Part 14
Signor Corrado Ricci, himself a son of Ravenna, speaks truly when he says 'Ravenna is a city historically great and fatal, nay, the very charnel-house of history, whither destiny sends great achievements and lofty personages to decay and oblivion. Here the Caesars, the Roman Empire, Roman Captains, Barbarian Kings, the reign of the Herulians, of the Goths, of the Exarchs, all pass away. And when its importance seems to wane, lo! Dante Aligheri is here to complete the greatest of his poems, and to die.
'Cardinal Bessarion, the perfect flower of Humanist culture, is brought to die in Ravenna. Francesco Maria della Rovere slays in her streets the infamous Cardinal of Pavia, Francesco Alidosio. Hither come the armies of Julius II., of Ferdinand of Spain, of Louis of France, of Alfonso d'Este; and Gaston de Foix receives his death-wound in the great battle which reimposes a term of foreign rule. Nor can the epic of the Risorgimento develop itself without new and memorable episodes being reserved for Ravenna. Here Garibaldi's astonishing retreat from Rome terminates; amid endless dangers the hero's life is preserved, but Anita, worn out by grief and hardships, died in his arms.'
THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO
To the classical scholar, San Marino must always be the real Nephelococcygia--the cloud-cuckoo-town, which the Athenian satirised as built by the birds up in the clouds to cut off the Gods from all connection with mankind. That is how the Sammarinesi live, cut off from the earth in which they are the smallest and most trivial nation. The proudest too, for though the area of their Republic is only twenty-four square miles, and they have their seat of government on the crest of a perpendicular rock, with a sheer drop of nearly a thousand feet, they have preserved unbroken their tradition of independence through fourteen centuries. Not, it appears, from any particular valour on the part of the Sammarinesi, although they must often have stood ready to the call of arms, with the greedy Malatesta so near at hand in Rimini, but because they have been greatly favoured by the enemies of Republics. The Papacy, which had already brought almost all the other petty States of Italy to their knees by force or treachery, granted recognition to the smallest of them in 1631. Napoleon listened to the pleading of Antonio Onofri, called by the grateful citizens 'the father of his country,' and repealed his decree for the suppression of the Republic. And the Kings of Italy, perhaps as a reward for the courageous shelter it offered to Garibaldi and his broken army, not only recognise its independence, but have made it a present of modern cannon, with which to defend itself.
San Marino was a true Nephelococcygia, on the afternoon we drove to it from Rimini. A heavy bank of cloud veiled the ragged crest of Monte Titano, that giant outpost of the Eastern Appennines, towering nearly 3000 feet above sea level, to which Marinus, the saintly stonemason of Dalmatia, fled from the persecutions of Diocletian. It was a day of storms. The sullen indigo-coloured mountains were lost in drifting clouds. Sometimes when the grey pall was rent by the wind, we glimpsed the fantastic towers of San Marino, high in the heavens on their mighty cliff; but while we pointed to them they were gone, like the city of a magician conjured out of mists.
From Serravalle, which is the first village of the Republic on the road from Rimini, our way led uphill, through the vineyards and fields of corn which are the chief source of income to the diminutive state. Down in the plain of Rimini it had been warm and sultry, but as the bearded clouds swept down to meet us, the air grew cold and damp. The Philosopher had a touch of fever and was unspeakably miserable, but nothing could damp the ardour of the Poet, who sat upon the coach-box and strained his eyes towards the fairy city overhead, whose turrets every now and then loomed grey among the clouds. On the long steep climb to the Borgo, we overtook the public diligence, which had dashed past us an hour before, rattling recklessly down one hill to gain sufficient impetus to carry it up the next. It was toiling along slowly enough, behind two rolling white oxen, while its steaming horses, ridden by grooms, brought up the rear.
And now the clouds rolled down the hillside and enveloped us, blotting out the distant view of Rimini and its sea-board, and crowding round us like curious ghosts. We could feel the chill breath of the mists upon our faces, and soon even the diligence with its laughing, chattering crowd of passengers was shut out of sight, and we were alone upon the grey mountain side. Just then the bells of the Borgo began to ring overhead, and their music floated down to us out of the thick fog, indescribably poetic, like the lights of an unknown harbour shining over the water. So we crept up, winding round the shoulder of the mountain towards the unseen town, which for all we knew might be one of the magic cities of our childhood. Sometimes the cliff rose sheer above us, and at others, the road faced a wall of cloud; and sometimes when, as it were, the breeze made windows in the mist, we saw the ragged, sullen crests of the Appennines lifting their heads above the drifting clouds. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a street with low stone houses, and in another minute we were in the Borgo.
It was all commonplace enough, not at all the city beautiful we had imagined,--a mountain village built of grey stone, with a few stuccoed houses, but it was very friendly and welcome after the unfamiliar mists. We did not stay. We still had before us the steep climb up to the Acropolis, 700 feet above the Borgo, and as we zig-zagged up the one road that for strategetical purposes San Marino possesses, we were overtaken by the rain, a cloud-burst, which, umbrellas notwithstanding, drenched us to the skin.
It was as though a sluice had opened in the heavens. But our _vetturino_, who had neither overcoat nor umbrella, was unmoved. He deposited us, bag and baggage, at the city gate, telling us with many shrugs, _non posso andare de più_. It rained in torrents. We did not know which way to turn. The steep, paved street in which we found ourselves was a miniature cascade whose stream ran over the tops of our shoes, and flowed in eddies round our luggage. Our condition was pitiable, until some kindly Sammarinesi helped us and our baggage up that waterfall and into the hospitable Albergo Titano.
Only then did we realise our good fortune in arriving before the public diligence, which was still lost in the mists below. For the Albergo Titano, an excellent and simple inn, where mine host in spite of his smart English tweeds is not too proud to help in the kitchen and hand the dishes at dinner, has limited accommodation. When we passed the belated travellers on the stairs after we had changed our wet clothes, we heard them expostulating indignantly because there was only one room to share between the five of them!
We found San Marino a City of Grey Cloud as romantic as the City of White Cloud into which the soul of the butterfly vanished in the Japanese legend of the Holy Mountain. It was full of shadows which materialised out of the mists, grew solid as we passed, then melted into wraiths again and vanished. It was very quiet, a world of ghosts, with great grey clouds ramping through everything. We could not see more than twenty yards ahead of us, and the end of each street seemed to float in space. No sooner had we won things from the mists than they were devoured again.
And so we came to the Piazza del Pianello with its statue of Liberty and its battlemented palace, which loomed up in the clouds like a ghost of the Gothic Palazzo dei Consoli at Gubbio. From the parapet where Herr Baedeker had told us to look for the view, we faced a sheet of mist on which some fantastic chimney-pots were faintly sketched.
Suddenly, by a seeming miracle, Monte Titano lifted its head out of the clouds, and San Marino lay clear before us, a grey, tidy, self-respecting hamlet overlooking some of the grandest mountain scenery to be found anywhere in Italy. Down in the valley the Marecchia wound, white as a river of bleached bones, towards the Appennines, whose heads were wreathed in sullen clouds. In the west the sun struggled to look once more upon the earth before it plunged below the mountains, and the white storm-wrack behind the ragged scarp of San Leo, where Cagliostro died, was fired by the fan-shaped rays. If we had felt like Dante and his guide climbing the hill of Purgatory as we toiled up the side of Monte Titano in the blear-grey mists, we looked for a moment into his Inferno when the curtaining clouds were rent apart.
'... For certain on the brink I found me of the lamentable vale, The dread abyss, that joins a thund'rous sound Of plaints innumerable. Dark and deep, And thick with clouds o'erspread ...'[24]
Across the valley the fortress of San Leo stood out in black relief against the smoking clouds, until it seemed as though eternal fires were burning behind the eagle's nest in which the great necromancer of the seventeenth century was confined. And beyond it rose the crested waves of the Appennines with the torn garments of the storm shredded upon their cruel rocks. Here and there a stray beam slanting athwart their slopes illumined the towers of some little far-off town. For a few minutes the valleys were bathed in golden light, then the sun went down, and the world grew indigo with night and storms.
San Marino itself has not much to offer to the stranger within its gates. Its houses are commonplace: its cathedral and its Gothic Palazzo del Governo are modern, and its palaces contain few traces of antiquity. On the other hand the manners and customs of the Republic have a refreshing quaintness not to be found elsewhere. For instance in San Marino you do not buy and sell with the coinage of the state; that is minted entirely for collectors; and in this small community, where every one knows the business of his neighbour better than he knows his own, the pretty telegraph girl goes about the town like the buttons in a hotel, asking strangers if the wire which has just been brought up from the Borgo is for them, when she does not know the name of the recipient. Unlike the cities of Italy, San Marino is early to bed: at half-past eight the streets are silent and deserted. But she is an early riser. The only public conveyance to Rimini, which also purposes to serve the Ancona-Rome express, is timed to depart from the city gates at 4 A.M. The gaoler and the police are foreigners, _i.e._ Italians, because, as the prison-keeper remarked, 'otherwise no one would ever be arrested, because the Sammarinesi would all be relations of the police.' But the army, forty strong, is recruited from the Sammarinesi themselves. Nor should the traveller be surprised if perchance he finds lop-eared rabbits making themselves at home in his bedroom, as we did in the Albergo Titano, although this peculiarity is not confined to San Marino, it being on record in Volterra that when an artist begged the hotelkeeper to sweep below his bed, she answered that it could not be done, much as she wished to oblige the signore, because her hens were sitting!
But it is San Marino's incomparable views, over the wide valley of the Marecchia to the Appennines on the one hand, and over the plain of Rimini to the Adriatic and the hills of Dalmatia on the other, which make the long climb worth while.
Even the Philosopher, who had rheumatism added to his other sorrows, could not help responding to the joy of waking, and finding himself high up in the clear blue sky overlooking a world washed clean by the rainstorms of the night before. The great mountains and rock-scarps which bounded the valley of the Marecchia were flecked with shadows, and snow-white cumuli, shining in the sunlight, were piled above the distant peaks. We climbed up to San Marino's second tower through a half-deserted quarry where pink cyclamens, brambles and wild flowers had woven a tangled web about the rocks. In the west the ragged hills rolled on like waves towards the gaunt peaks of the Appennines, and the highest of them all had its great solemn crest hidden in a low-hanging cloud which held it in the old embrace of sky and earth, regarded by the Greeks and Egyptians alike as a mythological sacrament. To the east the rock fell sheer to the vine-clad plain of Rimini, and far away we saw the Adriatic in a silver haze.
How long we stayed up there among the flowers by that ancient tower I do not know. There was a kind of rapture in the morning. The bees were humming in the ivy as though they thought that it was still summer. The cicalas sang. Close at hand the Rocca, as fantastic as the most fantastic fortress in the whole of fairy-land, overhung its precipice. On our left rose the third tower of the Republic flaunting its feather to the wind.
We forgot San Marino, that gay popinjay of a city, which is so out of keeping with its landscape, absorbed in watching the play of light and shadow down in the wild valley of the Marecchia, where the great cloud-barques which sailed across the wind-swept sky were reflected on the bosom of the hills. It was a land of great and primitive desires, with rivers rushing passionately to the sea, and inarticulate mountains travailing to reach heaven. Nor was the earth appeased until the gathering storm-clouds stooped down and rested on its hills, as the Ark of the Lord rested upon the peak of Ararat.
We left at dawn in the postchaise of the Republic. Night had not yet rolled her curtains from the mountains. Eastwards the sea and sky were veiled in tremulous mists, but when we reached the Borgo the silver morning was lightened by a rose and saffron glory. We found the Borgo asleep, though when we left, after waiting half an hour for the mail and picking up a solitary passenger, the church bells on the cliff above were ringing and all the cocks were crowing. How gay and fresh it was! None of the grumblers of the world were out of bed. The _cocchiere_ with the stemma of the Republic in his hat cracked his long whip; the horses made music with their bells, tossing their heads as they smelt the breeze; even the querulous brake made merry over its discomfort as we swung down the hillside.
Long after daybreak the mists lay supine in the valley and there were shadows on the mountains, as though the languid eyes of nature were not yet opened to the morning. But overhead the little clouds were pink as the wings of flamingoes, and when we reached the fields we found the vines, drunk with the magic of the morning, dancing like Bacchanals with linked hands across the valleys, bearing their gifts of purple grapes. Often at the turning of the road we looked back to San Marino, standing up like a biblical fortress with its strong watch-towers overlooking the plain, the home of liberty, where Garibaldi found sanctuary from his pursuers. When we reached Serravalle we saw it through a veil of mist, thin as gossamer spun out of the dawn. Later there were little wisps of cloud-drift hanging on the rocks below the towers. Long ere we drove into the gates of Rimini our Nephelococcygia vanished like a dream into its clouds again.
URBINO
We came to Urbino for the sake of Raphael, the gentle youth who conquered Death in dying, and to see the palace built by the greatest hero of the Rinascimento, Frederic of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. We stayed long after we had made our pilgrimage to the brown palace, where Giovanni Santi reared his motherless immortal, long after we had walked through the decaying splendours of that fairy castle which saw the star of Frederic's dynasty go down not ninety years after it had arisen so brightly on the slopes of Monte Ingino. For Urbino, though she is old and faded, though the grass grows in her streets and flowering weeds spring from her cracked and tottering walls, is still a city beautiful, a golden crown upon the green hillside.
We came to the foot of her vine-clad slopes after three hours of journeying through a world of shadowy mountains which had moonlit gossamer resting on their peaks, and silver rivers running through their valleys. Her towers gleamed white as polished ivory against the vaporous sky; her many lights were like a diadem of jewels out-brilliancing the stars. As we climbed up the hillside in the chill night air every turn of the road revealed fresh vistas of mountain peaks rising like crested waves out of the moonlit vapours. And when we reached the summit of Urbino's hill, and found ourselves below the terrific walls of Federigo's palace, we saw above them, limned against the stars, an enchanted palace such as Perrault might have dreamed of, with its towers and esedras transmuted by the moonlight into jade.
Only for a moment; in the next we were rattling over the cobbles of a wide arcaded street lit with electric lights and hung with hundreds of little coloured globes, red and white and green, for the festa of the Venti Settembre. It was so gay and homely after the moonlit silence of the mountains, and the inn we found upon that lonely hill-top was so unexpectedly good, with airy rooms and clean red tiles and snowy bed-linen, that we loved Urbino from the first hour we knew her. When we woke next morning to the music of Sabbath bells and saw the towers of Federigo's palace shutting out our horizon eastwards; and westwards, across a valley, the white houses of Urbino climbing up through their gardens towards the broken walls of her fortezza, we knew that she was to be one of our cities of happy memories. Nor were we disappointed. For in Urbino with her crisp morning air tempering the sunshine, and her vistas of wide valleys and deep-bosomed hills rolling away towards the magnificent crags of the Appennines, we spent some precious days forgetful of the world, which toils and sweats in busy marts and narrow self-made prisons, so far removed in spirit from the hills and all the sweetness that appertains thereto.
We had read in books that Urbino was decayed and lifeless, the true ensample of Leopardi's tragic words:--
'O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi, E le colonne, e i simulacri, e l'erme Torri degli avi nostri Ma la gloria non vedo.'
So we went out expecting to find her a mere ghost, pathetic in her faded grandeur, like beautiful San Gimignano or the wind-swept home of Perugino. It is true that grass was growing in the climbing street which leads up the hill past the house of Giovanni Santi, and we were to find out soon enough that the great castle of Federigo, where Castiglione wrote his Golden Book, was falling to decay like his palace at Gubbio. But it was easy to forget these things on a sunny morning in September, when the Piazza Otto Settembre was filled with a crowd of stalwart men, in their national costume of wide velvet breeches and black wide-awake hats, and lovely dark-eyed women, kerchief'd or wearing the fringed mantillas of Eastern Italy,--the descendants of the brave mountaineers who made the arms of Duke Frederic respected even by the redoubtable Francesco Sforza.
As it was Sunday, the day on which country people come into their hill-towns all over Italy for Mass and market, there were booths of haberdashery and flowered kerchiefs in the piazza below the ruddy old church of San Francesco, and pottery, not of Urbino, was spread out in the roadway of the two streets which descend so swiftly to the valley. The fruit and poultry market was in the little piazza full of pollard acacias behind the Franciscan church. The passive hens of Italy, which spend so much of their lives being carried head-downwards to and from market that they never give way to hysteria like the fowls of other countries, were ranged below the trees on one side of the square, and golden pears and peaches were heaped with purple grapes in the cool shade of the other. 'And may you have salvation!' cried the merry old dame from whom we bought more than we could carry of her luscious wares for a few soldi.
Close by, in the very heart of the gay little city, stands the house of Giovanni Santi, a brown fifteenth-century palace, with broad eaves and bricked-up arches, which bends like an aged man over the lichened pavement of the Contrada Raffaello. A white dove was bowing on the sill of the room in which Raphael was born, and through the opened panes of another window we could see the broad plastered beams of the low-ceiling living room within.
Urbino cherishes the memory of Raphael. The house in which he spent the spring of his short life is swept and garnished, empty except for framed engravings of his pictures and some antique chairs and high-backed stools old enough to have been there in his father's day. The rooms are low, with panelled ceilings and decent red-bricked floors. One of them has a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Santi which is said to be a portrait of Magia and the baby Raphael, and in the other is a bust of Morris Moore of London, who gave the money, needed to buy the house, to the Società Reale Accademia Raffaello in 1872. But to me the place was somewhat disappointing; it lacked the spirit of the happy boy who carried with him to the courts of Rome and Florence the breath of sunlight and fresh mountain air. Urbino itself is just the home one would imagine for Raphael, a city of the Renaissance, golden, full of gardens, in which the culture and refinement engendered by the Montefeltro Dukes still lingers. But there is nothing of Raphael in his father's house. Perhaps because he was there so little, for, like the lovely curly-headed children of Urbino to-day, he probably spent most of his time out in the streets when he was not working with his father, now waiting to see Duke Guidobaldo, and the knights and ladies of his court riding up the hill from their hunting and hawking, now playing with clay, as Gigi of the golden curls and petulant mouth plays still, a little higher up the Contrada Raffaello, with a world of great mountains lying below his feet.
When we first saw him, Gigi was sitting on the doorstep of a house close beside the palace of Timoteo Viti, one of Raphael's greatest pupils, who for love of his aged mother left his studio in Rome and came back to his native town. Gigi was three years old, with a shock of golden hair, and grey eyes, thickly-lashed and full of dreams. He was barefoot, very dirty and happy, modelling childish fancies out of a morsel of wet clay, and he was so beautiful that we stopped to speak to him. But Gigi was adamant. He frowned and went on making unintelligible daubs with his slim brown fingers. Later, when we passed again, his mother had dressed him in boots and socks, his face and hands were washed, his clay was forfeit. But when she tried to make him beg for soldi from the _forestieri_, he wept and hid his face against the wall. Poor little Gigi! We often tried to make acquaintance with him, but he would have none of us. Nor did he play with the other children, who seemed to laugh at him.