Part 9

It was Fortunato Rosso who came to our rescue, dear old man, with his dilapidated vehicle, which was no larger than a riksha, and so broken down that we expected the back to fall away every minute. The step did break when we tried to use it, and the axle bar was tied up with string. Fortunato Rosso is one of the characters of Passignano. He is a veteran of the Venti Settembre. As he has lost his teeth his conversation is difficult to follow, though he is an intelligent guide, having a soldier's eye for the possibilities of the land: his clothes are almost as dilapidated as his carriage, but he has a string of medal ribbons sewn across his scrupulously clean white waistcoat. The medals themselves are kept in a dirty scrap of paper in his pocket. He persisted in showing them to us before we started, and the villagers stood round and laughed indulgently. While he was eagerly pulling them out a cheap crucifix fell to the ground. A small boy picked it up, and pressed it to his lips as he handed it back, and Rosso himself gave it a resounding kiss before he put it into his pocket.

The spot where Hannibal entrapped the Roman army is as distinct as stage scenery. There is a semi-circle of mountains coming down to the lake at each end. Passignano clambers into the water at the southern extremity; and on the northern spur, close to the lake, there is an ancient road climbing between bluffs in an olive-garden. It is below the modern strada; and Fortunato Rosso, who takes a delight in propounding the stratagems of Hannibal, insists that Flaminius must have entered the plain through this pass. Half-way between the semi-circle and the lake is the hill of Tuoro, on which Hannibal's centre was conspicuously drawn up.

For the Punic general with his genius for guerilla warfare no better place for an ambuscade could be imagined. The Consul Flaminius lay at Arretium some miles to the north; and Hannibal, knowing his impetuous temper, determined to draw him out by laying waste the countryside from Cortona to Thrasymene under the very eyes of the Roman legions. As he anticipated, Flaminius, exasperated beyond endurance, left Arezzo and marched down to Thrasymene, paying no heed to the ill-omens which attended his setting forth. As a consequence his army had no enthusiasm. The name of Hannibal had turned even the heart of Rome to water, so that she spent her days in making sacrifices to the gods and consulting the oracles, but the fiery Flaminius would not allow his legions to make propitiation. 'Nay, rather,' said he with bitter sarcasm, 'let us lie before the walls of Arretium, for here is our country, here our household gods. Let Hannibal, slipping through our fingers, waste Italy through and through; and, ravaging and burning everything, let him arrive at the walls of Rome; nor let us move hence till the fathers shall have summoned Flaminius from Arretium, as they did Camillus of old from Veii.'[16]

Everything befell as Hannibal desired. Flaminius entered the pass. Seeing the Carthaginian army on the hill of Tuoro he advanced to give battle, not noticing the Baliares and light troops posted round the mountains, and unconscious of the fact that the Numidian cavalry had blocked his retreat by holding the pass when the last detachment of his army had come through. To add to his discomfiture a mist rose up from the lake and enveloped the lowlands, while the hills were in the sunlight above, and the enemy could watch for the preconcerted signal of attack.

It was given, and they poured down upon the Romans from all sides, taking them by surprise, and terrifying them by the unexpectedness of the assault. Even so the day might not have been lost if Flaminius had not fallen early in the engagement. After that it was a slaughter. There was no order. Each man fought for his own life, and when the legions attempted to escape by water, the only way left open to them, they were either drowned, or cut to pieces by the Carthaginian cavalry which followed them into the shallows. A band of some six thousand did indeed force their way to the hills, where they waited for the mist to rise, not being able to see how the day was going. And when at last the sun pierced through to the plain, and they could view the slaughter, they fled, taking their standards with them, only to fall prisoners on 'the following day when, Maharbal, who had followed them during the night with the whole body of cavalry, pledging his honour that he would let them depart with single garments if they would deliver up their arms, they surrendered themselves: which promise was kept by Hannibal with Punic fidelity, and he threw them all into chains' (Livy, xxii. 6).

So much for the battle, but the old tragedy that was enacted on these vine-clad plains has been forgotten. Many of the peasants have not even heard of the name of Hannibal, nor dream that where they gather their purple vintage to-day the earth was reddened once by Roman blood. The broad smooth road led us between ancient olives. White oxen yoked to clumsy wooden tumbrils rolled on and on towards us in a mist of sunlit dust; peasants in gay kerchiefs and skirts were working in the bearded corn which rose higher than their heads, so that we looked at them through a veil of stalks; a herd of black swine were nosing the yellow earth under the olives, with a little girl-child to keep them. And when we reached the summit of the pass above the turquoise lake we could see the road to Arezzo in a gap of the mountains, across a sea of vines. There was nothing to disturb the air of peace; the mediaeval towers and castles which crowned the hills were farms; and the Sanguinetto, whose sinister name is the one memento of that day of slaughter, was a river of stones agape for the September rains.

'Far other scene is Thrasymene now; Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plain Rent by no ravage save the gentle plough; Her aged trees rise thick as once the slain Lay where their roots are; but a brook hath ta'en-- A little rill of scanty stream and bed-- A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain; And Sanguinetto tells you where the dead Made the earth wet, and turn'd the unwilling waters red.'

CHILDE HAROLD.

ASSISI

Almost the first thing we noticed in Assisi was the Biblical simplicity of life. This little city, rose and white, upon the lower slopes of Subasio would be like a picture out of the Bible if it were not so Gothic. Its steep and rough-paved streets have grasses growing in between their stones; its grim and silent houses, built of Subasian rock, are as unresponsive as the East; at their barred gates stand mules and asses tethered, with clumsy wooden saddles on their backs, or sacks of grain thrown pannier-wise. It is not only Francis and his companions that you might see walking in this poor and humble town, but Jesus of Nazareth.

For Assisi still wears the thread-bare garment of her poverty, notwithstanding the great basilica on the hillside, which is rich out of all comparison with the poor little city of St. Francis. Long, long ago in the thirteenth century she dedicated her life to him, giving up her worldly vanities and espousing Lady Poverty, 'that Dame to whom none openeth pleasure's gate.' So that the story of the splendid young men of Assisi, whose magnificent equipages drew the eyes of Rome in the seventeenth century, comes as an echo of another place. I think she loved him from the first, when he was still gay Cecco of the midnight revels, Lord of Love, the boon companion of her merry youths. She listened to his songs--the soft Provençal songs which he had learnt from the lips of Madonna Pica, his mother--and smiled at his caprices, pleading his youth when others shook their heads. Later, when the world made a jest of the penitent, and his friends scorned him, and the hand of the people was against him, she wept for him, and gazed with wistful eyes down to the valleys where he ministered to her outcasts, and garnered in his soul that Peace of the Lord which passeth all understanding. She is like the bride of whom the poet of the Israelites sang, looking and listening for the voice of her beloved.

'The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

My beloved is like the roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice.

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.'

But if there had been no Saint Francis to raise her to the foremost rank of shrines, and sanctify her with a special crown of holiness, Assisi would still be one of the most lovely cities in the garden of Umbria. She has grown like a fair white flower upon the brown slope of Monte Subasio, whose shoulder is a bulwark between the ragged Appennines and the soft valleys of Umbria.

It is a sudden revelation, as though the landscape foreshadowed the history of Assisi, to stand on the windy height of her Rocca, and first to look down on the rolling Umbrian hills, clothed with the tender green of vines and olives, which have gentle streams meandering at their feet, and then to turn to the eastern slope of Subasio and see the brown and barren mountains ravening away to the horizon, like an angry sea, now towering into broken peaks, now falling back with steep, scarred sides, red as wounds where the ruddy limestone has been torn from them. On the one hand there is that Peace of God which St. Francis scattered through the turbulent thirteenth century, and which has lingered in the grass-grown streets of his native city; and, on the other, the bloody wars and revolutions which racked Assisi from the day that Rome first put its yoke upon her, to the sixteenth century, when she surrendered a second time to the Imperial city, and yielded up her keys to Paul III. For her history is one long tale of disasters. She fell a victim to so many conquerors--Totila, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and the condottieri of her enemy Perugia--Biordo Michelotti, Braccio Fortebraccio, and Niccolò Piccinino. And from the sack of the terrible little man, Niccolò, Assisi never recovered: to this day there is a spacious olive-garden between the Rocca and the town itself, on which the disheartened Assisans had not the spirit to rebuild their ravished homes.

Assisi is full of forgotten charms. No other city in Umbria, except proud Spoleto, can boast as many traces of her Roman greatness. Though her amphitheatre has vanished underground, its lines are clearly preserved by the houses which are built above it; there is a wonderful Roman cistern below the cathedral; there are fragments of a theatre, and a drain of excellent masonry in the Canon's garden; and in the Piazza Vittore Emanuele is the exquisite portico of the Temple of Minerva, which, legend says, was built by Dardanus of Troy. Be that as it may, this temple of the Goddess of Wisdom, which was long ago dedicated to the Mother of Christ, and on whose steps St. Francis often stood to preach, is one of the most perfect Roman temple-façades extant, notwithstanding the mass of mediaeval buildings which crowd in upon it, or the foreshortening of its pronaos, half sunk below the pavement of the piazza.

It would be difficult to find a more completely Gothic place than Assisi. Except for the great hotels near San Francesco, the sixteenth-century church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and the palaces of the Via Superba, in which the spendthrift nobles of the seventeenth century entertained Queen Christina of Sweden, there is hardly anything in Assisi that is not of the Gothic age. If all the bricked-up loggias and windows of Assisi were opened out, she would look like a city frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli.

And she has many treasures which the hurried traveller does not dream of. Who, for instance, ever remembers the ancient cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Bishop's Palace, where Saint Francis renounced his earthly heritage; or climbs the hill to see the cathedral of San Rufino, with its wonderful Romanesque façade, mystic with strange carvings, and its font in which not only Francis, but the great Emperor Frederick II., was baptized? How many people have lingered to look at the little loggia of the Comacine masters at the foot of one of the stair-streets of Assisi, which seem to have been created by the imagination of Albrecht Dürer? Or the sunken loggia of the Monte Frumentario, one of the most ancient municipal buildings in Assisi, which still carries on its original business and makes loans of money and seed to the peasantry, so that they shall not be ruined in the lean years of agriculture? How many have seen the little Chapel of the Pilgrims, founded by the Confraternity of St. Anthony in honour of their saint as a hospice for poor pilgrims, though it is frescoed by Matteo de Gualdo and Mesastris of Foligno?

There are few even who have visited the minor relics of St. Francis,--the Carcere; the cell in the garden of San Rufino in which the Miracle of the Fiery Chariot took place; the little parish church of San Giorgio; and the chapels scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed.

It is San Francesco which most people come to see; San Francesco, one of the most inspired Gothic buildings in Italy, made sacrosanct with the body of Francis, illuminated with all that Tuscany could yield of art in the far-back thirteenth century. So all those dreams of poverty and humility which were the moving spirit of the Early Companions have come to naught. It avails nothing that when the hand of death lay heavy upon Francis, he yielded up even the coarse rough robe, his last possession, and but for his hair-shirt lay naked upon the ground, until a brother covered him with another garment, given 'as to one who has made himself poor for the love of God.' Nor does his humility count for anything, for though his petition to be buried on the Collis Inferni among the criminals and malefactors was granted, he was not given the humble grave he sought; and it is probable that Pope Gregory, who changed the name of the hill from that day to Collis Paradisi, only yielded to the saint's request because there was no other spot near the city walls suitable for the huge monument which he and Brother Elias were preparing to build.

There is a story that the irresponsible Leo, the constant friend and companion of Francis, whom he so lovingly called 'the little sheep of God,' broke the porphyry vase for alms and collections which Brother Elias placed outside the church that all might contribute to its building. But it needed more than the simple Leo's protest to stem the flood of innovations which the ambitious Vicar-General was introducing into the Order. Even in his life-time St. Francis could not hold it back. Who, knowing the pathetic story of his home-coming from the East, and his disappointment at seeing the sumptuous Convent of the Brothers Minor in Bologna, can think that this splendid basilica does not weigh heavily upon the bones of the little poor man of Assisi? But it was inevitable. He had more to combat than the ambitions of individuals; there was the papacy to reckon with, the luxurious and effete Court of Rome, which saw well enough the moral of the Rule of Francis, but had no mind to make a bride of Poverty.

'Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes nor yet staves. And, as ye go, preach, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Thus, literally, did Francis, the splendid Idealist of the Middle Ages, whose faith in human nature was second only to his faith in God, follow the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Only once in a hundred ages does such a star arise in the East to illumine the darkness of the world and oppose the primeval laws of disaster. We know how much he achieved, what a vista of purity and love he opened to the thirteenth century, and how signally even this fervent age failed to respond to the voice of the Herald of God who preached repentance, and sang the praises of his Maker through the sunlit fields and gardens of Italy. So that there is much pathos in this mighty temple on the western rock of Assisi, which is the mausoleum of all the beautiful impracticable dreams of Francis as well as the shrine on which devotion, art and wealth have lavished every resource to make it a worthy resting-place for the Messiah of the Middle Ages.

It was the hour of sunset when we first climbed up the slope of Monte Subasio, and Assisi and her great church were rose-red, as though they glowed with inward fires. We left our vettura at the city gates, telling the driver to take our luggage to the inn, and we ourselves turned up the hill to San Francesco. As we approached it through the long arcades of the lower piazza the great golden church with its towers and gables, its buttressed sides, its jewelled windows and gracious portico, and the noble steps which lead up to the Chiesa Superiore, had something of the eternal beauty of St. Mark's at Venice.

We passed through a group of the clamorous beggars who besiege the pilgrim at the door of San Francesco, like a canker at the heart of a perfect fruit, and plunged into the gloom of the Lower Church. After the gold splendour of the sunset our eyes could distinguish little except the royal tombs which line the vestibule, and the great barrel arches which span the vault. But as we groped our way through the vast dim nave the world of Giotto, Cimabue and the Lorenzetti loomed on us through the shadows like a memory. The walls of chapel and transept were held in the bondage of shadow, but here and there some sweet familiar face looked down upon us with its golden halo fired by the last light of day. It was very dark. Vespers were over. One little lamp hanging in the Cappella San Martino only emphasised the gloom, but our footsteps were lighted by a faint glare radiating from the lowest tier of the altar. We could not imagine whence it came, shining so low in our path, until we drew near and beheld through the grille a lamp, suspended below the floor above the tomb of Francis. It was as though the luminous presence of the saint himself was guiding our feet through the shadows.

I have been many times to see San Francesco since the first night I climbed Assisi's hill, but I have never passed from the sunlight, which the little Poor Brother loved so well, into that shadowy vault without feeling something pulling at my heart-strings, for there is an atmosphere of sadness in San Francesco. Below all this splendour Francis is crushed out of thought just as his body is crushed out of sight by his massive tomb. It is Brother Elias, not Francis, whom we meet in these dim rich chapels; and the fabric of the great church and convent is a monument to human frailty rather than to individual holiness. But it is so completely lovely, so full of memories, with its unbroken chain of faith and prayer to link it to the thirteenth century, that I would not have one jot or tittle of it altered. It is one of the chief gems in Italy's crown of beauty, an inexhaustible treasure-house.

Every day, although we were living at the other end of Assisi, our feet wandered down the hillside to San Francesco. Now it was to hear Mass in the dim Lower Church when clouds of incense veiled Giotto's canopy of allegories above the High Altar, and the peasants knelt humbly round the shrine of the little Poor One, who having nothing gained the whole world. Now to gaze upon the pitiful relics of the saint housed in the magnificent carved presses of the sacristy--the fragments of his death-clothes; the original register of Honorius III.; the Blessing of St. Leo in Francis' handwriting; and, most touching of all, the rough sandals which Saint Clare made with her own hands for the beloved Father, when his poor weary feet, with their sacred wounds, could no longer tread the stony Umbrian roads. Now we would wander through the chapels spelling out the frescoes of Martini and the lesser Tuscans, pausing awhile before the tomb of that forgotten Queen of Cyprus, who is only remembered for her priceless gift of ultramarine, presented in the porphyry vase which is still to be seen in the east transept; or by the shadowy tomb of Madonna Giacobba di Settisoli, the Roman lady who loved Francis, and ministered to him at the last, bringing him his shroud and the candles for his burying, and, pitiful and human touch, the little comfits which had pleased him when he lay sick in Rome.

Nor did we ever weary of the small cloister of San Francesco with its faded grey of bricks and mortar, its cypresses and lichens, and the _stemme_ of the nobles who lie below its pavement. It is a veritable home of peace. The walls are veiled in hanging creepers; there is a little box-hedge and a shower of sun-flecked acacias and lilacs from which the grey trunks of giant cypresses soar like the columns of a mighty temple. Dragon-flies flash through the warm, pine-scented air, and in the heart of it there is a crucifix to turn the thoughts of the brothers to holiness, lest they should be distracted by the sight of so much beauty, as they walk in the garden before their Mass.

And many a golden afternoon did we while away in the beautiful Gothic Chiesa Superiore, whose walls Giotto has illumined with the story of St. Francis. It would be hard to find two buildings in such strong contrast as the Upper and Lower churches of San Francesco. The Chiesa Inferiore, with its great barrel arches, its shadows and its dim frescoes, moves the world most, for it is full of the suggestion of beautiful unseen things; but the Upper Church has blossomed like the flowers of the field above the tomb of Francis. It is a miracle of light and spaciousness and colour, with rich stained windows and soaring arches; and the white cities of Giotto's frescoes, and the exquisite blues of his many heavens encircle the walls like a gay ribbon below the faded reds and yellows of Cimabue.

Here at least we cannot but feel grateful to Brother Elias, for from the beginning the Franciscans were patrons of the art of painting, and they were among the first to encourage the independent school of art as distinct from the work of Byzantium. Giunto da Pisa clothed the walls of the transept, and Cimabue and his pupils were called in to complete the decorations of the Upper Church. Thus it befell that, while Cimabue was painting some of his masterpieces on the walls above, Giotto, serving his apprenticeship and working with the other pupils of his Master's atelier, stretched out his hand to snatch the greater laurel.

'Cimabue thought To lord it over painting's field; and now The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'[17]