We see in Pienza how the most active-minded and intelligent man of his epoch, the representative genius of Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, commanding vast wealth and the Pontifical prestige, worked out his whim of city-building.

The experiment had to be made upon a small scale; for Pienza was then and was destined to remain a village.

Yet here, upon this miniature piazza-in modern as in ancient Italy the meeting-point of civic [Pg 77]life, the forum-we find a cathedral, a palace of the bishop, a palace of the feudal lord, and a palace of the commune, arranged upon a well-considered plan, and executed after one design in a consistent style.

The religious, municipal, signorial, and ecclesiastical functions of the little town are centralised around the open market-place, on which the common people transacted business and discussed affairs.

Pius entrusted the realization of his scheme to a Florentine architect; whether Bernardo Rossellino, or a certain Bernardo di Lorenzo, is still uncertain.

The same artist, working in the flat manner of Florentine domestic architecture, with rusticated basements, rounded windows and bold projecting cornices-the manner which is so nobly illustrated by the Rucellai and Strozzi palaces at Florence-executed also for Pius the monumental Palazzo Piccolomini at Siena.

It is a great misfortune for the group of buildings he designed at Pienza, that they are huddled together in close quarters on a square too small for their effect.

A want of space is peculiarly injurious to the architecture of this date, 1462, which, itself geometrical and spatial, demands a certain harmony and liberty in its surroundings, a proportion between the room occupied by each building and the masses of the edifice.

The style is severe and prosaic.

Those charming episodes and accidents of fancy, in which the Gothic style and the style of the earlier Lombard Renaissance abounded, are wholly wanting to the rigid, mathematical, hard-headed genius of the Florentine quattrocento.

Pienza, therefore, disappoints us.

Its heavy palace frontispieces shut the spirit up in a tight box.

We seem unable to breathe, and lack that element of life and picturesqueness which the [Pg 78]splendid retinues of nobles in the age of Pinturicchio might have added to the now forlorn Piazza.

Yet the material is a fine warm travertine, mellowing to dark red, brightening to golden, with some details, especially the tower of the Palazzo Communale, in red brick.

This building, by the way, is imitated in miniature from that of Florence.

The cathedral is a small church of three aisles, equally high, ending in what the French would call a chevet.

Pius had observed this plan of construction somewhere in Austria, and commanded his architect, Bernardo, to observe it in his plan.

He was attracted by the facilities for window-lighting which it offered; and what is very singular, he provided by the Bull of his foundation for keeping the walls of the interior free from frescoes and other coloured decorations.

The result is that, though the interior effect is pleasing, the church presents a frigid aspect to eyes familiarised with warmth of tone in other buildings of that period.

The details of the columns and friezes are classical; and the façade, strictly corresponding to the structure, and very honest in its decorative elements, is also of the earlier Renaissance style.

But the vaulting and some of the windows are pointed.

The Palazzo Piccolomini, standing at the right hand of the Duomo, is a vast square edifice.

The walls are flat and even, pierced at regular intervals with windows, except upon the south-west side, where the rectangular design is broken by a noble double Loggiata, gallery rising above gallery-serene curves of arches, grandly proportioned columns, massive balustrades, a spacious corridor, a roomy vaulting-opening out upon the palace garden, and offering fair prospect [Pg 79]over the wooded heights of Castiglione and Rocca d’Orcia, up to Radicofani and shadowy Amiata.

It was in these double tiers of galleries, in the garden beneath and in the open inner square of the palazzo, that the great life of Italian aristocracy displayed itself.

Four centuries ago these spaces, now so desolate in their immensity, echoed to the tread of serving-men, the songs of pages; horse-hooves struck upon the pavement of the court; spurs jingled on the staircases; the brocaded trains of ladies sweeping from their chambers rustled on the marbles of the loggia; knights let their hawks fly from the garden-parapets; cardinals and abbreviators gathered round the doors from which the Pope would issue, when he rose from his siesta to take the cool of evening in those airy colonnades.

How impossible it is to realise that scene amid this solitude…. The palazzo still belongs to the Piccolomini family.

But it has fallen into something worse than ruin-the squalor of half-starved existence, shorn of all that justified its grand proportions.

Partition-walls have been run up across its halls to meet the requirements of our contracted modern customs.

Nothing remains of the original decorations except one carved chimney-piece, an emblazoned shield, and a frescoed portrait of the founder.

All movable treasures have been made away with.

And yet the carved heraldics of the exterior, the coat of Piccolomini, “argent, on a cross azure five crescents or,” the Papal ensigns, keys, and tiara, and the monogram of Pius, prove that this country dwelling of a Pope must once have been rich in details befitting its magnificence.

With the exception of the very small portion reserved for the Signori, when they visit Pienza, the palace has become a [Pg 80]granary for country produce in a starveling land.

There was one redeeming point about it to my mind.

That was the handsome young man, with earnest Tuscan eyes and a wonderfully sweet voice, the servant of the Piccolomini family, who lives here with his crippled father, and who showed us over the apartments.

We left Pienza and drove on to S.

Quirico, through the same wrinkled wilderness of marl; wasteful, uncultivated, bare to every wind that blows.

A cruel blast was sweeping from the sea, and Monte Amiata darkened with rain clouds.

Still the pictures, which formed themselves at intervals, as we wound along these barren ridges, were very fair to look upon, especially one, not far from S.

Quirico.

It had for foreground a stretch of tilth-olive-trees, honeysuckle hedges, and cypresses.

Beyond soared Amiata in all its breadth and blue air-blackness, bearing on its mighty flanks the broken cliffs and tufted woods of Castiglione and the Rocca d’Orcia; eagles’ nests emerging from a fertile valley-champaign, into which the eye was led for rest.

It so chanced that a band of sunlight, escaping from filmy clouds, touched this picture with silvery greys and soft greens-a suffusion of vaporous radiance, which made it for one moment a Claude landscape.

S.

Quirico was keeping festa.

The streets were crowded with healthy handsome men and women from the contado.

This village lies on the edge of a great oasis in the Sienese desert-an oasis, formed by the waters of the Orcia and Asso sweeping down to join Ombrone, and stretching on to Montalcino.

We put up at the sign of the “Two Hares,” where a notable housewife gave us a dinner of all we could desire; [Pg 81]frittata di cervelle, good fish, roast lamb stuffed with rosemary, salad and cheese, with excellent wine and black coffee, at the rate of three lire a head.

The attraction of S.

Quirico is its gem-like little collegiata, a Lombard church of the ninth century, with carved portals of the thirteenth.

It is built of golden travertine; some details in brown sandstone.

The western and southern portals have pillars resting on the backs of lions.

On the western side these pillars are four slender columns, linked by snake-like ligatures.

On the southern side they consist of two carved figures-possibly S.

John and the Archangel Michael.

There is great freedom and beauty in these statues, as also in the lions which support them, recalling the early French and German manner.

In addition, one finds the usual Lombard grotesques-two sea-monsters, biting each other; harpy-birds; a dragon with a twisted tail; little men grinning and squatting in adaptation to coigns and angles of the windows.

The toothed and chevron patterns of the north are quaintly blent with rude acanthus scrolls and classical egg-mouldings.

Over the western porch is a Gothic rose window.

Altogether this church must be reckoned one of the most curious specimens of that hybrid architecture, fusing and appropriating different manners, which perplexes the student in Central Italy.

It seems strangely out of place in Tuscany.

Yet, if what one reads of Toscanella, a village between Viterbo and Orbetello, be true, there exist examples of a similar fantastic Lombard style even lower down.

The interior was most disastrously gutted and “restored” in 1731: its open wooden roof masked by a false stucco vaulting.

A few relics, spared by the [Pg 82]eighteenth century Vandals, show that the church was once rich in antique curiosities.

A marble knight in armour lies on his back, half hidden by the pulpit stairs.

And in the choir are half a dozen rarely beautiful panels of tarsia, executed in a bold style and on a large scale.

One design-a man throwing his face back, and singing, while he plays a mandoline; with long thick hair and fanciful berretta; behind him a fine line of cypresses and other trees-struck me as singularly lovely.

In another I noticed a branch of peach, broad leaves and ripe fruit, not only drawn with remarkable grace and power, but so modelled as to stand out with the roundness of reality.

The whole drive of three hours back to Montepulciano was one long banquet of inimitable distant views.

Next morning, having to take farewell of the place, we climbed to the Castello, or arx of the old city…. It is a ruined spot, outside the present walls, upon the southern slope, where there is now a farm, and a fair space of short sheep-cropped turf, very green and grassy, and gemmed with little pink geraniums as in England in such places.

The walls of the old castle, overgrown with ivy, are broken down to their foundations.

This may possibly have been done when Montepulciano was dismantled by the Sienese in 1232.

At that date the Commune succumbed to its more powerful neighbours.

The half of its inhabitants were murdered, and its fortifications were destroyed.

Such episodes are common enough in the history of that internecine struggle for existence between the Italian municipalities, which preceded the more famous strife of Guelfs and Ghibellines.

Stretched upon the smooth turf of the Castello, we bade adieu [Pg 83]to the divine landscape bathed in light and mountain air-to Thrasymene and Chiusi and Cetona; to Amiata, Pienza, and S.

Quirico; to Montalcino and the mountains of Volterra; to Siena and Cortona; and, closer to Monte Fallonica, Madonna di Biagio, the house-roofs and the Palazzo tower of Montepulciano.

FOOTNOTES: [A] From Leigh Hunt’s Translation.

[Pg 84] SPRING WANDERINGS.

Ana-Capri.

The storm-clouds at this season, though it is the bloom of May, are daily piled in sulky or menacing masses over Vesuvius and the Abruzzi, frothing out their curls of moulded mist across the bay, and climbing the heavens with toppling castle towers and domes of alabaster.

We made the most of a tranquil afternoon, where there was an armistice of storm, to climb the bluff of Mount Solaro.

A ruined fort caps that limestone bulwark; and there we lay together, drinking the influences of sea, sun, and wind.

Immeasurably deep beneath us plunged the precipices, deep, deep descending to a bay where fisher boats were rocking, diminished to a scale that made the fishermen in them invisible.

Low down above the waters wheeled white gulls, and higher up the hawks and ospreys of the cliff sailed out of sunlight into shadow.

Immitigable strength is in the moulding of this limestone, and sharp, clear definiteness marks yon clothing of scant brushwood where the fearless goats are browsing.

The sublime of sculpturesque in crag structure is here, refined and modulated by the sweetness of sea distances.

For the air came pure and yielding to us over the unfooted sea; and at the basement of those [Pg 85]fortress-cliffs the sea was dreaming in its caves; and far away, to east and south and west, soft light was blent with mist upon the surface of the shimmering waters.

The distinction between prospects viewed from a mountain overlooking a great plain, or viewed from heights that, like this, dominate the sea, principally lies in this: that while the former only offer cloud shadows cast upon the fields below our feet, in the latter these shadows are diversified with cloud reflections.

This gives superiority in qualities of colour, variety of tone, and luminous effect to the sea, compensating in some measure for the lack of those associations which render the outlook over a wide extent of populated land so thrilling.

The emergence of towered cities into sunlight at the skirts of moving shadows, the liquid lapse of rivers half disclosed by windings among woods, the upturned mirrors of unruffled lakes, are wanting to the sea.

For such episodes the white sails of vessels, with all their wistfulness of going to and fro on the mysterious deep, are but a poor exchange.

Yet the sea-lover may justify his preference by appealing to the beauty of empurpled shadows, toned by amethyst or opal or shining with violet light, reflected from the clouds that cross and find in those dark shields a mirror.

There are suggestions, too, of immensity, of liberty, of action, presented by the boundless horizons and the changeful changeless tracts of ocean which no plain possesses.

It was nigh upon sunset when we descended to Ana-Capri.

That evening the clouds assembled suddenly.

The armistice of storm was broken.

They were terribly blue, and the sea grew dark as steel beneath them, till the moment when the sun’s lip [Pg 86]reached the last edge of the waters.

Then a courier of rosy flame sent forth from him passed swift across the gulf, touching, where it trod, the waves with accidental fire.

The messenger reached Naples; and in a moment, as by some diabolical illumination, the sinful city kindled into light like glowing charcoal.

From Posilippo on the left, along the palaces of the Chiaja, up to S.

Elmo on the hill, past Santa Lucia, down on the Marinella, beyond Portici, beyond Torre del Greco, where Vesuvius towered up aloof, an angry mount of amethystine gloom, the conflagration spread and reached Pompeii, and dwelt on Torre dell’Annunziata.

Stationary, lurid, it smouldered while the day died slowly.

The long, densely populated sea-line from Pozzuoli to Castellammare burned and smoked with intensest incandescence, sending a glare of fiery mist against the threatening blue behind, and fringing with pomegranate-coloured blots the water where no light now lingered.

It is difficult to bend words to the use required.

The scene in spite of natural suavity and grace, had become like Dante’s first glimpse of the City of Dis-like Sodom and Gomorrah when fire from heaven descended on their towers before they crumbled into dust.

From Capri to Ischia.

After this, for several days, Libeccio blew harder.

No boats could leave or come to Capri.

From the piazza parapet we saw the wind scooping the surface of the waves, and flinging spray-fleeces in sheets upon the churning water.

As they broke on Cape Campanella, the rollers climbed in foam-how many feet?-[Pg 87]and blotted out the olive trees above the headland.

The sky was always dark with hanging clouds and masses of low-lying vapour, very moist, but scarcely raining-lightning without thunder in the night.

Such weather is unexpected in the middle month of May, especially when the olives are blackened by December storms, and the orange-trees despoiled of foliage, and the tendrils of the vines yellow with cold.

The walnut-trees have shown no sign of making leaves.

Only the figs seem to have suffered little.

It had been settled that we should start upon the first seafaring dawn for Ischia or Sorrento, according as the wind might set; and I was glad when, early one morning, the captain of the Serena announced a moderate sirocco.

When we reached the little quay we found the surf of the libeccio still rolling heavily into the gulf.

A gusty south-easter crossed it, tearing spray-crests from the swell as it went plunging onward.

The sea was rough enough; but we made fast sailing, our captain steering with a skill which it was beautiful to watch, his five oarsmen picturesquely grouped beneath the straining sail.

The sea slapped and broke from time to time on our windward quarter, drenching the boat with brine; and now and then her gunwale scooped into the shoulder of a wave as she shot sidling up it.

Meanwhile enormous masses of leaden-coloured clouds formed above our heads and on the sea-line; but these were always shifting in the strife of winds, and the sun shone through them petulantly.

As we climbed the rollers, or sank into their trough, the outline of the bay appeared in glimpses, shyly revealed, suddenly withdrawn from sight; the immobility and majesty of mountains contrasted with the weltering [Pg 88]waste of water round us-now blue and garish where the sunlight fell, now shrouded in squally rain-storms, and then again sullen beneath a vaporous canopy.

Each of these vignettes was photographed for one brief second on the brain, and swallowed by the hurling drift of billows.

The painter’s art could but ill have rendered that changeful colour in the sea, passing from tawny cloud-reflections and surfaces of glowing violet to bright blue or impenetrable purple flecked with boiling foam, according as a light-illuminated or a shadowed facet of the moving mass was turned to sight.

Half-way across the gulf the sirocco lulled; the sail was lowered, and we had to make the rest of the passage by rowing.

Under the lee of Ischia we got into comparatively quiet water; though here the beautiful Italian sea was yellowish green with churned-up sand, like an unripe orange.

We passed the castle on its rocky island, with the domed church which has been so often painted in gouache pictures through the last two centuries, and soon after noon we came to Casamicciola.

La Piccola Sentinella.

Casamicciola is a village on the north side of the island, in its centre, where the visitors to the mineral baths of Ischia chiefly congregate.

One of its old-established inns is called La Piccola Sentinella.

The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with a pink wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays of thick-clustering scarlet and magenta flowers.

This is a rambling house, built in successive stages against a [Pg 89]hill, with terraces and verandahs opening on unexpected gardens to the back and front.

Beneath its long irregular façade there spreads a wilderness of orange-trees and honeysuckles and roses, verbenas, geraniums and mignonette, snapdragons, gazenias and stocks, exceeding bright and fragrant, with the green slopes of Monte Epomeo for a background and Vesuvius for far distance.

There are wonderful bits of detail in this garden.

One dark, thick-foliaged olive, I remember, leaning from the tufa over a lizard-haunted wall, feathered waist-high in huge acanthus-leaves.

The whole rich orchard ground of Casamicciola is dominated by Monte Epomeo, the extinct volcano which may be called the raison d’être of Ischia; for this island is nothing but a mountain lifted by the energy of fire from the sea-basement.

Its fantastic peaks and ridges, sulphur-coloured, dusty grey, and tawny, with brushwood in young leaf upon the cloven flanks, form a singular pendant to the austere but more artistically modelled limestone crags of Capri.

Not two islands that I know, within so short a space of sea, offer two pictures so different in style and quality of loveliness.

The inhabitants are equally distinct in type.

Here, in spite of what De Musset wrote somewhat affectedly about the peasant girls- Ischia…. c’est là qu’on a des yeux, C’est là qu’un corsage amoureux Serre la hanche.

Sur un bas rouge bien tiré Brille, sous le jupon doré, La mule blanche- in spite of these lines I did not find the Ischia women eminent, as those of Capri are, for beauty.

But the [Pg 90]young men have fine, loose, faun-like figures, and faces that would be strikingly handsome but for too long and prominent noses.

They are a singular race, graceful in movement.

Evening is divine in Ischia.

From the topmost garden terrace of the inn one looks across the sea toward Terracina, Gaeta, and those descending mountain buttresses, the Phlegræan plains and the distant snows of the Abruzzi.

Rain-washed and luminous, the sunset sky held Hesper trembling in a solid green of beryl.

Fireflies flashed among the orange blossoms.

Far away in the obscurity of eastern twilight glared the smouldering cone of Vesuvius-a crimson blot upon the darkness-a Cyclop’s eye, bloodshot and menacing.

The company in the Piccola Sentinella, young and old, were decrepit, with an odd, rheumatic, shrivelled look upon them.

The dining-room reminded me, as certain rooms are apt to do, of a ship’s saloon.

I felt as though I had got into the cabin of the Flying Dutchman, and that all these people had been sitting there at meat a hundred years, through storm and shine, for ever driving onward over immense waves in an enchanted calm.

Ischia and Forio.

One morning we drove along the shore, up hill, and down, by the Porto d’Ischia to the town and castle.

This country curiously combines the qualities of Corfu and Catania.

The near distance, so richly cultivated, with the large volcanic slopes of Monte Epomeo rising from the sea, is like Catania.

Then, across the gulf, [Pg 91]are the bold outlines and snowy peaks of the Abruzzi, recalling Albanian ranges.

Here, as in Sicily, the old lava is overgrown with prickly pear and red valerian.

Mesembrianthemums-I must be pardoned this word; for I cannot omit those fleshy-leaved creepers, with their wealth of gaudy blossoms, shaped like sea anemones, coloured like strawberry and pine-apple cream-ices-mesembrianthemums, then, tumble in torrents from the walls, and large-cupped white convolvuluses curl about the hedges.

The Castle Rock, with Capri’s refined sky-coloured outline relieving its hard profile on the horizon, is one of those exceedingly picturesque objects just too theatrical to be artistic.

It seems ready-made for a back scene in Masaniello, and cries out to the chromo-lithographer, “Come and make the most of me….” Yet this morning all things, in sea, earth, and sky, were so delicately tinted and bathed in pearly light that it was difficult to be critical.

In the afternoon we took the other side of the island, driving through Lacca to Forio.

One gets right round the bulk of Epomeo, and looks up into a weird region called Le Falange, where white lava streams have poured in two broad irregular torrents among broken precipices.

Florio itself is placed at the end of a flat headland, boldly thrust into the sea; and its furthest promontory bears a pilgrimage church, intensely white and glaring.

There is something arbitrary in the memories we make of places casually visited, dependent as they are upon our mood at the moment, or on an accidental interweaving of impressions which the genius loci blends for us.

Of Forio two memories abide with me.

[Pg 92]The one is of a young woman, with very fair hair, in a light blue dress, standing beside an older woman in a garden.

There was a flourishing pomegranate-tree above them.

The whiteness and the dreamy smile of the young woman seemed strangely out of tune with her strong-toned southern surroundings.

I could have fancied her a daughter of some moist north-western isle of Scandinavian seas.

My other memory is of a lad, brown, handsome, powerfully-featured, thoughtful, lying curled up in the sun upon a sort of ladder in his house-court, profoundly meditating.

He had a book in his hand, and his finger still marked the place where he had read.

He looked as though a Columbus or a Campanella might emerge from his earnest, fervent, steadfast adolescence.

Driving rapidly along, and leaving Forio in all probability for ever, I kept wondering whether these two lives, discerned as though in vision, would meet-whether she was destined to be his evil genius, whether posterity would hear of him and journey to his birthplace in this world-neglected Forio.

Such reveries are futile.

Yet who entirely resists them? Monte Epomeo.

About three on the morning which divides the month of May into two equal parts I woke and saw the waning moon right opposite my window, stayed in her descent upon the slope of Epomeo.

Soon afterwards Christian called me, and we settled to ascend the mountain.

Three horses and a stout black donkey, with their inevitable grooms, were ordered; and we took for guide a lovely faun-like boy, goat-faced, [Pg 93]goat-footed, with gentle manners and pliant limbs swaying beneath the breath of impulse.

He was called Giuseppe.

The way leads past the mineral baths and then strikes uphill, at first through lanes cut deep in the black lava.

The trees met almost overhead.

It is like Devonshire, except that one half hopes to see tropical foxgloves with violet bells and downy leaves sprouting among the lush grasses and sweet-scented ferns upon those gloomy, damp, warm walls.

After this we skirted a thicket of arbutus, and came upon the long volcanic ridge, with divinest outlook over Procida and Miseno toward Vesuvius.

Then once more we had to dive into brown sandstone gullies, extremely steep, where the horses almost burst their girths in scrambling, and the grooms screamed, exasperating their confusion with encouragement and curses.

Straight or bending like a willow wand, Giuseppe kept in front.

I could have imagined he had stepped to life from one of Lionardo’s fancy-sprighted studies.

After this fashion we gained the spine of mountain which composes Ischia-the smooth ascending ridge that grows up from those eastern waves to what was once the apex of fire-vomiting Inarime, and breaks in precipices westward, a ruin of gulfed lava, tortured by the violence of pent Typhœus.

Under a vast umbrella pine we dismounted, rested, and saw Capri.

Now the road skirts slanting-wise along the further flank of Epomeo, rising by muddy earth-heaps and sandstone hollows to the quaint pinnacles which build the summit.

There is no inconsiderable peril in riding over this broken ground; for the soil crumbles away, and [Pg 94]the ravines open downward, treacherously masked with brushwood.

On Epomeo’s topmost cone a chapel dedicated to S.

Niccolo da Bari, the Italian patron of seamen, has been hollowed from the rock.

Attached to it is the dwelling of two hermits, subterranean, with long dark corridors and windows opening on the western seas.

Church and hermitage alike are scooped, with slight expenditure of mason’s skill, from solid mountain.

The windows are but loopholes, leaning from which the town of Forio is seen, 2500 feet below; and the jagged precipices of the menacing Falange toss their contorted horror forth to sea and sky.

Through gallery and grotto we wound in twilight under a monk’s guidance, and came at length upon the face of the crags above Casamicciola.

A few steps upward, cut like a ladder in the stone, brought us to the topmost peak-a slender spire of soft, yellowish tufa.

It reminded me (with differences) of the way one climbs the spire at Strasburg, and stands upon that temple’s final crocket, with nothing but a lightning conductor to steady swimming senses.

Different indeed are the views unrolled beneath the peak of Epomeo and the pinnacle of Strasburg…. Vesuvius, with the broken lines of Procida, Miseno, and Lago Fusaro for foreground; the sculpturesque beauty of Capri, buttressed in everlasting calm upon the waves; the Phlegræan plains and champaign of Volturno, stretching between smooth seas and shadowy hills; the mighty sweep of Naples’ bay; all merged in blue; aërial, translucent, exquisitely frail.

In this ethereal fabric of azure the most real of realities, the most solid of substances, seem films upon a crystal sphere.

[Pg 95]The hermit produced some flasks of amber-coloured wine from his stores in the grotto.

These we drank, lying full-length upon the tufa in the morning sunlight.

The panorama of sea, sky, and long-drawn lines of coast, breathless, without a ripple or a taint of cloud, spread far and wide around us.

Our horses and donkey cropped what little grass, blent with bitter herbage, grew on that barren summit.

Their grooms helped us out with the hermit’s wine, and turned to sleep face downward.

The whole scene was very quiet, islanded in immeasurable air.

Then we asked the boy, Giuseppe, whether he could guide us on foot down the cliffs of Monte Epomeo to Casamicciola.

This he was willing and able to do; for he told me that he had spent many months each year upon the hill-side, tending goats.

When rough weather came, he wrapped himself in a blanket from the snow that falls and melts upon the ledges.

In summer time he basked the whole day long, and slept the calm ambrosial nights away.

Something of this free life was in the burning eyes, long clustering dark hair, and smooth brown bosom of the faun-like creature.

His graceful body had the brusque, unerring movement of the goats he shepherded.

Human thought and emotion seemed a-slumber in this youth who had grown one with nature.

As I watched his careless incarnate loveliness I remembered lines from an old Italian poem of romance, describing a dweller of the forest, who Haunteth the woodland aye ‘neath verdurous shade, Eateth wild fruit, drinketh of running stream; And such-like is his nature, as ’tis said, That ever weepeth he when clear skies gleam, Seeing of storms and rain he then hath dread, [Pg 96] And feareth lest the sun’s heat fail for him; But when on high hurl winds and clouds together, Full glad is he and waiteth for fair weather.

Giuseppe led us down those curious volcanic balze, where the soil is soft as marl, with tints splashed on it of pale green and rose and orange, and a faint scent in it of sulphur.

They break away into wild chasms, where rivulets begin; and here the narrow watercourses made for us plain going.

The turf beneath our feet was starred with cyclamens and wavering anemones.

At last we reached the chestnut woods, and so by winding paths descended on the village.

Giuseppe told me, as we walked, that in a short time he would be obliged to join the army.

He contemplated this duty with a dim and undefined dislike.

Nor could I, too, help dreading and misliking it for him.

The untamed, gentle creature, who knew so little but his goats as yet, whose nights had been passed from childhood à la belle étoile, whose limbs had never been cumbered with broadcloth or belt-for him to be shut up in the barrack of some Lombard city, packed in white conscript’s sacking, drilled, taught to read and write, and weighted with the knapsack and the musket…. There was something lamentable in the prospect.

But such is the burden of man’s life, of modern life especially.

United Italy demands of her children that by this discipline they should be brought into that harmony which builds a nation out of diverse elements.

[Pg 97] From Ischia to Naples.

Ischia showed a new aspect on the morning of our departure.

A sea-mist passed along the skirts of the island, and rolled in heavy masses round the peaks of Monte Epomeo, slowly condensing into summer clouds, and softening each outline with a pearly haze, through which shone emerald glimpses of young vines and fig-trees.

We left in a boat with four oarsmen for Pozzuoli.

For about an hour the breeze carried us well, while Ischia behind grew ever lovelier, soft as velvet, shaped like a gem.

The mist had become a great white luminous cloud-not dense and alabastrine, like the clouds of thunder; but filmy, tender, comparable to the atmosphere of Dante’s moon.

Porpoises and sea-gulls played and fished about our bows, dividing the dark brine in spray.

The mountain distances were drowned in bluish vapour-Vesuvius quite invisible.

About noon the air grew clearer, and Capri reared her fortalice of sculptured rock, aërially azure, into liquid ether.

I know not what effect of atmosphere or light it is that lifts an island from the sea by interposing that thin edge of lustrous white between it and the water.

But this phenomenon to-day was perfectly exhibited.

Like a mirage on the wilderness, like Fata Morgana’s palace ascending from the deep, the pure and noble vision stayed suspense ‘twixt heaven and ocean.

At the same time the breeze failed, and we rowed slowly between Procida and Capo Miseno-a space in old-world history athrong with Cæsar’s navies.

When we turned the point, and came in sight of [Pg 98]Baiæ, the wind freshened and took us flying into Pozzuoli.

The whole of this coast has been spoiled by the recent upheaval of Monte Nuovo with its lava floods and cindery deluges.

Nothing remains to justify its fame among the ancient Romans and the Neapolitans of Boccaccio’s and Pontano’s age.

It is quite wrecked, beyond the power even of hendecasyllables to bring again its breath of beauty: Mecum si sapies, Gravina, mecum Baias, et placidos coles recessus, Quos ipsæ et veneres colunt, et illa Quæ mentes hominum regit voluptas.

Hic vina et choreæ jocique regnant, Regnant et charites facetiæque.

Has sedes amor, has colit cupido.

Hic passim juvenes puellulæque Ludunt, et tepidis aquis lavantur, Cœnantque et dapibus leporibusque Miscent delitias venustiores: Miscent gaudia et osculationes, Atque una sociis toris foventur, Has te ad delitias vocant camœnæ; Invitat mare, myrteumque littus; Invitaut volucres canoræ, et ipse Gaurus pampineas parat corollas.

[B] [Pg 99]At Pozzuoli we dined in the Albergo del Ponte di Caligola (Heaven save the mark….), and drank Falernian wine of modern and indifferent vintage.

Then Christian hired two open carriages for Naples.

He and I sat in the second.

In the first we placed the two ladies of our party.

They had a large, fat driver.

Just after we had all passed the gate a big fellow rushed up, dragged the corpulent coachman from his box, pulled out a knife, and made a savage thrust at the man’s stomach.

At the same moment a guardia-porta, with drawn cutlass, interposed and struck between the combatants.

They were separated.

Their respective friends assembled in two jabbering crowds, and the whole party, uttering vociferous objurgations, marched off, as I imagined, to the watch-house.

A very shabby lazzarone, without more ado, sprang on the empty box, and we made haste for Naples.

Being only anxious to get there, and not at all curious about the squabble which had deprived us of our fat driver, I relapsed into indifference when I found that neither of the men to whose lot we had fallen was desirous of explaining the affair.

It was sufficient cause for self-congratulation that no blood had been shed, and that the Procuratore del Rè would not require our evidence.

[Pg 100]The Grotta di Posilippo was a sight of wonder, with the afternoon sun slanting on its festoons of creeping plants above the western entrance-the gas lamps, dust, huge carts, oxen, and contadini in its subterranean darkness-and then the sudden revelation of the bay and city as we jingled out into the summery air again by Virgil’s tomb.

Night at Pompeii.

On to Pompeii in the clear sunset, falling very lightly upon mountains, islands, little ports, and indentations of the bay.

From the railway station we walked above half a mile to the Albergo del Sole under a lucid heaven of aqua-marine colour, with Venus large in it upon the border line between the tints of green and blue.

The Albergo del Sole is worth commemorating.

We stepped, without the intervention of courtyard or entrance hall, straight from the little inn garden into an open, vaulted room.

This was divided into two compartments by a stout column supporting round arches.

Wooden gates furnished a kind of fence between the atrium and what an old Pompeian would have styled the triclinium.

For in the further part a table was laid for supper and lighted with suspended lamps.

And here a party of artists and students drank and talked and smoked.

A great live peacock, half asleep and winking his eyes, sat perched upon a heavy wardrobe watching them.

The outer chamber, where we waited in arm-chairs of ample girth, had its loggia windows and doors open to the air.

There were singing-birds in cages; and plants of rosemary, iris, [Pg 101]and arundo sprang carelessly from holes in the floor.

A huge vase filled to overflowing with oranges and lemons, the very symbol of generous prodigality, stood in the midst, and several dogs were lounging round.

The outer twilight, blending with the dim sheen of the lamps, softened this pretty scene to picturesqueness.

Altogether it was a strange and unexpected place.

Much experienced as the nineteenth-century nomad may be in inns, he will rarely receive a more powerful and refreshing impression, entering one at evenfall, than here.

There was no room for us in the inn.

We were sent, attended by a boy with a lantern, through fields of dew-drenched barley and folded poppies, to a farmhouse overshadowed by four spreading pines.

Exceedingly soft and grey, with rose-tinted weft of steam upon its summit, stood Vesuvius above us in the twilight.

Something in the recent impression of the dimly-lighted supper-room, and in the idyllic simplicity of this lantern-litten journey through the barley, suggested, by one of those inexplicable stirrings of association which affect tired senses, a dim, dreamy thought of Palestine and Bible stories.

The feeling of the cenacolo blent here with feelings of Ruth’s cornfields, and the white square houses with their flat roofs enforced the illusion.

Here we slept in the middle of a contadino colony.

Some of the folk had made way for us; and by the wheezing, coughing, and snoring of several sorts and ages in the chamber next me, I imagine they must have endured considerable crowding.

My bed was large enough to have contained a family.

Over its head there was a little shrine, hollowed in the thickness of the wall, with several sacred [Pg 102]emblems and a shallow vase of holy water.

On dressers at each end of the room stood glass shrines, occupied by finely-dressed Madonna dolls and pots of artificial flowers.

Above the doors S.

Michael and S.

Francis, roughly embossed in low relief and boldly painted, gave dignity and grandeur to the walls.

These showed some sense for art in the first builders of the house.

But the taste of the inhabitants could not be praised.

There were countless gaudy prints of saints, and exactly five pictures of the Bambino, very big, and sprawling in a field alone.

A crucifix, some old bottles, a gun, old clothes suspended from pegs, pieces of peasant pottery and china, completed the furniture of the apartment.

But what a view it showed when Christian next morning opened the door…. From my bed I looked across the red-tiled terrace to the stone pines with their velvet roofage and the blue-peaked hills of Stabiæ.

San Germano.

No one need doubt about his quarters in this country town.

The Albergo di Pompeii is a truly sumptuous place.

Sofas, tables, and chairs in our sitting-room are made of buffalo horns, very cleverly pieced together, but torturing the senses with suggestions of impalement.

Sitting or standing, one felt insecure.

When would the points run into us? when should we begin to break these incrustations off? and would the whole fabric crumble at a touch into chaotic heaps of horns? It is market day, and the costumes in the streets [Pg 103]are brilliant.

The women wear a white petticoat, a blue skirt made straight and tightly bound above it, a white richly-worked bodice, and the white square-folded napkin of the Abruzzi on their heads.

Their jacket is of red or green-pure colour.

A rug of striped red, blue, yellow, and black protects the whole dress from the rain.

There is a very noble quality of green-sappy and gemmy-like some of Titian’s or Giorgione’s-in the stuffs they use.

Their build and carriage are worthy of goddesses.

Rain falls heavily, persistently.

We must ride on donkeys, in waterproofs, to Monte Cassino.

Mountain and valley, oak wood and ilex grove, lentisk thicket and winding river-bed, are drowned alike in soft-descending, soaking rain.

Far and near the landscape swims in rain, and the hill-sides send down torrents through their watercourses.

The monastery is a square, dignified building, of vast extent and princely solidity.

It has a fine inner court, with sumptuous staircases of slabbed stone leading to the church.

This public portion of the edifice is both impressive and magnificent, without sacrifice of religious severity to parade.

We acknowledge a successful compromise between the austerity of the order and the grandeur befitting the fame, wealth, prestige, and power of its parent foundation.

The church itself is a tolerable structure of the Renaissance-costly marble incrustations and mosaics, meaningless Neapolitan frescoes.

One singular episode in the mediocrity of art adorning it, is the tomb of Pietro dei Medici.

Expelled from Florence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in the Garigliano.

Clement VII.

ordered, and Duke Cosimo I.

erected, [Pg 104]this marble monument-the handicraft, in part at least, of Francesco di San Gallo-to their relative.

It is singularly stiff, ugly, out of place-at once obtrusive and insignificant.

A gentle old German monk conducted Christian and me over the convent-boy’s school, refectory printing press, lithographic workshop, library, archives.

We then returned to the church, from which we passed to visit the most venerable and sacred portion of the monastery.

The cell of S.

Benedict is being restored and painted in fresco by the Austrian Benedictines; a pious but somewhat frigid process of re-edification.

This so-called cell is a many-chambered and very ancient building, with a tower which is now embedded in the massive superstructure of the modern monastery.

The German artists adorning it contrive to blend the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Egypt, and Byzance, not without force and a kind of intense frozen pietism.

S.

Mauro’s vision of his master’s translation to heaven-the ladder of light issuing between two cypresses, and the angels watching on the tower walls-might even be styled poetical.

But the decorative angels on the roof and other places, being adapted from Egyptian art, have a strange, incongruous appearance.

Monasteries are almost invariably disappointing to one who goes in search of what gives virtue and solidity to human life; and even Monte Cassino was no exception.

This ought not to be otherwise, seeing what a peculiar sympathy with the monastic institution is required to make these cloisters comprehensible.

The atmosphere of operose indolence, prolonged through centuries and centuries, stifles; nor can antiquity and influence impose upon a mind which resents [Pg 105]monkery itself as an essential evil.

That Monte Cassino supplied the Church with several potentates is incontestable.

That mediæval learning and morality would have suffered more without this brotherhood cannot be doubted.

Yet it is difficult to name men of very eminent genius whom the Cassinesi claim as their alumni; nor, with Boccaccio’s testimony to their carelessness, and with the evidence of their library before our eyes, can we rate their services to civilised erudition very highly.

I longed to possess the spirit, for one moment, of Montalembert.

I longed for what is called historical imagination, for the indiscriminate voracity of those men to whom world-famous sites are in themselves soul-stirring.

FOOTNOTES: [B] These verses are extracted from the second book of Pontano’s Hendecasyllabi (Aldus, 1513, p.

208).

They so vividly paint the amusements of a watering-place in the fifteenth century that I have translated them: With me, let but the mind be wise, Gravina, With me haste to the tranquil haunts of Baiæ, Haunts that pleasure hath made her home, and she who Sways all hearts, the voluptuous Aphrodite.

Here wine rules, and the dance, and games and laughter; Graces reign in a round of mirthful madness; Love hath built, and desire, a palace here too, Where glad youths and enamoured girls on all sides Play and bathe in the waves in sunny weather, Dine and sup, and the merry mirth of banquets Blend with dearer delights and love’s embraces, Blend with pleasures of youth and honeyed kisses, Till, sport-tired, in the couch inarmed they slumber.

Thee our Muses invite to these enjoyments; Thee those billows allure, the myrtled seashore, Birds allure with a song, and mighty Gaurus Twines his redolent wreath of vines and ivy.

[Pg 106] MAY IN UMBRIA.

From Rome to Terni.

We left Rome in clear sunset light.

The Alban Hills defined themselves like a cameo of amethyst upon a pale blue distance; and over the Sabine Mountains soared immeasurable moulded domes of alabaster thunder-clouds, casting deep shadows, purple and violet, across the slopes of Tivoli.

To westward the whole sky was lucid, like some half-transparent topaz, flooded with slowly yellowing sunbeams.

The Campagna has often been called a garden of wild-flowers.

Just now poppy and aster, gladiolus and thistle, embroider it with patterns infinite and intricate beyond the power of art.

They have already mown the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those brilliant patches of diapered fioriture.

These are like praying-carpets spread for devotees upon the pavement of a mosque whose roof is heaven.

In the level light the scythes of the mowers flash as we move past.

From their bronzed foreheads the men toss masses of dark curls.

Their muscular flanks and shoulders sway sideways from firm yet pliant reins.

On one hill, fronting the sunset, there stands a herd of some thirty huge grey oxen, feeding and raising their heads to look at us, with just a flush of [Pg 107]crimson on their horns and dewlaps.

This is the scale of Mason’s and of Costa’s colouring.

This is the breadth and magnitude of Rome.

Thus, through dells of ilex and oak, yielding now a glimpse of Tiber and S.

Peter’s, now opening on a purple section of the distant Sabine Hills, we came to Monte Rotondo.

The sun sank; and from the flames where he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen, grew slowly into sight.

Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying, turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself.

This changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to valley, hill and lustrous heaven.

There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the clouds are floating.

Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astride upon a sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fiery waves.

The orange deepens into dying red.

The green divides into daffodil and beryl.

The blue above grows fainter, and the moon and stars shine stronger.

Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit for Francia and the early Umbrian painters.

Low hills to right and left; suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of plain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in the mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting water.

The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this scene.

No painting could convey their influences.

Sometimes both luminaries tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river.

Sometimes they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere.

And here and [Pg 108]there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuft of shrubs upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallor of the West.

The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey monochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and woods all floating in aërial twilight.

There is no definition of outline now.

The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcely perceptible pale greenish yellow.

We have passed Stimigliano.

Through the mystery of darkness we hurry past the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni.

The Cascades of Terni.

The Velino is a river of considerable volume which rises in the highest region of the Abruzzi, threads the upland valley of Rieti, and precipitates itself by an artificial channel over cliffs about seven hundred feet in height into the Nera.

The water is densely charged with particles of lime.

This calcareous matter not only tends continually to choke its bed, but clothes the precipices over which the torrent thunders with fantastic drapery of stalactite; and, carried on the wind in foam, incrusts the forests that surround the falls with fine white dust.

These famous cascades are undoubtedly the most sublime and beautiful which Europe boasts; and their situation is worthy of so great a natural wonder.

We reach them through a noble mid-Italian landscape, where the mountain forms are austere and boldly modelled, but the vegetation, both wild and cultivated, has something of the South-Italian richness.

The hill-sides are a labyrinth of box and arbutus, with coronilla in golden bloom.

The [Pg 109]turf is starred with cyclamens and orchises.

Climbing the staircase paths beside the falls in morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage that command their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might be compared in its effect upon the mind to the impression left by a symphony or a tumultuous lyric.

The turbulence and splendour, the swiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke of shattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as the volume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung above impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keeping watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, the immobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were all for me the elements of one stupendous poem.

It was like an ode of Shelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through inarticulate appeal to primitive emotion than any words could be.

Montefalco.

The rich land of the Clitumnus is divided into meadows by transparent watercourses, gliding with a glassy current over swaying reeds.

Through this we pass, and leave Bevagna to the right, and ascend one of those long gradual roads which climb the hills where all the cities of the Umbrians perch.

The view expands, revealing Spello, Assisi, Perugia on its mountain buttress, and the far reaches northward of the Tiber valley.

Then Trevi and Spoleto came into sight, and the severe hill-country above Gubbio in [Pg 110]part disclosed itself.

Over Spoleto the fierce witch-haunted heights of Norcia rose forbidding.

This is the kind of panorama that dilates the soul.

It is so large, so dignified, so beautiful in tranquil form.

The opulent abundance of the plain contrasts with the severity of mountain ranges desolately grand; and the name of each of all those cities thrills the heart with memories.

The main object of a visit to Montefalco is to inspect its many excellent frescoes; painted histories of S.

Francis and S.

Jerome, by Benozzo Gozzoli; saints, angels, and Scripture episodes by the gentle Tiberio d’Assisi.

Full justice had been done to these, when a little boy, seeing us lingering outside the church of S.

Chiara, asked whether we should not like to view the body of the saint.

This privilege could be purchased at the price of a small fee.

It was only necessary to call the guardian of her shrine at the high altar.

Indolent, and in compliant mood, with languid curiosity and half-an-hour to spare, we assented.

A handsome young man appeared, who conducted us with decent gravity into a little darkened chamber behind the altar.

There he lighted wax tapers, opened sliding doors in what looked like a long coffin, and drew curtains.

Before us in the dim light there lay a woman covered with a black nun’s dress.

Only her hands, and the exquisitely beautiful pale contour of her face (forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, modelled in purest outline, as though the injury of death had never touched her) were visible.

Her closed eyes seemed to sleep.

She had the perfect peace of Luini’s S.

Catherine borne by the angels to her grave on Sinai.

I have rarely seen anything which surprised and [Pg 111]touched me more.

The religious earnestness of the young custode, the hushed adoration of the country-folk who had silently assembled round us, intensified the sympathy-inspiring beauty of the slumbering girl.

Could Julia, daughter of Claudius, have been fairer than this maiden, when the Lombard workmen found her in her Latin tomb, and brought her to be worshipped on the Capitol? S.

Chiara’s shrine was hung round with her relics; and among these the heart extracted from her body was suspended.

Upon it, apparently wrought into the very substance of the mummied flesh, were impressed a figure of the crucified Christ, the scourge, and the five stigmata.

The guardian’s faith in this miraculous witness to her sainthood, the gentle piety of the men and women who knelt before it, checked all expressions of incredulity.

We abandoned ourselves to the genius of the place; forgot even to ask what Santa Chiara was sleeping here; and withdrew, toned to a not unpleasing melancholy.

The world-famous Saint Clair, the spiritual sister of S.

Francis, lies in Assisi.

I have often asked myself, Who, then, was this nun? What history had she? And I think now of this girl as of a damsel of romance, a Sleeping Beauty in the wood of time, secluded from intrusive elements of fact, and folded in the love and faith of her own simple worshippers.

Among the hollows of Arcadia, how many rustic shrines in ancient days held saints of Hellas, apocryphal, perhaps, like this, but hallowed by tradition and enduring homage….[C] [Pg 112] Foligno.

In the landscape of Raphael’s votive picture, known as the Madonna di Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain at the edge of some blue hills.

Allowing for that license as to details which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of subordinate importance, Raphael’s sketch is still true to Foligno.

The place has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Indeed relatively to the state of Italy at large, it is still the same as in the days of ancient Rome.

Foligno forms a station of commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great Flaminian Way.

At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into the Umbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the Tiber, and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascent beneath the walls of Spoleto.

An army advancing from the north by the Metaurus and the Furlo Pass must find itself at Foligno; and the level champaign round the city is well adapted to the maintenance and exercises of a garrison.

In the days of the Republic and the Empire, the value of this position was well understood; but Foligno’s importance, as the key to the Flaminian Way, was eclipsed by two flourishing cities in its immediate vicinity, Hispellum and Mevania, the modern Spello and Bevagna.

We might hazard a conjecture that the Lombards, when they ruled the Duchy of Spoleto, [Pg 113]following their usual policy of opposing new military centres to the ancient Roman municipia, encouraged Fulginium at the expense of her two neighbours.

But of this there is no certainty to build upon.

All that can be affirmed with accuracy is that in the Middle Ages, while Spello and Bevagna declined into the inferiority of dependent burghs, Foligno grew in power and became the chief commune of this part of Umbria.

It was famous during the last centuries of struggle between the Italian burghers and their native despots, for peculiar ferocity in civil strife.

Some of the bloodiest pages in mediæval Italian history are those which relate the vicissitudes of the Trinci family, the exhaustion of Foligno by internal discord, and its final submission to the Papal power.

Since railways have been carried from Rome through Narni and Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno has gained considerably in commercial and military status.

It is the point of intersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it a great cavalry dépôt, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its decayed streets.

Whether the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediæval period, it is difficult to say.

Yet the impression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that of Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certain grace and gentleness in their inhabitants.

My window in the city wall looks southward across the plain to Spoleto, with Montefalco perched aloft upon the right, and Trevi on its mountain-bracket to the left.

From the topmost peaks of the Sabine [Pg 114]Apennines, gradual tender sloping lines descend to find their quiet in the valley of Clitumnus.

The space between me and that distance is infinitely rich with every sort of greenery, dotted here and there with towers and relics of baronial houses.

The little town is in commotion; for the working-men of Foligno and its neighbourhood have resolved to spend their earnings on a splendid festa-horse-races, and two nights of fireworks.

The acacias and pawlonias on the ramparts are in full bloom of creamy white and lilac.

In the glare of Bengal lights these trees, with all their pendulous blossoms, surpassed the most fantastic of artificial decorations.

The rockets sent aloft into the sky amid that solemn Umbrian landscape were nowise out of harmony with nature.

I never sympathised with critics who resent the intrusion of fireworks upon scenes of natural beauty.

The Giessbach, lighted up at so much per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and a crowd of cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle.

But where, as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself a festival, where there are multitudes of citizens and soldiers and country-people slowly moving and gravely admiring, with the decency and order characteristic of an Italian crowd, I have nothing but a sense of satisfaction.

It is sometimes the traveller’s good fortune in some remote place to meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the genius loci as he has conceived it.

Though his own subjectivity will assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring to his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and connecting this personality in some purely imaginative manner with thoughts derived from [Pg 115]study, or impressions made by nature; yet the stranger will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the central figure in a composition which derives from him its vividness.

Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to the creation of a picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself no knowledge.

On one of these nights I had been threading the aisles of acacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the Bengal lights kept changing.

My mind instinctively went back to scenes of treachery and bloodshed in the olden time, when Corrado Trinci paraded the mangled remnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on muleback, through Foligno, for a warning to the citizens.

As the procession moved along the ramparts, I found myself in contact with a young man, who readily fell into conversation.

He was very tall, with enormous breadth of shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo’s favourite models.

His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair.

Low forehead, and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely bright fierce eyes.

The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a statue of Hadrian’s age.

The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate above a firm round chin.

He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers, and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a peasant’s slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed panther.

He told me that he was just about to join a cavalry regiment; and I could well imagine, when military dignity was added to that gait, how grandly he would go.

This young man, of whom I heard nothing more after our half-hour’s [Pg 116]conversation among the crackling fireworks and roaring cannon, left upon my mind an indescribable impression of dangerousness-of “something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst forth.

” Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth century.

Gattamelata, who began life as a baker’s boy at Narni and ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed.

Like this were the Trinci and their bands of murderers.

Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice.

Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being “perfettamente tristo.

” Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude…. Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a nobler national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies.

Of such stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries.

When will the Italians learn to use these men as Fabius or as Cæsar, not as the Vitelli and the Trinci used them? In such meditations, deeply stirred by the meeting of my own reflections with one who seemed to represent for me in life and blood the spirit of the place which had provoked them, I said farewell to Cavallucci, and returned to my bed-room on the city-wall.

The last rockets had whizzed and the last cannons had thundered ere I fell asleep.

[Pg 117] Spello.

Spello contains some not inconsiderable antiquities-the remains of a Roman theatre, a Roman gate with the heads of two men and a woman leaning over it, and some fragments of Roman sculpture scattered through its buildings.

The churches, especially those of S.

M.

Maggiore and S.

Francesco, are worth a visit for the sake of Pinturicchio.

Nowhere, except in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, can that master’s work in fresco be better studied than here.

The satisfaction with which he executed the wall paintings in S.

Maria Maggiore is testified by his own portrait introduced upon a panel in the decoration of the Virgin’s chamber.

The scrupulously rendered details of books, chairs, window seats, &c.

, which he here has copied, remind one of Carpaccio’s study of S.

Benedict at Venice.

It is all sweet, tender, delicate, and carefully finished; but without depth, not even the depth of Perugino’s feeling.

In S.

Francesco, Pinturicchio, with the same meticulous refinement, painted a letter addressed to him by Gentile Baglioni.

It lies on a stool before Madonna and her court of saints.

Nicety of execution, technical mastery of fresco as a medium for Dutch detail-painting, prettiness of composition, and cheerfulness of colouring, are noticeable throughout his work here rather than either thought or sentiment.

S.

Maria Maggiore can boast a fresco of Madonna between a young episcopal saint and Catherine of Alexandria from the hand of Perugino.

The rich yellow harmony of its tones, and the graceful dignity of its emotion, conveyed no less by a certain Raphaelesque pose and outline than by suavity of [Pg 118]facial expression, enable us to measure the distance between this painter and his quasi-pupil Pinturicchio.

We did not, however, drive to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando.

It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, “from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history.

” Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much politeness, and were greatly interested in my researches, pointed out a mark waist-high upon the wall, where Orlando’s knee is reported to have reached.

But I could not learn anything about a phallic monolith, which is said by Guérin or Panizzi to have been identified with the Roland myth at Spello.

Such a column either never existed here, or had been removed before the memory of the present generation.

Easter Morning at Assisi.

We are in the lower church of S.

Francesco.

High mass is being sung, with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices.

Candles are lighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto’s allegories.

From the low southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the many-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles.

Women in bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men from the mountains stand or lean against the wooden benches.

There is no moving from point to point.

Where we have taken our station, at the north-western angle of the transept, there we stay till mass be over.

[Pg 119]The whole low-vaulted building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, the stained windows, the figure-crowded pavements blending their rich but subdued colours, like hues upon some marvellous moth’s wings, or like a deep-toned rainbow mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such tapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion of an empress.

Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces-ineffably pure-adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth.

Men and women of whom the world was not worthy-at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dove-like simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret.

Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco.

Over the whole scene-in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on the people, in the incense, from the chiming bells, through the music-broods one spirit: the spirit of him who was “the co-espoused, co-transforate with Christ;” the ardent, the radiant, the beautiful in soul; the suffering, the strong, the simple, the victorious over self and sin; the celestial who trampled upon earth and rose on wings of ecstasy to heaven; the Christ-inebriated saint of visions supersensual and life beyond the grave.

Far down below the feet of those who worship God through him, S.

Francis sleeps; but his soul, the incorruptible part of him, the message he gave the world, is in the spaces round us.

This is his temple.

He fills it like an unseen god.

Not as Phœbus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but [Pg 120]as an abiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itself all mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, all love, self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ, sweeping the centuries, hath wrought for men.

Let, therefore, choir and congregation raise their voices on the tide of prayers and praises; for this is Easter morning-Christ is risen…. Our sister, Death of the Body, for whom S.

Francis thanked God in his hymn, is reconciled to us this day, and takes us by the hand, and leads us to the gate whence floods of heavenly glory issue from the faces of a multitude of saints.

Pray, ye poor people; chant and pray.

If all be but a dream, to wake from this were loss for you indeed…. Perusia Augusta.

The piazza in front of the Prefettura is my favourite resort on these nights of full moon.

The evening twilight is made up partly of sunset fading over Thrasymene and Tuscany; partly of moonrise from the mountains of Gubbio and the passes toward Ancona.

The hills are capped with snow, although the season is so forward.

Below our parapets the bulk of S.

Domenico, with its gaunt, perforated tower, and the finer group of S.

Pietro, flaunting the arrowy “Pennacchio di Perugia,” jut out upon the spine of hill which dominates the valley of the Tiber.

As the night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky, these buildings seem to form the sombre foreground to some French etching.

Beyond them spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria.

Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, [Pg 121]Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements.

Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain.

The slowly moving population-women in veils, men winter-mantled-pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky.

Bells ring.

The bugles of the soldiers blow retreat in convents turned to barracks.

Young men roam the streets beneath, singing May songs.

Far, far away upon the plain, red through the vitreous moonlight ringed with thundery gauze, fires of unnamed castelli smoulder.

As we lean from ledges eighty feet in height, gas vies with moon in chequering illuminations on the ancient walls; Etruscan mouldings, Roman letters, high-piled hovels, suburban world-old dwellings plastered like martins’ nests against the masonry.

Sunlight adds more of detail to this scene.

To the right of Subasio, where the passes go from Foligno towards Urbino and Ancona, heavy masses of thunder-cloud hang every day; but the plain and hill-buttresses are clear transparent blueness.

First comes Assisi, with S.

M.

degli Angeli below; then Spello; then Foligno; then Trevi; and, far away, Spoleto; with, reared against those misty battlements, the village height of Montefalco-the “ringhiera dell’Umbria,” as they call it in this country.

By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks is clearly visible, where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above the sources of the Nera and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia.

The lower ranges seem as though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure, upon china; and then comes the broad, green champaign, flecked with villages and farms.

Just at the basement of Perugia winds Tiber, through [Pg 122]sallows and grey poplar-trees, spanned by ancient arches of red brick, and guarded here and there by castellated towers.

The mills beneath their dams and weirs are just as Raphael drew them; and the feeling of air and space reminds one, on each coign of vantage, of some Umbrian picture.

Every hedgerow is hoary with May-bloom and honeysuckle.

The oaks hang out their golden-dusted tassels.

Wayside shrines are decked with laburnum boughs and iris blossoms plucked from the copse-woods, and where spires of purple and pink orchis variegate the thin, fine grass.

The land waves far and wide with young corn, emerald green beneath the olive-trees, which take upon their underfoliage tints reflected from this verdure or red tones from the naked earth.

A fine race of contadini, with large, heroically-graceful forms, and beautiful dark eyes and noble faces, move about this garden, intent on ancient, easy tillage of the kind Saturnian soil.

La Magione.

On the road from Perugia to Cortona, the first stage ends at La Magione, a high hill-village commanding the passage from the Umbrian champaign to the lake of Thrasymene.

It has a grim square fortalice above it, now in ruins, and a stately castle to the south-east, built about the time of Braccio.

Here took place that famous diet of Cesare Borgia’s enemies, when the son of Alexander VI.

was threatening Bologna with his arms, and bidding fair to make himself supreme tyrant of Italy in 1502.

It was the policy of Cesare to fortify himself by reducing the fiefs of the Church to submission, and by rooting out [Pg 123]the dynasties which had acquired a sort of tyranny in Papal cities.

The Varani of Camerino and the Manfredi of Faenza had been already extirpated.

There was only too good reason to believe that the turn of the Vitelli at Città di Castello, of the Baglioni at Perugia, and of the Bentivogli at Bologna would come next.

Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, surrounded on all sides by Cesare’s conquests, and specially menaced by the fortification of Piombino, felt himself in danger.

The great house of the Orsini, who swayed a large part of the Patrimony of S.

Peter’s, and were closely allied to the Vitelli, had even graver cause for anxiety.

But such was the system of Italian warfare, that nearly all these noble families lived by the profession of arms, and most of them were in the pay of Cesare.

When, therefore, the conspirators met at La Magione, they were plotting against a man whose money they had taken, and whom they had hitherto aided in his career of fraud and spoliation.

The diet consisted of the Cardinal Orsini, an avowed antagonist of Alexander VI.

; his brother Paolo, the chieftain of the clan; Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello; Gian-Paolo Baglioni, made undisputed master of Perugia by the recent failure of his cousin Grifonetto’s treason; Oliverotto, who had just acquired the March of Fermo by the murder of his uncle Giovanni da Fogliani; Ermes Bentivoglio, the heir of Bologna; and Antonio da Venafro, the secretary of Pandolfo Petrucci.

These men vowed hostility on the basis of common injuries and common fear against the Borgia.

But they were for the most part stained themselves with crime, and dared not trust each other, and could not gain the confidence of any respectable [Pg 124]power in Italy except the exiled Duke of Urbino.

Procrastination was the first weapon used by the wily Cesare, who trusted that time would sow among his rebel captains suspicion and dissension.

He next made overtures to the leaders separately, and so far succeeded in his perfidious policy as to draw Vitellezzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Paolo Orsini, and Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, into his nets at Sinigaglia.

Under pretext of fair conference and equitable settlement of disputed claims, he possessed himself of their persons, and had them strangled-two upon December 31, and two upon January 18, 1503.

Of all Cesare’s actions, this was the most splendid for its successful combination of sagacity and policy in the hour of peril, of persuasive diplomacy, and of ruthless decision when the time to strike his blow arrived.

Cortona.

After leaving La Magione, the road descends upon the Lake of Thrasymene through oak-woods full of nightingales.

The Lake lay basking, leaden-coloured, smooth and waveless, under a misty, rain-charged, sun-irradiated sky.

At Passignano, close beside its shore, we stopped for mid-day.

This is a little fishing village of very poor people, who live entirely by labour on the waters.

They showed us huge eels coiled in tanks, and some fine specimens of the silver carp-Reina del Lago.

It was off one of the eels that we made our lunch; and taken, as he was, alive from his cool lodging, he furnished a series of dishes fit for a king.

Climbing the hill of Cortona seemed a quite interminable business.

It poured a deluge.

Our horses [Pg 125]were tired, and one lean donkey, who, after much trouble, was produced from a farmhouse and yoked in front of them, rendered but little assistance.

Next day we duly saw the Muse and Lamp in the Museo, the Fra Angelicos, and all the Signorellis.

One cannot help thinking that too much fuss is made nowadays about works of art-running after them for their own sakes, exaggerating their importance, and detaching them as objects of study, instead of taking them with sympathy and carelessness as pleasant or instructive adjuncts to our actual life.

Artists, historians of art, and critics are forced to isolate pictures; and it is of profit to their souls to do so.

But simple folk, who have no æsthetic vocation, whether reative or critical, suffer more than is good for them by compliance with mere fashion.

Sooner or later we shall return to the spirit of the ages which produced these pictures, and which regarded them with less of an industrious bewilderment than they evoke at present.

I am far indeed from wishing to decry art, the study of art, or the benefits to be derived from its intelligent enjoyment.

I only mean to suggest that we go the wrong way to work at present in this matter.

Picture and sculpture galleries accustom us to the separation of art from life.

Our methods of studying art, making a beginning of art-study while travelling, tend to perpetuate this separation.

It is only on reflection, after long experience, that we come to perceive that the most fruitful moments in our art education have been casual and unsought, in quaint nooks and unexpected places, where nature, art, and life are happily blent.

The Palace of the Commune at Cortona is [Pg 126]interesting because of the shields of Florentine governors, sculptured on blocks of grey stone, and inserted in its outer walls-Peruzzi, Albizzi, Strozzi, Salviati, among the more ancient-de’ Medici at a later epoch.

The revolutions in the Republic of Florence may be read by a herald from these coats of arms and the dates beneath them.

The landscape of this Tuscan highland satisfies me more and more with sense of breadth and beauty.

From S.

Margherita above the town the prospect is immense and wonderful and wild-up into those brown, forbidding mountains; down to the vast plain; and over to the cities of Chiusi, Montepulciano, and Foiano.

The jewel of the view is Trasimeno, a silvery shield encased with serried hills, and set upon one corner of the scene, like a precious thing apart and meant for separate contemplation.

There is something in the singularity and circumscribed completeness of the mountain-girded lake, diminished by distance, which would have attracted Lionardo da Vinci’s pencil, had he seen it.

Cortona seems desperately poor, and the beggars are intolerable.

One little blind boy, led by his brother, both frightfully ugly and ragged urchins, pursued us all over the city, incessantly whining “Signore…. Padrone….” It was only on the threshold of the inn that I ventured to give them a few coppers, for I knew well that any public beneficence would raise the whole swarm of the begging population round us.

Sitting later in the day upon the piazza of S.

Domenico, I saw the same blind boy taken by his brother to play.

The game consisted in the little creature throwing his arms about the trunk of a big tree, [Pg 127]and running round and round it, clasping it.

This seemed to make him quite inexpressibly happy.

His face lit up and beamed with that inner beatitude blind people show-a kind of rapture shining over it, as though nothing could be more altogether delightful.

This little boy had the small pox at eight months, and has never been able to see since.

He looks sturdy, and may live to be of any age-doomed always, is that possible, to beg? Chiusi.

What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellent Montepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat’s cheese in the inn of the Leone d’Oro at Chiusi? The windows are open, and the sun is setting.

Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the wooded hills of Città della Pieve to the left.

The deep green dimpled valley goes stretching away toward Orvieto; and at its end a purple mountain mass, distinct and solitary, which may peradventure be Soracte…. The near country is broken into undulating hills, forested with fine olives and oaks; and the composition of the landscape, with its crowning villages, is worthy of a background to an Umbrian picture.

The breadth and depth and quiet which those painters loved, the space of lucid sky, the suggestion of winding waters in verdant fields, all are here.

The evening is beautiful-golden light streaming softly from behind us on this prospect, and gradually mellowing to violet and blue with stars above.

At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red and black scrawled pictures.

One of [Pg 128]the sepulchres was a well-jointed vault of stone with no wall-paintings.

The rest had been scooped out of the living tufa.

This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spent in walking and driving through the country.

Chiusi means for me the mingling of grey olives and green oaks in limpid sunlight; deep leafy lanes; warm sandstone banks; copses with nightingales and cyclamens and cuckoos; glimpses of a silvery lake; blue shadowy distances; the bristling ridge of Monte Cetona; the conical towers, Becca di Questo and Becca di Quello, over against each other on the borders; ways winding among hedgerows like some bit of England in June, but not so full of flowers.

It means all this, I fear, for me far more than theories about Lars Porsena and Etruscan ethnology.

Gubbio.

Gubbio ranks among the most ancient of Italian hill-towns.

With its back set firm against the spine of central Apennines, and piled, house over house, upon the rising slope, it commands a rich tract of upland champaign, bounded southward toward Perugia and Foligno by peaked and rolling ridges.

This amphitheatre, which forms its source of wealth and independence, is admirably protected by a chain of natural defences; and Gubbio wears a singularly old-world aspect of antiquity and isolation.

Houses climb right to the crests of gaunt bare peaks; and the brown mediæval walls with square towers which protected them upon the mountain side, following the inequalities of the ground, are still a marked feature in the landscape.

It is a town of steep streets and staircases, [Pg 129]with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn across the lowland.

One of these views might be selected for especial notice.

In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds.

All this enclosed by the heavy archway of the Porta Romana, where sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tones of a dim fresco, indistinct with age, but beautiful.

Gubbio has not greatly altered since the middle ages.

But poor people are now living in the palaces of noblemen and merchants.

These new inhabitants have walled up the fair arched windows and slender portals of the ancient dwellers, spoiling the beauty of the streets without materially changing the architectural masses.

In that witching hour when the Italian sunset has faded, and a solemn grey replaces the glowing tones of daffodil and rose, it is not difficult, here dreaming by oneself alone, to picture the old noble life-the ladies moving along those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curling hair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts within.

The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by [Pg 130]Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted city was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations.

The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of the middle ages.

They abut upon a Piazza de’ Signori.

One of them, the Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry.

It is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman incised characters, are shown.

The Palazzo de’ Consoli has higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces for the combination of massiveness with lightness in a situation of unprecedented boldness.

Rising from enormous substructures morticed into the solid hill-side, it rears its vast rectangular bulk to a giddy height above the town; airy loggias imposed on great forbidding masses of brown stone, shooting aloft into a light aërial tower.

The empty halls inside are of fair proportions and a noble size, and the views from the open colonnades in all directions fascinate.

But the final impression made by the building is one of square, tranquil, massive strength-perpetuity embodied in masonry-force suggesting facility by daring and successful addition of elegance to hugeness.

Vast as it is, this pile is not forbidding, as a similarly weighty structure in the North would be.

The fine quality of the stone and the delicate though simple mouldings of the windows give it an Italian grace.

These public palaces belong to the age of the Communes, when Gubbio was a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part to play in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf and Ghibelline.

The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo [Pg 131]Ducale reminds us of the advent of the despots.

It has been stripped of all its tarsia-work and sculpture.

Only here and there a Fe.

D.

, with the cupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbio once became the fairest fief of the Urbino duchy.

S.

Ubaldo, who gave his name to this duke’s son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him the cathedral is dedicated-one low enormous vault, like a cellar or feudal banqueting hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothic arches.

This strange old church, and the House of Canons, buttressed on the hill beside it, have suffered less from modernisation than most buildings in Gubbio.

The latter, in particular, helps one to understand what this city of grave palazzi must have been, and how the mere opening of old doors and windows would restore it to its primitive appearance.

The House of the Canons has, in fact, not yet been given over to the use of middle-class and proletariate.

At the end of a day in Gubbio, it is pleasant to take our ease in the primitive hostelry, at the back of which foams a mountain-torrent, rushing downward from the Apennines.

The Gubbio wine is very fragrant, and of a rich ruby colour.

Those to whom the tints of wine and jewels give a pleasure not entirely childish, will take delight in its specific blending of tawny hues with rose.

They serve the table still, at Gubbio, after the antique Italian fashion, covering it with a cream-coloured linen cloth bordered with coarse lace-the creases of the press, the scent of old herbs from the wardrobe, are still upon it-and the board is set with shallow dishes of warm, white earthenware, basket-worked in open lattice at the edge, which contain [Pg 132]little separate messes of meat, vegetables, cheese, and comfits.

The wine stands in strange, slender phials of smooth glass, with stoppers; and the amber-coloured bread lies in fair round loaves upon the cloth.

Dining thus is like sitting down to the supper at Emmaus, in some picture of Gian Bellini or of Masolino.

The very bareness of the room-its open rafters, plastered walls, primitive settees, and red-brick floor, on which a dog sits waiting for a bone-enhances the impression of artistic delicacy in the table.

From Gubbio to Fano.

The road from Gubbio, immediately after leaving the city, enters a narrow Alpine ravine, where a thin stream dashes over dark, red rocks, and pendent saxifrages wave to the winds.

The carriage in which we travelled at the end of May, one morning, had two horses, which our driver soon supplemented with a couple of white oxen.

Slowly and toilsomely we ascended between the flanks of barren hills-gaunt masses of crimson and grey crag, clothed at their summits with short turf and scanty pasture.

The pass leads first to the little town of Scheggia, and is called the Monte Calvo, or bald mountain.

At Scheggia, it joins the great Flaminian Way, or North road of the Roman armies.

At the top there is a fine view over the conical hills that dominate Gubbio, and, far away, to noble mountains above the Furlo and the Foligno line of railway to Ancona.

Range rises over range, crossing at unexpected angles, breaking into sudden precipices, and stretching out long, exquisitely-modelled outlines, as only Apennines can do, in silvery sobriety [Pg 133]of colours toned by clearest air.

Every square piece of this austere, wild landscape forms a varied picture, whereof the composition is due to subtle arrangements of lines always delicate; and these lines seem somehow to have been determined in their beauty by the vast antiquity of the mountain system, as though they all had taken time to choose their place and wear down into harmony.

The effect of tempered sadness was heightened for us by stormy lights and dun clouds, high in air, rolling vapours and flying shadows, over all the prospect, tinted in ethereal grisaille.

After Scheggia, one enters a land of meadow and oak-trees.

This is the sacred central tract of Jupiter Apenninus, whose fane- Delubra Jovis saxoque minantes Apenninigenis cultæ pastoribus aræ -once rose behind us on the bald Iguvian summits.

A second little pass leads from this region to the Adriatic side of the Italian water-shed, and the road now follows the Barano downward toward the sea.

The valley is fairly green with woods, where misletoe may here and there be seen on boughs of oak, and rich with cornfields.

There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat with ladies-for this was the Marchesa’s pleasance; or may have watched through a short summer’s night, until he saw that tremolar della marina, portending dawn, which afterwards he painted in the “Purgatory.”

From Fosdinovo one can trace the Magra work its way out seaward, not into the plain where once the candentia mœnia Lunæ flashed sunrise from their battlements, but close beside the little hills which back the southern arm of the Spezzian gulf. At the extreme end of that promontory, called Del Corvo, stood the [Pg 22]

Benedictine convent of S. Croce; and it was here in 1309, if we may trust to tradition, that Dante, before his projected journey into France, appeared and left the first part of his poem with the Prior. Fra Ilario, such was the good father’s name, received commission to transmit the “Inferno” to Uguccione della Faggiuola; and he subsequently recorded the fact of Dante’s visit in a letter which, though its genuineness has been called in question, is far too interesting to be left without allusion. The writer says that on occasion of a journey into lands beyond the Riviera, Dante visited this convent, appearing silent and unknown among the monks. To the Prior’s question what he wanted, he gazed upon the brotherhood, and only answered, “Peace!”

Afterwards, in private conversation, he communicated his name and spoke about his poem. A portion of the “Divine Comedy” composed in the Italian tongue aroused Ilario’s wonder, and led him to inquire why his guest had not followed the usual course of learned poets by committing his thoughts to Latin. Dante replied that he had first intended to write in that language, and that he had gone so far as to begin the poem in Virgilian hexameters. Reflection upon the altered conditions of society in that age led him, however, to reconsider the matter; and he was resolved to tune another lyre, “suited to the sense of modern men.”

“For,” said he, “it is idle to set solid food before the lips of sucklings.”

If we can trust Fra Ilario’s letter as a genuine record, which is unhappily a matter of some doubt, we have in this narration not only a picturesque, almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of the poet’s [Pg 23]

apparition to those quiet monks in their seagirt house of peace, but also an interesting record of the destiny which presided over the first great work of literary art in a distinctly modern language. IV.-La Spezzia. While we were at Fosdinovo the sky filmed over, and there came a halo round the sun. This portended change; and by evening, after we had reached La Spezzia, earth, sea, and air were conscious of a coming tempest. At night I went down to the shore, and paced the sea-wall they have lately built along the Rada. The moon was up, but overdriven with dry smoky clouds, now thickening to blackness over the whole bay, now leaving intervals through which the light poured fitfully and fretfully upon the wrinkled waves; and ever and anon they shuddered with electric gleams which were not actual lightning. Heaven seemed to be descending on the sea; one might have fancied that some powerful charms were drawing down the moon with influence malign upon those still resisting billows. For not as yet the gulf was troubled to its depth, and not as yet the breakers dashed in foam against the moonlight-smitten promontories. There was but an uneasy murmuring of wave to wave; a whispering of wind, that stooped its wing and hissed along the surface, and withdrew into the mystery of clouds again; a momentary chafing of churned water round the harbour piers, subsiding into silence petulant and sullen. I leaned against an iron stanchion and longed for the sea’s message. But nothing came to [Pg 24]

me, and the drowned secret of Shelley’s death those waves which were his grave revealed not. “Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea!”

Meanwhile the incantation swelled in shrillness, the electric shudders deepened. Alone in this elemental overture to tempest I took no note of time, but felt, through self-abandonment to the symphonic influence, how sea and air, and clouds akin to both, were dealing with each other complainingly, and in compliance to some maker of unrest within them. A touch upon my shoulder broke this trance; I turned and saw a boy beside me in a coastguard’s uniform. Francesco was on patrol that night; but my English accent soon assured him that I was no contrabbandiere, and he too leaned against the stanchion and told me his short story. He was in his nineteenth year, and came from Florence, where his people live in the Borgo Ognissanti. He had all the brightness of the Tuscan folk, a sort of innocent malice mixed with espièglerie. It was diverting to see the airs he gave himself on the strength of his new military dignity, his gun, and uniform, and night duty on the shore. I could not help humming to myself Non più andrai; for Francesco was a sort of Tuscan Cherubino. We talked about picture galleries and libraries in Florence, and I had to hear his favourite passages from the Italian poets. And then there came the plots of Jules Verne’s stories and marvellous narrations about l’uomo cavallo, l’uomo volante, l’uomo pesce. The last of these personages turned out to be Paolo Boÿnton (so pronounced), who had swam the Arno in his diving dress, passing the several bridges, and when he came to the [Pg 25]

great weir “allora tutti stare con bocca aperta.”

Meanwhile the storm grew serious, and our conversation changed. Francesco told me about the terrible sun-stricken sand shores of the Riviera, burning in summer noon, over which the coastguard has to tramp, their perils from falling stones in storm, and the trains that come rushing from those narrow tunnels on the midnight line of march. It is a hard life; and the thirst for adventure which drove this boy-il più matto di tutta la famiglia-to adopt it, seems well-nigh quenched. And still, with a return to Giulio Verne, he talked enthusiastically of deserting, of getting on board a merchant ship, and working his way to southern islands where wonders are. A furious blast swept the whole sky for a moment almost clear. The moonlight fell, with racing cloud-shadows, upon sea and hills, the lights of Lerici, the great fanali at the entrance of the gulf, and Francesco’s upturned handsome face. Then all again was whirled in mist and foam; one breaker smote the sea-wall in a surge of froth, another plunged upon its heels; with inconceivable swiftness came rain; lightning deluged the expanse of surf, and showed the windy trees bent landward by the squall. It was long past midnight now, and the storm was on us for the space of three days. V.-Porto Venere. For the next three days the wind went worrying on, and a line of surf leapt on the sea-wall always to the same height. The hills all around were inky black and weary. [Pg 26]

At night the wild libeccio still rose, with floods of rain and lightning poured upon the waste. I thought of the Florentine patrol. Is he out in it, and where? At last there came a lull. When we rose on the fourth morning, the sky was sulky, spent and sleepy after storm-the air as soft and tepid as boiled milk or steaming flannel. We drove along the shore to Porto Venere, passing the arsenals and dockyards, which have changed the face of Spezzia since Shelley knew it. This side of the gulf is not so rich in vegetation as the other, probably because it lies open to the winds from the Carrara mountains. The chestnuts come down to the shore in many places, bringing with them the wild mountain-side. To make up for this lack of luxuriance, the coast is furrowed with a succession of tiny harbours, where the fishing-boats rest at anchor. There are many villages upon the spurs of hills, and on the headlands naval stations, hospitals, lazzaretti, and prisons. A prickly bindweed (the Smilax sarsaparilla) forms a feature in the near landscape, with its creamy odoriferous blossoms, coral berries, and glossy thorned leaves. A turn of the road brought Porto Venere in sight, and on its grey walls flashed a gleam of watery sunlight. The village consists of one long narrow street, the houses on the left side hanging sheer above the sea. Their doors at the back open on to cliffs with drop about fifty feet upon the water. A line of ancient walls, with medieval battlements and shells of chambers suspended midway between earth and sky, runs up the rock behind the town; and this wall is pierced with a deep gateway above which the inn is piled. We had our lunch in a room opening upon the [Pg 27]

town-gate, adorned with a deep-cut Pisan arch enclosing images and frescoes-a curious episode in a place devoted to the jollity of smugglers and seafaring folk. The whole house was such as Tintoretto loved to paint-huge wooden rafters; open chimneys with pent-house canopies of stone, where the cauldrons hung above logs of chestnut; rude low tables spread with coarse linen embroidered at the edges, and laden with plates of fishes, fruit, quaint glass, big-bellied jugs of earthenware, and flasks of yellow wine. The people of the place were lounging round in lazy attitudes. There were odd nooks and corners everywhere; unexpected staircases with windows slanting through the thickness of the town-wall; pictures of saints; high-zoned serving women, on whose broad shoulders lay big coral beads; smoke-blackened roofs, and balconies that opened on the sea. The house was inexhaustible in motives for pictures. We walked up the street, attended by a rabble rout of boys-diavoli scatenati-clean, grinning, white-teethed, who kept incessantly shouting, “Soldo, soldo!”

I do not know why these sea-urchins are so far more irrepressible than their land brethren. But it is always thus in Italy. They take an imperturbable delight in noise and mere annoyance. I shall never forget the sea-roar of Porto Venere, with that shrill obbligato, “Soldo, soldo, soldo!”

rattling like a dropping fire from lungs of brass. At the end of Porto Venere is a withered and abandoned city, climbing the cliffs of S. Pietro; and on the headland stands the ruined church, built by Pisans with alternate rows of white and black marble, upon the site of an old temple of Venus. This is a [Pg 28]

modest and pure piece of Gothic architecture, fair in desolation, refined and dignified, and not unworthy in its grace of the dead Cyprian goddess. Through its broken lancets the sea-wind whistles and the vast reaches of the Tyrrhene gulf are seen. Samphire sprouts between the blocks of marble, and in sheltered nooks the caper hangs her beautiful purpureal snowy bloom. The headland is a bold block of white limestone stained with red. It has the pitch of Exmoor stooping to the sea near Lynton. To north, as one looks along the coast, the line is broken by Porto Fino’s amethystine promontory; and in the vaporous distance we could trace the Riviera mountains, shadowy and blue. The sea came roaring, rolling in with tawny breakers; but, far out, it sparkled in pure azure, and the cloud-shadows over it were violet. Where Corsica should have been seen, soared banks of fleecy, broad-domed alabaster clouds. This point, once dedicated to Venus, now to Peter-both, be it remembered, fishers of men-is one of the most singular in Europe. The island of Palmaria, rich in veined marbles, shelters the port; so that outside the sea rages, while underneath the town, reached by a narrow strait, there is a windless calm. It was not without reason that our Lady of Beauty took this fair gulf to herself; and now that she has long been dispossessed, her memory lingers yet in names. For Porto Venere remembers her, and Lerici is only Eryx. There is a grotto here, where an inscription tells us that Byron once “tempted the Ligurian waves.”

It is just such a natural sea-cave as might have inspired Euripides when he described the refuge of Orestes in “Iphigenia.”

[Pg 29]

VI.-Lerici. Libeccio at last had swept the sky clear. The gulf was ridged with foam-fleeced breakers, and the water churned into green, tawny wastes. But overhead there flew the softest clouds, all silvery, dispersed in flocks. It is the day for pilgrimage to what was Shelley’s home. After following the shore a little way, the road to Lerici breaks into the low hills which part La Spezzia from Sarzana. The soil is red, and overgrown with arbutus and pinaster, like the country around Cannes. Through the scattered trees it winds gently upwards, with frequent views across the gulf, and then descends into a land rich with olives-a genuine Riviera landscape, where the mountain-slopes are hoary, and spikelets of innumerable light-flashing leaves twinkle against a blue sea, misty-deep. The walls here are not unfrequently adorned with bas-reliefs of Carrara marble-saints and madonnas very delicately wrought, as though they were love-labours of sculptors who had passed a summer on this shore. San Terenzio is soon discovered low upon the sands to the right, nestling under little cliffs; and then the high-built castle of Lerici comes in sight, looking across the bay to Porto Venere-one Aphrodite calling to the other, with the foam between. The village is piled around its cove with tall and picturesquely-coloured houses; the molo and the fishing-boats lie just beneath the castle. There is one point of the descending carriage road where all this gracefulness is seen, framed by the boughs of olive branches, swaying, wind-ruffled, laughing the many-twinkling smiles of ocean back from their grey [Pg 30]

leaves. Here Erycina ridens is at home. And, as we stayed to dwell upon the beauty of the scene, came women from the bay below-barefooted, straight as willow wands, with burnished copper bowls upon their heads. These women have the port of goddesses, deep-bosomed, with the length of thigh and springing ankles that betoken strength no less than elasticity and grace. The hair of some of them was golden, rippling in little curls around brown brows and glowing eyes. Pale lilac blent with orange on their dress, and coral beads hung from their ears. At Lerici we took a boat and pushed into the rolling breakers. Christian now felt the movement of the sea for the first time. This was rather a rude trial, for the grey-maned monsters played, as it seemed, at will with our cockle-shell, tumbling in dolphin curves to reach the shore. Our boatmen knew all about Shelley and the Casa Magni. It is not at Lerici, but close to San Terenzio, upon the south side of the village. Looking across the bay from the molo, one could clearly see its square white mass, tiled roof, and terrace built on rude arcades with a broad orange awning. Trelawny’s description hardly prepares one for so considerable a place. I think the English exiles of that period must have been exacting if the Casa Magni seemed to them no better than a bathing-house. We left our boat at the jetty, and walked through some gardens to the villa. There we were kindly entertained by the present occupiers, who, when I asked them whether such visits as ours were not a great annoyance, gently but feelingly replied:

“It is not so bad now as it used to be.”

The English [Pg 31]

gentleman who rents the Casa Magni has known it uninterruptedly since Shelley’s death, and has used it for villeggiatura during the last thirty years. We found him in the central sitting-room, which readers of Trelawny’s Recollections have so often pictured to themselves. The large oval table, the settees round the walls, and some of the pictures are still unchanged. As we sat talking, I laughed to think of that luncheon party, when Shelley lost his clothes, and came naked, dripping with sea-water, into the room, protected by the skirts of the sympathising waiting-maid. And then I wondered where they found him on the night when he stood screaming in his sleep, after the vision of his veiled self, with its question, “Siete soddisfatto?”

There were great ilexes behind the house in Shelley’s time, which have been cut down, and near these he is said to have sat and written the Triumph of Life. Some new houses, too, have been built between the villa and the town; otherwise the place is unaltered. Only an awning has been added to protect the terrace from the sun. I walked out on this terrace, where Shelley used to listen to Jane’s singing. The sea was fretting at its base, just as Mrs. Shelley says it did when the Don Juan disappeared. From San Terenzio we walked back to Lerici through olive woods, attended by a memory which toned the almost overpowering beauty of the place to sadness. VII.-Viareggio. The same memory drew us, a few days later, to the spot where Shelley’s body was burned. Viareggio [Pg 32]

is fast becoming a fashionable watering-place for the people of Florence and Lucca, who seek fresher air and simpler living than Livorno offers. It has the usual new inns and improvised lodging-houses of such places, built on the outskirts of a little fishing village, with a boundless stretch of noble sands. There is a wooden pier on which we walked, watching the long roll of waves, foam-flaked, and quivering with moonlight. The Apennines faded into the grey sky beyond, and the sea-wind was good to breathe. There is a feeling of “immensity, liberty, action” here, which is not common in Italy. It reminds us of England; and to-night the Mediterranean had the rough force of a tidal sea. Morning revealed beauty enough in Viareggio to surprise even one who expects from Italy all forms of loveliness. The sand-dunes stretch for miles between the sea and a low wood of stone pines, with the Carrara hills descending from their glittering pinnacles by long lines to the headlands of the Spezzian Gulf. The immeasurable distance was all painted in sky-blue and amethyst; then came the golden green of the dwarf firs; and then dry yellow in the grasses of the dunes; and then the many-tinted sea, with surf tossed up against the furthest cliffs. It is a wonderful and tragic view, to which no painter but the Roman Costa has done justice; and he, it may be said, has made this landscape of the Carrarese his own. The space between sand and pine-wood was covered with faint, yellow, evening primroses. They flickered like little harmless flames in sun and shadow, and the spires of the Carrara range were giant flames transformed to marble. The memory of that day described by [Pg 33]

Trelawny in a passage of immortal English prose, when he and Byron and Leigh Hunt stood beside the funeral pyre, and libations were poured, and the Cor Cordium was found inviolate among the ashes, turned all my thoughts to flame beneath the gentle autumn sky. Still haunted by these memories, we took the carriage road to Pisa, over which Shelley’s friends had hurried to and fro through those last days. It passes an immense forest of stone-pines-aisles and avenues; undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowded cyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in their velvet roof and stationary domes of verdure. [Pg 34]

MONTE OLIVETO. I. In former days the traveller had choice of two old hostelries in the chief street of Siena. Here, if he was fortunate, he might secure a prophet’s chamber, with a view across tiled house-roofs to the distant Tuscan champaign-glimpses of russet field and olive-garden framed by jutting city walls, which in some measure compensated for much discomfort. He now betakes himself to the more modern Albergo di Siena, overlooking the public promenade La Lizza. Horse-chestnuts and acacias make a pleasant foreground to a prospect of considerable extent. The front of the house is turned toward Belcaro and the mountains between Grosseto and Volterra. Sideways its windows command the brown bulk of San Domenico, and the Duomo, set like a marble coronet upon the forehead of the town. When we arrived there one October afternoon the sun was setting amid flying clouds and watery yellow spaces of pure sky, with a wind blowing soft and humid from the sea. Long after he had sunk below the hills, a fading chord of golden and rose-coloured tints burned on the city. The cathedral bell-tower was glistening with recent rain, and we could see right through its lancet windows to the clear blue heavens beyond. Then, as the day descended into evening, the autumn trees assumed that [Pg 35]

wonderful effect of luminousness self-evolved, and the red brick walls that crimson after-glow, which Tuscan twilight takes from singular transparency of atmosphere. It is hardly possible to define the specific character of each Italian city, assigning its proper share to natural circumstances, to the temper of the population, and to the monuments of art in which these elements of nature and of human qualities are blended. The fusion is too delicate and subtle for complete analysis; and the total effect in each particular case may best be compared to that impressed on us by a strong personality, making itself felt in the minutest details. Climate, situation, ethnological conditions, the political vicissitudes of past ages, the bias of the people to certain industries and occupations, the emergence of distinguished men at critical epochs, have all contributed their quota to the composition of an individuality which abides long after the locality has lost its ancient vigour. Since the year 1557, when Gian Giacomo de’ Medici laid the country of Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which was given to her in her days of glory, the title of “Fair Soft Siena,” still describes the city. She claims it by right of the gentle manners, joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the grace of their pure Tuscan speech, and by the unique delicacy of her architecture. Those palaces of brick, with finely-moulded lancet windows, and the lovely use of sculptured marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for the nobles who reared them five [Pg 36]

centuries ago, of whose refined and costly living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And though the necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an independent state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese are not unworthy of their courteous ancestry. Superficially, much of the present charm of Siena consists in the soft opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the city into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not peculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness which stirs melancholy. The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena lies westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is a region of deep lanes and golden-green oak-woods, with cypresses and stone-pines, and little streams in all directions flowing over the brown sandstone. The country is like some parts of rural England-Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleen-wort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges under [Pg 37]

boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut. This is the landscape which the two sixteenth century novelists of Siena, Fortini and Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of literature absorbing in itself the specific character of a country, and conveying it to the reader less by description than by sustained quality of style, I know none to surpass Fortini’s sketches. The prospect from Belcaro is one of the finest to be seen in Tuscany. The villa stands at a considerable elevation, and commands an immense extent of hill and dale. Nowhere, except Maremma-wards, a level plain. The Tuscan mountains, from Monte Amiata westward to Volterra, round Valdelsa, down to Montepulciano and Radicofani, with their innumerable windings and intricacies of descending valleys, are dappled with light and shade from flying storm-clouds, sunshine here and there cloud-shadows. Girdling the villa stands a grove of ilex-trees, cut so as to embrace its high-built walls with dark continuous green. In the courtyard are lemon-trees and pomegranates laden with fruit. From a terrace on the roof the whole wide view is seen; and here upon a parapet, from which we leaned one autumn afternoon, my friend discovered this graffito:

“E vidi e piansi il fato amaro!”

-”I gazed, and gazing, wept the bitterness of fate.”

II. The prevailing note of Siena and the Sienese seems, as I have said, to be a soft and tranquil grace; yet this people had one of the stormiest and maddest of Italian histories. They were passionate in love and hate, vehement in their popular amusements, [Pg 38]

almost frantic in their political conduct of affairs. The luxury, for which Dante blamed them, the levity De Comines noticed in their government found counter-poise in more than usual piety and fervour. S. Bernardino, the great preacher and peace-maker of the Middle Ages; S. Catherine, the worthiest of all women to be canonised; the blessed Colombini, who founded the Order of the Gesuati or Brothers of the Poor in Christ; the blessed Bernardo, who founded that of Monte Oliveto; were all Sienese. Few cities have given four such saints to modern Christendom. The biography of one of these may serve as prelude to an account of the Sienese monastery of Oliveto Maggiore. The family of Tolomei was among the noblest of the Sienese aristocracy. On May 10, 1272, Mino Tolomei and his wife Fulvia, of the Tancredi, had a son whom they christened Giovanni, but who, when he entered the religious life, assumed the name of Bernard, in memory of the great Abbot of Clairvaux. Of this child, Fulvia is said to have dreamed, long before his birth, that he assumed the form of a white swan, and sang melodiously, and settled in the boughs of an olive-tree, whence afterwards he winged his way to heaven amid a flock of swans as dazzling white as he. The boy was educated in the Dominican Cloister at Siena, under the care of his uncle Christoforo Tolomei. There, and afterwards in the fraternity of S. Ansano, he felt that impulse towards a life of piety, which after a short but brilliant episode of secular ambition, was destined to return with overwhelming force upon his nature. He was a youth of promise, and at the age of sixteen he obtained the doctorate in philosophy and both laws, civil and canonical. The [Pg 39]

Tolomei upon this occasion adorned their palaces and threw them open to the people of Siena. The Republic hailed with acclamation the early honours of a noble, born to be one of their chief leaders. Soon after this event Mino obtained for his son from the Emperor the title of Cæsarian Knight; and when the diploma arrived, new festivities proclaimed the fortunate youth to his fellow-citizens. Bernardo cased his limbs in steel, and rode in procession with ladies and young nobles through the streets. The ceremonies of a knight’s reception in Siena at that period were magnificent. From contemporary chronicles and from the sonnets written by Folgore da San Gemignano for a similar occasion, we gather that the whole resources of a wealthy family and all their friends were strained to the utmost to do honour to the order of chivalry. Open house was held for several days. Rich presents of jewels, armour, dresses, chargers were freely distributed. Tournaments alternated with dances. But the climax of the pageant was the novice’s investiture with sword and spurs and belt in the cathedral. This, as it appears from a record of the year 1326, actually took place in the great marble pulpit carved by the Pisani; and the most illustrious knights of his acquaintance were summoned by the squire to act as sponsors for his fealty. It is said that young Bernardo Tolomei’s head was turned to vanity by these honours showered upon him in his earliest manhood. Yet, after a short period of aberration, he rejoined his confraternity and mortified his flesh by discipline and strict attendance on the poor. The time had come, however, when he should choose a career suitable to his high rank. He [Pg 40]

devoted himself to jurisprudence, and began to lecture publicly on law. Already at the age of twenty-five his fellow-citizens admitted him to the highest political offices, and in the legend of his life it is written, not without exaggeration doubtless, that he ruled the State. There is, however, no reason to suppose that he did not play an important part in its government. Though a just and virtuous statesman, Bernardo now forgot the special service of God, and gave himself with heart and soul to mundane interests. At the age of forty, supported by the wealth, alliances, and reputation of his semi-princely house, he had become one of the most considerable party-leaders in that age of faction. If we may trust his monastic biographer, he was aiming at nothing less than the tyranny of Siena. But in that year, when he was forty, a change, which can only be described as conversion, came over him. He had advertised a public disputation, in which he proposed before all comers to solve the most arduous problems of scholastic science. The concourse was great, the assembly brilliant; but the hero of the day, who had designed it for his glory, was stricken with sudden blindness. In one moment he comprehended the internal void he had created for his soul, and the blindness of the body was illumination to the spirit. The pride, power, and splendour of this world seemed to him a smoke that passes. God, penitence, eternity appeared in all the awful clarity of an authentic vision. He fell upon his knees and prayed to Mary that he might receive his sight again. This boon was granted; but the revelation which had come to him in blindness was not withdrawn. Meanwhile the hall of disputation was crowded with an expectant audience. [Pg 41]

Bernardo rose from his knees, made his entry, and ascended the chair; but instead of the scholastic subtleties he had designed to treat, he pronounced the old text, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

Afterwards, attended by two noble comrades, Patrizio Patrizzi and Ambrogio Piccolomini, he went forth into the wilderness. For the human soul, at strife with strange experience, betakes itself instinctively to solitude. Not only prophets of Israel, saints of the Thebaid, and founders of religions in the mystic East have done so; even the Greek Menander recognised, although he sneered at, the phenomenon. “The desert, they say, is the place for discoveries.”

For the mediæval mind it had peculiar attractions. The wilderness these comrades chose was Accona, a doleful place, hemmed in with earthen precipices, some fifteen miles to the south of Siena. Of his vast possessions Bernardo retained but this- The lonesome lodge, That stood so low in a lonely glen. The rest of his substance he abandoned to the poor. This was in 1313, the very year of the Emperor Henry VII.’s death at Buonconvento, which is a little walled town between Siena and the desert of Accona. Whether Bernardo’s retirement was in any way due to the extinction of immediate hope for the Ghibelline party by this event, we do not gather from his legend. That, as is natural, refers his action wholly to the operation of divine grace. Yet we may remember how a more illustrious refugee, the singer of the Divine Comedy, betook himself upon the same occasion to the lonely convent of Fonte Avellana on the Alps of Catria, and meditated there the cantos of his [Pg 42]

Purgatory. While Bernardo Tolomei was founding the Order of Monte Oliveto, Dante penned his letter to the cardinals of Italy:

Quomodo sola sedet civitas plena populo:

facta est quasi vidua domino gentium. Bernardo and his friends hollowed with their own hands grottos in the rock, and strewed their stone beds with withered chestnut-leaves. For S. Scolastica, the sister of S. Benedict, they built a little chapel. Their food was wild fruit, and their drink the water of the brook. Through the day they delved, for it was in their mind to turn the wilderness into a land of plenty. By night they meditated on eternal truth. The contrast between their rude life and the delicate nurture of Sienese nobles, in an age when Siena had become a by-word for luxury, must have been cruel. But it fascinated the mediæval imagination, and the three anchorites were speedily joined by recruits of a like temper. As yet the new-born order had no rules; for Bernardo, when he renounced the world, embraced humility. The brethren were bound together only by the ties of charity. They lived in common; and under their sustained efforts Accona soon became a garden. The society could not, however, hold together without further organisation. It began to be ill spoken of, inasmuch as vulgar minds can recognise no good except in what is formed upon a pattern they are familiar with. Then Bernardo had a vision. In his sleep he saw a ladder of light ascending to the heavens. Above sat Jesus with Our Lady in white raiment, and the celestial hierarchies around them were attired in white. Up the ladder, led by angels, climbed men in vesture of dazzling white; and among these Bernardo recognised his own companions. Soon after this dream, he called [Pg 43]

Ambrogio Piccolomini, and bade him get ready for a journey to the Pope at Avignon. John XXII. received the pilgrims graciously, and gave them letters to the Bishop of Arezzo, commanding him to furnish the new brotherhood with one of the rules authorised by Holy Church for governance of a monastic order. Guido Tarlati, of the great Pietra-mala house, was Bishop and despot of Arezzo at this epoch. A man less in harmony with cœnobitical enthusiasm than this warrior prelate, could scarcely have been found. Yet attendance to such matters formed part of his business, and the legend even credits him with an inspired dream; for Our Lady appeared to him, and said:

“I love the valley of Accona and its pious solitaries. Give them the rule of Benedict. But thou shalt strip them of their mourning weeds, and clothe them in white raiment, the symbol of my virgin purity. Their hermitage shall change its name, and henceforth shall be called Mount Olivet, in memory of the ascension of my divine Son, the which took place upon the Mount of Olives. I take this family beneath my own protection; and therefore it is my will it should be called henceforth the congregation of S. Mary of Mount Olivet.”

After this, the Blessed Virgin took forethought for the heraldic designs of her monks, dictating to Guido Tarlati the blazon they still bear; it is of three hills or, whereof the third and highest is surmounted with a cross gules, and from the meeting-point of the three hillocks upon either hand a branch of olive vert. This was in 1319. In 1324, John XXII. confirmed the order, and in 1344 it was further approved by Clement VI. Affiliated societies sprang up in several Tuscan cities; and in [Pg 44]

1347, Bernardo Tolomei, at that time General of the Order, held a chapter of its several houses. The next year was the year of the great plague or Black Death. Bernardo bade his brethren leave their seclusion, and go forth on works of mercy among the sick. Some went to Florence, some to Siena, others to the smaller hill-set towns of Tuscany. All were bidden to assemble on the Feast of the Assumption at Siena. Here the founder addressed his spiritual children for the last time. Soon afterwards he died himself, at the age of seventy-seven, and the place of his grave is not known. He was beatified by the Church for his great virtues. III. At noon we started, four of us, in an open waggonette with a pair of horses, for Monte Oliveto, the luggage heaped mountain-high and tied in a top-heavy mass above us. After leaving the gateway, with its massive fortifications and frescoed arches, the road passes into a dull earthy country, very much like some parts-and not the best parts-of England. The beauty of the Sienese contado is clearly on the sandstone, not upon the clay. Hedges, haystacks, isolated farms-all were English in their details. Only the vines, and mulberries, and wattled waggons drawn by oxen, most Roman in aspect, reminded us we were in Tuscany. In such carpenta may the vestal virgins have ascended the Capitol. It is the primitive war-chariot also, capable of holding four with ease; and Romulus may have mounted with the images of Roman gods in even such a vehicle to Latiarian Jove upon the Alban hill. Nothing changes in Italy. The wooden ploughs [Pg 45]

are those which Virgil knew. The sight of one of them would save an intelligent lad much trouble in mastering a certain passage of the Georgics. Siena is visible behind us nearly the whole way to Buonconvento, a little town where the Emperor Henry VII. died, as it was supposed, of poison, in 1313. It is still circled with the wall and gates built by the Sienese in 1366, and is a fair specimen of an intact mediæval stronghold. Here we leave the main road, and break into a country-track across a bed of sandstone, with the delicate volcanic lines of Monte Amiata in front, and the aërial pile of Montalcino to our right. The pyracanthus bushes in the hedge yield their clusters of bright yellow berries, mingled with more glowing hues of red from haws and glossy hips. On the pale grey earthen slopes men and women are plying the long Sabellian hoes of their forefathers, and ploughmen are driving furrows down steep hills. The labour of the husbandmen in Tuscany is very graceful, partly, I think, because it is so primitive, but also because the people have an eminently noble carriage, and are fashioned on the lines of antique statues. I noticed two young contadini in one field, whom Frederick Walker might have painted with the dignity of Pheidian form. They were guiding their ploughs along a hedge of olive-trees, slanting upwards, the white-horned oxen moving slowly through the marl, and the lads bending to press the plough-shares home. It was a delicate piece of colour-the grey mist of olive branches, the warm smoking earth, the creamy flanks of the oxen, the brown limbs and dark eyes of the men, who paused awhile to gaze at us, with shadows cast upon the furrows from their tall straight [Pg 46]

figures. Then they turned to their work again, and rhythmic movement was added to the picture. I wonder when an Italian artist will condescend to pluck these flowers of beauty, so abundantly offered by the simplest things in his own native land. Each city has an Accademia delle Belle Arti, and there is no lack of students. But the painters, having learned their trade, make copies ten times distant from the truth of famous masterpieces for the American market. Few seem to look beyond their picture galleries. Thus the democratic art, the art of Millet, the art of life and nature and the people, waits. As we mount, the soil grows of a richer brown; and there are woods of oak where herds of swine are feeding on the acorns. Monte Oliveto comes in sight-a mass of red brick, backed up with cypresses, among dishevelled earthy precipices, balze as they are called-upon the hill below the village of Chiusure. This Chiusure was once a promising town; but the life was crushed out of it in the throes of mediæval civil wars, and since the thirteenth century it has been dwindling to a hamlet. The struggle for existence, from which the larger communes of this district, Siena and Montepulciano, emerged at the expense of their neighbours, must have been tragical. The balze now grow sterner, drier, more dreadful. We see how deluges outpoured from thunderstorms bring down their viscous streams of loam, destroying in an hour the terraces it took a year to build, and spreading wasteful mud upon the scanty cornfields. The people call this soil creta; but it seems to be less like a chalk than a marl, or marna. It is always washing away into ravines and gullies, exposing the roots of trees, [Pg 47]

and rendering the tillage of the land a thankless labour. One marvels how any vegetation has the faith to settle on its dreary waste, or how men have the patience, generation after generation, to renew the industry, still beginning, never ending, which reclaims such wildernesses. Comparing Monte Oliveto with similar districts of cretaceous soil-with the country, for example, between Pienza and San Quirico-we perceive how much is owed to the monks whom Bernardo Tolomei planted here. So far as it is clothed at all with crop and wood, this is their service. At last we climb the crowning hill, emerge from a copse of oak, glide along a terraced pathway through the broom, and find ourselves in front of the convent gateway. A substantial tower of red brick, machicolated at the top and pierced with small square windows, guards this portal, reminding us that at some time or other the monks found it needful to arm their solitude against a force descending from Chiusure. There is an avenue of slender cypresses; and over the gate, protected by a jutting roof, shines a fresco of Madonna and Child. Passing rapidly downwards, we are in the courtyard of the monastery, among its stables, barns, and out-houses, with the forlorn bulk of the huge red building spreading wide, and towering up above us. As good luck ruled our arrival, we came face to face with the Abbate de Negro, who administers the domain of Monte Oliveto for the Government of Italy, and exercises a kindly hospitality to chance-comers. He was standing near the church, which, with its tall square campanile, breaks the long stern outline of the convent. The whole edifice, it may be said, is composed of a red brick inclining to [Pg 48]

purple in tone, which contrasts not unpleasantly with the lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives. Advantage has been taken of a steep crest; and the monastery, enlarged from time to time through the last five centuries, has here and there been reared upon gigantic buttresses, which jut upon the balze at a sometimes giddy height. The Abbate received us with true courtesy, and gave us spacious rooms, three cells apiece, facing Siena and the western mountains. There is accommodation, he told us, for three hundred monks; but only three are left in it. As this order was confined to members of the nobility, each of the religious had his own apartment-not a cubicle such as the uninstructed dream of when they read of monks, but separate chambers for sleep and study and recreation. In the middle of the vast sad landscape, the place is still, with a silence that can be almost heard. The deserted state of those innumerable cells, those echoing corridors and shadowy cloisters, exercises overpowering tyranny over the imagination. Siena is so far away, and Montalcino is so faintly outlined on its airy parapet, that these cities only deepen our sense of desolation. It is a relief to mark at no great distance on the hill-side a contadino guiding his oxen, and from a lonely farm yon column of ascending smoke. At least the world goes on, and life is somewhere resonant with song. But here there rests a pall of silence among the oak-groves and the cypresses and balze. As I leaned and mused, while Christian (my good friend and fellow-traveller from the Grisons) made our beds, a melancholy sunset flamed up from a rampart of cloud, built like a city of the air above [Pg 49]

the mountains of Volterra-fire issuing from its battlements, and smiting the fretted roof of heaven above. It was a conflagration of celestial rose upon the saddest purples and cavernous recesses of intensest azure. We had an excellent supper in the visitor’s refectory-soup, good bread and country wine, ham, a roast chicken with potatoes, a nice white cheese made of sheep’s milk, and grapes for dessert. The kind Abbate sat by, and watched his four guests eat, tapping his tortoise-shell snuff-box, and telling us many interesting things about the past and present state of the convent. Our company was completed with Lupo, the pet cat, and Pirro, a woolly Corsican dog, very good friends, and both enormously voracious. Lupo in particular engraved himself upon the memory of Christian, into whose large legs he thrust his claws, when the cheese-parings and scraps were not supplied him with sufficient promptitude. I never saw a hungrier and bolder cat. It made one fancy that even the mice had been exiled from this solitude. And truly the rule of the monastic order, no less than the habit of Italian gentlemen, is frugal in the matter of the table, beyond the conception of northern folk. Monte Oliveto, the Superior told us, owned thirty-two poderi, or large farms, of which five have recently been sold. They are worked on the mezzeria system; whereby peasants and proprietors divide the produce of the soil; and which he thinks inferior for developing its resources to that of affito, or lease-holding. The contadini live in scattered houses; and he says the estate would be greatly improved by doubling the number of these dwellings, and letting the sub-divided farms to more energetic people. The village [Pg 50]

of Chiusure is inhabited by labourers. The contadini are poor:

a dower, for instance, of fifty lire is thought something:

whereas near Genoa, upon the leasehold system, a farmer may sometimes provide a dower of twenty thousand lire. The country produces grain of different sorts, excellent oil, and timber. It also yields a tolerable red wine. The Government makes from eight to nine per cent upon the value of the land, employing him and his two religious brethren as agents. In such conversations the evening passed. We rested well in large hard beds with dry rough sheets. But there was a fretful wind abroad, which went wailing round the convent walls and rattling the doors in its deserted corridors. One of our party had been placed by himself at the end of a long suite of apartments, with balconies commanding the wide sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. He confessed in the morning to having passed a restless night, tormented by the ghostly noises of the wind, a wanderer, “like the world’s rejected guest,” through those untenanted chambers. The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as eery as that of willows by some haunted mere. IV. The great attraction to students of Italian art in the convent of Monte Oliveto is a large square cloister, covered with wall-paintings by Luca Signorelli and Giovannantonio Bazzi, surnamed Il Sodoma. These represent various episodes in the life of S. Benedict; [Pg 51]

while one picture, in some respects the best of the whole series, is devoted to the founder of the Olivetan Order, Bernardo Tolomei, dispensing the rule of his institution to a consistory of white-robed monks. Signorelli, that great master of Cortona, may be studied to better advantage elsewhere, especially at Orvieto and in his native city. His work in this cloister, consisting of eight frescoes, has been much spoiled by time and restoration. Yet it can be referred to a good period of his artistic activity (the year 1497) and displays much which is specially characteristic of his manner. In Totila’s barbaric train, he painted a crowd of fierce emphatic figures, combining all ages and the most varied attitudes, and reproducing with singular vividness the Italian soldiers of adventure of his day. We see before us the long-haired followers of Braccio and the Baglioni; their handsome savage faces; their brawny limbs clad in the parti-coloured hose and jackets of that period; feathered caps stuck sideways on their heads; a splendid swagger in their straddling legs. Female beauty lay outside the sphere of Signorelli’s sympathy; and in the Monte Oliveto cloister he was not called upon to paint it. But none of the Italian masters felt more keenly, or more powerfully represented in their work, the muscular vigour of young manhood. Two of the remaining frescoes, different from these in motive, might be selected as no less characteristic of Signorelli’s manner. One represents three sturdy monks, clad in brown, working with all their strength to stir a boulder, which has been bewitched, and needs a miracle to move it from its place. The square and powerfully outlined drawing of these figures is beyond all praise for its effect [Pg 52]

of massive solidity. The other shows us the interior of a fifteenth century tavern, where two monks are regaling themselves upon the sly. A country girl, with shapely arms and shoulders, her upper skirts tucked round the ample waist to which broad sweeping lines of back and breasts descend, is serving wine. The exuberance of animal life, the freedom of attitude expressed in this, the mainly interesting figure of the composition, show that Signorelli might have been a great master of realistic painting. Nor are the accessories less effective. A wide-roofed kitchen chimney, a page-boy leaving the room by a flight of steps, which leads to the house door, and the table at which the truant monks are seated, complete a picture of homely Italian life. It may still be matched out of many an inn in this hill district. Called to graver work at Orvieto, where he painted his gigantic series of frescoes illustrating the coming of Antichrist, the Destruction of the World, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the final state of souls in Paradise and Hell, Signorelli left his work at Monte Oliveto unaccomplished. Seven years later it was taken up by a painter of very different genius. Sodoma was a native of Vercelli, and had received his first training in the Lombard schools, which owed so much to Lionardo da Vinci’s influence. He was about thirty years of age when chance brought him to Siena. Here he made acquaintance with Pandolfo Petrucci, who had recently established himself in a species of tyranny over the Republic. The work he did for this patron and other nobles of Siena, brought him into notice. Vasari observes that his hot Lombard colouring, a something florid and attractive in his style, which [Pg 53]

contrasted with the severity of the Tuscan school, rendered him no less agreeable as an artist than his free manners made him acceptable as a house-friend. Fra Domenico da Leccio, also a Lombard, was at that time General of the monks of Monte Oliveto. On a visit to this compatriot in 1505, Sodoma received a commission to complete the cloister; and during the next two years he worked there, producing in all twenty-five frescoes. For his pains he seemed to have received but little pay-Vasari says, only the expenses of some colour-grinders who assisted him; but from the books of the convent it appears that 241 ducats, or something over 60l. of our money, were disbursed to him. Sodoma was so singular a fellow, even in that age of piquant personalities, that it may be worth while to translate a fragment of Vasari’s gossip about him. We must, however, bear in mind that, for some unknown reason, the Aretine historian bore a rancorous grudge against this Lombard, whose splendid gifts and great achievements he did all he could by writing to depreciate. “He was fond,” says Vasari, “of keeping in his house all sorts of strange animals:

badgers, squirrels, monkeys, cat-a-mountains, dwarf-donkeys, horses, racers, little Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, doves of India, and other creatures of this kind, as many as he could lay his hands on. Over and above these beasts, he had a raven, which had learned so well from him to talk, that it could imitate its master’s voice, especially in answering the door when some one knocked, and this it did so cleverly that people took it for Giovannantonio himself, as all the folk of Siena know quite well. In like manner, his other pets were [Pg 54]

so much at home with him that they never left his house, but played the strangest tricks and maddest pranks imaginable, so that his house was like nothing more than a Noah’s Ark.”

He was a bold rider, it seems; for with one of his racers, ridden by himself, he bore away the prize in that wild horse-race they run upon the Piazza at Siena. For the rest, “he attired himself in pompous clothes, wearing doublets of brocade, cloaks trimmed with gold lace, gorgeous caps, neck-chains, and other vanities of a like description, fit for buffoons and mountebanks.”

In one of the frescoes of Monte Oliveto, Sodoma painted his own portrait, with some of his curious pets around him. He there appears as a young man with large and decidedly handsome features, a great shock of dark curled hair escaping from a yellow cap, and flowing down over a rich mantle which drapes his shoulders. If we may trust Vasari, he showed his curious humours freely to the monks. “Nobody could describe the amusement he furnished to those good fathers, who christened him Mattaccio (the big madman), or the insane tricks he played there.”

In spite of Vasari’s malevolence, the portrait he has given us of Bazzi has so far nothing unpleasant about it. The man seems to have been a madcap artist, combining with his love for his profession a taste for fine clothes, and what was then perhaps rarer in people of his sort, a great partiality for living creatures of all kinds. The darker shades of Vasari’s picture have been purposely omitted from these pages. We only know for certain, about Bazzi’s private life, that he was married in 1510 to a certain Beatrice, who bore him two children, and who was [Pg 55]

still living with him in 1541. The further suggestion that he painted at Monte Oliveto subjects unworthy of a religious house, is wholly disproved by the frescoes which still exist in a state of very tolerable preservation. They represent various episodes in the legend of S. Benedict; all marked by that spirit of simple, almost childish piety which is a special characteristic of Italian religious history. The series forms, in fact, a painted novella of monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles. Bazzi was well fitted for the execution of this task. He had a swift and facile brush, considerable versatility in the treatment of monotonous subjects, and a never-failing sense of humour. His white-cowled monks, some of them with the rosy freshness of boys, some with the handsome brown faces of middle life, others astute and crafty, others again wrinkled with old age, have clearly been copied from real models. He puts them into action without the slightest effort, and surrounds them with landscapes, architecture, and furniture, appropriate to each successive situation. The whole is done with so much grace, such simplicity of composition, and transparency of style, corresponding to the naïf and superficial legend, that we feel a perfect harmony between the artist’s mind and the motives he was made to handle. In this respect Bazzi’s portion of the legend of S. Benedict is more successful than Signorelli’s. It was fortunate, perhaps, that the conditions of his task confined him to uncomplicated groupings, and a scale of colour in which white predominates. For Bazzi, as is shown by subsequent work in the Farnesina Villa at Rome, and in the church of S. Domenico at Siena, [Pg 56]

was no master of composition; and the tone, even of his masterpieces, inclines to heat. Unlike Signorelli, Bazzi felt a deep artistic sympathy with female beauty; and the most attractive fresco in the whole series is that in which the evil monk Florentius brings a bevy of fair damsels to the convent. There is one group, in particular, of six women, so delicately varied in carriage of the head and suggested movement of the body, as to be comparable only to a strain of concerted music. This is perhaps the painter’s masterpiece in the rendering of pure beauty, if we except his S. Sebastian of the Uffizzi. We tire of studying pictures, hardly less than of reading about them! I was glad enough, after three hours spent among the frescoes of this cloister, to wander forth into the copses which surround the convent. Sunlight was streaming treacherously from flying clouds; and though it was high noon, the oak-leaves were still a-tremble with dew. Pink cyclamens and yellow amaryllis starred the moist brown earth; and under the cypress-trees, where alleys had been cut in former time for pious feet, the short firm turf was soft and mossy. Before bidding the hospitable Padre farewell, and starting in our waggonette for Asciano, it was pleasant to meditate awhile in these green solitudes. Generations of white-stoled monks who had sat or knelt upon the now deserted terraces, or had slowly paced the winding paths to Calvaries aloft and points of vantage high above the wood, rose up before me. My mind, still full of Bazzi’s frescoes, peopled the wilderness with grave monastic forms, and gracious, young-eyed faces of boyish novices. [Pg 57]

MONTEPULCIANO. I. For the sake of intending travellers to this, the lordliest of Tuscan hill-towns, it will be well to state at once and without circumlocution what does not appear upon the time-tables of the line from Empoli to Rome. Montepulciano has a station; but this railway station is at the distance of at least an hour and a half’s drive from the mountain upon which the city stands. The lumbering train which brought us one October evening from Asciano crawled into this station after dark, at the very moment when a storm, which had been gathering from the south-west, burst in deluges of rain and lightning. There was, however, a covered carriage going to the town. Into this we packed ourselves, together with a polite Italian gentleman who, in answer to our questions, consulted his watch, and smilingly replied that a little half-hour would bring us easily to Montepulciano. He was a native of the place. He knew perfectly well that he would be shut up with us in that carriage for two mortal hours of darkness and down-pour. And yet, such is the irresistible impulse in Italians to say something immediately agreeable, he fed us with false hopes and had no fear of consequences. What did it matter to him if [Pg 58]

we were pulling out our watches and chattering in well-contented undertone about vino nobile, biftek, and possibly a pollo arrosto, or a dish of tordi? At the end of the half-hour, as he was well aware, self-congratulations and visions of a hearty supper would turn to discontented wailings, and the querulous complaining of defrauded appetites. But the end of half an hour was still half an hour off; and we meanwhile were comfortable. The night was pitchy dark, and blazing flashes of lightning showed a white ascending road at intervals. Rain rushed in torrents, splashing against the carriage wheels, which moved uneasily, as though they could but scarcely stem the river that swept down upon them. Far away above us to the left, was one light on a hill, which never seemed to get any nearer. We could see nothing but a chasm of blackness below us on one side, edged with ghostly olive-trees, and a high bank on the other. Sometimes a star swam out of the drifting clouds; but then the rain hissed down again, and the flashes came in floods of livid light, illuminating the eternal olives and the cypresses which looked like huge black spectres. It seemed almost impossible for the horses to keep their feet, as the mountain road grew ever steeper and the torrent swelled around them. Still they struggled on. The promised half hour had been doubled, trebled, quadrupled, when at last we saw the great brown sombre walls of a city tower above us. Then we entered one of those narrow lofty Tuscan gates, and rolled upon the pavement of a street. The inn at Montepulciano is called Marzocco, after the Florentine lion which stands upon its column in a [Pg 59]

little square before the house. The people there are hospitable, and more than once on subsequent occasions have they extended to us kindly welcome. But on this, our first appearance, they had scanty room at their disposal. Seeing us arrive so late, and march into their dining-room, laden with sealskins, waterproofs, and ulsters, one of the party hugging a complete Euripides in Didot’s huge edition, they were confounded. At last they conducted the whole company of four into a narrow back bed-room, where they pointed to one fair-sized and one very little bed. This was the only room at liberty, they said; and could we not arrange to sleep here? S’accomodi, Signore! S’accomodi, Signora! These encouraging words, uttered in various tones of cheerful and insinuating politeness to each member of the party in succession, failed to make us comprehend how a gentleman and his wife, with a lean but rather lengthy English friend, and a bulky native of the Grisons, could “accommodate themselves” collectively and undividedly with what was barely sufficient for their just moiety, however much it might afford a night’s rest to their worse half. Christian was sent out into the storm to look for supplementary rooms in Montepulciano, which he failed to get. Meanwhile we ordered supper, and had the satisfaction of seeing set upon the board a huge red flask of vino nobile. In copious draughts of this the King of Tuscan wines, we drowned our cares; and when the cloth was drawn, our friend and Christian passed their night upon the supper table. The good folk of the inn had recovered from their surprise, and from the inner recesses of their house had brought forth mattresses and blankets. [Pg 60]

So the better and larger half of the company enjoyed sound sleep. It rained itself out at night, and the morning was clear, with the transparent atmosphere of storm-clouds hurrying in broken squadrons from the bad sea quarter. Yet this is just the weather in which Tuscan landscape looks its loveliest. Those immense expanses of grey undulating uplands need the luminousness of watery sunshine, the colour added by cloud-shadows, and the pearly softness of rising vapours, to rob them of a certain awful grimness. The main street of Montepulciano goes straight uphill for a considerable distance between brown palaces; then mounts by a staircase-zigzag under huge impending masses of masonry; until it ends in a piazza. On the ascent, at intervals, the eye is fascinated by prospects to the north and east over Val di Chiana, Cortona, Thrasymene, Chiusi; to south and west over Monte Cetona, Radicofani, Monte Amiata, the Val d’Ombrone, and the Sienese Contado. Grey walls overgrown with ivy, arcades of time-toned brick, and the forbidding bulk of houses hewn from solid travertine, frame these glimpses of aërial space. The piazza is the top of all things. Here are the Duomo; the Palazzo del Comune, closely resembling that of Florence, with the Marzocco on its front; the fountain, between two quaintly sculptured columns; and the vast palace Del Monte, of heavy Renaissance architecture, said to be the work of Antonio di San Gallo. We climbed the tower of the Palazzo del Comune, and stood at the altitude of 2000 feet above the sea. The view is finer in its kind than I have elsewhere seen, even in Tuscany, that land of panoramic [Pg 61]

prospects over memorable tracts of world-historic country. Such landscape cannot be described in words. But the worst is that, even while we gaze, we know that nothing but the faintest memory of our enjoyment will be carried home with us. The atmospheric conditions were perfect that morning. The sun was still young; the sky sparkled after the night’s thunderstorm; the whole immensity of earth around lay lucid, smiling, newly washed in baths of moisture. Masses of storm-cloud kept rolling from the west, where we seemed to feel the sea behind those intervening hills. But they did not form in heavy blocks or hang upon the mountain summits. They hurried and dispersed and changed and flung their shadows on the world below. II. The charm of this view is composed of so many different elements, so subtly blent, appealing to so many separate sensibilities; the sense of grandeur, the sense of space, the sense of natural beauty, and the sense of human pathos; that deep internal faculty we call historic sense; that it cannot be defined. First comes the immense surrounding space-a space measured in each arc of the circumference by sections of at least fifty miles, limited by points of exquisitely picturesque beauty, including distant cloud-like mountain ranges and crystals of sky-blue Apennines, circumscribing landscapes of refined loveliness in detail, always varied, always marked by objects of peculiar interest where the eye or memory may linger. Next in importance to this immensity of space, so [Pg 62]

powerfully affecting the imagination by its mere extent, and by the breadth of atmosphere attuning all varieties of form and colour to one harmony beneath illimitable heaven, may be reckoned the episodes of rivers, lakes, hills, cities, with old historic names. For there spreads the lordly length of Thrasymene, islanded and citadelled, in hazy morning mist, still dreaming of the shock of Roman hosts with Carthaginian legions. There is the lake of Chiusi, set like a jewel underneath the copse-clad hills which hide the dust of a dead Tuscan nation. The streams of Arno start far far away, where Arezzo lies enfolded in bare uplands. And there at our feet rolls Tiber’s largest affluent, the Chiana. And there is the canal which joins their fountains in the marsh that Lionardo would have drained. Monte Cetona is yonder height which rears its bristling ridge defiantly from neighbouring Chiusi. And there springs Radicofani, the eagle’s eyrie of a brigand brood. Next, Monte Amiata stretches the long lines of her antique volcano; the swelling mountain flanks, descending gently from her cloud-capped top, are russet with autumnal oak and chestnut woods. On them our eyes rest lovingly; imagination wanders for a moment through those mossy glades, where cyclamens are growing now, and primroses in spring will peep amid anemones from rustling foliage strewn by winter’s winds. The heights of Casentino, the Perugian highlands, Volterra, far withdrawn amid a wilderness of rolling hills, and solemn snow-touched ranges of the Spolentino, Sibyl-haunted fastnesses of Norcia, form the most distant horizon-lines of this unending panorama. And then there are the cities, placed each upon a point of vantage:

Siena; [Pg 63]

olive-mantled Chiusi; Cortona, white upon her spreading throne; poetic Montalcino, lifted aloft against the vaporous sky; San Quirico, nestling in pastoral tranquillity; Pienza, where Æneas Sylvius built palaces and called his birthplace after his own Papal name. Still closer to the town itself of Montepulciano, stretching along the irregular ridge which gave it building ground, and trending out on spurs above deep orchards, come the lovely details of oak-copses, blending with grey tilth and fields rich with olive and vine. The gaze, exhausted with immensity, pierces those deeply cloven valleys, sheltered from wind and open to the sun-undulating folds of brown earth, where Bacchus, when he visited Tuscany, found the grape-juice that pleased him best, and crowned the wine of Montepulciano king. Here from our eyrie we can trace white oxen on the furrows, guided by brown-limbed, white-shirted contadini. The morning glory of this view from Montepulciano, though irrecoverable by words, abides in the memory, and draws one back by its unique attractiveness. On a subsequent visit to the town in spring time, my wife and I took a twilight walk, just after our arrival, through its gloomy fortress streets, up to the piazza, where the impendent houses lowered like bastions, and all the masses of their mighty architecture stood revealed in shadow and dim lamplight. Far and wide, the country round us gleamed with bonfires; for it was the eve of the Ascension, when every contadino lights a beacon of chestnut logs and straw and piled-up leaves. Each castello on the plain, each village on the hills, each lonely farmhouse at the skirt of forest or the edge of lake, smouldered like a red [Pg 64]

Cyclopean eye beneath the vault of stars. The flames waxed and waned, leapt into tongues, or disappeared. As they passed from gloom to brilliancy and died away again, they seemed almost to move. The twilight scene was like that of a vast city, filling the plain and climbing the heights in terraces. Is this custom, I thought, a relic of old Pales-worship? III. The early history of Montepulciano is buried in impenetrable mists of fable. No one can assign a date to the foundation of these high-hill cities. The eminence on which it stands belongs to the volcanic system of Monte Amiata, and must at some time have formed a portion of the crater which threw that mighty mass aloft. But æons have passed since the gran sasso di Maremma was a fire-vomiting monster, glaring like Etna in eruption on the Tyrrhene sea; and through those centuries how many races may have camped upon the summit we call Montepulciano! Tradition assigns the first quasi-historical settlement to Lars Porsena, who is said to have made it his summer residence, when the lower and more marshy air of Clusium became oppressive. Certainly it must have been a considerable town in the Etruscan period. Embedded in the walls of palaces may still be seen numerous fragments of sculptured bas-reliefs, the works of that mysterious people. A propos of Montepulciano’s importance in the early years of Roman history, I lighted on a quaint story related by its very jejune annalist, Spinello Benci. It will be remembered that Livy attributes the invasion of the Gauls, who, after besieging Clusium, advanced [Pg 65]

on Rome, to the persuasions of a certain Aruns. He was an exile from Clusium; and wishing to revenge himself upon his country-people, he allured the Senonian Gauls into his service by the promise of excellent wine, samples of which he had taken with him into Lombardy. Spinello Benci accepts the legend literally, and continues:

“These wines were so pleasing to the palate of the barbarians, that they were induced to quit the rich and teeming valley of the Po, to cross the Apennines, and move in battle array against Chiusi. And it is clear that the wine which Aruns selected for the purpose was the same as that which is produced to this day at Montepulciano. For nowhere else in the Etruscan district can wines of equally generous quality and fiery spirit be found, so adapted for export and capable of such long preservation.”

We may smile at the historian’s naïveté. Yet the fact remains that good wine of Montepulciano can still allure barbarians of this epoch to the spot where it is grown. Of all Italian vintages, with the exception of some rare qualities of Sicily and the Valtellina, it is, in my humble opinion, the best. And when the time comes for Italy to develop the resources of her vineyards upon scientific principles, Montepulciano will drive Brolio from the field and take the same place by the side of Chianti which Volnay occupies by common Macon. It will then be quoted upon wine-lists throughout Europe, and find its place upon the tables of rich epicures in Hyperborean regions, and add its generous warmth to Transatlantic banquets. Even as it is now made, with very little care bestowed on cultivation and none to speak of on selection of the grape, the wine is rich and noble, slightly rough to a [Pg 66]

sophisticated palate, but clean in quality and powerful and racy. It deserves the enthusiasm attributed by Redi to Bacchus:

[A]

– Fill, fill, let us all have our will! But with what, with what, boys, shall we fill? Sweet Ariadne-no, not that one-ah no; Fill me the manna of Montepulciano:

Fill me a magnum and reach it me.-Gods! How it glides to my heart by the sweetest of roads! Oh, how it kisses me, tickles me, bites me! Oh, how my eyes loosen sweetly in tears! I’m ravished! I’m rapt! Heaven finds me admissible! Lost in an ecstasy! blinded! invisible!- Hearken all earth! We, Bacchus, in the might of our great mirth, To all who reverence us, are right thinkers; Hear, all ye drinkers! Give ear and give faith to the edict divine; Montepulciano’s the King of all wine. It is necessary, however, that our modern barbarian should travel to Montepulciano itself, and there obtain a flask of manna or vino nobile from some trusty cellar-master. He will not find it bottled in the inns or restaurants upon his road. IV. The landscape and the wine of Montepulciano are both well worth the trouble of a visit to this somewhat inaccessible city. Yet more remains to be said about the attractions of the town itself. In the Duomo, which was spoiled by unintelligent rebuilding at a dismal epoch of barren art, are fragments of one of the rarest monuments of Tuscan sculpture. This is the tomb of [Pg 67]

Bartolommeo Aragazzi. He was a native of Montepulciano, and secretary to Pope Martin V., that Papa Martino non vale un quattrino, on whom, during his long residence in Florence, the street-boys made their rhymes. Twelve years before his death he commissioned Donatello and Michelozzo Michelozzi, who about that period were working together upon the monuments of Pope John XXIII. and Cardinal Brancacci, to erect his own tomb at the enormous cost of twenty-four thousand scudi. That thirst for immortality of fame, which inspired the humanists of the Renaissance, prompted Aragazzi to this princely expenditure. Yet, having somehow won the hatred of his fellow-students, he was immediately censured for excessive vanity. Lionardo Bruni makes his monument the theme of a ferocious onslaught. Writing to Poggio Bracciolini, Bruni tells a story how, while travelling through the country of Arezzo, he met a train of oxen dragging heavy waggons piled with marble columns, statues, and all the necessary details of a sumptuous sepulchre. He stopped, and asked what it all meant. Then one of the contractors for this transport, wiping the sweat from his forehead, in utter weariness of the vexatious labour, at the last end of his temper, answered:

“May the gods destroy all poets, past, present, and future.”

I inquired what he had to do with poets, and how they had annoyed him. “Just this,” he replied, “that this poet, lately deceased, a fool and windy-pated fellow, has ordered a monument for himself; and with a view to erecting it, these marbles are being dragged to Montepulciano; but I doubt whether we shall contrive to get them up there. The roads are too bad.”

“But,” cried I, “do you believe that man was a poet-that [Pg 68]

dunce who had no science, nay, nor knowledge either? who only rose above the heads of men by vanity and doltishness?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, “nor did I ever hear tell, while he was alive, about his being called a poet; but his fellow-townsmen now decide he was one; nay, if he had but left a few more moneybags, they’d swear he was a god. Anyhow, but for his having been a poet, I would not have cursed poets in general.”

Whereupon, the malevolent Bruni withdrew, and composed a scorpion-tailed oration, addressed to his friend Poggio, on the suggested theme of “diuturnity in monuments,” and false ambition. Our old friends of humanistic learning-Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar-meet us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric “thick and slab.”

The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against “that excrement in human shape,” who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse the rancour of his fellow-humanists. I have dwelt upon this episode, partly because it illustrates the peculiar thirst for glory in the students of that time, but more especially because it casts a thin clear thread of actual light upon the masterpiece which, having been transported with this difficulty from Donatello’s workshop, is now to be seen by all lovers of fine art, in part at least, at Montepulciano. In part at least:

the phrase is pathetic. Poor Aragazzi, who thirsted so for “diuturnity in monuments,” who had been so cruelly assaulted in the grave by humanistic jealousy, expressing its malevolence with humanistic [Pg 69]

crudity of satire, was destined after all to be defrauded of his well-paid tomb. The monument, a master work of Donatello and his collaborator, was duly erected. The oxen and the contractors, it appears, had floundered through the mud of Valdichiana, and struggled up the mountain-slopes of Montepulciano. But when the church, which this triumph of art adorned, came to be repaired, the miracle of beauty was dismembered. The sculpture for which Aragazzi spent his thousands of crowns, which Donatello touched with his immortalising chisel, over which the contractors vented their curses and Bruni eased his bile; these marbles are now visible as mere disjecta membra in a church which, lacking them, has little to detain a traveller’s haste. On the left hand of the central door, as you enter, Aragazzi lies, in senatorial robes, asleep; his head turned slightly to the right upon the pillow, his hands folded over his breast. Very noble are the draperies, and dignified the deep tranquillity of slumber. Here, we say, is a good man fallen upon sleep, awaiting resurrection. The one commanding theme of Christian sculpture, in an age of Pagan feeling, has been adequately rendered. Bartolommeo Aragazzi, like Ilaria del Carretto at Lucca, like the canopied doges in S. Zanipolo at Venice, like the Acciauoli in the Florentine Certosa, like the Cardinal di Portogallo in Samminiato, is carved for us as he had been in life, but with that life suspended, its fever all smoothed out, its agitations over, its pettinesses dignified by death. This marmoreal repose of the once active man symbolises for our imagination the state into which he passed four centuries ago, but in which, according to the creed, he still abides, reserved for judgment and [Pg 70]

reincarnation. The flesh, clad with which he walked our earth, may moulder in the vaults beneath. But it will one day rise again; and art has here presented it imperishable to our gaze. This is how the Christian sculptors, inspired by the majestic calm of classic art, dedicated a Christian to the genius of repose. Among the nations of antiquity this repose of death was eternal; and being unable to conceive of a man’s body otherwise than for ever obliterated by the flames of funeral, they were perforce led back to actual life when they would carve his portrait on a tomb. But for Christianity the rest of the grave has ceased to be eternal. Centuries may pass, but in the end it must be broken. Therefore art is justified in showing us the man himself in an imagined state of sleep. Yet this imagined state of sleep is so incalculably long, and by the will of God withdrawn from human prophecy, that the ages sweeping over the dead man before the trumpets of archangels wake him, shall sooner wear away memorial stone than stir his slumber. It is a slumber, too, unterrified, unentertained by dreams. Suspended animation finds no fuller symbolism than the sculptor here presents to us in abstract form. The boys of Montepulciano have scratched Messer Aragazzi’s sleeping figure with graffiti at their own free will. Yet they have had no power to erase the poetry of Donatello’s mighty style. That, in spite of Bruni’s envy, in spite of injurious time, in spite of the still worse insult of the modernised cathedral and the desecrated monument, embalms him in our memory and secures for him the diuturnity for which he paid his twenty thousand crowns. Money, methinks, beholding him, was rarely better expended on a similar [Pg 71]

ambition. And ambition of this sort, relying on the genius of such a master to give it wings for perpetuity of time, is, pace Lionardo Bruni, not ignoble. Opposite the figure of Messer Aragazzi are two square bas-reliefs from the same monument, fixed against piers of the nave. One represents Madonna enthroned among worshippers; members, it may be supposed, of Aragazzi’s household. Three angelic children, supporting the child Christ upon her lap, complete that pyramidal form of composition which Fra Bartolommeo was afterwards to use with such effect in painting. The other bas-relief shows a group of grave men and youths, clasping hands with loveliest interlacement; the placid sentiment of human fellowship translated into harmonies of sculptured form. Children below run up to touch their knees, and reach out boyish arms to welcome them. Two young men, with half-draped busts and waving hair blown off their foreheads, anticipate the type of adolescence which Andrea del Sarto perfected in his S. John. We might imagine that this masterly panel was intended to represent the arrival of Messer Aragazzi in his home. It is a scene from the domestic life of the dead man, duly subordinated to the recumbent figure, which, when the monument was perfect, would have dominated the whole composition. Nothing in the range of Donatello’s work surpasses these two bas-reliefs for harmonies of line and grouping, for choice of form, for beauty of expression, and for smoothness of surface-working. The marble is of great delicacy, and is wrought to a wax-like surface. At the high altar are three more fragments from the mutilated tomb. One is a long low frieze of children [Pg 72]

bearing garlands, which probably formed the base of Aragazzi’s monument, and now serves for a predella. The remaining pieces are detached statues of Fortitude and Faith. The former reminds us of Donatello’s S. George; the latter is twisted into a strained attitude, full of character, but lacking grace. What the effect of these emblematic figures would have been when harmonised by the architectural proportions of the sepulchre, the repose of Aragazzi on his sarcophagus, the suavity of the two square panels and the rhythmic beauty of the frieze, it is not easy to conjecture. But rudely severed from their surroundings, and exposed in isolation, one at each side of the altar, they leave an impression of awkward discomfort on the memory. A certain hardness, peculiar to the Florentine manner, is felt in them. But this quality may have been intended by the sculptors for the sake of contrast with what is eminently graceful, peaceful, and melodious in the other fragments of the ruined masterpiece. V. At a certain point in the main street, rather more than half way from the Albergo del Marzocco to the piazza, a tablet has been let into the wall upon the left-hand side. This records the fact that here in 1454 was born Angelo Ambrogini, the special glory of Montepulciano, the greatest classical scholar and the greatest Italian poet of the fifteenth century. He is better known in the history of literature as Poliziano, or Politianus, a name he took from his native city, when he came, a marvellous boy, at the age of ten, to Florence, and joined the household of Lorenzo de’ [Pg 73]

Medici. He had already claims upon Lorenzo’s hospitality. For his father, Benedetto, by adopting the cause of Piero de’ Medici in Montepulciano, had exposed himself to bitter feuds and hatred of his fellow-citizens. To this animosity of party warfare he fell a victim a few years previously. We only know that he was murdered, and that he left a helpless widow with five children, of whom Angelo was the eldest. The Ambrogini or Cini were a family of some importance in Montepulciano; and their dwelling-house is a palace of considerable size. From its eastern windows the eye can sweep that vast expanse of country, embracing the lakes of Thrasymene and Chiusi, which has been already described. What would have happened, we wonder, if Messer Benedetto, the learned jurist, had not espoused the Medicean cause and embroiled himself with murderous antagonists? Would the little Angelo have grown up in this quiet town, and practised law, and lived and died a citizen of Montepulciano? In that case the lecture-rooms of Florence would never have echoed to the sonorous hexameters of the “Rusticus” and “Ambra.”

Italian literature would have lacked the “Stanze” and “Orfeo.”

European scholarship would have been defrauded of the impulse given to it by the “Miscellanea.”

The study of Roman law would have missed those labours on the Pandects, with which the name of Politian is honourably associated. From the Florentine society of the fifteenth century would have disappeared the commanding central figure of humanism, which now contrasts dramatically with the stern monastic Prior of S. Mark. Benedetto’s tragic death gave Poliziano to Italy and to posterity. [Pg 74]

VI. Those who have a day to spare at Montepulciano can scarcely spend it better than in an excursion to Pienza and San Quirico. Leaving the city by the road which takes a westerly direction, the first object of interest is the Church of San Biagio, placed on a fertile plateau immediately beneath the ancient acropolis. It was erected by Antonio di San Gallo in 1518, and is one of the most perfect specimens existing of the sober classical style. The Church consists of a Greek square, continued at the east end into a semicircular tribune, surmounted by a central cupola, and flanked by a detached bell-tower, ending in a pyramidal spire. The whole is built of solid yellow travertine, a material which, by its warmth of colour, is pleasing to the eye, and mitigates the mathematical severity of the design. Upon entering, we feel at once what Alberti called the music of this style; its large and simple harmonies, depending for effect upon sincerity of plan and justice of balance. The square masses of the main building, the projecting cornices and rounded tribune, meet together and soar up into the cupola; while the grand but austere proportions of the arches and the piers compose a symphony of perfectly concordant lines. The music is grave and solemn, architecturally expressed in terms of measured space and outlined symmetry. The whole effect is that of one thing pleasant to look upon, agreeably appealing to our sense of unity, charming us by grace and repose; not stimulative nor suggestive, not multiform nor mysterious. We are reminded of the temples imagined by Francesco Colonna, and figured in his [Pg 75]

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. One of these shrines has, we feel, come into actual existence here; and the religious ceremonies for which it is adapted are not those of the Christian worship. Some more primitive, less spiritual rites, involving less of tragic awe and deep-wrought symbolism, should be here performed. It is better suited for Polifilo’s lustration by Venus Physizoe than for the mass on Easter morning. And in this respect, the sentiment of the architecture is exactly faithful to that mood of religious feeling which appeared in Italy under the influences of the classical revival-when the essential doctrines of Christianity were blurred with Pantheism; when Jehovah became Jupiter Optimus Maximus; and Jesus was the Heros of Calvary, and nuns were Virgines Vestales. In literature this mood often strikes us as insincere and artificial. But it admitted of realisation and showed itself to be profoundly felt in architecture. After leaving Madonna di San Biagio, the road strikes at once into an open country, expanding on the right towards the woody ridge of Monte Fallonica, on the left toward Cetona and Radicofani, with Monte Amiata full in front-its double crest and long volcanic slope recalling Etna; the belt of embrowned forest on its flank, made luminous by sunlight. Far away stretches the Sienese Maremma; Siena dimly visible upon her gentle hill; and still beyond, the pyramid of Volterra, huge and cloud-like, piled against the sky. The road, as is almost invariable in this district, keeps to the highest line of ridges, winding much, and following the dimplings of the earthy hills. Here and there a solitary castello, rusty with old age, and turned into a farm, juts into picturesqueness from some point of [Pg 76]

vantage on a mound surrounded with green tillage. But soon the dull and intolerable creta, ash-grey earth, without a vestige of vegetation, furrowed by rain, and desolately breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm. It is difficult to believe that this creta of Southern Tuscany, which has all the appearance of barrenness, and is a positive deformity in the landscape, can be really fruitful. Yet we are frequently being told that it only needs assiduous labour to render it enormously productive. When we reached Pienza we were already in the middle of a country without cultivation, abandoned to the marl. It is a little place, perched upon the ledge of a long sliding hill, which commands the vale of Orcia; Monte Amiata soaring in aërial majesty beyond. Its old name was Cosignano. But it had the honour of giving birth to Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who, when he was elected to the Papacy and had assumed the title of Pius II.