Part 17

Nature has endowed Spoleto richly. She is built on the slopes of an isolated bastion of the Appennines, which closes as it were the Central Plain of Umbria. Behind her towers the broad shoulder of Monte Luco, veiled in ilex woods. To the south the wild valley of the Tessino opens a vista of rolling hills, mounting fold on fold to the horizon. And from the windows of our inn, the picturesque old Albergo Lucini, whose palatial rooms, sparsely furnished with ancient grandeur, are such a luxury in the hot summer months, we looked over the roofs of the lower town, and across the tranquil country to Perugia, more than forty miles away.

Was it perhaps because we knew this soft and gracious valley, sanctified by the footsteps of many saints, so well, that we loved it even more dearly than we had loved it as we gazed from the bulwarks of Perugia? Then these little towns sown along the hillsides or crowning their miniature peaks, like Trevi, and Montefalco, were nothing but names and points of beauty. But now after many weeks spent on the eastern coast of Italy or among the rugged Appennines, we had come back again to gentle Umbria, to find that every little town was full of smiling memories, and all the winding roads were pathways to romance. Who could forget the classic grace of Clitumnus, when he saw the clustered poplars soaring from the plain? Or the capers and the flowering rosemary, which made a garden of the ancient walls of Trevi? Or the sweetness of the olive woods below Assisi, where we wandered in the footsteps of St. Francis gathering an imperishable bouquet of holy memories? Or the subtle beauty of the Tiber, as it washed the skirts of Perugia's hill?

Nor had long association lessened the miracle of the soft radiance of the heavens, or made commonplace the clarity of atmosphere, or dimmed the strange light which seems to float like an eternal benediction between the mountains of this Mystic Land.

Early next morning we climbed up the hillside, past the Piazza Mercato, where a blackbird, always singing in a wicker cage, in the shadow of a Roman arch, is the personification of the joyous spirit of Spoleto. A few steps from the Rocca, through a gate in the ancient line of fortification, brought us into a small bastioned piazza overlooking the deep ravine of the Tessino, and the aqueduct which spans it.

In my notes, I have said nothing of the Ponte delle Torri except to cry the wonder of it! Which is not surprising, for there are no words to fit it, no words large, or grand, or ambitious, or vigorous enough to describe this bridge of towers and colossal arches, which bestrides the valley between Monte Luco and the hill of Spoleto. It is the work of giants. It would be a worthy testimony to the grandeur that was Rome's; to the energy and the indomitable courage of the men who moulded an empire out of a handful of earth, and ruled the world from seven little hills. But the Ponte delle Torri is not the work of Rome. A mystery surrounds its origin. Theodelapius, third Duke of Spoleto, is said to have built it early in the seventh century, but it is at least reasonable to suppose that the foundations were Roman--indeed the local Guida di Spoleto claims that the actual conduits in use to-day are Roman. And it is obvious that the pointed arches are of mediaeval structure, probably contemporary with the ancient fortress, now a water-mill, which guards the head of the aqueduct on the slopes of Monte Luco. It is in fact a mosaic to which the Spoletans of all ages have contributed their stones.

But it was not only the grandeur of this Leviathan which held us spell-bound on the edge of the ravine; we were captivated by the lavish beauty of its _mise en scène_. For the ilex groves of Monte Luco, sacred to the ancients for their primeval forests, and to a younger world for the mediaeval saints who dwelt therein, were full of morning mists. Here and there some treetops illumined by the rays of the sun, lately risen above the shoulder of the mountain, stood out in clear relief against the dark hillside. The rest was held in shadow. Little blue columns of smoke ascended on the windless air from the bosky depths where charcoal-burners made their fires; the far-away bells of the Franciscan Convent on its crest were like the music of wind-bells under the roof-trees of the Gods. Every now and then the chimney of a cottage, sunk in the hillside below the level of the road on which we stood, wove a transparent veil of fragrant wood-smoke between our profane eyes and the sacred mount.

We came again in the evening when the aqueduct was bathed in the declining sunlight, which threaded its great arches with slanting bars of gold. And then we crossed that magic Bridge of the Giants and plunged into the enchanted ilex woods of Monte Luco. The stony way was sown with cyclamens, and the rocks were broidered with bronze and emerald mosses. At our feet the hill sloped sharply down the ravine and the slanting sunshine wove a web of light between the trees. Above us a sea of sunlit ilexes rose to the blue heavens. As we went deeper, the cool, scented breath of oak trees came out to greet us. And across the valley we could see Spoleto and her crested Rocca, with her ancient walls striding down the hillside through her vineyards. From this point she seemed to be a city of towers and _loggie_ and hanging gardens.

Presently we reached the beautiful and ancient church of San Pietro, and found the strange Mediaeval carvings on its façade gilded by the last rays of the setting sun. While we were spelling out its fanciful devices the glow faded from its face, leaving it old and grey at the head of its long flight of steps, as though it had seen fear. And indeed time has dealt harshly with this shrine since it was founded in the fifth century on the fragments of a pagan building. Even the fading light sufficed to show us that it held no treasures, beyond the twelfth-century fragments from Byzantine Bestiaries on its façade, and the later reliefs dating from its restoration in the fourteenth century, after it had been wantonly destroyed by the Ghibelline wolf, seeking in vain to force an entrance to the fold of Spoleto.

THE FALLS OF TERNI

At Terni the marvels of Nature have been transformed into the marvels of electricity without changing the face of the landscape. For the Velino, the swift black river which has its source deep in the mountains of the Abruzzi, and hurls itself in three gigantic columns over a precipice 600 feet high, takes to the mills of Terni an electric current which does the work of 200,000 horses without speeding the placid Nar as it washes the fantastic Gothic walls of Interamna.

There are few waterfalls so unspoiled as Terni. The immense power-station is almost out of sight, and though the leafy valley which excited the admiration of the younger Pliny is blocked at various points by great factories, there is not a single café or restaurant to mar the savage splendour of the Cascate delle Marmore.

Early in the morning of a St. Martin's summer we set out from Terni to see the famous cascades of the Velino, which, like the falls of Tivoli, are the work of Roman hands.[26] The great mountains closing the valley of the Nar were shadowy against the sunlit mists. As we drew near, the clamour of the water grew and gathered like the exultant roar of some primeval giant. The river began to hurry in its deep channel below the road, and foam-white torrents clambered down its banks, with bursts of laughter, to find themselves escaped from the main waterfall. But still the mists clung to the green hillsides so that we only saw their crests silhouetted against the welkin.

Suddenly out of the tender half-tones a sunlit cloud loomed silver in the heavens. I have seen the snowy turrets of a cumulus illuminated by a burst of sunlight on many an April noon. I seemed to see them now, shadowed against the blue Empyrean. But it was no cloud. The growing clamour told me so. That fantastic outline, clothed in the semblance of giant trees, was solid rock cleft with a flood of leaping water, which caught the sunshine, like the silver lining of a storm-cloud, as it topped the cliff, and then vanished in a mist of mounting spray.

Sun and river poured together over the ilex-crested mountain, the light in solid rays athwart the belching smoke of the falls, the water like a living thing, an unchained element, which leapt again in ecstasy to the blue heavens, winnowing the air with plumes of wind-tossed spray. On either side the hills fell back before us, their forests and terraces glistening with Byron's

'... unceasing shower, which round, With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain, Is an eternal April to the ground, Making it all one emerald....'

And in the midst, cleaving the ilex forest on the brink of the precipice, the Velino hurled itself into the abyss with a mighty shout of laughter. Sometimes it spent itself upon the rocks in foaming passion, impotently desiring its consummation with the sea, doomed to captivity upon the way, to lie in stagnant pools chained for the service of humanity. Sometimes it trickled languidly over the moss-grown crevices, engrossed in the delicate pleasure of its own music. Sometimes it glissaded as transparently as glass, seemingly motionless in its resistless speed, over the smooth yellow boulders bearded with stalactites.

It was profoundly exciting--the voice of Nature, a real and primitive thing. Only a little way up the valley great manufactories choked up the banks of the Nera; but here the clamorous voices, mad with the delirium of motion, sang to the heavens in unbridled joy. It was a great song of labour, a gigantic Wagnerian strain, in which we could distinguish the lilting song of the Rhine daughters above the thunder of the giants, telling the happy innocence of earth before her stolen gold became a passion to gods and men. Or in another mood we heard the laughter of water-gods as they leapt into the boiling chasm, and the dryads and the naiads calling to their sisters, the 'wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist,' and clapping their hands to see their great comrade come hurtling from the heavens careless, in his mad race, of the defeat to come. Only the mists, the tiger-striped mists, leapt up to warn the silver giant, and lost themselves under the melting kiss of the sun. We never could have wearied of watching these maenads dancing before their lord.

But time pressed. We were to be in Narni that night, and we had yet to climb to the head of the fall, through its enchanted ilex-wood, where ferns and flowers, all wet with glancing spray, grow round the lips of overhanging caves, and dock leaves wave huge fans in the wind of rushing waters.

Sometimes through an opening in the trees we caught sight of a moving curtain of white mist; sometimes the path led on to a narrow ledge overhanging the main fall, where we could stand in the shelter of a hollowed cave and watch the water leaping down in Gothic points of spume, plunging into the smoking cauldron to rise again in Iris clouds of spray. A butterfly which had ventured from the green shadows of the music-haunted wood fluttered an instant in the wild wet breath of the fall, and was drawn remorselessly into the vortex. Here, indeed, with the thunder of the Velino shaking the hillside, there was a savage and awful beauty in the scene. Here we could recognise the landscape where Virgil's Fury, leaving 'the high places of the world,' fled to the mansions of Cocytus. 'A place of high renown, and celebrated by fame in many regions ... the side of a grove, gloomy with thick boughs, hems it in on either hand, and in the midst a torrent, in hoarse murmurs and with whirling eddies, roars along the rocks....'

We lunched in a cottage a little way from the bottom of the fall, which seemed to be a restaurant for the humble needs of the workmen in a neighbouring carburet factory. At least its landlady was greatly distressed because she had nothing for the signori. 'Non è basta! non è basta!' she cried, although we discovered four roast chickens and some excellent potato salad as well as a huge cauldron of _minestre_ on her stove. Later, when the factory bell had rung for _mezzogiorno_, and all the employés crowded in, we found there really was not enough to go round. But the courtesy and charming manners of the workmen were a revelation. Although there was no soup for some of them, and certainly we had eaten one of their chickens, they treated the whole affair as a joke, and heaped their plates contentedly with _pasti_.

But to us the biggest joke was the price of the good lunch we had so unwittingly stolen from the regular patrons of the inn. For the bill for the wine was threepence-halfpenny for all, and the potato salad was a penny each, and a plate of chicken was sixpence, and a plate of soup twopence only. Truly, as the poet said, 'Italy has everything: climate, scenery, art, antiquities, history, romance, beautiful people, fruit and wine and cheapness.'

NARNI

From the first moment that we saw her, a jewelled hill-top set high among the stars, there was a touch of magic about Narni. As we drove through the valley tall black cypress spires showed us our path, and the starry heavens were as luminous as though Diana had already lit her lamp below the hills. Dimly we glimpsed a battlemented gate rising gaunt above the road, and the ghostly form of the broken bridge of Augustus striding amid the reflections of the Nar. We climbed up into the hooded night between great hedges where the frogs shrilled softly to each other. The Pleiades hung low upon the mists of the horizon like the phosphorescence of a tropic sea, and above us the lights of Narni were gold against the silvered canopy of stars.

The way was long although it was so beautiful, and lonely, too, when the town was hidden from us by a fold of the hill and we could see nothing but the towers of the Rocca upon its crest, a shade of the Middle Ages among the imperishable stars. So that we welcomed the cheery beams of a shepherd's lantern set by chance in the window of a white-walled farm, like a beacon on the dark hillside. And soon afterwards we passed under the beetling Trecento gate of Narni, and found ourselves in a piazza where the driver pointed out thousands of earthenware pots spread on the ground beneath the trees. 'For the festa to-morrow, Signori,' he said. And that was the first we heard of any festa. But not the last, for all the inns were crowded, and it was only by dint of a great deal of talking, and through the courtesy of a young Italian girl who had travelled by the same train as ourselves, and who volunteered to sleep in the village, that we were able to find two beds and a sofa in the Albergo del Angelo.

We woke to find ourselves in Arcady. The smiling sunshine called me early out of bed. Below my windows came the music of passing herds and flocks--the lowing of kine and the tinkling of their bells, the clipping hoofs of mules and asses, the pattering feet of sheep, like summer rainfall on the broad-leaved trees. And, strangest sound of all, the clear high song of larks, so rarely heard in Italy, where the native, as in Dante's age, still 'throws away his days in idle chase of the diminutive birds.'[27]

There were two windows in my room. The one to which the dulcet singing of the larks called my attention looked from the wall of Narni's precipice into the deep valley of the Nera, a magnificent and awe-inspiring view, for the Angelo is perched upon a crest of beetling rocks with a sheer drop of a hundred feet towards the river. But from the other I looked on one of the loveliest pastoral pageants I have ever seen in Umbria. For down the old Flaminian Way which Popes and Emperors, and Caesar with an army, trod, and up a winding pathway such as Gentile da Fabriano loved to paint, which led from the valley to the hill of Narni and joined the main road at our very door, came neat-herds driving before them snow-white oxen, and peasant women with brightly flowered kerchiefs riding a-pillion on mules and asses, or walking behind flocks of sheep with wide flat baskets of poultry and fruit and vegetables on their heads. Barefoot children helped to guide the calves; and here a shaggy farmer rode up the hill a-horseback in sheepskin trousers, with a wallet and flask of wine slung across his mediaeval wooden saddle; and there some happy youths led in their heifers with scarlet fillets hanging on their brows.

They might have been processions of the Magi bringing their gifts to the Infant Christ in the dawn of the Nativity. Or, better still, these joyful husbandmen and shepherds bringing the first-fruits of their harvest into this little hill-town for the ox-fair of St. Michael, might have been the votaries of Apollo coming to celebrate the Pyanepsia with offerings and invocations.

We dressed in haste and hurried to join them as they flowed along the streets and out through Narni's mediaeval gate to their Forum Boarium beyond the city walls. And it was Arcady we found below the silver olives. For the road looped a natural theatre, such as the Greeks loved to terrace and face with marble, where the citizens might sit gazing over the glittering stage, on which Gods and Heroes spoke the dialogues of Aeschylus and Sophocles, at one of Nature's masterpieces--Etna, rising above the Strait of Messina, or the isle-girt sea of Salamis.

Here the olive-clad slopes were steep and the curves of the bay were bold, and the flat area which they enclosed was commanded on one side by the towering bastions of Narni and on the other by a great Dominican Convent with all its ancient splendour revived by the Royal House of France. And here we looked across a market in the hollow of the theatre, where thousands of white oxen, their foreheads bound with Roman fillets, scarlet and blue, stood below the twisted olives in a mist of slanting sunlight, which threw a tracery of blue-veined shadows on their snowy flanks. Beyond them in the open champaign we could see the towered bridge over the Nera, and the green pasture land characteristic of lower Umbria which makes it so different to the vine-engarlanded plains of the Valley of Spoleto.

On the hill above, the mules and asses, still bearing their wooden pack-saddles picked out in brass and scarlet cloth, were tethered in the shade of the army of olives, which swept up to the walls of the grim old Rocca. And before us lay the winding road, with its gay stalls and booths and its moving crowd of peasants, looking for all the world like a brightly-coloured ribbon threading the grey wood.

Surely the gay Hermes, the god of markets, the beneficent patron of pastures and herds, smiled on this gracious fête champêtre, so pagan in its simplicity and lavish beauty. Perhaps he lingered down in the ox-fair where a charming patriarchal custom was observed every time a bargain was concluded, when the bystanders joined the hands of the two farmers concerned, and held them while they shook in token of good-will. Or likelier still he wandered on the causeway with Corydon and Thyrsis, or, in more jovial mood, searched among the pretty peasant girls, for Amaryllis and fair Delia, whose thoughts to-day were all for market wares, displayed by plausible auctioneers below the laurel avenue.

There were restaurants of trestle-tables in the chequered shade, where husbandmen regaled themselves with such aesthetic fare as bread and celery and walnuts, washed down by plentiful libations of amber wine; and savoury kitchens where pigs and calves were roasted whole on spits; and stalls of peasant jewellery--strings of blood-red coral and over-chased earrings; and booths of lace and embroidery. Here boots and shoes were spread beside the road; there sun-burnt peasant women were buying stays, heaped on the ground close to a stall of fluttering kerchiefs. The majolica and copper dishes were also ranged along the roadside, as were the stalls of wooden implements, bobbins, and spoons and trays. But the cotton umbrellas, scarlet and blue and emerald green, were hung like fantastic lanterns from the branches of the avenue.

What a scene it was! The lowing of the kine mingled with the distant music of the bells of Narni. Every moment fresh arrivals added their quota to the merry bustle of the market, some bearing on their heads great baskets heaped with fruit, some laden with captive turkeys and chickens, some leading in their wide-horned oxen, gay with scarlet fillets and bells slung round their silken dewlaps. The brilliant kerchiefs of the women made them look like flower-gardens as they stood in smiling groups before some alluring bargain held up to their admiring eyes by salesmen. And mingling with the crowd were fortune-tellers, and ballad-singers, and the terrible crawling beggars of Italy.

Later in the day we went down the hillside and rested in the shadow of the great ruined bridge of Augustus, that splendid relic of Imperial Rome, which once carried the Flaminian Way across the waters of the Nera. Only one arch is left to stride across the ravine, and in the middle of the sulphureous stream the second pier has fallen sideways in huge blocks, as though it had been toppled over by an earthquake. But even in its ruin it is a monument of the greatness of Rome, and it frames a wonderful vista of the wooded glen of the Nar and the ancient convent of San Casciano.

The contadini were pouring out of the city and across the river by the mediaeval bridge that takes on its shoulders the modern traffic, which, had the years been kinder, would still have been carried by the Ponte d'Augusto. They were all laden with purchases from the fair, and they made merry as they passed along, driving before them, not without a struggle, their unwilling cattle. But we did not stay there long to watch them, notwithstanding the picturesque beauty of the scene. For the pitiable cries of the mothers, struggling to go back to their calves, resounded through the valley; and the blind unreasoning misery of their offspring, driven with blows along an unaccustomed road, was heartrending to witness. Though common sense was plausible to point out how soon the agony would pass, it was too human to be anything but tragic.

So we climbed the hill back to Narni and wandered through her empty streets, astonished to find them rich in ancient grandeur. For we had grown to think of her as a pastoral queen of Arcady, forgetting her antiquity--that as Nequinum she was great among the cities of the Umbri; that under the Romans she was a fortress of importance commanding the Flaminian Way; and that in the fifteenth century she bore a famous name as the ancestral home of Gattamelata, the great Condottiere of the Venetians. Narni has good reason to be proud of her sons. One was an Emperor, one a Pope, and one a hero.