CHAPTER XIII

ACROSS UMBRIA TO THE ADRIATIC

The mountain district of Umbria, a country of clear outlines against pale blue skies, is one of the most charming in the peninsula though not the most grandly scenic.

The highway from Rome to Ancona, across Umbria, follows the itinerary of one of the most ancient of Roman roads, the Via Valeria. The railway, too, follows almost in the same track, though each leaves the Imperial City, itself, by the great trunk line via Salaria and the Valley of the Tiber.

Terni is the great junction from which radiate various other lines of communication to all parts of the kingdom. Terni is, practically, the geographical centre of Italy. It is a bustling manufacturing town and, supposedly, the Interamna where Tacitus was born.

From Terni one reaches Naples, via Avezzano in 257 kilometres; Rome, via Civita Castellana in 94 kilometres; Florence via Perugia and Arezzo in 256 kilometres and Ancona, on the shores of the Adriatic, via Foligno in 209 kilometres. All of these roads run the gamut from high to low levels and, though in no sense to be classed as mountain roads, are sufficiently trying to even a modern automobile to be classed as difficult.

The Cascades of Terni used to be one of the stock sights of tourists, a generation ago, but, truth to tell, they are not remarkable natural beauties, and, indeed, are too apparently artificial to be admired. Moreover one is too much "exploited" in the neighbourhood to enjoy his visit. It costs half a lira to enter by this gate, and to leave by that road; to cross this bridge, or descend into that cavern; and troops of children beg soldi of you at every turn. The thing is not worth doing.

Spoleto, twenty-six kilometres away, is somewhat more interesting. It is famous for the fine relics, which still exist, of its more magnificent days, when, 242 B. C., it was named Spoletium.

The towers of Spoleto, like those of San Gimignano and Volterra, are its chief glory; civic, secular and churchly towers, all blending into one hazy mass of grim, militant power. The Franciscan convent, on the uppermost height, seems to guard all the towers below, as a shepherd guards his flock, or a mother hen her chickens.

In 1499 the equivocal, enigmatic Lucrezia Borgia came to inhabit the castle of Spoleto. The fair but unholy Lucrezia was a wandering, restless being who liked apparently to be continually on the move.

Here, in the fortress of Spoleto, Lucrezia Borgia, coming straight from the Vatican, held for a brief year the seals of the state in her frail hands, her father at the time being governor.

The aspect of this grim fortress-château, grim but livable, as one knows from the historical accounts, is to-day, so far as outlines are concerned, just as it was five centuries ago. It is grandiose, severe and majestic, and is dominant in all the landscape round about, not even its mountain background dwarfing its proportions. The military defence was that portion lying lowest down in the valley, while the residence of the governor was in the upper portion. One reads the history of three distinct epochs in its architecture, the Gothic of the fifteenth century, that of the sixteenth, and the later interpolated Renaissance decorations.

Through Foligno and Assisi runs the road to Perugia. Assisi is a much visited shrine, but Foligno is remembered by most of those who have travelled that way only as a grimy railway junction.

Assisi, the little Umbrian hill town, is deservedly the popular shrine that it is. Assisi is a religious shrine, but its skyline silhouette is more like that which properly belongs to a warlike stronghold. The city of St. Francis is loved by men of all creeds who recall the story of the holy man who, with poverty as a garment, trod his long way, singing, talking to the birds and succouring all who were sore or heavy laden.

Immense antiquity is suggested by everything round about, from the tombs of the Etruscan Necropolis, dating from 150 B.C., down to the triple-storied convent church of San Francesco of 1230 and the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli of 1509.

The now secularized convent and its triple church have all the characteristics of a mediæval fortress when viewed from afar.

The town itself owes most, if not all, of its fame to its beloved San Francesco. His birthplace has disappeared and its site occupied by the Chiesa Nuova, but a part of it has been built into the church, making it another shrine of the holy man who did so much good to his fellows during his life, and to his native town in these late days by bringing tens, nay, even hundreds, of thousands of tourists thither to spend their money on local guides, cabmen and inn-keepers. A sordid point of view some may think. But is it? What would Assisi be without the tourists? Still wooing the Lady Poverty, there's no doubt about that. What would Venice be without the tourists? Not what it is to-day. No indeed. It is dead and dull enough even now at certain seasons. It would become so for all time without the strangers.

Perugia is the big town of Umbria. To-day it boasts of twenty odd thousand souls, but in the days when it struggled against papal control it was even more populous. Its history is one long drawn out tale of revolt and submission in turn, from the days when it first submitted to the Romans in 310 B. C. until it threw its fate in with that of the other states of Victor Emmanuel in 1860.

If ever a city was blood-baptized that honour is Perugia's. It has not a crooked old street nor gate nor fountain nor piazza or palazzo but what is gory with bloody memories.

Perugia was a dominant mediæval influence all through the neighbourhood and levied tribute on all her vassal cities and towns. Foligno's walls and ramparts had fallen and the people of Perugia came and carted off the stone for their own needs; Arezzo stripped her churches and palaces to provide the marbles for Perugia's cathedral.

Perugia's oxen are famous in literature and art, but they have almost become a memory, though an occasional one may be seen standing in the market place or a yoke working in the nearby fields. Electric cars haul passengers and freight about the city at a death-dealing pace, and the ox as a beast of burden is out-distanced and out-classed.

The ancient civilization is represented at Perugia by a remarkable series of old fortification walls, still admirably conserved, a kilometre or more from the centre of town, a necropolis of ten chambers, and an antique Roman arch of Augustus.

Perugia's lode star for travellers has ever been the fact that it was the centre of the school of Umbrian painters. This is not saying that it has no architecture worth mentioning, for the reverse is the case.

Out from Perugia by the Porta di Elce, on the Cortona road, one passes a couple of imposing edifices. One, from a distance, looks grandly romantic and mediæval, but is only a base modern reproduction in cement and timber--and for all the writer knows, steel beams as well--of an ancient feudal castle. The other is less grand, less luxurious possibly, but is the very ideal of an Italian country house, habitable to-day, but surrounded with all the romantic flavour of mediævalism. It is still called the Villa of the Cardinal by virtue of the fact that Cardinal Fulvio della Corgna built it in 1580. Locally, it is also known as the Villa Umberto, and it belongs to, and is inhabited by, the family of Commendatore Ferdinando Cesaroni. Architecturally, perhaps, the villa is not a great work, but it is marvellously satisfying to the eye by reason of its disposition and its outlook.

Gubbio, thirty-nine kilometres away by road, is not readily accessible by rail from Perugia, though on the direct line from Arezzo, Ancona and Foligno.

The automobilist may reach Gubbio from Perugia in less time than the rail-tied traveller may check his baggage and take his place in the train.

Not many include Gubbio in their Italian tours. Its Etruscan lore and relics have been made the subject of volumes, but little has been done to set forth its charms for the Italian pilgrim who would seek to get away from the herding crowds of the great cities and towns.

Gubbio's ducal palace is moss grown and weedy, so far as its rooftop and courtyard are concerned, but it is a very warm and lively old fabric nevertheless, and those that love historic old shrines will find much here that they will often not discover in a well restored, highly furbished monument kept frankly as a show-place for throngs of trippers who cannot tell old bronze from new copper, or wrought iron from _font_.

The hurly-burly of twentieth century life has not yet reached Gubbio, and that is why it presents itself to the visitor within its walls in such agreeable fashion.

Off in the Marches, sixty-five kilometres from Gubbio, is the little town of Urbino. It has a Palazzo Ducale most remarkable in its architecture and its emplacement. It was begun in 1648 by Frederigo di Montefeltro, on the site of a former palace of a century before. The apartments within are not merely the halls of a museum, but are remarkably interesting and livable mediæval apartments, and to-day are much as they were in the days of the gallant dukes, one of whom, Guidobaldo II, was a poet himself and a patron of letters who gave his protection to the last Italian poet whose fame was European--Torquato Tasso.

Urbino, too, was the birthplace of him whom we know familiarly as Raphael, though curiously enough the local museum contains but a single example of his work, and that a drawing of "Moses in the Bulrushes."

Urbino's chief "sight," though it is not beautiful in itself, is the birthplace of Raphael, situated in a little street running off from near the ducal palace, a street which mounts heavenward so steeply that it was formerly called the Via del Monte. The authorities, in an effort to keep up with popular taste, have recently changed the name to Via Raffaello.

It is a mean, simple and grim looking little house, not at all beautiful according to palatial standards. On the 6th of April, 1483, its fame began, but pilgrims have only in recent years come to bow down before it. Nevertheless popes and prelates and princes came here to sit to the "painter of Urbino" and have left an added distinction to the house. Muzio Oddi, the celebrated architect and mathematician, caused to be graven the following on its façade:--

"Ludet in humanis divina potentia rebus Et saepe in parvis claudre magna solet."

A tablet marks the house plainly. It will not be possible to miss it.

Urbino sits high above the surrounding valley, twelve or fifteen hundred feet above sea level. A coach of doubtful antiquity formerly made the same journey as that covered by the railway and deposited its mixed freight of travellers and inhabitants in one of the most splendid of the Renaissance cities of Italy. Now, the automobile brings many more tourists than ever before came by coach, or railway even, and accordingly Urbino will undoubtedly become better known.

The court of Urbino in the sixteenth century was one of the most refined and learned of the courts of Italy, and therefore of the world. Coryat in his "Crudities," of the seventeenth century, remarks a difference between English and Italian manners.

"I observed a custom in all those Italian cities and towns through which I passed, that is not used in any other country that I saw in my travels; neither do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian, and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork when they cut their meat." Is it that the fork came to earth as a seventeenth century Italian innovation?

Urbino's Albergo Italia merits the sign of the crossed knife and fork, the Automobile Club's endorsement of good food.

One of the classic figures of mediæval Urbino was Oddantonio, of the great house of Montefeltro, who, succeeding to the dukedom at the age of fifteen, fell under the ill control of the brilliant, but corrupt, Sigismondo Malatesta, of Rimini.

Thirty five kilometres east of Urbino lies the blue Adriatic, perhaps the most beautiful of all the Italian seas. The descent from four hundred metres at Urbino to sea level is gradual and easy, but it is a steady fall that is bound to be remarked by travellers by road, with the sea in sight for the major part of the way.

One comes to the Adriatic shore at Pesaro, midway on the coast between Ravenna and Ancona. North and south, from the Venetian boundary to the rocky, sparse-populated shores of Calabria, flanking upon the Ionian sea, is a wonderland of little-travelled highroad, all of it a historic itinerary, though indeed the road is none of the best. To the jaded traveller, tired of stock sights and scenes, the covering of this coast road from Venice to Brindisi would be a journey worth the making, but it should not be done hurriedly.