward the Splügen pass. It was not the way to Switzerland.
[Illustration:
_By the Port of Lovere_
E. C. Peixotto
LOVEIRE. 1901.
]
We mounted to ice and snow. The savage landscape led us to the top of
the pass and dogged us down to the miserable Italian custom-house on
the other side. Then began the long descent through snow-galleries and
steep pine-forests, above the lonely gorge of the Madesimo: Switzerland
still in every aspect, but with a promise of Italy in the names of
the dreary villages. Visible Italy began with the valley of the Lira,
where, in a wild Salvator Rosa landscape, the beautiful campanile
of the Madonna of Gallevaggio rises above embowering walnuts. After
that each successive village declared its allegiance more openly.
The huddled stone houses disappeared in a wealth of pomegranates and
oleanders. Vine-pergolas shaded the doorways, roses and dahlias
overflowed the terraces of rough masonry, and between the
walnut-groves there were melon-patches and fields of maize.
As we approached Chiavenna a thick bloom of heat lay on the motionless
foliage, and the mountains hung like thunder-clouds on the horizon.
There was something oppressive, menacing almost, in the still weight
of the atmosphere. It seemed to have absorbed all the ardour of the
sun-baked Lombard plain, of the shadeless rice and maize fields
stretching away to the south of us. But the eye had ample compensation.
The familiar town of Chiavenna had grown as fantastically picturesque
as the background of a fresco. The old houses, with their medallioned
doorways of worn marble; the court-yards bright with flowers and
shaded by trellised vines; the white turbulence of the Lira, rushing
between gardens, balconies and terraces set at reckless angles above
the water--were all these a part of the town we had so often seen at
less romantic seasons? The general impression was of an exuberance of
rococo--as though the sportive statue of Saint John Nepomuc on the
bridge, the grotesque figures on the balustrade of the pale-green villa
near the hotel, and the stucco shrines at the street corners, had
burst into a plastic efflorescence rivalling the midsummer wealth of
the gardens.
We had left Switzerland with the general object of going to Italy and
the specific one of exploring the Bergamasque Alps. It was the name
which had attracted us, as much from its intrinsic picturesqueness as
from its associations with the _commedia dell’ arte_ and the jolly
figures of Harlequin and Brighella. I have often journeyed thus in
pursuit of a name, and have seldom been unrewarded. In this case the
very aspect of the map was promising. The region included in the
scattered lettering--_Bergamasker Hochthäler_--had that furrowed,
serried look so encouraging to the experienced traveller. It was rich,
crowded, suggestive; and the names of the villages were enchanting.
Early the next morning we set out for Colico, at the head of the
Lake of Como, and thence took train for Sondrio, the chief town of
the Valtelline. The lake, where we had to wait for our train, lay in
unnatural loveliness beneath a breathless sky, the furrowed peaks
bathed in subtle colour-gradations of which, at other seasons, the
atmosphere gives no hint. At Sondrio we found all the dreariness of a
modern Italian town with wide unshaded streets; but taking carriage in
the afternoon for Madonna di Tirano we were soon in the land of romance
again. The Valtelline, through which we drove, is one vast fruit and
vegetable garden of extraordinary fertility. The _gran turco_ (as the
maize is called) grows in jungles taller than a man, and the grapes and
melons have the exaggerated size and bloom of their counterfeits in a
Dutch fruit-piece. The rich dulness of this foreground was relieved by
the noble lines of the hills, and the air cooled by the rush of the
Adda, which followed the windings of our road, and by a glimpse of
snow peaks at the head of the valley. The villages were uninteresting,
but we passed a low-lying deserted church, a charming bit of
seventeenth-century decay, with peeling stucco ornaments, and weeds
growing from the florid vases of the pediment; and far off, on a lonely
wooded height, there was a tantalizing glimpse of another church, a
Renaissance building rich with encrusted marbles: one of the nameless
uncatalogued treasures in which Italy still abounds.
Toward sunset we reached Madonna di Tirano, the great pilgrimage
church of the Valtelline. With its adjoining monastery it stands
alone in poplar-shaded meadows a mile or more from the town of Tirano.
The marble church, a late fifteenth-century building by Battagio
(the architect of the Incoronata of Lodi), has the peculiar charm of
that transitional period when individuality of detail was merged,
but not yet lost, in the newly-recovered sense of unity. From the
columns of the porch, with their Verona-like arabesques, to the
bronze Saint Michael poised like a Mercury on the cupola, the whole
building combines the charm and naïveté of the earlier tradition with
the dignity of a studied whole. The interior, if less homogeneous,
is, in the French sense, even more “amusing.” Owing, doubtless, to
the remote situation of the church, it has escaped the unifying
hand of the improver, and presents three centuries of conflicting
decorative treatment, ranging from the marble chapel of the Madonna,
so suggestive, in its clear-edged reliefs, of the work of Omodeo at
Pavia, to the barocco carvings of the organ and the eighteenth-century
_grisailles_ beneath the choir-gallery.
The neighbouring monastery of Saint Michael has been turned into an inn
without farther change than that of substituting tourists for monks
in the white-washed cells around the cloisters. The old building is
a dusty labyrinth of court-yards, loggias and pigeon-haunted upper
galleries, which it needs but little imagination to people with cowled
figures gliding to lauds or benediction; and the refectory where we
supped is still hung with portraits of cardinals, monsignori, and lady
abbesses holding little ferret-like dogs.
The next day we drove across the rich meadows to Tirano, one of those
unhistoried and unconsidered Italian towns which hold in reserve for
the observant eye a treasure of quiet impressions. It is difficult to
name any special “effect”: the hurried sight-seer may discover only
dull streets and featureless house-fronts. But the place has a fine
quality of age and aloofness. The featureless houses are “palaces,”
long-fronted and escutcheoned, with glimpses of arcaded courts, and of
gardens where maize and dahlias smother the broken statues and choked
fountains, and where grapes ripen on the peeling stucco walls. Here
and there one comes on a frivolous rococo church, subdued by time to
delicious harmony with its surroundings; on a fountain in a quiet
square, or a wrought-iron balcony projecting romantically from a
shuttered façade; or on one or another of the hundred characteristic
details which go to make up the _mise en scène_ of the average Italian
town. It is precisely in places like Tirano, where there are no salient
beauties to fix the eye, that one appreciates the value of these
details, that one realizes what may be called the negative strength
of the Italian artistic sense. Where the Italian builder could not be
grand, he could always abstain from being mean and trivial; and this
artistic abnegation gives to many a dull little town like Tirano an
architectural dignity which our great cities lack.
II
The return to secular life was made two days later, when we left
our monastery and set out to drive across the Aprica pass to Edolo.
Retracing for a mile or two the way toward Sondrio, we took a turn to
the left and began to mount the hills through forests of beech and
chestnut. With each bend of the road the views down the Valtelline
toward Sondrio and Como grew wider and more beautiful. No one who has
not looked out on such a prospect in the early light of an August
morning can appreciate the poetic truth of Claude’s interpretation
of nature: we seemed to be moving through a gallery hung with his
pictures. There was the same expanse of billowy forest, the same silver
winding of a river through infinite gradations of distance, the same
aërial line of hills melting into illimitable sky.
As we neared the top of the pass the air freshened, and pines and open
meadows replaced the forest. We lunched at a little hotel in a bare
meadow, among a crowd of Italians enjoying the _villeggiatura_ in their
shrill gregarious fashion; then we began the descent to Edolo in the
Val Camonica.
The scenery changed rapidly as we drove on. There was no longer
any great extent of landscape, as on the other side of the pass,
but a succession of small park-like views: rounded clumps of trees
interspersed with mossy glades, water-falls surmounted by old mills,
_campanili_ rising above villages hidden in foliage. On these smooth
grassy terraces, under the walnut boughs, one expected at each turn
to come upon some pastoral of Giorgione’s, or on one of Bonifazio’s
sumptuous picnics. The scenery has a studied beauty in which velvet
robes and caparisoned palfreys would not be out of place, and even the
villages might have been “brushed in” by an artist skilled in effects
and not afraid to improve upon reality.
It was after sunset when we reached Edolo, a dull town splendidly
placed at the head of the Val Camonica, beneath the ice-peaks of the
Adamello. The Oglio, a loud stream voluble of the glaciers, rushes
through the drowsy streets as though impatient to be gone; and we were
not sorry, the next morning, to follow its lead and continue our way
down the valley.
III
The Val Camonica, which extends from the Adamello group to the head of
the lake of Iseo, is a smaller and more picturesque reproduction of the
Valtelline. Vines and maize again fringed our way; but the mountains
were closer, the villages more frequent and more picturesque.
[Illustration:
_The Municipio--Brescia_
E. C. Peixotto
BRESCIA. 1901.
]
We had read in the invaluable guide-book of Gsell-Fels a vague allusion
to an interesting church among these mountains, but we could learn
nothing of it at Edolo, and only by persistent enquiries along the
road did we finally hear that there _was_ a church with “sculptures”
in the hill-village of Cerveno, high above the reach of carriages. We
left the high-road at the point indicated, and drove in a light country
carriole up the stony mule-path, between vines and orchards, till
the track grew too rough for wheels; then we continued the ascent on
foot. As we approached the cluster of miserable hovels which had been
pointed out to us we felt sure we had been misled. Not even in Italy,
the land of unsuspected treasures, could one hope to find a church with
“sculptures” in a poverty-stricken village on this remote mountain!
Cerveno does not even show any signs of past prosperity. It has plainly
never been more than it now is--the humblest of _paesi_, huddled away
in an unvisited fold of the Alps. The peasants whom we met still
insisted that the church we sought was close at hand; but the higher we
mounted the lower our anticipations fell.
Then suddenly, at the end of a long stony lane, we came on an imposing
doorway. The church to which it belonged stood on a higher ledge of
the hill, and the door led into a vaulted ascent, with shallow flights
of steps broken by platforms or landings--a small but yet impressive
imitation of the Bernini staircase in the Vatican. As we mounted we
found that each landing opened into a dimly-lit chapel with grated
doors, through which we discerned terra-cotta groups representing the
scenes of the Passion. The staircase was in fact a Sacred Way like
the more famous one of Varallo; but there was distinct originality in
placing the chapels on each side of the long flight of steps leading to
the church, instead of scattering them on an open hill-side, according
to the traditional plan common to all the other sacred mountains of
northern Italy.
The dilettante will always allow for the heightening of emotion that
attends any unexpected artistic “find”; but, setting this subjective
impression aside, the Via Crucis of Cerveno remains in my memory as
among the best examples of its kind--excepting always the remarkable
terra-cottas of San Vivaldo in Tuscany. At Cerveno, as at Varallo,
the groups are marked by unusual vivacity and expressiveness. The
main lines of the composition are conventional, and the chief
personages--Christ and the Apostles, the Virgin and the other
holy characters--are modelled on traditional types; but the minor
figures, evidently taken from life, are rendered with frank realism
and with extraordinary truth of expression and gesture. Just such
types--the dwarf, the beggar, the hunchback, the brawny waggoner or
ploughman--had met us in every village on the way to Cerveno. As in
all the hill-regions where the goitre is prevalent, the most villanous
characters in the drama are depicted with a hideous bag of flesh
beneath the chin; and Signorelli could not have conceived more bestial
leering cruelty than that in some of the faces which press about the
dying Christ. The scenes follow the usual order of the sacred story,
without marked departure from the conventional grouping; but there is
unusual pathos in the Descent from the Cross, where the light from
the roof of the chapel falls with tragic intensity on the face of a
Magdalen full of suave Lombard beauty.
Hardly less surprising than this remarkable stairway is the church to
which it leads. The walls are hung with devotional pictures set in
the faded gilding of rich old frames, the altar-fronts are remarkable
examples of sixteenth-century wood-carving, and the high altar is
surmounted by an elaborate tabernacle, also of carved wood, painted and
gilt, that in itself repays the effort of the climb to Cerveno. This
tabernacle is a complicated architectural composition--like one of the
fantastic designs of Fontana or Bibbiena--thronged with tiny saints
and doctors, angels and _putti_, akin to the little people of the
Neapolitan _presepii:_ a celestial company fluttering
_Si come schiera d’api che s’infiora_
around the divine group which surmounts the shrine.
This prodigality of wood-carving, surprising as it is in so remote and
humble a church, is yet characteristic of the region about Brescia
and Bergamo. Lamberti of Brescia, the sculptor of the famous frame
of Romanino’s Madonna in the church of San Francesco, was one of the
greatest wood-carvers of the Italian Renaissance; and every church
and chapel in the country through which we were travelling bore
witness to the continued practice of the art in some graceful frame or
altar-front, some saint or angel rudely but expressively modelled.
We lunched that day at Breno, a town guarded by a ruined castle on
a hill, and sunset brought us to Lovere, at the head of the lake of
Iseo. It was the stillest of still evenings, and the little town which
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has immortalized was reflected, with every
seam and wrinkle of its mountain background, in the pearly surface
of the lake. Literal-minded critics, seeking in vain along the shore
for Lady Mary’s villa and garden, have grumbled at the inaccuracy of
her descriptions; but every lover of Italy will understand the mental
process by which she unconsciously created an imaginary Lovere. For
though the town, at first sight, is dull and disappointing, yet, taken
with its surroundings, it might well form the substructure of one of
those Turneresque visions which, in Italy, are perpetually intruding
between the most conscientious traveller and his actual surroundings.
It is indeed almost impossible to see Italy steadily and see it whole.
The onset of impressions and memories is at times so overwhelming that
observation is lost in mere sensation.
Certainly he who, on an August morning, sails from Lovere to Iseo, at
the southern end of the lake, is likely to find himself succumbing to
Lady Mary’s hallucinations. Warned by her example, and conscious of
lacking her extenuating gift, I hesitate to record my impressions of
the scene; or venture, at most, to do so in the past tense, asserting
(and this even with a mental reservation) that on a certain morning
a certain number of years ago the lake of Iseo wore such and such an
aspect. But the difficulty of rendering the aspect remains. I can only
say it was that very lake of the _carte du Tendre_ upon which, in the
eighteenth-century romances, gay parties in velvet-hung barges used
to set out for the island of Cythera. Every village on that enchanted
shore might have been the stage of some comedy in the Bergamasque
dialect, with Harlequin in striped cloak, and Brighella in conical hat
and wide green and white trousers, strutting up and down before the
shuttered house in which Dr. Graziano hides his pretty ward; every
villa reflecting its awnings and bright flowers in the lake might
have housed some Rosaura to whom Leandro, the Tuscan lover, warbled
_rispetti_ beneath the padlocked water-gate; every pink or yellow
monastery on the hill-side might have sent forth its plausible friar,
descendant of Machiavelli’s Fra Timoteo, to preach in the market-place,
beg at the villa-door, and help Rosaura and Leandro cozen the fat dupe
of a Pantaloon in black cloak and scarlet socks. The eighteenth century
of Longhi, of Tiepolo and Goldoni was reflected in the lake as in some
magic crystal. Did the vision dissolve as we landed at Iseo, or will
some later traveller find it still lying beneath the wave like the
vanished city of Ys? There is no telling, in such cases, how much the
eye receives and how much it contributes; and if ever the boundaries
between fact and fancy waver, it may well be under the spell of the
Italian midsummer madness.
IV
The sun lay heavy on Iseo; and the railway journey thence to Brescia
left in our brains a golden dazzle of heat. It was refreshing, on
reaching Brescia, to enter the streets of the old town, where the
roofs almost meet and there is always a blessed strip of shade to
walk in. The cities in Italy are much cooler than the country. It is
in August that one understands the wisdom of the old builders, who
made the streets so narrow, and built dim draughty arcades around the
open squares. In Brescia the effects of light and shade thus produced
were almost Oriental in their sharp-edged intensity; the rough stucco
surfaces gilded with vivid sunlight bringing out the depths of
contrasting shade, and the women with black veils over their heads
slipping along under the mysterious balconies and porticoes like
flitting fragments of the shadow.
[Illustration:
_Chiesa dei Miracoli--Brescia_
]
Brescia is at all times a delightful place to linger in. Its chief
possessions--the bronze Victory, and that room in the Martinengo palace
where Moretto, in his happiest mood, depicted the ladies of the line
under arches of trellis-work backed by views of the family villas--make
it noteworthy even among Italian cities; and it has, besides, its
beautiful town-hall, its picture-gallery, and the curious court-yards
painted in perspective that are so characteristic of the place. But in
summer there is a strong temptation to sit and think of these things
rather than to go and see them. In the court-yard of the hotel, where
a fountain tinkles refreshingly, and the unbleached awnings flap in
the breeze of the electric fans, it is pleasant to feel that the
Victory and the pictures are close at hand, like old friends waiting
on one’s inclination; but if one ventures forth, let it be rather
to the churches than to the galleries. Only at this season can one
appreciate the atmosphere of the churches: that chill which cuts the
sunshine like a knife as one steps across the dusky threshold. When
we entered the cathedral its vast aisles were empty, but far off,
in the dimness of the pillared choir, we heard a drone of intoning
canons that freshened the air like the sound of a water-fall in a
forest. Thence we wandered on to San Francesco, empty too, where, in
the sun-spangled dimness, the great Romanino throned behind the high
altar. The sacristan drew back the curtain before the picture, and as
it was revealed to us in all its sun-bathed glory he exclaimed with
sudden wonder, as though he had never seen it before: “_È stupendo! È
stupendo!_” Perhaps he vaguely felt, as we did, that Romanino, to be
appreciated, must be seen in just that light, a projection of the suave
and radiant atmosphere in which his own creations move. Certainly no
Romanino of the great public galleries arrests the imagination like the
Madonna of San Francesco; and in its presence one thinks with a pang of
all the beautiful objects uprooted from their native soil to adorn the
herbarium of the art-collector....
V
It was on the last day of our journey that the most imperturbable
member of the party, looking up from a prolonged study of the
guide-books, announced that we had not seen the Bergamasque Alps after
all.
In the excited argument that followed, proof seemed to preponderate
first on one side and then on the other; but a closer scrutiny of the
map confirmed the fear that we had not actually penetrated beyond
the borders of the promised land. It must be owned that at first the
discovery was somewhat humiliating; but on reflection it left us
overjoyed to think that we had still the Bergamasque Alps to visit.
Meanwhile our pleasure had certainly been enhanced by our delusion; and
we remembered with fresh admiration Goethe’s profound saying--a saying
which Italy inspired--
_O, wie beseliget uns Menschen ein falscher Begriff!_
THE SANCTUARIES OF THE PENNINE ALPS
When June is hot on the long yellow streets of Turin, it is pleasant to
take train for the Biellese, that romantic hill-country where the last
slopes of the Pennine Alps melt into the Piedmontese plain.
The line, crossing the lowland with its red-tiled farm-houses and
mulberry orchards, rises gradually to a region of rustling verdure.
Mountain streams flow down between alder-fringed banks, white oxen doze
under the acacia-hedges, and in the almond and cherry orchards the
vine hangs its Virgilian garlands from blossoming tree to tree. This
pastoral land rolls westward to the Graiian Alps in an undulating sea
of green, but to the north it breaks abruptly into the height against
which rises the terraced outline of Biella.
The cliffs of the Biellese are the haunt of ancient legend, and on
almost every ledge a church or monastery perpetuates the story of
some wonder-working relic. Biella, the chief town of this devout
district, covers a small conical hill and spreads its suburbs over the
surrounding level. Its hot sociable streets are full of the shrill
activity of an Italian watering-place; but the transalpine traveller
will probably be inclined to push on at once to the village of Andorno,
an hour’s drive deeper in the hills.
Biella overhangs the plain; but Andorno lies in a valley which soon
contracts to a defile between the mountains. The drive thither from
Biella skirts the Cervo, a fresh mountain stream, and passes through
villages set on park-like slopes in the ample shade of chestnut-groves.
The houses of these villages have little of the picturesqueness
mistakenly associated with Italian rural architecture; but every window
displays its pot of lavender or of carnations, and the arched doorways
reveal gardens flecked with the blue shadows of the vine-pergola.
Andorno itself is folded in hills, rounded, umbrageous, cooled with
the song of birds. A sylvan hush envelops the place, and the air one
breathes seems to have travelled over miles of forest freshened by
unseen streams. It is all as still and drowsy as the dream of a tired
brain. There is nothing to see but the country itself--acacia-fringed
banks sloping to the stream below the village; the arch of a ruined
bridge; an old hexagonal chapel with red-tiled roof and an arcade of
stunted columns; and, beyond the bridge and the chapel, rich upland
meadows where all day long the peasant women stoop to the swing of the
scythe.
In June in this high country (where patches of snow still lie in the
shaded hollows), the wild flowers of spring and summer seem to meet:
narcissus and forget-me-not lingering in the grass, while yellow
broom--Leopardi’s _lover of sad solitudes_--sheets the dry banks with
gold, and higher up, in the folds of the hills, patches of crimson
azalea mix their shy scent with the heavy fragrance of the acacia. In
the meadows the trees stand in well-spaced majestic groups, walnut,
chestnut and beech, tenting the grass with shade. The ivy hangs its
drapery over garden walls and terraces, and the streams rush down under
a quivering canopy of laburnum. The scenery of these high Pennine
valleys is everywhere marked by the same nobleness of colour and
outline, the same atmosphere of spaciousness and poetry. It is the rich
studied landscape of Bonifazio’s idyls: a scene of peace and plenitude,
not the high-coloured southern opulence but the sober wealth poured
from a glacial horn of plenty. There is none of the Swiss abruptness,
of the Swiss accumulation of effects. The southern aspect softens and
expands. There is no crowding of impressions, but a stealing sense of
harmony and completeness.
From Andorno the obvious excursion is to the famous shrine of San
Giovanni; a “sight” taking up eight pages in the excellent “Guida del
Biellese,” but remaining in the traveller’s memory chiefly as the
objective point of a charming walk or drive. The road thither winds
up the Val d’Andorno, between heights set with villages hung aloft
among the beech-groves, or thrusting their garden-parapets above the
spray and tumult of the Cervo. The densely-wooded cliffs are scarred
with quarries of sienite, and the stream, as the valley narrows,
forces its way over masses of rock and between shelving stony banks;
but the little gardens dashed by its foam overflow with irises, roses
and peonies, surrounded with box-hedges and shaded by the long mauve
panicles of the wistaria.
Presently the road leaves the valley, and ascends the beech-clothed
flank of the mountain on which the church of San Giovanni is perched.
The coolness and hush of this wooded hill-side are delicious after
the noise and sunshine of the open road, and one is struck by the
civic amenity which, in this remote solitude, has placed benches at
intervals beneath the trees. At length the brow of the hill is reached.
The beeches recede, leaving a grassy plateau flanked by a long façade
of the monastery; and from the brink of this open space the eye drops
unhindered down the long leafy reaches of the Val d’Andorno.
The scene is characterized by the tenderest gradations of colour
and line: beeches blending with walnuts, these with the tremulous
laburnum-thickets along the stream, and the curves of the hills flowing
into one another till they lose themselves in the aërial distances of
the plain. The building which commands this outlook is hardly worthy
of its station, unless, indeed, the traveller feels its sober lines
to be an admission of art’s inferiority to nature in such aspects. To
the confirmed apologist of Italy there is indeed a certain charm in
finding so insignificant a piece of architecture in so rare a spot:
as though in a land thus amply dowered no architectural emphasis
were needed to call attention to any special point of view. Yet a
tenderness for the view, one cannot but infer, must have guided the
steps of those early cenobites who peopled the romantic landscape with
wonder-working images. When did a miracle take place on a barren plain
or in a circumscribed hollow? The manifestations of divine favour
invariably sought the heights, and those who dedicated themselves to
the commemoration of such holy incidents did so in surroundings poetic
enough to justify their faith in the supernatural.
[Illustration:
_The Inner Quadrangle at Oropa_
E. C. Peixotto
LOVEIRE. 1901.
]
The church, with its dignified front and sculptured portal, adjoins
the hospice, and shows little of interest within but the stone grotto
containing the venerated image of Saint John, discovered in the third
century by Saint Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli. This grotto is protected
by an iron grating, and its dark recess twinkles with silver hearts
and other votive offerings. The place is still a favourite pilgrimage,
but there seems to be some doubt as to which Saint John has chosen it
as the scene of his posthumous thaumaturgy; for, according to the
local guide-book, it is equally frequented on the feasts of the Baptist
and of the Evangelist. This uncertainty is not without its practical
advantages; and one reads that the hospice is open the year round,
and that an excellent meal may always be enjoyed in the _trattoria_
above the arcade; while on the feasts of the respective saints it is
necessary for the devotee to bespeak his board and lodging in advance.
If San Giovanni appeals chiefly to the lover of landscape, the more
famous sanctuary of Oropa is of special interest to the architect; for
thither, in the eighteenth century, the piety of the house of Savoy
sent Juvara, one of the greatest architects of his time, to add a grand
façade and portico to the group of monastic buildings erected a hundred
years earlier by Negro di Pralungo.