Project Gutenberg's New Italian sketches, by John Addington Symonds

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: New Italian sketches

Author: John Addington Symonds

Release Date: February 26, 2008 [EBook #24689]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW ITALIAN SKETCHES ***




Produced by Melissa Er-Raqabi, Barbara Kosker, Ted Garvin
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net






    +---------------------------------------------------------+
    | Transcriber's Note:                                     |
    |                                                         |
    | Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original   |
    | document has been preserved.                            |
    |                                                         |
    | Greek text has been transliterated and marked with +'s. |
    |                                                         |
    | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For   |
    | a complete list, please see the end of this document.   |
    |                                                         |
    +---------------------------------------------------------+



     NEW

     ITALIAN SKETCHES.

     BY

     JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS,

     AUTHOR OF "SKETCHES IN ITALY," ETC.

     _COPYRIGHT EDITION._

     LEIPZIG

     BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ

     1884.

     _The Right of Translation is reserved._



PREFATORY NOTE.


This volume of New Italian Sketches has been made up from two books
published in England and America under the titles of "Sketches and
Studies in Italy" and "Italian Byways." It forms in some respects a
companion volume to my "Sketches in Italy" already published in the
Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors. But it is quite independent of
that other book, and is in no sense a continuation of it. In making the
selection, I have however followed the same principles of choice. That
is to say, I have included only those studies of places, rather than of
literature or history, which may suit the needs of travellers in Italy.

     JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

     DAVOS PLATZ, _Dec. 1883_.


     TO

     CHRISTIAN BUOL AND CHRISTIAN PALMY

     MY FRIENDS AND FELLOW-TRAVELLERS

     I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.



CONTENTS


                                          Page
     AUTUMN WANDERINGS                      11

     MONTE OLIVETO                          34

     MONTEPULCIANO                          57

     SPRING WANDERINGS                      84

     MAY IN UMBRIA                         106

     THE PALACE OF URBINO                  138

     A VENETIAN MEDLEY                     169

     THE GONDOLIER'S WEDDING               212

     FORNOVO                               238

     BERGAMO AND BARTOLOMMEO COLLEONI      261

     LOMBARD VIGNETTES                     282



     NEW ITALIAN SKETCHES.




     AUTUMN WANDERINGS.

     I.--ITALIAM PETIMUS.


_Italiam petimus!_ We left our upland home before daybreak on a clear
October morning. There had been a hard frost, spangling the meadows with
rime-crystals, which twinkled where the sun's rays touched them. Men and
women were mowing the frozen grass with thin short Alpine scythes; and
as the swathes fell, they gave a crisp, an almost tinkling sound. Down
into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horses plunged; and there we
lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear's Walk, opening upon the
vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn. But up above, shone morning
light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-cloven slopes reddening with a
hundred fading plants; now and then it caught the grey-green icicles
that hung from cliffs where summer streams had dripped. There is no
colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn sky in the high Alps,
defining ridges powdered with light snow, and melting imperceptibly
downward into the warm yellow of the larches and the crimson of the
bilberry. Wiesen was radiantly beautiful: those aërial ranges of the
hills that separate Albula from Julier soared crystal-clear above their
forests; and for a foreground, on the green fields starred with lilac
crocuses, careered a group of children on their sledges. Then came the
row of giant peaks--Pitz d'Aela, Tinzenhorn, and Michelhorn, above the
deep ravine of Albula--all seen across wide undulating golden swards,
close-shaven and awaiting winter. Carnations hung from cottage windows
in full bloom, casting sharp angular black shadows on white walls.

_Italiam petimus!_ We have climbed the valley of the Julier, following
its green, transparent torrent. A night has come and gone at Mühlen. The
stream still leads us up, diminishing in volume as we rise, up through
the fleecy mists that roll asunder for the sun, disclosing far-off snowy
ridges and blocks of granite mountains. The lifeless, soundless waste of
rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence and fade suddenly
into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent, with its forests of
larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and in
front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of
emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this
landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of
larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not
unlike that of the lands we seek. By the side of the lake at Silvaplana
the light was strong and warm, but mellow. Pearly clouds hung over the
Maloja, and floating overhead cast shadows on the opaque water, which
may literally be compared to chrysoprase. The breadth of golden, brown,
and russet tints upon the valley at this moment adds softness to its
lines of level strength. Devotees of the Engadine contend that it
possesses an austere charm beyond the common beauty of Swiss landscape;
but this charm is only perfected in autumn. The fresh snow on the
heights that guard it helps. And then there are the forests of dark
pines upon those many knolls and undulating mountain-flanks beside the
lakes. Sitting and dreaming there in noonday sun, I kept repeating to
myself _Italiam petimus!_

A hurricane blew upward from the pass as we left Silvaplana, ruffling
the lake with gusts of the Italian wind. By Silz Maria we came in sight
of a dozen Italian workmen, arm linked in arm in two rows, tramping in
rhythmic stride, and singing as they went. Two of them were such
nobly-built young men, that for a moment the beauty of the landscape
faded from my sight, and I was saddened. They moved to their singing,
like some of Mason's or Frederick Walker's figures, with the free grace
of living statues, and laughed as we drove by. And yet, with all their
beauty, industry, sobriety, intelligence, these Italians of the northern
valleys serve the sterner people of the Grisons like negroes, doing
their roughest work at scanty wages.

So we came to the vast Alpine wall, and stood on a bare granite slab,
and looked over into Italy, as men might lean from the battlements of a
fortress. Behind lies the Alpine valley, grim, declining slowly
northward, with wind-lashed lakes and glaciers sprawling from
storm-broken pyramids of gneiss. Below spread the unfathomable depths
that lead to Lombardy, flooded with sunlight, filled with swirling
vapour, but never wholly hidden from our sight. For the blast kept
shifting the cloud-masses, and the sun streamed through in spears and
bands of sheeny rays. Over the parapet our horses dropped, down through
sable spruce and amber larch, down between tangles of rowan and autumnal
underwood. Ever as we sank, the mountains rose--those sharp embattled
precipices, toppling spires, impendent chasms blurred with mist, that
make the entrance into Italy sublime. Nowhere do the Alps exhibit their
full stature, their commanding puissance, with such majesty as in the
gates of Italy; and of all those gates I think there is none to compare
with Maloja, none certainly to rival it in abruptness of initiation into
the Italian secret. Below Vico Soprano we pass already into the violets
and blues of Titian's landscape. Then come the purple boulders among
chestnut trees; then the double dolomite-like peak of Pitz Badin and
Promontogno.

It is sad that words can do even less than painting could to bring this
window-scene at Promontogno before another eye. The casement just frames
it. In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciously planted
with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadow cast upon
the sward. A little farther falls the torrent, foaming down between
black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildings of a
rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this landscape soars
the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines; and
there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and then
cliffs, where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit, shooting
into ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar the double
peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the
Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy saddle,
and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts.
Sunlight pours between them into the ravine. The green and golden
forests now join from either side, and now recede, according as the
sinuous valley brings their lines together or disparts them. There is a
sound of cow-bells on the meadows; and the roar of the stream is dulled
or quickened as the gusts of this October wind sweep by or slacken.
_Italiam petimus!_

_Tangimus Italiam!_ Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gate Italian.
We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedral-cloister--white,
smoothly curving, well-proportioned logge, enclosing a green space, whence
soars the campanile to the stars. The moon had sunk, but her light still
silvered the mountains that stand at watch round Chiavenna; and the castle
rock was flat and black against that dreamy background. Jupiter, who
walked so lately for us on the long ridge of the Jacobshorn above our
pines, had now an ample space of sky over Lombardy to light his lamp in.
Why is it, we asked each other, as we smoked our pipes and strolled, my
friend and I;--why is it that Italian beauty does not leave the spirit so
untroubled as an Alpine scene? Why do we here desire the flower of some
emergent feeling to grow from the air, or from the soil, or from humanity
to greet us? This sense of want evoked by Southern beauty is perhaps the
antique mythopoeic yearning. But in our perplexed life it takes another
form, and seems the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever new,
unrealised, unreal, insatiable.


II.--OVER THE APENNINES.

At Parma we slept in the Albergo della Croce Bianca, which is more a
bric-à-brac shop than an inn; and slept but badly, for the good folk of
Parma twanged guitars and exercised their hoarse male voices all night
in the street below. We were glad when Christian called us, at 5 A.M.,
for an early start across the Apennines. This was the day of a right
Roman journey. In thirteen and a half hours, leaving Parma at 6, and
arriving in Sarzana at 7.30, we flung ourselves across the spine of
Italy, from the plains of Eridanus to the seashore of Etruscan Luna. I
had secured a carriage and extra post-horses the night before; therefore
we found no obstacles upon the road, but eager drivers, quick relays,
obsequious postmasters, change, speed, perpetual movement. The road
itself is a noble one, and nobly entertained in all things but
accommodation for travellers. At Berceto, near the summit of the pass,
we stopped just half an hour, to lunch off a mouldly hen and six eggs;
but that was all the halt we made.

As we drove out of Parma, striking across the plain to the _ghiara_ of
the Taro, the sun rose over the austere autumnal landscape, with its
withered vines and crimson haws. Christian, the mountaineer, who at home
had never seen the sun rise from a flat horizon, stooped from the box to
call attention to this daily recurring miracle, which on the plain of
Lombardy is no less wonderful than on a rolling sea. From the village of
Fornovo, where the Italian League was camped awaiting Charles VIII. upon
that memorable July morn in 1495, the road strikes suddenly aside, gains
a spur of the descending Apennines, and keeps this vantage till the
pass of La Cisa is reached. Many windings are occasioned by thus adhering
to arêtes, but the total result is a gradual ascent with free prospect
over plain and mountain. The Apennines, built up upon a smaller scale
than the Alps, perplexed in detail and entangled with cross sections and
convergent systems, lend themselves to this plan of carrying highroads
along their ridges instead of following the valley.

What is beautiful in the landscape of that northern water-shed is the
subtlety, delicacy, variety, and intricacy of the mountain outlines.
There is drawing wherever the eye falls. Each section of the vast
expanse is a picture of tossed crests and complicated undulations. And
over the whole sea of stationary billows, light is shed like an ethereal
raiment, with spare colour--blue and grey, and parsimonious green--in
the near foreground. The detail is somewhat dry and monotonous; for
these so finely moulded hills are made up of washed earth, the immemorial
wrecks of earlier mountain ranges. Brown villages, not unlike those of
Midland England, low houses built of stone and tiled with stone, and
square-towered churches, occur at rare intervals in cultivated hollows,
where there are fields and fruit trees. Water is nowhere visible except
in the wasteful river-beds. As we rise, we break into a wilder country,
forested with oak, where oxen and goats are browsing. The turf is starred
with lilac gentian and crocus bells, but sparely. Then comes the highest
village, Berceto, with keen Alpine air. After that, broad rolling downs
of yellowing grass and russet beech-scrub lead onward to the pass La Cisa.
The sense of breadth in composition is continually satisfied through this
ascent by the fine-drawn lines, faint tints, and immense air-spaces of
Italian landscape. Each little piece reminds one of England; but the
geographical scale is enormously more grandiose, and the effect of majesty
proportionately greater.

From La Cisa the road descends suddenly; for the southern escarpment of
the Apennines, as of the Alpine, barrier is pitched at a far steeper
angle than the northern. Yet there is no view of the sea. That is
excluded by the lower hills which hem the Magra. The upper valley is
beautiful, with verdant lawns and purple hill-sides breaking down into
thick chestnut woods, through which we wound at a rapid pace for nearly
an hour. The leaves were still green, mellowing to golden; but the fruit
was ripe and heavy, ready at all points to fall. In the still October air
the husks above our heads would loosen, and the brown nuts rustle through
the foliage, and with a dull short thud, like drops of thunder-rain,
break down upon the sod. At the foot of this rich forest, wedged in
between huge buttresses, we found Pontremoli, and changed our horses here
for the last time. It was Sunday, and the little town was alive with
country-folk; tall stalwart fellows wearing peacock's feathers in their
black slouched hats, and nut-brown maids.

From this point the valley of the Magra is exceeding rich with fruit
trees, vines, and olives. The tendrils of the vine are yellow now, and
in some places hued like generous wine; through their thick leaves the
sun shot crimson. In one cool garden, as the day grew dusk, I noticed
quince trees laden with pale fruit entangled with pomegranates--green
spheres and ruddy amid burnished leaves. By the roadside too were many
berries of bright hues; the glowing red of haws and hips, the amber of
the pyracanthus, the rose tints of the spindle-wood. These make autumn
even lovelier than spring. And then there was a wood of chestnuts
carpeted with pale pink ling, a place to dream of in the twilight. But
the main motive of this landscape was the indescribable Carrara range,
an island of pure form and shooting peaks, solid marble, crystalline in
shape and texture, faintly blue against the blue sky, from which they
were but scarce divided. These mountains close the valley to south-east,
and seem as though they belonged to another and more celestial region.

Soon the sunlight was gone, and moonrise came to close the day, as we
rolled onward to Sarzana, through arundo donax and vine-girdled olive
trees and villages, where contadini lounged upon the bridges. There was
a stream of sound in our ears, and in my brain a rhythmic dance of
beauties caught through the long-drawn glorious golden autumn-day.


III.--FOSDINOVO.

The hamlet and the castle of Fosdinovo stand upon a mountain-spur above
Sarzana, commanding the valley of the Magra and the plains of Luni. This
is an ancient fief of the Malaspina House, and still in the possession
of the Marquis of that name.

The road to Fosdinovo strikes across the level through an avenue of
plane trees, shedding their discoloured leaves. It then takes to the
open fields, bordered with tall reeds waving from the foss on either
hand, where grapes are hanging to the vines. The country-folk allow
their vines to climb into the olives, and these golden festoons are a
great ornament to the grey branches. The berries on the trees are still
quite green, and it is a good olive season. Leaving the main road, we
pass a villa of the Malaspini, shrouded in immense thickets of sweet bay
and ilex, forming a grove for the Nymphs or Pan. Here may you see just
such clean stems and lucid foliage as Gian Bellini painted, inch by
inch, in his Peter Martyr picture. The place is neglected now; the
semicircular seats of white Carrara marble are stained with green mosses,
the altars chipped, the fountains choked with bay leaves; and the rose
trees, escaped from what were once trim garden alleys, have gone wandering
a-riot into country hedges. There is no demarcation between the great
man's villa and the neighbouring farms. From this point the path rises,
and the barren hill-side is a-bloom with late-flowering myrtles. Why did
the Greeks consecrate these myrtle-rods to Death as well as Love? Electra
complained that her father's tomb had not received the honour of the
myrtle branch; and the Athenians wreathed their swords with myrtle in
memory of Harmodius. Thinking of these matters, I cannot but remember
lines of Greek, which have themselves the rectitude and elasticity of
myrtle wands:

    +kai prospesôn eklaus' erêmias tychôn
    spondas te lysas askon on pherô zenois
    espeisa tymbô d' amphethêka mursinas.+

As we approach Fosdinovo, the hills above us gain sublimity; the
prospect over plain and sea--the fields where Luna was, the widening bay
of Spezzia--grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still capable of
partial habitation, and now undergoing repair--the state in which a ruin
looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce
this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such
antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild
cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never
missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals,
where portcullises still threaten, of Fosdinovo to themselves. Over the
gate, and here and there on corbels, are carved the arms of Malaspina--a
barren thorn-tree, gnarled with the geometrical precision of heraldic
irony.

Leaning from the narrow windows of this castle, with the spacious view
to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the guest
of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the "Inferno."
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 moenia Lunæ_ flashed sunrise
from their battlements, but close beside the little hills which back the
the southern arm of the Spezzian gulf. At the extreme end of that
promontory, called Del Corvo, stood the 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
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 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 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.

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
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 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."


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 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 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 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
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.




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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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
coenobitical 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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; 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 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 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 60_l._ 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 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
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, 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.




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 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 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. 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
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
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; 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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' 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.


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 _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 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., determined to transform and dignify his native
village, and to call it after his own name. From that time forward
Cosignano has been known as Pienza.

Pius II. succeeded effectually in leaving his mark upon the town. And
this forms its main interest at the present time. 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 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
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 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 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; _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 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 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.




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 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 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?--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 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-establ