Part 1
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 46092-h.htm or 46092-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46092/pg46092-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46092/46092-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/littlepilgrimage00pottuoft
A LITTLE PILGRIMAGE IN ITALY
A LITTLE PILGRIMAGE IN ITALY
by
OLAVE M. POTTER
Author of 'The Colour of Rome.'
With 8 Coloured Plates and Illustrations by Yoshio Markino
Toronto The Musson Book Company Limited
First Published November 1911 Cheap Re-Issue 1913
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
FOREWORD
One morning of high summer three pilgrims met together in the City of Genoa to sally forth in search of sunshine and the Middle Ages.
At least that was what the Poet said, for sunshine and Ancient Stones were the passions of the Poet's life.
The Philosopher insisted that we went in search of Happiness.
It is no matter. But in fact we did meet one July day of sweltering sunshine in Genoa, the Western Gate of Italy, which is a city of grateful shadows, whose narrow streets defy the brilliant sun.
This is a book of simple delights, a chronicle of little pleasures, so I shall not talk much of Genoa, although to my mind she is the most Italian of all the great cities of Italy. Nor shall I speak of Florence, or Naples, or Venice, or Rome. Doubtless, like me, you have loved them all.
If you come with me I shall take you away from the great cities where your feet are bruised on the stony streets and never feel the soft warm earth beneath their soles, where mountainous walls of brick limit your vision to smoke-clouded strips of sky, where you never smell the fragrance of the night. If you come with me I shall take you to the hills, the deep-bosomed rolling hills, with their valleys and their plains and with towered cities riding on their crests. You will lie with me under the olives and stone-pines, where the warm earth cushions your limbs in luxury, and the sunlight flickering in the green shadows lights on a wealth of flowers.
Then, if you will, come back to your haunted streets.
But I am persuaded that if you go there you will find a great content among the little cities of great memories which stand knee-deep in flowers upon the hills of Italy, or in those nobler towns,--Siena, who belongs to the Madonna, and Perugia, whose name is as a torch to light your feet into the Valleys of Romance. In their streets you are seldom shut away from the mountains and the sky; and little gracious weeds and grasses have spread a web among their stones as though an elfin world sought to entrap a monster and pull him down to ruin.
Our little pilgrimage took us to many shrines, and haunts of peace and beauty. We made our discoveries, saw much, learned not a little philosophy. And, most of all, we caught a glimpse of the heart of Umbria--Umbria of the saints. We watched the gathering of the golden maize in the plain below Assisi while we walked with St. Francis among the vines and olives; we saw the vintage being brought home with song and thanksgiving at Orvieto and Viterbo. We dwelt among beautiful simple-hearted men and women, living in little farms far from the toil of the modern world, who still worship God in the gladness of their hearts and the spirit of the ardent thirteenth century; who toil and spin and bear children and lie down to die, not with the stupidity of animals or the self-satisfaction of the bourgeoisie, but full of a beautiful content, moved by a beautiful faith. We dipped into Tuscany too, into Lombardy, into the March of Ancona, into Lazio, but nowhere else was the world as perfect, as unspoiled as in Umbria. If you are travel-stained with life, if the sweat of a work-a-day world still clings about you, if you have lost your saints and almost forgotten your Gods, you will cure the sickness of your soul in Umbria.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
FOREWORD v
I. AREZZO 1
II. CORTONA 14
III. PERUGIA 24
IV. TODI 45
V. SIENA AND THE PALIO 58
VI. SAN GIMIGNANO DELLE BELLE TORRI 88
VII. MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE 105
VIII. CHIUSI 116
IX. HANNIBAL'S THRASYMENE 129
X. ASSISI 144
XI. GUBBIO 171
XII. ANCONA 188
XIII. LORETO 201
XIV. RAVENNA 216
XV. THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO 234
XVI. URBINO 245
XVII. FOLIGNO 259
XVIII. CLITUMNUS 276
XIX. SPOLETO 280
XX. THE FALLS OF TERNI 296
XXI. NARNI 303
XXII. ORVIETO: THE CITY OF WOE 316
XXIII. VITERBO 333
XXIV. ROME 353
ILLUSTRATIONS
COLOURED PLATES
PERUGIA: LOOKING TOWARDS ASSISI _Frontispiece_
SIENA: TORRE DEL MANGIA _Facing page_ 62
SAN GIMIGNANO " 102
LAKE THRASYMENE " 137
ASSISI: THE LOWER CHURCH OF SAN FRANCESCO " 152
ANCONA: THE FISHING FLEET " 192
SPOLETO: THE AQUEDUCT " 292
THE FALLS OF TERNI " 298
HALF-TONES
GENOA: THE HARBOUR _Facing page_ viii
A STREET IN AREZZO " 8
CORTONA FROM THE PORTA S. MARGHERITA " 20
PERUGIA: PIAZZA DEL MUNICIPIO " 28
PERUGIA: THE RING OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN " 30
PERUGIA: PORTA EBURNEA " 40
PERUGIA: THE TOMB OF THE VOLUMNII " 42
A STREET IN SIENA " 66
SIENA: S. DOMENICO AND THE VIA BENINCASA " 68
SIENA FROM THE CONVENTO DELL'OSSERVANZA " 72
SIENA: THE PALIO " 84
SAN GIMIGNANO: THE WASHING PLACE " 96
CHIUSI: THE PALACE OF THE BISHOP " 126
A STREET IN ASSISI " 148
THE LITTLE CLOISTER IN S. FRANCESCO D'ASSISI " 154
ASSISI: THE PORZIUNCULA " 168
GUBBIO: PIAZZA VITTORIO EMANUELE " 180
GUBBIO: VIA CARMIGNANO " 184
LORETO " 202
SAN MARINO " 236
URBINO: SAN FRANCESCO " 252
FOLIGNO: THE WASHING PLACE " 268
THE TEMPLE OF CLITUMNUS " 278
A STREET IN SPOLETO " 288
THE CATTLE FAIR AT NARNI " 306
A STREET IN ORVIETO " 322
ORVIETO: ETRUSCAN TOMB " 330
VITERBO: MEDIAEVAL HOUSE IN THE PIAZZA S. LORENZO " 336
VITERBO: FROM A WINDOW IN THE PALACE OF THE POPES " 340
VITERBO: VIA DI S. PELLEGRINO " 346
ROME: ST. PETER'S SEEN FROM THE ARCO OSCURO " 354
ROME: A FOUNTAIN IN THE BORGHESE GARDENS " 358
LINE DRAWINGS
A STREET IN GENOA _See page_ vi
AREZZO: THE PRISON " 6
CORTONA FROM THE PIAZZA GARIBALDI " 16
PERUGIA: DETAIL FROM THE CHOIR OF S. PIETRO DE' CASSINENSI " 24
PERUGIA: ARCO DI AUGUSTO " 27
THE GRIFFON OF PERUGIA " 32
FOUNTAIN IN THE CLOISTER OF S. PIETRO DE' CASSINENSI " 36
DETAILS FROM THE APSE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF TODI " 51
TODI: S. MARIA DELLA CONSOLAZIONE " 54
SIENA: BANNER-HOLDER " 61
SIENA: TORCH-REST " 64
SIENESE YOUTHS IN PALIO DRESS " 77
SEEN AT THE PALIO " 81
THE TOWERS OF SAN GIMIGNANO " 89
CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE " 107
CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI " 118
ETRUSCAN CINERARY URNS " 122
CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO " 133
ASSISI: S. MARIA MADDALENA AT RIVO TORTO " 159
ASSISI: THE CARCERE " 163
GUBBIO: THE LAMPLIGHTER " 173
GUBBIO: SAN FRANCESCO " 177
GUBBIO: THE MEDIAEVAL AQUEDUCT " 183
PEASANTS AT LORETO " 206
PILGRIMS AT LORETO " 211
RAVENNA: THE PINETA " 218
RAVENNA: SANT'AGATA " 221
RAVENNA: THE TOMB OF DANTE " 228
RAVENNA: COLUMN OF GASTON DE FOIX " 232
THE PALACE OF THE DUKES OF URBINO " 247
FOLIGNO: SAN DOMENICO " 263
FOLIGNO: WELL IN THE CASA NOCCHI " 265
SPELLO " 273
SPOLETO: PORTA D'ANNIBALE " 282
SPOLETO: SAN GREGORIO " 285
A FOUNTAIN OF SPOLETO " 290
SPOLETO: SAN PIETRO " 294
THE LOWER FALL OF TERNI " 300
FARMERS AT THE OX " 304
FAIR OF NARNI " 308
NARNI: MARKET PEOPLE " 310
NARNI: THE PONTE D'AUGUSTO " 312
BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO " 318
ORVIETO: THE CLOCK TOWER " 320
ORVIETO: SANT'AGOSTINO " 326
ETRUSCAN NECROPOLIS BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO " 329
OUTSIDE THE WALLS OF VITERBO " 334
VITERBO: THE MOAT OUTSIDE THE PORTA SAN PIETRO " 338
VITERBO: THE STEMMA OF THE CITY " 341
VITERBO: THE PALACE OF THE POPES " 343
VITERBO: FOUNTAIN IN THE PALAZZO MUNICIPIO " 344
VITERBO: THE HOUSE OF THE BELLA GALIANA " 345
ONE OF VITERBO'S MANY FOUNTAINS " 348
THE RUINED THEATRE OF FERENTO " 351
THE ALTAR OF THE UNKNOWN GOD ON THE PALATINE " 356
THE VIA APPIA " 360
AREZZO
We came to Arezzo in the cool of the evening. It had been a breathless day. Even at Genoa the air hung heavy with the sirocco. We found Pisa in a mirage, and the white hills of Carrara glistening like the lime rocks of a desert.
It was good to be in Tuscany again--Tuscany with her grey farms and lichened roofs, her towered horizons, her blue hills, her vineyards, and her olive-gardens. We could hear the song of the cicalas vibrating in the sunshine above the jar of the train; near at hand the hills swelled up, clothed with the tender mist of olives or linked with vines; stone-pines floated darkly against the sky, and cypress spires climbed the hillsides in a long procession like souls on pilgrimage.
Perhaps it is because Arezzo, little Arezzo, with her ancient history and her tale of great men, was the earliest of our hill-cities that we loved her at first sight. Coming from London and Genoa, with the noise and dust and heat of long train journeys still hanging about us, she seemed very cool and sweet among her vineyards and olive-gardens. She has left her hill-top now that she needs no more the walls which Sangallo built in the fighting days of the Popes, and has trailed down to the railway in the valley, leaving behind her wide piazzas which she has filled with shady trees, and benches, and statues of her great ones. Her paved streets, steep and clean, climb up the hillside between grey palaces, green-shuttered, with wide Tuscan eaves, whose fantastic outlines, seen in échelon against the sky, bring back a score of memories of other clean-swept Tuscan towns.
Now that we were threading her byways, Arezzo, though she had looked imposing from the valley, dwindled to a little brown city, full of memories, and frescoed churches, and ancient houses in which the labourer dwells in his poverty to-day where the rich citizens of Arezzo once held great state. Capers and all manner of pensive creepers grew out of the rough walls; fig-trees, roses, wistarias, and oleanders in full blossom poured over them, so that the air was full of fragrance. And there were flowers in the upper windows of thirteenth-century houses, for your Tuscan is fond of flowers, and will have his _garofani_ upon his window-ledge. Through the low-browed gateways we could see women spinning in arcaded courtyards; and the shoemakers and basket-weavers worked at their humble trades as they sat on the steps of weather-beaten Gothic houses.
And often as we wandered through her narrow streets we paused to look down upon the calm beauty of the Tuscan plain, which stretched from the vineyards below her walls to the blue mountains of Chianti. Nor did it require any effort of imagination, while we were walking in those mediaeval byways between the Borgunto and the Via di Pellicceria, to people the rich valley with the pageant which Dante witnessed while he was staying in Arezzo with the elder Petrarch, both exiles from Florence.
'It hath been heretofore my chance to see Horsemen with martial order shifting camp, To onset sallying, or in muster rang'd, Or in retreat sometimes outstretch'd for flight; Light-armed squadrons and fleet foragers Scouring thy plains, Arezzo! have I seen, And clashing tournaments, and tilting jousts, Now with the sound of trumpets, now of bells, Tabors, or signals made from castled heights.'[1]
A common sight enough, heaven knows, in the Middle Ages, when every little city sought to rule itself, and the populace and the petty lords alike cloaked their ambitions under the old war-cry of Guelph and Ghibelline!
There is an air of gaiety in Arezzo, a simple, almost pastoral, joy. The philosopher felt it at once.
'We are like flowers,' he said, as we sat on a bench outside the inn after our first breakfast in Tuscany. 'In London our roots spread in the ground, and they get knotted and twisted in the darkness. Here we shoot right up into the sun.'
And, indeed, Arezzo is a happy place, whose charm, it may be, owes its origin to an earlier civilisation, which has left so many broken fragments of its art scattered on the neighbouring hillsides. They are garnered to-day in the museum among the relics of Arezzo's history, of which they are the chief glory now that the bronze Chimera and the magnificent Etruscan statue of Minerva have gone to swell the treasures of Florence. There is not a vase or _patera_ unbroken. The entire collection is composed of fragments, moulds and casts in low relief. But every piece is exquisitely beautiful; each one is like a shell cast by the tides of fantasy upon the shores of a work-a-day world. And though the streets of Arezzo are nearly always empty and silent, I think the flutes and lyres and dancing fauns, with which the artists of Arretium delicately graced their coral-coloured bowls and cups, are not silenced yet upon this Tuscan hill. Perhaps the spirit of the slim-limbed girls and youths, and merry little loves, whose forms are beauty, and whose fragile feet seem scarce to bruise the ground, dance still to their forgotten songs about the vineyards of Arretium. It is as though the dream of some Attic poet, for I cannot think that the heavy-eyed people of Etruria imagined such gods, lingers on in this little Tuscan town, and the echo of its ancient music vibrates in the stillness of the museum like the murmur of waves in a shell. Or perhaps it is a magic in the air, the subtle air of Tuscany, that poets sing of, which has inspired more genius than we can find in all the rest of Italy.
For Arezzo, like Florence, has been the mother of great men. Michelangelo, himself born but a few miles from Arezzo, wrote to Vasari, 'Giorgio, of myself I have no power. I happened to be born in the subtle air of your _paese_.'
Poets and artists, sculptors and musicians, have issued from her walls. All the world knows that she bred Maecenas and Petrarch, but only those who pause to read her chronicles know how many of her sons have walked with History in the corridors of Time--Margheritone, the Spinelli; Leonardo Bruni; Carlo Marsuppini, and a host of other humanists; the fighting bishop, Guido Tarlati; Vasari; and Guido Monaco, the Benedictine monk, born in the closing years of the eleventh century, who was the inventor of our modern system of musical notation.
Whether Arezzo occupies the site of Arretium, the city of the Etruscan league, which is unlikely, or whether it rose like a phoenix from the ashes of its ancient necropolis, or grew from a Roman colony of that name near the Etruscan settlement, is not for me to say, since antiquaries are undecided. In any case there is little of either Etruscan or Roman antiquity outside the museum to-day.
It is the Middle Ages which have set their crown upon Arezzo. Knowing her courage, and how it outweighed her strength so that she dared to offer battle to her great neighbour Florence through many stormy centuries, it is a marvel that anything of value should be left. And in fact Arezzo boasts few civic buildings--the palace of the Podestà or del Governo, now the prison, whose façade is covered with the _stemme_ of her many rulers, and the Palazzo Comunale or dei Priori, with its picturesque clock tower, are all that remain of the mediaeval city, except some streets of fifteenth-century dwelling-houses. But she has several noble churches--the Gothic Duomo, majestically simple within and without, which crowns her hill-top; the Pieve, Santa Maria di Gradi, with its wonderful Pisan-Romanesque façade, hoary with antiquity; the great bare church of San Francesco, enriched by Piero della Francesca's Story of the True Cross; and Santa Maria delle Grazie in the vineyards outside the walls.
It is the same all over Italy. What little town is there, however broken, but has ancient churches and palaces to crown its hill and keep troth through the ages with its vanished greatness? Arezzo is particularly rich. The most expectant pilgrim to Italy's shrines of art, even though he come straight from Florence, will be thrilled by the golden church which soars from the crest of Arezzo's hill between the gracious old Palazzo Comunale and the public gardens, gay in July with the flame-coloured pennons of a flowering tree, which Mr. Markino tells me is called Urushi in Japan. For the Aretines have lavished wealth upon their cathedral, and the Ark of San Donato, which is one of the most beautiful mediaeval shrines in Italy, a rival to Orcagna's masterpiece in Or San Michele, is alone worth the long hot climb. The exquisitely wrought marble is yellowing with age; it is as finely carved as Oriental ivories; the trefoils and the edges of its panels are set with lapis lazuli. And here we have the reverence of the Trecento, with its rude handiwork redeemed by its ardent sincerity. For the sculptors saw nothing strange or irreverent in filling their scenes of the lives of Madonna and San Donato with all the incongruous details of their own day, so that we have at the same time jesters and angels, knights a-horseback and heavy-headed saints, and the queer beasts of mediaeval imaginings.
Close at hand is the tomb of the splendid old fighting Bishop of Arezzo, Guido Tarlati, who crowned the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria with the Iron Crown of Lombardy in defiance of the excommunications of John XXII., and who led his people to battle against the Pope as readily as he led their prayers to God. A great man this, who has a worthy tomb, for Agostino and Agnolo of Siena carved the history of his stirring life below his recumbent form when he was laid to rest, and have shown us incidentally the life of the Trecento in all its vigour and humour. Two angels draw back the curtains of his bier, revealing him as he lies asleep, with folded hands and an air of extreme piety and humility, belied by the long recital of his little wars, and the story of his triumphs, from his Consecration as a Bishop to the Coronation of Lewis, and his death in 1327.