Europe in the Looking Glass (8 page)

ITALY IN AUGUST
is not the quaint hippety-hop country of middle-aged water colourists that she appears in the Spring. The landscape of the Tuscan and Umbrian Apennines assumes a grim, forbidding aspect. The afternoon, as we set out for Florence, was thick and sultry, with thunder in the air. The sun had ceased to shine; it glowed through a molten haze; a sort of dull, yellow fog of heat overspread the whole land. Light and shade seemed to disappear.

We turned off the main road at Poggibonsi, having first entered the town and upset a hand-cart in our efforts to find a way out of it. A few miles up a side road brought us to San Gimignano, with her thirteen perfectly plain and haphazardly oblique fortified towers silhouetted against the skyline like a series of bowled wickets. At Easter time, two years ago, wallflowers were sprouting from the crevices of the towers, and the fruit trees were in bloom in the gardens. Now the place seemed deserted. We looked at the frescoes at Benozzo Gozzoli and drank some soda water, then drove out by the opposite gate along an ill-defined track, in the hope of coming to Volterra.

Gradually the country began to lose its vegetation. The hills developed longer and more sweeping curves; at the same time, as though convulsed by some uncontrollable agony, their sides were thrown into fissures and tumours of the most fantastic description. At the foot of each straggled a little grass, burnt a dirty brown, which, as though seared to dust beneath the furnace of the heavens, soon gave place to hot, grey powdery earth. Occasionally a couple of white oxen might be seen ploughing
some precipitous slope, one of them standing two feet higher than the other, yet both harnessed to the same plough.

Volterra is situated on a rock, black and gloomy, looking out over long-drawn wastes of parched desolation. The site is of great age, Volterra having been the capital of the old kingdom of Etruria, and the last city to hold out against the Romans. She is now famed for her mines of alabaster, which is carved locally into battleships and motor-bicycles. As we zig-zagged up the face of the cliff, huge walls, remnants of the extinct Etruscan civilization, frowned their massive, uncemented blocks upon us.

We passed through the Porta dell’Arco, also Etruscan, a double gate thirty feet deep. At this point a small boy hopped on to the car, and we drove about the town under his direction, to the envy of his fellows.

We eventually came to a stop between the baptistery and the cathedral. This latter supports a dome designed, like that of the
duomo
at Florence, by Brunelleschi. As if to add to the sinister atmosphere of the place, the ancient fortress has been converted into a convict prison. Also, owing to a slow subsidence of their foundations, the majority of the churches are beginning to fall over the cliff. Our urchin informed us that he was one of the few certified guides in Volterra. When, after a long absence in the cathedral, I thought it advisable to make sure that no one was molesting the car, he remarked in a tone of offended indignation: ‘There are thieves in Florence, in Rome, in Milan; in Volterra, only gentlemen.’

It was dark by the time we reached Siena.

Siena reigns supreme among the hill towns. The architecturally fastidious may affect to dislike her black and white cathedral, with its Neapolitan wedding cake façade, that dominates the town like a great, humped zebra sitting on a rock. These same purists will, however, be lost in admiration of the primitives with which the Palazzo Publico is frescoed, many of which, especially the panoramic battlepieces, are unlike any to be found elsewhere. They are done in much the same style as those decorative memorials of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir and
the triumphs of Sir Garnet Wolseley in the Soudan, which still adorn the walls of old-fashioned public houses. Most attractive of all is the equestrian portrait, executed in 1328 by Simone Martini, of Guidoriccio da Folignano di Reggio attending the siege of Montemassi, a painting mentioned above as the nearest analogy – in two dimensions – to the statue of Can Grande at Verona. High up on the end wall of a large room there rides a solitary man upon a horse, in the midst of an oblong, dark blue landscape, relieved by fortresses, palisades, tents and attendant armies drawn and shaded in opaque, yellowish grey. The man himself is puffed with satisfaction, and the horse, prancing along beneath him, is draped from top to bottom in a yellow robe adorned with diagonal black lozenges.

In a neighbouring room is a series of life-size representations of the triumph and eventual funeral of Victor Emmanuel II, first king of Italy, one of whose many coats reposes in a glass case beneath. The sleek realism with which these illustrations of Italy’s unification have been depicted by the artist is enhanced by the fact that he has so contrived his compositions, that the brilliant patches of red upon the uniforms, the green grass, and the great airy spaces of white sky, convey without a moment’s hesitation an impression of the Italian national flag. The art to which the exploits of Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini, and the House of Savoy gave birth in the seventies and eighties still awaits recognition as one of the most widespread, if not meritorious, intellectual phenomena of the nineteenth century. There is not a town or a villa throughout the length and breadth of Italy where it is not represented. Here indeed is a novel and fruitful subject to which the ever-increasing body of artistic commentators may turn their attention. The style culminates in the frescoes in the Vatican, perpetuating the proclamation of the Infallibility of the Pope, in which the Holy Father is represented standing firmly on the red baize steps of his throne, while a ray from Heaven strikes his uplifted visage in the presence of an applauding crowd.

The great beauty of Siena is the main piazza, fashioned like one of those fan-shaped shells that are found on the sands, with the ribs marked out in stone. At its foot, adjoining the Palazzo Publico, rises the Mangia, a very tall, slender, brick tower, stone-machicolated, and supporting on its topmost platform a bell, beneath the gaping metal mouth of which it is possible to stand and survey the view. As though from an aeroplane, the whole of Tuscany stretches away on every side. In the foreground on its altar of rock, stands the cathedral, with its black ringed campanile, and its dome, a delicate white shell, now visible. Diverging from it lies the town, hemmed in by the encasing walls, with the streets lined in black shadow against the sunbaked brilliance of the rough tiled roofs.

It was at Siena, in the Spring of 1923, that we arrived to find the whole town
en fête
, the windows hung with arras – whatever arras is – and the entire population lining the narrow streets and converging on to the open space beneath the façade of the cathedral. As we watched, amid intense, yet restrained excitement, there materialised, ensconsed in a pre-war taxi, the embalmed hand of St Francis Xavier. The whole multitude fell on its knees to the ground as the vehicle approached. Seated bolt upright on the worn, black leather seat, a bishop in mitre and cope, inclined the shrivelled relic and its emerald ring from side to side, blessing the crowd. The arrival was followed by an impressive ceremony in the cathedral, so largely attended that little boys were to be seen seated among the large altar candlesticks. As a result the floor was boarded up to prevent it from damage. This year, however, it was uncovered and we could admire the superb drawing of the incised battle-pictures, with which it is emblazoned.

The ten frescoes, ordered by Pope Pius III to commemorate the papacy of his uncle, Pius II, with which the Piccolomini library leading from the cathedral is adorned, are too well known as the consummate achievement of Pinturicchio, to justify superfluous comment; the magnificence and freshness of their colour has lost nothing during four hundred years.
Equally familiar is the pulpit of Niccolo Pisano, with its groups of supporting pillars resting on the backs of lions marchant. A curious and less noticed feature of the building is the frieze of the heads of all the Popes, running on either side of the main aisle above the Gothic arches, among which, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning has remarked:

… … … Joan

And Borgia ’mid their fellows, you may greet,

A harlot and a devil.

Much has been written of this building and the works of art beneath its roof. More no doubt is to come. But there is one sentence which expresses to perfection that particular genius, a mixture of extreme splendour and mysterious solemnity, that characterizes the cathedral; a sentence which describes it as the supreme example of what ‘the unassisted genius of the Italians’ could produce ‘when influenced by medieval ideas’. In this rare combination lies the whole secret of the spiritual magnificence of early Italian art.

The day after our arrival was a Sunday and the streets of the town were paraded by bands representative of the various
contradi
in their medieval dresses of tights, doublets, and feathered ‘Caps of Maintenance’, who attracted attention by banners and drums. This curious survival of the parochial rivalries of the Middle Ages reaches its climax in the Palia, a racing fixture held twice yearly in the piazza, in which each
contrada
is represented by one or two riders, while the majority stand in the middle and beat one another with staves. In the afternoon we went to present a letter of introduction to Donna Issa Chigi at the Palazzo Chigi, a large building, the ground floor of which was converted into shops. She was away in the country, about two miles outside the town. We did not feel capable of following her.

The next day we set out in the afternoon for a motor drive. The heat was suffocating, and the sun was still invisible behind
the lowering haze, which seemed to have become intensified. The land was the colour of burning pewter, patched with deadened ochres. Now and then the green streaks of a vineyard or the effervescent grey of an olive grove would take shape on the side of an approaching hill. Our objective was Pienza. It was here that the famous scholar and agnostic, Aeneas Sylvius, Pius II, built himself a palace, and, in fact, created the whole town, which remains exactly as when it came into being by his command five hundred years ago. The palace is built round three sides of a court, the fourth of which is left open to a wonderful view and is still inhabited by the Piccolomini, of which family Pius II was a member. A contemporary
fresco-portrait
still looks from over the door of his bedroom at the golden-pillared bed in which he slept. The rooms are small, and surmounted by fifteenth-century ceilings that have preserved their original decorations, consisting of a large number of painted beams crossing and re-crossing. The wallpapers, more modern, are reminiscent of William Morris. One room was occupied by a delightful miniature theatre in the Greek style, painted white and gold, with a tiny gallery at the back.

Later, we continued to Montepulciano, a hill town in a state of dilapidation. The once imposing tomb of Bartelomeo Aragazzi, by Donatello, has been split up all over the cathedral. One of the friezes, now part of the altar, consists of cupids and wreaths in soft relief. Its fellow is in the National Gallery. The town hall has a tower which I insisted on ascending in order to view Lake Trasimene, which could not be seen for the increasing haze. The others sat below.

On the way home I began to develop a headache. We had not gone far before the silencer fell off, and David and I were obliged to lie full length on our backs, in three inches of stifling dust and filth, and tie it on again with our handkerchiefs. As it was red-hot, this was not easy.

Late that night, the storm which had been threatening for so long broke on the hills with a terrific vehemence. After emptying the heavens of water, it began to blow with such
force that the tiles rained off the roofs like dead leaves. The noise resembled a cinema orchestra accompanying a battle film. The orange trees in the courtyard fell against each other like a pile of drunken women; and Simon’s little octagonal boudoir (Gothic 1820) was deluged with flying earth, which landed in clouds on his bed and befouled the clean linen in his open trunk.

Next morning the air was cool and fresh. We lunched at Arezzo, where we were held up twenty minutes at a level crossing. In the afternoon we passed along the shores of Lake Trasimene, but any desire to bathe was dispelled by a soaking downpour of rain that had wetted us to the skin before we had time to put up the hood. During the delay we were able to pluck large bunches of black grapes, which we ate as we drove along. We arrived at Perugia for dinner.

PERUGIA IS THE STOCK HILL TOWN
. It is not as picturesque as most and has manufacturing suburbs, which produce chocolate and pencils. But in the middle of the last century there arrived upon the scene the celebrated M. Brufani, who proceeded to plant on top of the cliffs an English family hotel. This he adorned with portraits of Queen Victoria, Edward, Prince of Wales, and Mr Gladstone, and thus made famous and popular the least interesting of Tuscan and Umbrian cities. The earliest known painting of Raphael, the largest stained-glass window in the world, and a series of moon-faced and boneless frescoes in the Sala del Cambio by Perugino, whose figures always have an air of being ‘stuffed and done to a turn’, are the chief objects of interest.

The electric light of the city is of a dubious quality. In my experience it has gone out twice and left my whole hotel to the mercy of a box of nightlights. While only a year previously the grandmother of a friend of ours had been carried fainting to the roof of a building by an uncontrollable lift, where she remained for an hour and a half, having only a few months before been precipitated from the top to the bottom of one of London’s largest stores in another. Finally, even during the short eighteen hours of this present visit, our evening café was plunged into darkness for twenty minutes; and by the time that the lights had gone on again, the band had retired in despair.

As a tourist centre, this town seems to exercise an irresistible attraction for Americans. The visitors at Brufani’s, under the influence of a ‘family hotel’, were disarmingly chatty. I was writing some letters one morning before breakfast, when a
voice from out of an elaborately coiffured head, surmounted by a toque of pheasants’ breasts, broke on my peace with the words: ‘Say, young man, you look about the right age to inform me whether it was right here in Perugia that Shakespeare staged “The Taming of the Shrew”.’

And again, just as we were hurrying out one evening to an appointment for which we were already late, we were buttonholed in a swing-door by an animated professor, who was anxious to inform us that he had been given a year’s holiday, with travelling expenses paid, to go wherever he liked, and that though only four months of it were over, he wished he was nowhere so much as ‘back over in Chicago, setting down to a good meal of buckwheat fritters and clams’. We seconded his desire.

Fifteen miles away, clinging scab-like to the mountainside, is Assisi, also monopolized by the English-speaking peoples. There are at least to be seen here, however, the finest of Giotto’s frescoes, especially that of St Francis calling water from the rock, the companion to the famous picture of his preaching to the birds. For the rest, there is something disillusioning in struggling round a grated cloister in the company of a battalion of well-meaning but loud-voiced matrons and their daughters, to view the plantation of those emasculated bushes into which St Francis is supposed to have fallen, and eventually carrying away a little sprig of thornless rose-leaves encased in an illuminated sachet, for which five lire have been paid. One cannot help feeling that the money taken would be better devoted to the provision of soap for the monks, rather than the relief of a fictitious poor.

We did nothing in Perugia. David, to annoy, pretended that he liked the place and wished to see its sights. Simon and I, by subterfuges, prevented anything of the sort, and next morning insisted on starting at once. The drive was most confusing. We accidentally left the town on the Assisi road, and had to go right up the hill and into it again before finding our way out on the right side. Then, after about ten miles, we lost the main
road in the mountains. Every turning that we took ended, after leading us five miles along it, in a village perched on some impregnable promontory of rock. Then down a street no wider than herself, Diana, amid a crowd of gesticulating men, women and children, bleating goats, braying asses, patient oxen and fluttered fowls, would back slowly out again, turn round, and after an operatic converse with the population, retrace her tracks and endeavour to take the second turning after the two pine trees by the white house, as instructed. At length, however, we found a continuous mountain path, which pursued its way up the steepest peaks and down the most bottomless valleys with irresistible pertinacity. For some twenty miles we crept along this ledge, corkscrewing up between woods of stunted oaks with fresh, light-green leaves, until on the top of the range, we finally rejoined the telegraph wires.

Round the next corner, Orvieto came in sight. In the foreground of an enormous landscape, dominated in one distant corner of the horizon by the dome of Monte Fiascone, there reared the rocky shape of some gigantic Stilton cheese, with Orvieto spread over the top and the white Gothic spikes of her cathedral peaking querulously above a sea of roofs. The sky was overcast with low black clouds and the city on her platform stood out a mysterious dark blue from a panorama outlined in the delicate tints of smoke arising from a bonfire of dead leaves. We descended by a series of twenty-five hairpin bends into this tremendous valley and then curveted our way up the road cut in the cliff beneath the town, in time for a late lunch at the hotel. A gramophone from behind two glass folding-doors was playing some dance tunes of three years ago.

From the hotel we walked to the cathedral, which is not unlike that of Siena, save that the black and white stripes are carried out in stone instead of marble, and thereby lose much of their effectiveness. The three main doorways alternate with four large panels of primitive bas-reliefs illustrating the Creation and other Bible incidents. The doors themselves are flanked by twisted columns of marvellous intricacy and elaboration, ornamented
with Cosmati-work, a sort of gold and coloured inlay, that winds in and out of their circuitous flutings.

The interior is famous for the frescoes of Signorelli, which are said to have inspired those by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. In revolt from Perugino and his school, which included Raphael, Signorelli was the first artist to study anatomy; and his pupil, Michael Angelo, profited by his example. It was he, Signorelli, who first made his figures stand upon the ground. They grip the earth with a kind of prehensile intensity that tautens the muscles of their calves like knotted rope and leaves those of the spectator aching in sheer sympathy.

From Orvieto we motored to Viterbo, and without entering the town went straight to the Villa Lante to see the gardens, designed in their entirety by Giovanni di Bologna. The Italian garden, if not one of the greatest contributions made by that country to civilization, is one of the most purely pleasurable. That of the Villa Lante is small and not so obviously magnificent or such a feat of engineering as the fountains and cascaded terraces of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli. The whole design is subordinated to the course of a single stream, which flows down from a wooded hill behind. Even the house is divided into two square blocks in order to preserve the effect of symmetry. Right at the back, where the woods begin, the stream falls wildly over a small declivity of fern-grown rock, to find itself confined in a dark, still pool, heavily shaded beneath the myriad leaves of ancient, twisted ilexes. On either side stand the cracked and pillared façades of two old moss-grown pavilions. The stream then descends from terrace to terrace in a series of sloping troughs about twenty feet long and eighteen inches wide. The first of these is square and massive like an elongated sarcophagus with a broad brim curving slightly downwards at the edges. The second is shallow, and shaped in a succession of formalized scallop shells, not only at the sides but on the bottom, so that the water itself is cast into a regular design as it ripples down the moulded surface to the next terrace.

The stream is then received in a semi-circular basin, ruled by two recumbent Tritons, barely distinguishable beneath their coating of ferns and moss. From the balustrading above them expectorating lions assist the downward course of the waters. Between the two blocks of the villa they flow and come to rest in a large open square, laid out like a Dutch garden: but in place of beds is water, and in place of box hedges, stone. The climax is reached in the bronze group of four male figures upholding the Lante crest, a pile of mountains surmounted by a star, from the innumerable points of which, at all angles and from all planes, long thin jets of water rise into the air like the tail of a spun-glass bird, and form a rainbow against the sun. This square, the only part of the garden that is not heavily shaded by ilexes, is separated from the attendant town by a high, grey stone wall. In the middle of this, in line with the course of the water and the troughs, is an archway, through which can be discerned the main street, sloping downhill to an indistinct vista of mountains on a distant horizon. Being the summer, the Duke of Lante was in residence, and we were not allowed, as formerly, to examine the lower part of the garden.

Driving back to the town, itself famous for its ancient fountains, we went to the papal palace, a ruin with a beautiful raised loggia, Gothic arcaded, supported on the side of a hill by one huge pillar. Through the tracery could be discerned a view of a domed church, standing out on the other side of a valley against a sky already pink with evening light. It was here that the two-year election of Martin V, who started the schism and went to Avignon, took place. Public opinion was so incensed at the delay that the building was de-roofed and the cardinals left to debate in the rain. Hence the ruin. Simon was full of historical theories about it. Viterbo is a curious decayed town, very old in appearance, with twelfth-century balconies and staircases still clinging to the outside of the houses. We left at about six o’clock on the last stage of our journey to the Eternal City.

Simon had expressed a desire to see the dome of St Peter’s from afar, rising as it does, like some huge mauve bulb out of
the landscape. The road turns a corner and far below in the plain it suddenly appears. This is the view, this first glimpse of Rome amid her halo of the past, that has thrilled so many statesmen, writers, artists and pilgrims to ecstasy, the culminating moment in the ‘Grand Tour’ of other days. Late as it was, we still had hopes that despite the fifty miles, we should catch sight of the cupola before dark.

The absurd ups and downs of the northern Apennines were now finally behind us, and the country assumed a lonely and uninhabited aspect. The hills rose and fell in wild, sweeping curves; a vast plain appeared, edged with mountains in the very far distance; out of the foreground rose Soracte, like the shadowy crest of a wave arrested in mid-air; on the right, deep in the purple shadows of a great hollow, a lake glistened like a mirror of burnished silver, as the setting sun slanted its rays over the unrippled surface of the water. The road had been mended since David and I had traversed it in 1924 and 1923, and we looked eagerly for the corner round which St Peter’s should appear.

But it was not to be. At a small town named Roncigliano, climbing down the side of a steep cobbled street, a dense crowd barred our way: well-to-do shop-keepers; peasants come in from the country, the holsters of their arm-chair saddles bristling with bottles; and the inevitable brass bands in uniform. We waited half-an-hour expectantly, amused rather than annoyed at the delay. Suddenly, with no preliminary warning, there was a clatter, a roar from the crowd, and two men in faded jockey’s colours rode full gallop up the cobbles on two small, stockily-built chestnut horses. This, however, was only a preliminary heat. The winner was led to one side and covered by a horse-rug embroidered with a large coronet. We hurried on before it could happen again.

We had not gone ten miles further when Diana, emitting a series of agonised coughs, stopped dead in her tracks. With sickening apprehension for the magneto, we leapt out, to discover that she had run out of petrol. We filled the tank,
but still she refused to move. It was now almost dark and the road was deserted. With great resolution, Simon and I stopped the first car that came along. In the back sat a fat man in a straw hat and bow tie, accompanied by an extremely fat woman in a pink muslin
decolleté
, against whose swarthy skin Roman pearl earrings and a Roman pearl necklace glistened in that peculiarly rotund manner in which Roman pearls glisten against swarthy skin. The man spoke English. He requested me to sit in front by the chauffeur. The car was a cheap little Fiat limousine, upholstered in fancy embroideries and sporting a spray of artificial grass from a silvered icecream horn.

We had not gone four miles before David caught us up. Diana was restored, having been pushed to the top of the nearest hill. She had refused to move owing to an air-lock, caused by David’s having accelerated on an empty tank. With effusive thanks and many apologies, I changed cars once more. Immediately afterwards we had a puncture; and it was nine o’clock before we arrived outside the Hotel de Russie, just off the Piazza del Popolo. We dined in the garden amidst electric fairy lights buried in beds of begonias, and dangling like fruit in a protestant Heaven from two poplars and a giant acacia. After a walk up the Corso, we went to bed.