Part 16

We drove to Spello on a September day of vagrant sunshine, when the earth was musical with running waters and the heavens, tinted mother-o'-pearl, were spread with tearful clouds. The rugged crests of Nocera's pyramidal hills in the van of the great Appennines were shadowed with cobalt. The vines were brown, the hedges full of berries, the scent of wild mint sweetened the air. A rippling stream was singing in its rocky bed beside the road, and long grasses were still lying against the muddy banks as they were pressed by the rush of storm-rain the day before. And Spello lay before us in the sunshine like a cluster of yellowing roses on the spur of Monte Subasio.

But first we drove between the vineyards to the little church of San Giovanni Profiamma which marks the site of the ancient town of Forum Flaminii, built by the Consul Flaminius on his Roman road before it left the Umbrian Vale and plunged into the passes of the Appennines. Like all the thirteenth century churches of this part of Umbria, it is built of the lovely pink limestone of Subasio which gives such a peculiar beauty to the streets of Spello and Assisi. Its ancient rose window is broken, and two white houses hem in the façade on either side.

The Romanesque doorway stood wide open, because a knot of villagers were busied in putting up a gilt and paper baldacchino for a festa. Some children and a black goat had strayed in to watch; the priest was giving directions, and every now and then lending a shoulder when the whole affair threatened to fall over. But what simplicity, what unspoiled mediaeval grace we found in this tiny chapel in the fields, which is the only relic of a long-forgotten city. It has been restored, almost rebuilt, by the parish priest, who to his honour has preserved every ancient stone, and arch, and bifora; even the altar he has left in mediaeval simplicity, a slab of marble on a worn and battered fragment of granite column, all that remains of the pagan city of Flaminius.

They are a splendid people, these country priests of Umbria, with their ambition to beautify their little churches, and their merry good-nature in the face of hardships. We met so many of them in Foligno,--one who had written a book about his church, and toiled to rescue the faded frescoes veiled in plaster on its walls, taking the same pleasure in their beauty as a gardener in the first blossoms of the year; another who had made a museum of his sacristy and cloisters. But the priest of San Giovanni Profiamma has preserved some precious pages in the history of art. We watched him scramble into his ramshackle cart, shouting some last instructions to his villagers before he drove off at full gallop over the rough road with a huge sack of fodder tied on behind. And we remembered another country priest whom we had seen at Todi leading his saddle horse down the hill to say Mass in some roadside chapel, singing as he went, as Brother Francis might have sung, with no thought of the morrow, but only joy in the present, and faith for the life to come.

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We found Spello gay with the bells of her ox-carts, and as busy as a good housewife, her men bringing in bundles of fire-wood against the winter, or getting ready for the vintage by rolling the pipes and hogs-heads down the hill to be cleansed at the fountain below the old bell-tower; and her women washing their linen with song and laughter outside the Roman gate.

Spello, the old Hispellum, which claims to have been the birthplace of Propertius, notwithstanding the stress that poet laid upon the neighbouring city of Mevania as his home, is one of the loveliest cities in the Valley of Spoleto. She is as pink as a rose. Her houses are all ancient, many of them with Gothic doors and windows; her arches are threaded with vines and Morning Glories; she clambers up the hillside in narrow streets which turn naturally into steps when they are too steep even for the nimble mule; her people dress in bright-coloured linens, and the women cover their burnished hair with the gayest of flowered kerchiefs. As we drew near we saw her Gothic gate bestriding the road as fiercely as though it feared the Trinci might still come riding from Foligno, but close behind it, on the tower of some fighting baron which has been turned into a belfry, a full-grown olive tree stretched out its arms, welcoming strangers with the branch of peace.

We went up through the ancient Porta Consolare, whose Roman statues, toga'd ghosts of old Hispellum, stare down upon the snowy flanks of the yoked oxen bringing in the fresh-picked grapes just as they did in the years before Hannibal laid waste the Valley of Spoleto on his march down to Campania. In Spello's climbing streets, though she is poor and broken, we found treasures worthy of great temples, heirlooms stranded in the shipwreck of her wealth, like Santa Maria Maggiore's rich Renaissance doorway and thirteenth-century portal, and the exquisite holy water stoup in the nave, which was once a pagan altar.

But most of all Spello is Pinturicchio's city. Her peasants are the ghosts of his old people; in her streets we met the lovely fair-haired girls whom he was never weary of crowning as Madonna Mary. He painted many pictures in her churches, in San Girolamo and Sant'Andrea, and a whole chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, where he left his own portrait hanging from the Virgin's shelf of books in the scene of the Annunciation, as it hung perhaps from the shelf of some woman whom he loved. In this church too are many altar pictures, and an exquisite Madonna hidden away in the sacristy among the tawdry paraphernalia of saints' days, and an angel, lost for three hundred years in a dark cupboard, which, when the sacristan illuminates it with a candle, shines like a vision of the angel Gabriel coming in the dawn of day to Mary.

The chapel, which was painted for one of the Baglioni of Perugia, is faded and defaced like the Borgia room in the Vatican, and needs bright sunshine to bring out its dim rich colours. But it is full of gracious Pinturicchio figures who play their parts in the drama of the birth of Christ against a luminous background in which we glimpse the life of the Quattrocento as it flows in and out of distant cities. And the floor is covered with gold and blue Deruta tiles, made for the Brothers in 1565, and so worn that we were sad to walk on them, although the sacristan dragged chairs across them with the utmost unconcern.

Then it rained, and because we had seen all Spello's churches we had to seek shelter and lunch. The only inn was down the hill outside the Porta Consolare, but we found both food and refuge in a humble cottage where the family were just sitting down to their meal of steaming pottage. They gave us a plate of that, and dressed some raw tomatoes with oil and vinegar, at our suggestion, for Italians seldom eat raw tomatoes, which they do not think are healthy. And we were content with this and some good wine and excellent rough bread, although the coffee which our smiling hostess prepared so carefully was spoilt by its too liberal dash of methylated cognac.

But the rain drove us from our little hill-city. We tried to brave it, as we searched in vain for the Porta Venere; nor could the old country women climbing the hill in the shelter of their enormous green umbrellas, who were the only people out in the storm beside ourselves, tell us the whereabouts of anything.

CLITUMNUS

We drove to Spoleto along the Roman road which threads the rich green valley of the Clitumnus, skirting the hill of Trevi and the olive-groves which crowd round the ruined fortress of Le Vene, and dipping at last into an oak wood where the crystal springs, far-famed in ancient days, leap from the rocky hillside.

It is the loveliest drive in Umbria. Not only for the beauty of the way, for here all ways are beautiful, and lie through gardens, where milk-white oxen labour with wooden ploughs beneath the classic olive, and vineyards where the vines usurp the trees and clothe the valley in luxuriant festoons; not only for the loggia'd farms scattered among the fields, or for the towered castles frowning upon the road like mediaeval Sant'Eraclio; not only for the sight of Trevi, the steepest town in Italy, a queen upon her hill-top, with her face towards Spoleto and her yellow skirts trailing down into an olive-grove. All these we had seen a hundred times before from other Umbrian towns. But nowhere else had we found such unspoiled pastoral loveliness as in this soft wide valley whose glory Virgil sang, and all the ancients praised, the latest home of gods, where snowy bulls, victims for the Roman sacrifice, were bred beside the waters of a sacred stream.

'Thou, gay Clitumnus, where thy currents glide There bleating flocks thy flow'ry borders hide; There snow-white bulls, the greatest sacrifice Design'd for Jove, who rules the deities, First wash'd and sprinkled with thy sacred flood Pay for the Roman triumphs with their blood.'

Though she looks like a queen on her hill-top, Trevi is at heart a simple country maid, with nothing to offer to the traveller but a few pictures by Perugino and his pupils, and an exquisite Renaissance altar by Rocco da Vicenza. She is the most disappointing of all the mountain fastnesses which have defied the assaults of change, but she stands like a sentinel before a landscape of surpassing beauty, peopled with classic memories.

For here, below the crumbling walls and towers of Le Vene, at the foot of olive-wooded hills, we walked beside the crystal waters of Clitumnus, through scenes immortalised by Virgil in the Georgics.

'Unbounded plains with endless riches blest; Yet caves and living springs, and airy glades, And the soft low of kine, and sleepy shades Are never wanting ...'

Here by the roadside we found the little temple which some say is one of those chapels of the god Clitumnus that Pliny wrote of to his friend Romanus when he adjured him to visit this so-lovely spot. And others, because of the Christian symbolism carved on its walls, claim to be a Christian fane built of pagan fragments in the fourth century. In any case it is deserted of its gods to-day, for if no incense is offered to old Clitumnus, neither is Mass said now before its altar, for the honour of San Salvatore. And yet I do not think the oracle, whom Caligula as well as Honorius came to consult, is far away; for the sun and rain have mellowed the old stones, giving them a rare and perfect beauty, and the birds nesting beneath its tympanum chant praises in the dawn, while from below ascends the song of the sacred stream as its flows by to mingle with the Tiber on its way to Rome. Nay, Pan himself, weary of making music in the reeds, might stray into this temple, to wonder at the faded saints who looked so coldly on him from their niches, before he leapt back again at break of day to the oak-woods on the hill above, where the goat-herds tend their flocks.

A little further on we reached the source of the Clitunno, where many crystal streams gush from the hillside or bubble up from the ground, uniting in a wide lake before the river can escape along the valley. The air was full of the merry music of lapping waters and the ecstatic shrilling of the frogs. Tall poplars swayed upon the shallow banks, and giant willows trailed their branches in the stream like the long hair of water-nymphs. Little white bridges led from one green island to another, but the lush grass sloped so gradually to the clear waters that we could hardly tell where it first mingled with its own reflections. The crystal pools were underworlds of emerald waterweeds, now dark, now light, and in their mysterious depths were springs whose shafts of cyanite blue gleamed phosphorescent through the swaying plants. And here small fishes darted in and out with watchful eyes, and speckled trout swam slowly to and fro.

Surely if anywhere the old gods linger here. And when the valley is silent, but for the distant shepherd piping to his flocks, surely the naiads resting on the emerald sward call to their sisters, the Hamadryads and the Oreads, to leave their oak-woods and the hills above and dance down to join them in the clear cool water. Half unconsciously we looked and listened for them. And in a moment the youth of Arcady seemed to be born again. The babbling of the many little streams was like the echo of mocking laughter. I felt as though I had strayed into a court of water-nymphs and heard them making merry as they hid among the reeds. I could have sworn I saw one once; but it was only a darting fish. Then a kingfisher flying low took cover in the sedges just where the glinting sunshine dazzled my eyes. And I thought I heard them laugh again.

SPOLETO

Too few have sung the splendour and beauty of Spoleto, the proud white city whose towers breathe a message of peace to-day, where they once blazoned war down the wide green valley to Perugia. For Spoleto, like Perugia, has been a queen among cities. Like Perugia she has kept ward through the ages upon the valleys of Umbria, gazing down from her sacred ilex groves on lesser cities riding the encircling hills--towered Montefalco upon the ridge which shuts off the valley of the Tiber; Trevi on its steep olive-girt mount; Foligno and Bevagna down in the plain; little Spello; Assisi, very beautiful as she kneels before the mighty temple she has raised to San Francesco on the slopes of Monte Subasio; Santa Maria degli Angeli and Ponte San Giovanni. And in one proud memory at least she is greater even than Perugia, for she alone withstood the tidal wave of Hannibal in the second Punic War, so that he turned from her walls dismayed, nor dared to march on Rome, seeing that this small colony could hold his force in check.

If she had faded out of history after that, her name would have been heroic among the Umbrian towns. But though she suffered in the civil war of Marius and Sulla, we know that she continued to flourish even in the dark years between the fall of Rome and the growth of mediaevalism. Totila destroyed her as Frederick Barbarossa was to destroy her in the middle of the twelfth century; but Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and after him Narses, the Exarch, built her up. Under the Longobards she became an independent duchy; after the fall of the Carlovingians her Dukes were for a short time Emperors of Italy.

Ah! Spoleto, it is little wonder that you are proud to-day, that your bells ring so joyously down the valleys, that you hold high festival to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of United Italy. What does it profit Perugia that her name was splendid in the Middle Ages, and that she is still the Queen of Umbria, 'the Empress of hill-set cities'? Yours was the greatness of a more heroic day. Her lords were savage beasts, her people slaves, her streets were noisome with slaughter, her name a proverb for ferocity, while the Baglioni spread their pestilence across the valleys, seeking ignoble victories, and fighting unending little wars for self-aggrandisement. Because the Barbarossa laid you low the star of Perugia rose clear upon your horizon. Already in 1198, when you with all the other Umbrian towns paid tribute to Innocent III., she was the capital of Umbria. But you, the champion of Rome, the Knight-errant of the Papacy, had nobler ambitions. Your Dukes were heroes before the lords of Perugia were even robbers. Were they not Emperors too? Guido, with his pretentious claim to the kingship of France, and poor young Lambert, the chivalrous and beautiful Knight of Spoleto, with whose ill-timed death, on the very spot where the great battle of Marengo was fought nearly a thousand years after, perished the hope of a united and independent kingdom within the Italian[25] frontier.

Spoleto was truly in a jubilant mood when we climbed up her winding streets, past the beautiful but ruined apse of San Niccolò, and the magnificent prehistoric wall below its convent. An Industrial Exhibition was being held in the Piazza Bernardino Campello, and the Merry Widow--'nuovissima per Spoleto'--was to be played that night in the Teatro Nuovo, 'con richissima messa in scena!'

But at all times we found the quality of joy in Spoleto. Long long ago she wept perhaps when she waited, as Elaine for Lancelot, while her lover, the beautiful and splendid Lambert, was in the toils of his insatiable mistress, Rome. Widowed, she trimmed a lamp before his shrine and turned her eyes towards the Papacy, seeking to build up an Italian Empire, through the temporal kingdom of the Pope. But now she has opened her gates to welcome the new era, and, having doffed her mourning garments, sits enthroned at the head of her magnificent valley, welcoming the world with the gracious dignity of one who for a few short years was the mother of United Italy.

Spoleto does not clamber up the hillside like rosy little Spello. She is tall and stately, pale as a lily, silent as a girl who dreams of love. More than any other of the hill-set cities of Umbria she bears the stamp of Rome, in arches and half-buried houses, in walls and ancient temples long since turned to the worship of other gods, and most of all in the inspiration of the great aqueduct which spans the ravine between her Rocca and the ilex-woods of Monte Luco.

In Spoleto Rome and modernity walk hand in hand. Spoleto is not mediaeval in character like other Umbrian towns. Her hill is crowned by the imposing Castello which Cardinal Albornoz and Nicholas v. built on the site of the Rocca of Theodoric, and she has many gracious churches which flowered from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, like the cathedral and San Gregorio Maggiore; or, more ancient still, San Salvatore, that exquisite relic of the fourth century, which contains the nucleus of a Roman temple; and San Pietro, on the lower slopes of Monte Luco, which was built in the fifth century and restored in 1320, after it had been practically destroyed by the Ghibellines. It is true that the splendid roofless apse of San Niccolò soars above the main street with broken lancet windows framing the heavens, like the windows of Tintern, but it is built over the ancient circuit of the city walls; and though its slender Gothic grace beautifies the hillside, it was the rugged stones of Spoleto's prehistoric fortifications which claimed our eyes. For it was against these walls, which the Unknown People, and later the Pelasgians and the Romans, built round the foot of their city, that Hannibal threw his Punic troops in vain before he retired to the rich territory of Picenum, where he fortified his soldiers after the rigors of their journey through Northern Italy and the Alps.

It is the same all through Spoleto. Here and there we wandered into steep, narrow lanes, where the strip of sky above our heads was cut by bridges leading from one tall mediaeval mansion to another, where there were shrines in the walls and Gothic doorways leading to dark and mysterious courtyards, and Doors of the Dead, and, to speak truth, unsavoury odours, which are the least pleasing reminiscences of the Middle Ages. But for the most part Spoleto is clean and modern, with wide streets and piazzas graced by hanging gardens, in which her Roman fragments are stranded like the skeletons of giants, where they are not buried beneath the soil, like the wonderful subterranean bridge outside the Porta San Gregorio; and the lower church of Sant'Ansano, on the foundations of a Temple of the Sun; and the mosaiced house which is said to have been the home of the mother of the Emperor Vespasian.

Among her treasures Spoleto holds the dust of Brother Philip in a beautifully wrought casket of lapis lazuli and gold, for that was how the façade of Santa Maria Assunta appeared to us as we rounded the corner of the Episcopal Palace, and came upon it suddenly, bathed in the yellow sunlight of late afternoon.

The Cathedral of Spoleto is set humbly on the hillside in the shadow of the great Rocca of Nicholas V. So that we stood, as it were, above the jewelled façade, and saw it rising in all its glory at the bottom of a wide steep slope which opened out into a green piazza between the sloping gardens of the Rocca and the little Renaissance Chiesa della Manna d'Oro. Like the Cathedral of Assisi, which its façade resembles, having the same triangular tympanum enclosing grand Gothic arches corresponding to the naves of the older building, it is externally one of the most gracious churches in Umbria. The fifteenth century loggia of its portico supports a Renaissance arabesque, and above it the central arch of the tympanum is filled with gold and blue mosaics which glow like jewels in their rich setting of mellowing stones. The glass in the beautiful rose windows is the colour of lapis lazuli; two little stone pulpits are built into the wall on either side of the portico, and in its shadow is the frescoed chapel of Francesco Eroli, Bishop of Spoleto.

But why attempt to reproduce with pen and ink and dull description a picture more fitted to the golden brush of Fra Filippo Lippi, and which indeed owes much of its charm to the beauty of the Umbrian hills billowing away to the horizon, and the alchemy of sunlight changing ancient stones to gold--the complete and lovely unity of Art and Nature.

I hope the sun sometimes shines in upon the tomb of Lippo Lippi, for I know he loved it, and the marble cenotaph which Lorenzo the Magnificent raised in his honour, when the Spoletani refused to let him carry away the body of the painter, because 'they were badly provided with things of note,' is rather bald in spite of its florid epitaph. But the tomb itself did not detain us long, for in the apse we had caught sight of some of Brother Philip's loveliest frescoes telling the story of the life of the Virgin, in four great chapters--the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, her Death, and in the vault above, her Coronation in the Courts of Heaven.

According to Vasari, Fra Filippo, engaged as usual in a love affair, was poisoned by the family of the lady whom he had seduced while he was at work on the Cathedral. It is likely that the people of Spoleto were not so complaisant as the Florentines, who had long ago ceased even to shrug their shoulders at the amours of this son of the Renaissance, although he had refused the offer of Pius II. to legitimise his marriage with the beautiful nun Lucrezia. But later writers have dismissed the idea as one of Vasari's ill-founded scandals. In any case there were few men less worthy of painting the sacred story of Madonna Mary, and few who could have told it with such purity and tenderness, and intuition. For not even the damp which has caused them to peel and discolour in places, or the uninspired work of Fra Diamante who finished them, when Lippo Lippi, 'that vagabond and joyous mortal,' had been laid to rest, can rob these pale and sad Madonnas of their beauty, or take away the spiritual loveliness of the angels, who with the sun and the moon and all the constellations do homage to the Queen of Heaven.

But these things are as nothing compared with the real glories of Spoleto--the peculiar beauty of her landscape, and the magnificence of the Ponte delle Torri, the great aqueduct of the Longobard Dukes, which links the city to the sacred ilex groves of Monte Luco.