hills. Our way lay north-westward, toward the Ciminian mountains. Once
free of the gates, our motor started on its steady rush along the white
highway, first past the walls of vineyard and garden, and then across
the grey waste spaces of the Campagna. The Roman champaign is the type
of variety in monotony. Seen from the heights of the city, it reaches
in silvery sameness toward all points of the compass; but to a near
view it reveals a dozen different physiognomies. Toward Frascati and
the Alban hills it wears the ordered garb of fertility: wheat-fields,
vineyards and olive-groves. South-eastward, in the direction of the
Sabine range, its white volcanic reaches are tufted with a dark _maqui_
of sullen and reluctant growth, while in the west the Agro Romano rolls
toward Monterosi and Soracte in sere reaches of pasture-land mottled
with hillock and ravine.
Gradually, as we left the outskirts of Rome, the grandeur of this
stern landscape declared itself. To the right and left the land
stretched out in endless grassy reaches, guarded here and there by
a lonely tomb or by the tall gateway of some abandoned vineyard.
Presently the road began to rise and dip, giving us, on the ascent,
sweeping views over a wider range of downs which rolled away in
the north-west to the Ciminian forest, and in the east to the hazy
rampart of the Sabine hills. Ahead of us the same undulations swept on
interminably, the road undulating with them, now engulfed in the trough
of the land, now tossed into view on some farther slope, like a streak
of light on a flying sea. There was something strangely inspiriting
in the call of this fugitive road. From ever-lengthening distances it
seemed to signal us on, luring us up slope after slope, and racing
ahead of us down the long declivities where the motor panted after it
like a pack on the trail.
For some time the thrill of the chase distracted us from a nearer view
of the foreground; but gradually there stole on us a sense of breadth
and quietude, of sun-bathed rugged fields with black cattle grazing
in their hollows, and here and there a fortified farm-house lifting
its bulk against the sky. These fortress-farms of the Campagna,
standing sullen and apart among the pacific ruins of pagan Rome--tombs,
aqueducts and villas--give a glimpse of that black age which rose on
the wreck of the Imperial civilization. All the violence and savagery
of the mediæval city, with its great nobles forever in revolt, its
popes plotting and trembling within the Lateran walls, or dragging
their captive cardinals from point to point as the Emperor or the
French King moved his forces--all the mysterious crimes of passion and
cupidity, the intrigues, ambushes, massacres with which the pages of
the old chronicles reek, seem symbolized in one of those lowering brown
piles with its battlemented sky-line, crouched on a knoll of the waste
land which its masters helped to devastate.
At length a blue pool, the little lake of Monterosi, broke the expanse
of the downs; then we flashed through a poor roadside village of the
same name, and so upward into a hill-region where hedgerows and copses
began to replace the brown tufting of the Campagna. On and on we fled,
ever upward to the town of Ronciglione, perched, like many hill-cities
of this region, on the sheer edge of a ravine, and stretching its line
of baroque churches and stately crumbling palaces along one steep
street to the edge of a lofty down.
Across this plateau, golden with budding broom, we flew on to the next
height, and here paused to embrace the spectacle--beneath us, on the
left, the blue volcanic lake of Vico in its oak-fringed crater; on the
right, far below, the plain of Etruria, scattered with ancient cities
and ringed in a mountain-range still touched with snow; and rising from
the middle of the plain, Soracte, proud, wrinkled, solitary, with the
ruined monastery of Sant’ Oreste just seen on its crest.
[Illustration:
_An Italian Sky in March_
]
From this mount of vision we dropped abruptly downward by a road cut
in the red tufa-banks. Presently there began to run along the crest
of the tufa on our left a lofty wall gripping the flanks of the rock,
and overhung by dark splashes of ivy and clumps of leafless trees--one
of those rugged Italian walls which are the custodians of such hidden
treasures of scent and verdure. This wall continued to run parallel
with us till our steep descent ended in a stone-paved square, with the
roofs of a town sliding abruptly away below it on one side, and above,
on the other, the great ramps and terraces of a pentagonal palace
clenched to the highest ledge of the cliff. Such is the first sight of
Caprarola.
Never, surely, did feudal construction so insolently dominate its
possessions. The palace of the great Farnese Cardinal seems to lord
it not only over the golden-brown town which forms its footstool, but
over the far-reaching Etrurian plain, the forests and mountains of the
horizon: over Nepi, Sutri, Cività Castellana, and the lonely pride of
Soracte. And the grandeur of the site is matched by the arrogance of
the building: no villa, but a fortified and moated palace, or rather a
fortress planned in accordance with the most advanced military science
of the day, but built on the lines of a palace. Yet on such a March day
as this, with the foreground of brown oak-woods all slashed and fringed
with rosy almond-bloom; with the haze of spring just melting from the
horizon, and revealing depth after depth of mountain-blue; with March
clouds fleeing overhead, and flinging trails of shadow and showers of
silver light across the undulations of the plain--on such a day, the
insolent Farnese keep, for all its background of gardens, frescoes, and
architectural splendour, seems no longer the lord of the landscape,
but a mere point of vantage from which to view the outspread glory at
our feet.
IV
The drive from Viterbo to Montefiascone lies across the high plateau
between the Monte Cimino and the lake of Bolsena.
For the best part of the way, the landscape is pastoral and
agricultural, with patches of oak-wood to which in March the leaves
still cling; and on this fitful March morning, with rain in the
shifting clouds, the ploughmen move behind their white oxen under
umbrellas as vividly green as the young wheat. Here are none of the
great bursts of splendour which mark the way from Rome to Caprarola;
and it seems fitting that this more prosaic road should be travelled
at a sober pace, in a Viterban posting-chaise, behind two plodding
horses. The horses are not so plodding, however, but that they swing us
briskly enough down the short descents of the rolling country, which
now becomes wilder and more diversified, with stretches of woodland
interspersed with a heathy growth of low fragrant shrubs. Here the
slopes are thick with primroses, and the blue vinca and violet peep
through the ivy trails of the hedgerows; but the trees are still
leafless, for it is a high wind-swept region, where March practises
few of her milder arts. A lonely country too: no villages, and only
a few solitary farm-houses, are to be seen as we jog up and down the
monotonous undulations of the road to the foot of Montefiascone.
The town overhangs us splendidly, on a spur above the lake of Bolsena;
and a long ascent between fortified walls leads to the summit on which
its buildings are huddled. Through the curtain of rain which the skies
have now let down, the crooked streets with their archways and old
blackened stone houses present no striking effects, though doubtless
a bright day would draw from them some of that latent picturesqueness
which is never far to seek when Italian masonry and Italian sunlight
meet. Meanwhile, however, the rain persists, and the environment of
Montefiascone remains so obstinately shrouded that, for all we know,
the town may be situated “Nowhere,” like the famous scene in Festus.
Through this rain-muffled air, led blindfold as it were, we presently
descend again by the same windings to the city gates, and thence,
following the road to Bagnorea, come on the desolate church of San
Flaviano, lying by itself in a hollow beneath the walls of the town.
In our hasty dash from the carriage to the door, there is just time
to receive the impression of an immensely old brick façade, distorted
and scarred with that kind of age which only the Latin sense of
antiquity has kept a word to describe--then we are in a low-arched
cavernous interior, with spectral frescoes emerging here and there
from the universal background of whitewash, and above the choir a
spreading gallery or upper church, which makes of the lower building
a species of crypt above ground. And here--O irony of fate!--in this
old, deserted and damp-dripping church, under a worn slab before
the abandoned altar (for it is only in the upper church that mass
continues to be said)--here, a castaway as it were from both worlds,
lies that genial offshoot of a famous race, the wine-loving Bishop
Fugger, whose lust of the palate brought him to this lonely end. It
would have been impossible to pass through Montefiascone without
dropping a commemorative tear on the classic Est-Est-Est upon which,
till so lately, a good cask of Montefiascone has been yearly broached
in memory of the prelate’s end; yet one feels a regret, almost, in
carrying away such a chill recollection of the poor Bishop’s fate,
in leaving him to the solitude of that icy limbo which seems so
disproportionate a punishment for his amiable failing.
Leaving San Flaviano, we press on toward Orvieto through an unbroken
blur of rain. The weary miles leave no trace in memory, and we are
still in an indeterminate region of wood and pasture and mist-muffled
hills when gradually the downpour ceases, and streaks of sunset begin
to part the clouds. Almost at the same moment a dip of the road brings
us out above a long descent, with a wavy plain at its base, and reared
up on a cliff above the plain a fierce brown city, walled, towered
and pinnacled, which seems to have dropped from the sky like some
huge beast of prey and locked its talons in the rock. All about the
plain, in the watery evening light, rises a line of hills, with Monte
Amiata thrusting its peak above the circle; the nearer slopes are
clothed in olive and cypress, with castles and monasteries jutting from
their ledges, and just below us the sight of an arched bridge across
a ravine, with a clump of trees at its approach, touches a spring
of memory and transports us from the actual scene to its pictured
presentment--Turner’s “Road to Orvieto.”
It was, in fact, from this point that the picture was painted; and
looking forth on the landscape, with its stormy blending of sepia-hues
washed in pallid sunlight, one sees in it the vindication of Turner’s
art--that true impressionism which consists not in the unimaginative
noting of actual “bits,” but in the reconstruction of a scene as it
has flowed into the mould of memory, the merging of fragmentary facts
into a homogeneous impression. This is what Turner has done to the view
of Orvieto from the Bolsena road, so summing up and interpreting the
spirit of the scene that the traveller pausing by the arched bridge
above the valley loses sense of the boundaries between art and life,
and lives for a moment in that mystical region where the two are one.
V
Our friends and counsellors had for many years warned us against
visiting Vallombrosa in March--the month which oftenest finds us in
Tuscany.
“Wait till June,” they advised--and knowing the complexity of
influences which go to make up an Italian “sensation,” and how, for
lack of one ingredient, the whole mixture may lose its savour, we
had obediently waited for June. But June in Florence never seemed to
come--“the time and the place” were no more to meet in our horoscope
than in the poet’s; and so, one year when March was playing at April,
we decided to take advantage of her mood and risk the adventure.
We set out early, in that burnished morning air which seems, as with a
fine burin, to retrace overnight every line of the Tuscan landscape.
The railway runs southward along the Arno valley to Sant’ Ellero; and
we might have been travelling through some delicately-etched background
of Mantegna’s or Robetta’s, in which the clear pale colours of early
spring were but an effect of subtle blendings of line. This Tuscan hill
scenery, which for purity of modelling has no match short of Greece, is
seen to the best advantage in March, when the conformation of the land
is still unveiled by foliage, and every line tells like the threads of
silver in a _niello_.
From Sant’ Ellero, where the train is exchanged for a little funicular
car of primitive construction, we were pushed jerkily uphill by a
gasping engine which had to be constantly refreshed by long draughts of
water from wayside tanks. On such a day, however, it was impossible to
grudge the slowness of the ascent. As we mounted higher, the country
developed beneath us with that far-reaching precision of detail which
gives to extended views in mid-Italy a curiously pre-Raphaelite
look--as though they had been wrought out by a hand enamoured of
definition and unskilled in the creation of general effects. The new
wheat springing under the olives was the only high note of colour: all
else was sepia-brown of new-turned earth, grey-brown of weather-mottled
farm-houses and village belfries, golden-black of rusty cypresses
climbing the hill-sides in straight interminable lines, and faint blush
of peach-blossoms floating against grey olives.
Then we gained a new height, and the details of the foreground were
lost in a vast unfolding of distances--hill on hill, blurred with
olive-groves, or bare and keen-cut, with a sprinkling of farm-houses
on their slopes, and here and there a watch-tower on a jutting spur;
and beyond these again, a tossing sunlit sea of peaks, its farthest
waves still crested with snow. Half way up, the abrupt slopes of
oak-forest which we had skirted gave way to a plateau clothed with
vines and budding fruit orchards; then another sharp climb through
oak-scrub, across the dry beds of mountain-streams and up slopes of
broom and heather, brought us to the topmost ledge, where the railway
ends. On this ledge stands the dreary village of Saltina--a cluster
of raw-looking houses set like boxes on a shelf (with a Hôtel Milton
among them), and a background of Swiss chalets dotted forlornly on a
treeless slope. Saltina must be arid even in midsummer, and in March
it was a place to fly from. Our flight, however, was regulated by the
leisurely gait of a small white donkey who was the only _bête de somme_
to be had at that early season, and behind whom we slowly turned the
shoulder of the cliff, and entered the pillared twilight of a great
fir-wood. The road ran through this wood for a mile or two, carrying
us straight to the heart of the Etrurian shades. As we advanced,
byways branched off to the right and left, climbing the hill-sides
through deep-perspectives of verdure; and presently we came to a wide
turfy hollow, where the great trees recede, leaving a space for the
monastery and its adjacent buildings.
The principal _corps-de-bâtiment_ faces on a walled entrance-court with
box-bordered paths leading to the fine arcaded portico of the church.
These buildings are backed by a hanging wood with a hermitage on its
crest--the Paradiso--but before them lies an open expanse studded with
ancient trees, with a stone-bordered fish-pond, and grass walks leading
down to mossy glens with the sound of streams in their depths. Facing
the monastery stands the low building where pilgrims were formerly
lodged, and which now, without farther modification than the change of
name, has become the Albergo della Foresta; while the monastery itself
has been turned into a government school of forestry.
Since change was inevitable, it is a fortunate accident which has
housed a sylvan college in these venerable shades, and sent the
green-accoutred foresters to carry on the husbandry of the monks.
Never, surely, were the inevitable modifications of time more gently
tempered to the survivor of earlier conditions. The monastery of
Vallombrosa has neither the examinate air of a _monument historique_,
nor that look of desecration and decadency that too often comes with
altered uses. It has preserved its high atmosphere of meditative
peace, and the bands of students flitting through the forest with
surveying-implements and agricultural tools seem the lawful successors
of the monks.
We had been told in Florence that winter still held the mountains, that
we should find snow in the shady hollows and a glacial wind from the
peaks. But spring airs followed us to the heights. Through the aromatic
fir-boughs the sunlight slanted as warmly as down the ilex-walks of
the Boboli gardens, and over the open slopes about the monastery there
ran a rosy-purple flush of crocuses--not here and there in scattered
drifts, or starring the grass as in the foregrounds of Mantegna and
Botticelli, but so close-set that they formed a continuous sheet of
colour, a tide of lilac which submerged the turf and, flowing between
the ancient tree-boles, invaded even the dark edges of the forest. It
was probably the one moment of the year at which the forest flushes
into colour; its hour of transfiguration--we might have tried every
other season, and missed the miracle of March in Vallombrosa. At first
the eye was dazzled by this vast field of the cloth-of-purple, and
could take in none of the more delicate indications of spring; but
presently we found our way to the lower glens, where the crocuses
ceased, and pale-yellow primroses poured over ivy-banks to the brink
of agate-coloured brooks. In the forest, too, ferns were uncurling and
violets thrusting themselves through the close matting of fir-needles;
while the terraces of the monks’ garden, which climbs the hill-side
near the monastery, were fragrant with budding box and beds of tulip
and narcissus.
It was an air to idle in, breathing deep the stored warmth of
immemorial springs; but the little donkey waited between the shafts of
his _calessina_, and on the ledge of Saltina we knew that our engine
was taking a last draught before the descent. Reluctantly we jogged
back through the forest, and, regaining our seats in the train, plunged
downward into a sea of translucent mountains, and valleys bathed in
haze, a great reach of irradiated heights flowing by imperceptible
gradations into amber depths of air, while below us the shadows fell,
and the Arno gleamed white in the indistinctness of evening.
PICTURESQUE MILAN
I
It is hard to say whether the stock phrase of the stock tourist--“there
is so little to see in Milan”--redounds most to the derision of the
speaker or to the glory of Italy. That such a judgment should be
possible, even to the least instructed traveller, implies a surfeit
of impressions procurable in no other land; since, to the hastiest
observation, Milan could hardly seem lacking in interest when
compared to any but Italian cities. From comparison with the latter,
even, it suffers only on a superficial estimate, for it is rich in
all that makes the indigenous beauty of Italy, as opposed to the
pseudo-Gothicisms, the trans-Alpine points and pinnacles, which Ruskin
taught a submissive generation of art critics to regard as the typical
expression of the Italian spirit. The guide-books, long accustomed
to draw their Liebig’s extract of art from the pages of this school
of critics, have kept the tradition alive by dwelling only on the
monuments which conform to perpendicular ideals, and by apologetic
allusions to the “monotony” and “regularity” of Milan--as though
endeavouring in advance to placate the traveller for its not looking
like Florence or Siena!
[Illustration:
_Court of the Palazzo Marino,
now the Municipio_
]
Of late, indeed, a new school of writers, among whom Mr. J. W.
Anderson, and the German authors, Messrs. Ebe and Gurlitt, deserve
the first mention, have broken through this conspiracy of silence,
and called attention to the intrinsically Italian art of the
post-Renaissance period; the period which, from Michael Angelo to
Juvara, has been marked in sculpture and architecture (though more
rarely in painting) by a series of memorable names. Signor Franchetti’s
admirable monograph on Bernini, and the recent volume on Tiepolo in the
Knackfuss series of Künstler-Monographien have done their part in this
redistribution of values; and it is now possible for the traveller to
survey the course of Italian art with the impartiality needful for its
due enjoyment, and to admire, for instance, the tower of the Mangia
without scorning the palace of the Consulta.
II
But, it may be asked, though Milan will seem more interesting to the
emancipated judgment, will it appear more picturesque? Picturesqueness
is, after all, what the Italian pilgrim chiefly seeks; and the current
notion of the picturesque is a purely Germanic one, connoting Gothic
steeples, pepper-pot turrets, and the huddled steepness of the northern
burgh.
Italy offers little, and Milan least of all, to satisfy these
requirements. The Latin ideal demanded space, order, and nobility of
composition. But does it follow that picturesqueness is incompatible
with these? Take up one of Piranesi’s etchings--those strange
compositions in which he sought to seize the spirit of a city or a
quarter by a mingling of its most characteristic features. Even the
northern conception of the picturesque must be satisfied by the sombre
wildness of these studies--here a ruined aqueduct, casting its shade
across a lonely stretch of ground tufted with acanthus, there a palace
colonnade through which the moonlight sweeps on a winter wind, or the
recesses of some mighty Roman bath where cloaked figures are huddled
in dark confabulation.
Canaletto’s black-and-white studies give, in a lesser degree, the
same impression of the grotesque and the fantastic--the under-side
of that _barocchismo_ so long regarded as the smirk on the face of a
conventional age.
But there is another, a more typically Italian picturesqueness, gay
rather than sinister in its suggestions, made up of lights rather
than of shadows, of colour rather than of outline, and this is the
picturesqueness of Milan. The city abounds in vivid effects, in
suggestive juxtapositions of different centuries and styles--in
all those incidental contrasts and surprises which linger in the
mind after the catalogued “sights” have faded. Leaving behind the
wide modern streets--which have the merit of having been modernized
under Eugène Beauharnais rather than under King Humbert--one enters
at once upon some narrow byway overhung by the grated windows of a
seventeenth-century palace, or by the delicate terra-cotta apse of a
_cinque-cento_ church. Everywhere the forms of expression are purely
Italian, with the smallest possible admixture of that Gothic element
which marks the old free cities of Central Italy. The rocca Sforzesca
(the old Sforza castle) and the houses about the Piazza de’ Mercanti
are the chief secular buildings recalling the pointed architecture of
the north; and the older churches are so old that they antedate Gothic
influences, and lead one back to the round-arched basilican type. But
in the line of national descent what exquisite varieties the Milanese
streets present! Here, for instance, is the Corinthian colonnade of San
Lorenzo, the only considerable fragment of ancient Mediolanum, its last
shaft abutting on a Gothic archway against which clings a flower-decked
shrine. Close by, one comes on the ancient octagonal church of San
Lorenzo, while a few minutes’ drive leads to where the Borromeo palace
looks across a quiet grassy square at the rococo front of the old
family church, flanked by a fine bronze statue of the great saint and
cardinal.