"Aërial Fiesole"
Andrea del Sarto--Fiesole sights--The Villa Palmieri
and the "Decameron"--Botticini's picture in the National
Gallery--S. Francesco--The Roman amphitheatre--The Etruscan museum--A
sculptor's walk--The Badia di Fiesole--Brunelleschi again--Giovanni
di San Giovanni.
After all these pictures, how about a little climbing? From so many
windows in Florence, along so many streets, from so many loggias and
towers, and perhaps, above all, from the Piazzale di Michelangelo,
Fiesole is to be seen on her hill, with the beautiful campanile of
her church in the dip between the two eminences, that very soon one
comes to feel that this surely is the promised land. Florence lies
so low, and the delectable mountain is so near and so alluring. But
I am not sure that to dream of Fiesole as desirable, and to murmur
its beautiful syllables, is not best.
Let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine,
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole
--that was Andrea's way and not an unwise one. For Fiesole at
nearer view can easily disappoint. It is beautifully set on its
hill and it has a fascinating past; but the journey thither on
foot is very wearisome, by the electric tram vexatious and noisy,
and in a horse-drawn carriage expensive and cruel; and when you
are there you become once more a tourist without alleviation and
are pestered by beggars, and by nice little girls who ought to
know better, whose peculiar importunacy it is to thrust flowers
into the hand or buttonhole without any denial. What should have
been a mountain retreat from the city has become a kind of Devil's
Dyke. But if one is resolute, and, defying all, walks up to the
little monastery of S. Francesco at the very top of the hill, one
may rest almost undisturbed, with Florence in the valley below, and
gardens and vineyards undulating beneath, and a monk or two ascending
or descending the steps, and three or four picture-postcard hawkers
gambling in a corner, and lizards on the wall. Here it is good to be
in the late afternoon, when the light is mellowing; and if you want
tea there is a little loggia a few yards down this narrow steep path
where it may be found. How many beautiful villas in which one could
be happy sunning oneself among the lizards lie between this point
and Florence! Who, sitting here, can fail to think that?
In walking to Fiesole one follows the high walls of the Villa Palmieri,
which is now very private American property, but is famous for ever as
the first refuge of Boccaccio's seven young women and three young men
when they fled from plague-stricken Florence in 1348 and told tales for
ten halcyon days. It is now generally agreed that if Boccaccio had any
particular house in his mind it was this. It used to be thought that
the Villa Poggio Gherardo, Mrs. Ross's beautiful home on the way to
Settignano, was the first refuge, and the Villa Palmieri the second,
but the latest researches have it that the Palmieri was the first and
the Podere della Fonte, or Villa di Boccaccio, as it is called, near
Camerata, a little village below S. Domenico, the other. The Villa
Palmieri has another and somewhat different historical association,
for it was there that Queen Victoria resided for a while in 1888. But
the most interesting thing of all about it is the circumstance that
it was the home of Matteo Palmieri, the poet, and Botticelli's friend
and fellow-speculator on the riddle of life. Palmieri was the author
of a remarkable poem called "La Citta della Vita" (The City of Life)
which developed a scheme of theology that had many attractions to
Botticelli's curious mind. The poem was banned by Rome, although
not until after its author's death. In our National Gallery is a
picture which used to be considered Botticelli's--No. 1126, "The
Assumption of the Virgin"--especially as it is mentioned with some
particularity by Vasari, together with the circumstance that the
poet and painter devised it in collaboration, in which the poem is
translated into pigment. As to the theology, I say nothing, nor as to
its new ascription to Botticini; but the picture has a greater interest
for us in that it contains a view of Florence with its wall of towers
around it in about 1475. The exact spot where the painter sat has been
identified by Miss Stokes in "Six Months in the Apennines". On the
left immediately below the painter's vantage-ground is the Mugnone,
with a bridge over it. On the bank in front is the Villa Palmieri,
and on the picture's extreme left is the Badia of Fiesole.
On leaving S. Domenico, if still bent on walking, one should keep
straight on and not follow the tram lines to the right. This is the
old and terribly steep road which Lorenzo the Magnificent and his
friends Politian and Pico della Mirandola had to travel whenever they
visited the Medici villa, just under Fiesole, with its drive lined with
cypresses. Here must have been great talk and much conviviality. It
is now called the Villa McCalmont.
Once at Fiesole, by whatever means you reach it, do not neglect to
climb the monastery steps to the very top. It is a day of climbing,
and a hundred or more steps either way mean nothing now. For here
is a gentle little church with swift, silent monks in it, and a few
flowers in bowls, and a religious picture by that strange Piero di
Cosimo whose heart was with the gods in exile; and the view of Monte
Ceceri, on the other side of Fiesole, seen through the cypresses here,
which could not be better in disposition had Benozzo Gozzoli himself
arranged them, is very striking and memorable.
Fiesole's darling son is Mino the sculptor--the "Raphael of the
chisel"--whose radiant Madonnas and children and delicate tombs may
be seen here and there all over Florence. The piazza is named after
him; he is celebrated on a marble slab outside the museum, where all
the famous names of the vicinity may be read too; and in the church
is one of his most charming groups and finest heads. They are in a
little chapel on the right of the choir. The head is that of Bishop
Salutati, humorous, wise, and benign, and the group represents the
adoration of a merry little Christ by a merry little S. John and
others. As for the church itself, it is severe and cool, with such
stone columns in it as must last for ever.
But the main interest of Fiesole to most people is not the
cypress-covered hill of S. Francesco; not the view from the summit;
not the straw mementoes; not the Mino relief in the church; but
the Roman arena. The excavators have made of this a very complete
place. One can stand at the top of the steps and reconstruct it
all--the audience, the performance, the performers. A very little time
spent on building would be needed to restore the amphitheatre to its
original form. Beyond it are baths, and in a hollow the remains of a
temple with the altar where it ever was; and then one walks a little
farther and is on the ancient Etruscan wall, built when Fiesole was an
Etruscan fortified hill city. So do the centuries fall away here! But
everywhere, among the ancient Roman stones so massive and exact,
and the Etruscan stones, are the wild flowers which Luca Signorelli
painted in that picture in the Uffizi which I love so much.
After the amphitheatre one visits the Museum--with the same ticket--a
little building filled with trophies of the spade. There is nothing
very wonderful--nothing to compare with the treasures of the
Archaeological Museum in Florence--but it is well worth a visit.
On leaving the Museum on the last occasion that I was there--in
April--I walked to Settignano. The road for a while is between
houses, for Fiesole stretches a long way farther than one suspects,
very high, looking over the valley of the Mugnone; and then after a
period between pine trees and grape-hyacinths one turns to the right
and begins to descend. Until Poggio del Castello, a noble villa,
on an isolated eminence, the descent is very gradual, with views of
Florence round the shoulder of Monte Ceceri; but afterwards the road
winds, to ease the fall, and the wayfarer turns off into the woods and
tumbles down the hill by a dry water-course, amid crags and stones,
to the beginnings of civilization again, at the Via di Desiderio da
Settignano, a sculptor who stands to his native town in precisely
the same relation as Mino to his.
Settignano is a mere village, with villas all about it, and
the thing to remember there is not only that Desiderio was born
there but that Michelangelo's foster-mother was the wife of a
local stone-cutter--stone-cutting at that time being the staple
industry. On the way back to Florence in the tram, one passes on the
right a gateway surmounted by statues of the poets, the Villa Poggio
Gherardo, of which I have spoken earlier in the chapter. There is no
villa with a nobler mien than this.
That is one walk from Fiesole. Another is even more a sculptors' way:
for it would include Maiano too, where Benedetto was born. The road
is by way of the tram lines to that acute angle just below Fiesole
when they turn back to S. Domenico, and so straight on down the hill.
But if one is returning to Florence direct after leaving Fiesole it
is well to walk down the precipitous paths to S. Domenico, and before
again taking the tram visit the Badia overlooking the valley of the
Mugnone. This is done by turning to the right just opposite the church
of S. Domenico, which has little interest structurally but is famous
as being the chapel of the monastery where Fra Angelico was once a
monk. The Badia (Abbey) di Fiesole, as it now is, was built on the
site of an older monastery, by Cosimo Pater. Here Marsilio Ficino's
Platonic Academy used to meet, in the loggia and in the little temple
which one gains from the cloisters, and here Pico della Mirandola
composed his curious gloss on Genesis.
The dilapidated marble façade of the church and its rugged stone-work
are exceedingly ancient--dating in fact from the eleventh century;
the new building is by Brunelleschi and to my mind is one of his
most beautiful works, its lovely proportions and cool, unfretted
white spaces communicating even more pleasure than the Pazzi chapel
itself. The decoration has been kept simple and severe, and the colour
is just the grey pietra serena of Fiesole, of which the lovely arches
are made, all most exquisitely chiselled, and the pure white of the
walls and ceilings. This church was a favourite with the Medici, and
the youthful Giovanni, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, received
his cardinal's hat here in 1492, at the age of sixteen. He afterwards
became Pope Leo X. How many of the boys, now in the school--for the
monastery has become a Jesuit school--will, one wonders, rise to
similar eminence.
In the beautiful cloisters we have the same colour scheme as
in the church, and here again Brunelleschi's miraculous genius
for proportion is to be found. Here and there are foliations and
other exquisite tracery by pupils of Desiderio da Settignano. The
refectory has a high-spirited fresco by that artist whose room in
the Uffizi is so carefully avoided by discreet chaperons--Giovanni di
San Giovanni--representing Christ eating at a table, his ministrants
being a crowd of little roguish angels and cherubim, one of whom (on
the right) is in despair at having broken a plate. In the entrance
lobby is a lavabo by Mino da Fiesole, with two little boys of the
whitest and softest marble on it, which is worth study.
And now we will return to the heart of Florence once more.