formal objections to the contrary, I venture to defend that now
somewhat obsolete and heretical opinion. For why does Fiesole stand
just where it does? What made them build a city up there, anyway? Well,
a town always exists just where it does exist for some good and amply
sufficient reason. Even if, like Fiesole, it is mainly a survival
(though at Fiesole there are, indeed, olives in plenty and other live
trades to keep a town going), it yet exists there in virtue of facts
which once upon a time were quite sufficient to bring the world to the
spot, and it goes on existing, partly by mere conservative use and
wont, no doubt, but partly also because there are houses, churches,
mills, and roads all ready built there. Now, a town must always, from a
very early period, have existed upon the exact site of Fiesole. And
why? To answer that question you have only to look at the view from the
platform. I do not mean to suggest that the ancient Etruscans came
there to enjoy the prospect as we go nowadays to the hotels on the Rigi
or to the summit of Mount Washington. The ancient Etruscan was a
practical man, and his views about views were probably rudimentary. But
gaze down for a moment from the cathedral platform upon the valley of
the Arno, spread like a glowing picture at your feet, and see how
immediately it resolves the doubt. Not, indeed, the valley of the Arno
as it stands at present, thick set with tower and spire and palace. In
order to arrive at the _raison d'être_ of Fiesole you must blot out
mentally Arnolfo's vast pile, and Brunelleschi's dome, and Giotto's
campanile, and Savonarola's monastery, and the tall and slender tower
of the Palazzo Vecchio, rising like a shaft sheer into the air far, far
below--you must blot out, in short, all that makes the world now
congregate at Florence, and all Florence itself into the bargain.
Nowhere on earth do I know a more peopled plain than that plain of Arno
in our own time, seen on a sunny autumn day, when the light glints
clearly on each white villa and church and hamlet, from this specular
mount of antique Fiesole. But to understand why Fiesole itself stands
there at all you must neglect all this, neglect all the wealth of art
that makes each inch of that valley classic ground, and look only, if
you can for a brief moment, at the bare facts of primitive nature.
And what then do you see? Spread far below you, and basking in the
sunshine, a comparatively flat and wide, open valley; olive and stone
pine and mulberry on its slopes; pasture land and flowery vale in its
midst. North and south, in two long ridges, the Apennines stretch their
hard, blue outlines from Carrara to Siena against the afternoon
sky--outlines of a sort that one never gets in northern lands, but
which remind one so exactly of the painted background to a
fifteenth-century Italian picture that nature seems here, to our
topsy-turvy fancy, to be whimsically imitating an effect from art. But
in between those two tossed and tumbled guardian ridges, the valley of
the Arno, as it flows towards Pisa, with the minor basins of its
tributary streams, expands for a while about Florence itself into a
broad and comparatively level plain. In a mountain country so broken
and heaved about as Peninsular Italy, every spare inch of cultivable
plain like that has incalculable value. True, on the terraced slopes of
the hillsides generation after generation of ingenious men have managed
to build up, tier by tier, a wonderful expanse of artificial tilth. But
while oil and wine can be produced upon the terraces, it is on the
river valleys alone that the early inhabitants had to depend for their
corn, their cheese, and their flesh-meat. Hence, in primitive Italy and
in primitive England alike, every such open alluvial plain, fit for
tilth or grazing, had overhanging it a stockaded hill-fort, which grew
with time into a mediæval town or a walled city. It is just so that
Caer Badon at Bath overhangs, with its prehistoric earthworks, the
plain of Avon on which Beau Nash's city now spreads its streets, and it
is just so that Old Sarum in turn overhangs, with its regular Roman
fosses and gigantic glacis, the dale of the namesake river in Wilts,
near its point of confluence with the stream of the Wily.
We find it hard, no doubt, to imagine nowadays that once upon a time
England was almost as thickly covered with hill-top villages (though on
minor heights) as Italy is in the present century. Yet such was
undoubtedly the case in prehistoric times. I know no better instance of
the way these stockaded villages were built than the magnificent group
of antique earthworks in Dorset and Devon which rings round with a
double row of fortresses the beautiful valley of the Axminster Axe.
There, on one side, a long line of strongholds built by the Durotriges
caps every jutting down and hill-top on the southern and eastern bank
of the river, while facing them, on the opposite northern and western
side, rises a similar series of Damnonian fortresses, crowning the
corresponding Devonshire heights. Lambert's Castle, Musberry Castle,
Hawksdown Castle, and so forth, the local nomenclature still calls
them, but they are castles, or _castra_, only in the now obsolete Roman
sense; prehistoric earthworks, with dyke and trench, once stockaded
with wooden palings on top, and enclosing the huts and homes of the
inhabitants. The river ran between the hostile territories; each
village held its own strip of land below its fortress-height, and drove
up its cattle, its women, and its children, in times of foray, to the
safety of the kraal or hill-top encampment.
In such a condition of society, of course, every community was
absolutely dependent upon its own territory for the means of
subsistence. And wherever the means of subsistence existed, a village
was sure to spring up in time upon the nearest hill-top. That is how
the oldest Fiesole of all first came to be perched there. It was a
hill-top refuge for the tillers and grazers of the fertile Arno vale at
its feet.
But why did the people of the Arno Valley fix upon the particular site
of Fiesole? Surely on the southern side of the river, about the Viale
dei Colli, the hills approach much nearer to the plain. From San
Miniato and the Bello Sguardo one looks down far more directly upon the
domes and palaces and campaniles of Florence spread right at one's
feet. Why didn't the primitive inhabitants of the valley fix rather on
a spur of that nearer range--say the one where Galileo's tower
stands--for the site of their village?
If you know Florence and have asked that question within yourself in
all seriousness as you read, I see you haven't yet begun to throw
yourself into the position of affairs in prehistoric Tuscany. You can't
shuffle off your own century. For between the broad plain and the range
of hills where the Viale dei Colli now winds serpentine on its
beautiful way round the glens and ravines, the Arno runs, a broad
torrent flood in times of freshet: the Arno, unbridged as yet (in the
days I speak of) by the Ponte Vecchio, an impassable frontier between
the wide territory of prehistoric Fiesole and the narrow fields of some
minor village, long since forgotten, on the opposite bank. The great
alluvial plain lies north of the river; the three streams whose silt
contributes to form it flow into the main channel from Pistoja and
Prato. To live across the river on the south bank would have been
absolutely impossible for the owners of the plain. But Fiesole occupies
a central spur of the northern heights, overlooking the valley to east
and west, and must therefore have been always the natural place from
which to command the plain of Arno. A little above and a little below
Florence gorges once more hem the river in. So that the plain of
Florence (as we call it nowadays), the plain of Fiesole, as it once
was, formed at the beginning a little natural principality by itself,
of which Fiesole was the obvious capital and stronghold.
For in order to understand Fiesole aright, we must always manage in our
own minds to get rid entirely of that beautiful mushroom growth,
Florence, and to think only of the most ancient epoch. While we are in
Florence itself, to be sure, it seems to us always, by comparison with
our modern English towns, that Florence is a place of immemorial
antiquity. It was civilized when Britain was a den of thieves. While in
feudal England Edward I. was summoning his barons to repress the rising
of William Wallace, in Florence, already a great commercial town,
Arnolfo di Cambio had received the sublime orders of the Signoria to
construct for the Duomo 'the most sumptuous edifice that human
invention could desire or human labour execute,' and had carried out
those orders with consummate skill. While Edward III. was dreaming of
his lawless filibustering expeditions into France, Ciotto was
encrusting the face of his glorious belfry with that magnificent
decoration of many-coloured marbles which makes northern churches look
so cold and grey and barbaric by comparison. While Englishmen were
burning Joan of Arc at Rouen, Fra Angelico was adorning the walls of
San Marco with those rapt saints and those spotless Madonnas. Even the
very back streets of Florence recall at every step its mediæval
magnificence. But when from Florence itself one turns to Fiesole, the
city by the Arno sinks at once by a sudden revulsion into a mere thing
of yesterday by the side of the city on the Etruscan hill-top. Fiesole
was a town of immemorial antiquity while Florence was still, what
perhaps its poetical name imports, a field of flowers.
But why this particular height rather than any other of the dozen that
jut out into the plain? Well, there we get at another fundamental point
in hill-top town history. Fiesole had water. A spring at such a height
is comparatively rare, but it is a necessary accompaniment, or rather a
condition precedent, of all high-place villages. In the Borgo Unto you
will still find this spring--a natural fountain, the Fonte Sotterra--in
an underground passage, now approached (so greatly did the Fiesolans
appreciate its importance) by a Gothic archway. The water supplies the
whole neighbourhood; and that accounts for the position of the town on
the low _col_ just below the acropolis.
Who first chose the site it would be impossible to say; the earliest
stockaded fort at Fiesole (enclosing the town and arx above) must go
back to the very dawn of neolithic history, long before the Etruscans
had ever issued forth from their Rhætian fastnesses to occupy the blue
and silver-grey hills of modern Tuscany. Nor do we know who built the
great Cyclopean walls, whose huge rough blocks still overhang the
modern carriage road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladies
and Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the Valley. They
are attributed to the Etruscans, of course, on much the same grounds as
Stonehenge is attributed to the Druids--because in the minds of the
people who made the attribution Etruscans and Druids were each in their
own place the _ne plus ultra_ of aboriginal antiquity. But at any rate,
at some very early time, the people who held the valley of the Arno
erected these vast megalithic walls round their city and citadel as a
protection, probably, against the people who held the Ligurian
sea-board. Throughout the early historical period at least we know that
Fæsulæ was an Etruscan border-town against the Ligurian freebooters,
and we can see that the arx or acropolis of Fæsulæ must have occupied
the hill-top now occupied by the Franciscan monastery on the height
above the town, while the houses must have spread, as they still do
within shrunken limits, about the spring and over the _col_ at its
base.
Fæsulæ was not one of the great Etrurian cities, not one of the twelve
cities of the Etruscan League. Volterra occupies the site of the large
Tuscan town which lorded it over this part of the Lower Apennines. But
Fæsulæ must still have been a considerable place, to judge by the
magnitude and importance of its fortifications, and it must have
gathered into itself the entire population of all the little Arno
plain. As long as _fortis Etruria crevit_, Fæsulæ must always have held
its own as a frontier post against the Ligurian foe. But when _fortis
Etruria_ began to decline, and Rome to become the summit of all things,
the glory of Fæsulæ received a severe shock. Not indeed by
conquest--that counts for little--but the Roman peace introduced into
Italy a new order of things, fatal to the hill-tops. Sulla, who humbled
Fæsulæ, did far worse than that: he planted a Roman colony in the
valley at its foot--the colony of Florentia--at the point where the
road crossed the Arno--the colony that was afterwards to become the
most famous commercial and artistic town of the mediæval world as
Florence.
The position of the new town marks the change that had come over the
conditions of life in Upper Italy. Florence was a Fiesole descended to
the plain. And it descended for just the selfsame reason that made
Bishop Poore thirteen centuries later bring down Sarum from its lofty
hill-top to the new white minster by the ford of Avon. Roads,
communications, internal trade were henceforth to exist and to count
for much; what was needed now was a post and trading town on the river
to guard the passage from north to south against possible aggression.
Fiesole had been but a mountain stronghold; Florence was marked from
the very beginning by its mere position as a great commercial and
manufacturing town.
Nevertheless, just as in mediæval England the upper town on the hill,
the castled town of the barons, often existed for many years side by
side with the lower town on the river, the high-road town of the
merchant guilds--just as Old Sarum, for example, continued to exist
side by side with Salisbury--so Fæsulæ continued to exist side by side
with Florentia. As a military post, commanding the plain, it was
needful to retain it; and so, though Sulla destroyed in part its
population, he reinstated it before long as one of his own Roman
colonies. And for a long time, during the ages of doubtful peace that
succeeded the first glorious flush of the military empire, Fæsulæ must
have kept up its importance unchanged. The remains of the Roman theatre
on the slope behind the cathedral--great stone semicircles carved on a
scale to seat a large audience--betoken a considerable Roman town. And
from a very early period it seems to have possessed a Christian church,
whose first bishop, according to a tradition as good as most, was a
convert of St. Peter's, and was martyred, says his legend, in the
Neronian persecution. The existing cathedral, its later representative,
is still an early and very simple Tuscan basilica, with picturesque
crypt and raised choir, of a very plain Romanesque type. It looks like
a fitting church for the mother-town of Florence; it seems to recall in
its own cold and austere fabric the more ancient claims of the sombre
Etruscan hill-top city.
It was the middle ages, however, that finally brought down Fiesole in
earnest to the plain. Pisa had been the earliest Tuscan town to attain
importance and maritime supremacy after the dark days of barbarian
incursion; but as soon as land-transit once more assumed general
importance, Florence, seated on the great route from the north to Rome
by Siena, and commanding the passage of the Arno and the gate of the
Apennines, naturally began to surpass in time its distanced rival. As
early as the Roman days a bridge is said to have spanned the Arno on
the site of the existing Ponte Vecchio. The mediæval walls enclosed the
southern _tête du pont_ within their picturesque circuit, thus securing
the passage of the river and giving Florence its little Janiculus, the
Oltrarno, with its southern exit by the Porta Romana. The real 'makers
of Florence' were the humble workmen who thus extended the firm hold of
the growing republic to the southern bank. By so doing, they gave their
city undoubted command of the imperial route from Germany Romeward, and
brought in their train Dante and Giotto, Brunelleschi and Donatello,
Fra Angelico and Savonarola, the Medici and the Pitti, Michael Angelo
and Raffaele, and all the glories of the Renaissance epoch. For as at
Athens, so in Florence, art and literature followed plainly in the wake
of commerce. But the rise of Florence was the fall of Fiesole. Already
in the eleventh century the undutiful daughter had conquered and
annexed her venerable mother; and in proportion as the mercantile
importance of the city in the plain waxed greater and greater, that of
the city on the hill-top must slowly have waned to less and less. At
the present day Fiesole has degenerated into a mere suburb of Florence,
which, indeed, it had almost become when Lorenzo the Magnificent held
his country court at the Villa Mozzi, or even earlier, when Boccaccio's
lively narrators fled from the plague to the gardens of the Palmieri,
though it still retains the dignity of its ancient cathedral, its
municipal palace, its gigantic seminary, and its great overgrown
Franciscan monastery, that replaces the citadel on the height above the
town. Nay, more, with its local museum, its bishop's palace, and its
quaint churches, it keeps up, to some extent, all the airs and graces
of a real living town. But in reality these few big buildings, and the
graceful campanile which makes so fair a show in all the neighbouring
views, are the best of the little city. Fiesole looks biggest seen from
afar. All that is vital in it is the ecclesiastical establishment,
which still clings, with true ecclesiastical conservatism, to the
hill-top city, and the trade of the straw plaiters, who make Leghorn
straw goods and pester the visitor with their flimsy wares, taking no
answer to all their importunities save one in solid coin of good King
Umberto.
One last question. How does it come that in these southern climates the
hill-top town has survived so much more generally to our own day than
in Northern Europe? The obvious answer seems at first sight to be that
in the warmer climates life can be carried on comfortably, and
agriculture can yield good results, at a greater height than in a cold
climate. Olives, vines, chestnuts, maize will grow far up on Italian
hill sides, and that, no doubt, counts for something; but I do not
believe it covers all the ground. Two other points seem to me at least
equally important, especially when we remember that the hill-top town
was once as common in the north as in the south, and that what we have
really to account for in Italy is not its existence merely, but rather
its late survival into newer epochs. One point is that in Southern
Europe the state of perpetual internal warfare lasted much longer than
in the feudal north. The other point is that each little patch of
country in the south is still far more self-supporting, has had its
economic conditions far less disturbed by modern rearrangements and
commercial necessities, than in Northern Europe. In England every town
and village stands upon some high road; the larger stand almost
invariably upon some railway or some navigable river. In Italy it is
still quite possible, where agricultural conditions are favourable, to
have a comparatively flourishing town perched upon some out-of-the-way
mountain height. Even a carriage road is scarcely a necessity; a mule
path will do well enough for wine and oil and the other simple
commodities of southern life. The hill-top town, in short, belongs to
an earlier type of civilisation than ours; it survives, unaltered, on
its own pinnacle wherever that type of civilisation is still possible.
And I sincerely hope our pretty American friend will pardon me for
having thus publicly answered, at so great length, her natural
question.
A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY.
Standing to-day before the dim outline of Orcagna's "Hell" in the
Church of Santa Maria Novella, at Florence, and mentally comparing
those mediæval demons and monsters and torturers on the frescoed wall
in front of me with the more antique Etruscan devils and tormentors
pictured centuries earlier on the ancient tombs of Etrurian princes,
the thought, which had often occurred to me before, how essentially
similar were the Tuscan intellect and Tuscan art in all ages, forced
itself upon me once more at a flash with an irresistible burst of
internal conviction. The identity of old and new seemed to stand
confessed. Etruria throughout has been one and the same; and it is
almost impossible for any one to over-estimate the influence of the
powerful, but gloomy, Etruscan character upon the whole tone, not only
of popular Christianity, but of that modern civilisation which is its
offspring and outcome.
I suppose it is hardly necessary, "in this age of enlightenment" (as
people used to say in the last century), to insist any longer upon the
obvious fact that conquest and absorption do not in any way mean
extermination. Most people still vaguely fancy to themselves, to be
sure, that, when Rome conquered and absorbed Etruria, the ancient
Etruscan ceased at once to exist--was swallowed, as it were, and became
forthwith, in some mysterious way, first a Roman, and then a modern
Italian. And, in a certain sense, this is, no doubt, more or less true;
but that sense is decidedly not the genealogical one. Manners change,
but blood persists. The Tuscan people went on living and marrying under
consul and emperor just as they had done under _lar_ and _lucumo_;
Latin and Gaul, Lombard and Goth, mingled with them in time, but did
not efface them; and I do not doubt that the vast mass of the
population of Tuscany at the present day is still of preponderatingly
Etruscan blood, though qualified, of course (and perhaps improved), by
many Italic, Celtic, and Teutonic elements.
Again, when we remember that Florence, Pisa, Siena, Perugia are all
practically in Tuscany, and that Florence alone has really given to the
world Dante and Boccaccio, Galileo and Savonarola, Cimabue and Giotto,
Botticelli and Fra Angelico, Donatello and Ghiberti, Michael Angelo and
Raffael, Leonardo da Vinci and Macchiavelli and Alfieri, and a host of
other almost equally great names, it will be obvious to every one that
the problem of the origin of this Tuscan nationality must be one that
profoundly interests the whole world. Nay, more, we must remember, too,
that Etruria had other and earlier claims than these; that it spread up
to the very walls of Rome; that the Etruscan element in Rome itself was
immensely strong; that the Roman religion owed, confessedly, much to
Tuscan ideas; that Latin Christianity, the Christianity of all the
Western world, took its shape in semi-Tuscan Rome; that the Roman
Empire was largely modelled by the Etruscan Mæcenas; that the Italian
renaissance was largely influenced by the Florentine Medici; that Leo
the Tenth was himself a member of that great house; and that the
artists whom he summoned to the metropolis to erect St. Peter's and to
beautify the Vatican were, almost all of them, Florentines by birth,
training, or domicile. I think, when we have run over mentally these
and ten thousand other like facts, we will readily admit to ourselves
the magnitude of the world's debt to Tuscany--social, artistic,
intellectual, religious--both in ancient, mediæval, and modern times.
And what, now, was this strong Tuscan nationality, which persists so
thoroughly through all external historical changes, and which has
contributed so large and so marvellous a part to the world's thought
and the world's culture? It is a curious consideration for those who
talk so glibly, about the enormous natural superiority of the Aryan
race, that the ancient Etruscans were the one people of the antique
European world, who, by common consent, did _not_ belong to the Aryan
family. They were strangers in the land, or, rather, perhaps they were
its oldest possessors. Their language, their physique, their creed,
their art, all point to a wholly different origin from the Aryans. I am
not going, in a brief essay like this, to settle dogmatically,
off-hand, the vexed question of the origin and affinities of the
Etruscan type; more nonsense, I suppose, has been talked and written
upon that occult subject by learned men than even learned men have ever
poured forth upon any other sublunary topic; but one thing at least, I
take it, is absolutely certain amid the conflicting theories of
ingenious theorists about the Etruscan race, and that one thing is that
the Rasennæ stand in Europe absolutely alone, the sole representatives
of some ancient and elsewhere exterminated stock, surviving only in
Tuscany itself, and in the Rhætian Alps of the Canton Grisons.