Cremona

Leaving Mantua, Hutton took the road to Cremona. On the way to that "beautiful and harmonious city," he stopped at the unique  shrine of S. Maria delle Grazie.

 

About three and a half miles from Mantua stands one of the most astonishing pilgrimage churches in all Italy. S. Maria delle Grazie was first built in 1399 by Francesco Gonzaga, who wished to render thanks to the Madonna for having freed the city of Mantua from the plague…. In 1419 the place was enlarged and became one of the most important religious houses in Lombardy. The whole place is a shrine of the Madonna, full of every sort of votive offering, from cannon balls that fell harmless into Mantua in the famous siege of 1322…to piles of crutches, shoes, wax arms, and legs, silver hearts and the usual litter of a shrine. More amazing is it that  not so much the worshipped as the worshipper is represented here in effigy. For, on coming into the church, you find yourself in an avenue of figures, life-size, and dressed in every sort of costume, in niches along the walls. These are they whom the Madonna has heard and answered here in the Church of the Graces. Among these favored petitioners we find figures of Pope Pius II.,  the Emperor Charles V, and the pillager of Rome, the Constable Bourbon, whom Cellini swears he shot. Beneath each figure the story of his petition is told in rude verse, evidently of local manufacture. Here, amid all this amazement, lie the princes of the House of Gonzaga: and among them the pattern of courtiers, Baldassare Castiglione, the author of Il Cortigiano, which in those happier days was as eagerly read in the best and most cultured society throughout Europe as the French novel is on the Continent, or the Daily Mail newspaper in England to-day. For the tomb of this man, who was literally the first gentleman in Europe, Bembo composed this epitaph, for the body of Castiglione had been brought at his own desire all the way from Toledo, where he died, in order that it might be laid here on the tomb of his young wife.[220]

 

Non ego nunc vivo, quae in ambiguo reliquit, utrum

Corpore namquae  tuo fate meum abstulerunt;

Sed vitam, tumulo cum tecum condar in isto,

Jungenturque tuis ossibus ossa mea. ***

 

I can never make up my mind which is the most beautiful city in Lombardy, whether it be Bergamo, Mantua or Cremona, but I know that I love Cremona best. Picture to yourself a city like a pale rose growing in the midst of the great green plain, that, when the mulberry flowers, is all a sea of white blossom. You enter this city and find it silent, but not forlorn, smiling through the grass grown in its beautiful great Piazza and the wide streets which the sun fills with gold; the great palaces are often deserted, the tall and beautiful towers that here and there rise to watch the plain are crumbling and make no sign, for Cremona is very old, the oldest Roman town in all the plain, and, in truth, here in Cisalpine Gaul she seems in her nobility like a stranger, some old centurion still on guard amid the dykes and the endless ways, in the service of the Senate and the Roman people.

 

   *** Note: Below is a rough translation from Google.

 

I am not living now, which has left me in doubt whether

For with your body they took away my destiny;

But life, I will build a grave with you in this,

And my bones shall be joined to your bones.

 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 220-221.

 

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Mantua and Isabella d'Este

  

Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to Mantua, "forlorn upon her lakes," but I would just single out his comments on Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, the famed Renaissance art patron and collector.

 

By far the largest and by far the most interesting building in the Piazza is the vast Reggia or Palazzo Ducale, which stretches away from here to the Lago Superiore….The façade, with its portal, is in the Gothic style, but within we find the Renaissance, in the splendid apartments of Isabella d’ Este, which have largely escaped the vandalism of the Austrians… We see what the extraordinary barbarism of these foreigners achieved almost at once on entering the Reggia. For there on the ground-floor only the so-called Scalcheria remains, with its pagan hunting scenes and grotesques by Giulio Romano, of all the Appartamento della Grotta which that extraordinary craftsman decorated for Isabella. Here, ‘in the fair Cortile della Grotta, with its slender marble columns and pavement of majolica tiles, each with a separate device and meaning,” as Bembo described it to the Duchess of Urbino, Isabella had gathered all her treasures of sculpture and painting. Here were the grisailles of Mantegna, as well as his Parnassus, one of the glories of the Louvre to-day. Here were the allegories of Correggio, the works of Costa, the old court painter, a Holy Family of Giovanni Bellini, a Romance by Dosso Dossi, and some wonderful Titians, more than one Holy Family and some marvellous portraits. Here were the antique sculptures that Isabella had collected with so much pains, and the putto which Michelangelo had carved and Cesare Borgia had sent her. Nor was this all. For in the Grotta Isabella had placed the alabaster organ which Castiglione had sent her from Rome, cases of Murano glass chosen by Leonardo from the collection of Lorenzo de Medici, mirrors of crystal, cabinets of porphyry and lapis lazuli, and lutes inlaid with ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl, and viols by Lorenzo da Pavia.

 

Here too, was her library, the precious manuscripts we shall never see, Aldines tall and clean and new from the press, French and Spanish romances, an illuminated Boccaccio, the very book of verses Petrarch had left behind him.

From the Scalcheria one is led up a great seventeenth century staircase to the upper floor, and so through the vast series of state apartments. How mysteriously lovely they are in the falling light of late afternoon! One feels like a ghost among ghosts, and expects at every moment the clouded mirrors to give up some vision of the beauty they have reflected and cannot altogether have lost. … And if this is so in all these great shadowy rooms with their fading mirrors, their emptiness and silence, it is a feeling almost impossible to describe that assails one in the Appartamento del Paradiso, those four little rooms that were Isabella’s own, with their early Renaissance decoration, the work of her time, still fit to be seen. How graceful they are, and since she loved them and spoke of them so much and always with a smile, how lovely they appear? They were her home, the most present thing and perhaps the dearest in all that long and vital existence…. How often did she stand, I wonder, in that inner room looking over the garden and the lake, gay enough then, so hopeless now, and waiting there perhaps for the cool evening, question herself of this and of that and of her thoughts about it all. They are all gone into that deep pool where she watched one evening when the moon shone, the petals of her lilies heavy with perfume, falling and sinking one by one, till one of her dwarfs called her to play, and she passed through the Hall of the Mirrors to watch the masques in the great room where hung Mantegna’s cartoons for the triumph of Julius Caesar, and to greet her guests. But later, as we see, that assurance was eclipsed, and in another room we read the very secret of the indecision of her heart graven everywhere, “Forse che Si, Forse che No,” many times. ***

 

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*** Maybe Yes, Maybe No.   

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 213-215.

From Bergamo to Brescia

  

Edward Hutton provided an almost innumerable list of the pictures to be found in Bergamo and Brescia but the scenery surrounding these hill towns pleased him most.

Accademia Carrara: Bergamo

The Accademia Carrara of Bergamo, just outside the Porta Santa Caterina, consists of three collections, one of which is very famous. These three collections are the Galleria Carrara, the Galleria Luchis and the Galleria Morelli…. [176]

 

These two collections, the Carrara and Luchis galleries, would be enough to bring renown to any city half as lovely as Bergamo. But, as it happens, they are but the smaller part of her dowry. In the year 1891, the great art critic and connoisseur, Giovanni Morelli, died at Milan, and bequeathed his magnificent collection of pictures to his native city. These three collections, well arranged by the Director Signor Frizzoni, were, till the year 1911, the delight of every traveller who entered Bergamo. In that year a rearrangement of the three collections was entered upon, and the gallery was closed for a time. What the new arrangement may be  we cannot say, but it is to be hoped that the Morelli collection will still be shown as a thing apart; for it is fully characteristic of the great critic and of his triumphs of connoisseurship….[178]

 

When all is said, however, the true delight of Bergamo will always be found in Bergamo herself: in her winding steep streets, her narrow ways, her windy piazzas, her shady ramparts and marvellous views of blue far-away mountains, so often covered with snow, and of the valleys and the plain, green and silver and gold, and the glory of the setting sun. [182]

There is no more delightful and consoling road in all North Italy, south of the mountains, than that which leads at last from Bergamo to Brescia. This book does not propose to deal with the mountains, the Bergamesque and Brescian Alps, for they deserve and shall have a book to themselves; therefore I say nothing of such places as Alzano and its Lottos; it is the plain with which we are concerned, the true Cisalpine Gaul and the true Lombardy, and I know not where in all that vast country you will better the thirty miles that lie between Bergamo and Brescia. For the way is by no means a monotony of flatness, but is broken by low hills and downs, and little passes and valleys about the feet of the mountains, and there, on the hill-tops or beside the rivers, stands many a fair town worthy of remembrance, to say nothing of the castles, shrines and churches which are often worthy of Tuscany, and of Tuscany at its best. And this is especially the reward of him who will go slowly, loitering by the way….  [183]

The city of Brescia, which has thus known so many agonies, is a quiet little place, crouched like a mouse, hid under its Castello at the foot of the great hills. and, if we except the Roman ruins, and the old cathedral and the Broletto, the town for us is really just a delightful picture gallery, where one wanders at random from church to church in search of the painters of the native school of painting. [187]

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 176-187.

Bergamo

  

 

 

 

Edward Hutton believed that there was nothing in Lombardy "more beautiful and lovely" than Bergamo. 

 

There is a corner of Italy—let us confess it, it is only a corner—where that accursed disease of Industrialism, the cancer that is eating away our virility, has unfortunately taken root: that corner I seemed to leave behind me at Monza. At least, I know I was altogether in another country when one autumn evening I came to the beautiful city of Bergamo, on the hills, over against the mountains, upon which the snow was lying far away, very pure and white; against which, in her girdle of ancient walls, the city stood up lofty and splendid, her towers all shining in the setting sun.

 

Bergamo, as we know it, consists of two separate parts which might seem to have nothing in common: there is the Citta Bassa, anciently the Borgo, in the illimitable plain at the foot of the hills, an almost completely modern town, and quite separate from it the true Bergamo, the old Etruscan, Gaulish, Roman and Italian city, on the hill-top, the Citta Alta, as beautiful a place as is to be found in all Lombardy, and almost completely of the Middle Age and the Renaissance….Apart from these churches, the Citta Bassa has little interest, and is indeed a rather miserable place…

 

It is far different with the Citta Alta. There everything is old and beautiful, full of honour, virility, and endurance. Unsuited to the modern restlessness and hurry, unapproachable by the railway, the true Bergamo still dreams on her fair hill-top of all we in our foolishness have forgotten, and, deserted by the Gadarene herd, who long since have rushed down her steep hillside into the mire of the plain, she still keeps her dreams about her, content to wait every even the curfew from the Torre Comunale, and to ask for the protection of her two patrons, S. Alessandro and the Blessed Virgin, at sunset

I have said enough to tell the traveller that something unique and lovely awaits him in Bergamo, but no amount of description can hope to convince him of all the virile beauty of the place, the magical beauty of the Piazza Maggiore to which all these steep, narrow, winding ways lined with great palaces, seem to lead, the picturesque and virile beauty of the grand old tower that rises over it, the charm of the Broletto built upon arches, as at Como, through which one has glimpses of the splendour beyond. Here in Bergamo there is nothing frowning, miserable, or unhappy; she is gay and yet stately, bright, noble and sure of herself. There is nothing in all Lombardy better and lovelier than she. …

She gives you herself utterly at that moment when, emerging from the narrow ways between the tall, rugged houses, you come into the Piazza Maggiore, paved with brick, with a ruined fountain in the midst, and on one side the stateliness and beauty of the Broletto on its arcade of columns, on the other the Palazzo della Ragione, which Scamozzi left unfinished. Through the arches of the Broletto you catch glimpses of the magnificent portal of S. Maria Maggiore and the façade of the Capella Colleoni; but it is never by this way I prefer to approach these wonders, but by a devious way from the east past the Palazzo dell’ Ateneo, with its early Renaissance façade and flights of steps, so that what I see first may be the apse of S. Maria with its lovely semicircular open arcade, its flight after flight of roof and gallery and tower up to the pointed steeple which crowns the whole.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 169-172. 

Christmas in Dolcedorme

 Edward Hutton interrupted his tour of Umbria to spend the winter in Rome. But he did take time to visit Ulisse, his young traveling  companion, in the boy's hometown of Dolcedorme where they attending the Christmas Midnight Mass. Hutton's charming account is a unique historical document.

 

Ah! That Midnight Mass! … I am not likely to forget it. I had gone with Ulisse, who guided me through the dark and narrow ways, up to the Collegiata, enthroned above the city, under those enormous and precipitous rocks, like giant’s teeth, which distinguish Dolcedorme.

 

It is a large church, rebuilt after an earthquake, in the seventeenth century; but large and spacious though it was, it was full. And not only of the faithful, not only of the women and the poveri. The whole city seemed to be there when the bell sounded for the third time.

 

In their own place sat the women, young and old, devout enough, and for the most part already on their knees. Behind and about, against the pillars and side-altars, stood the men, a vast crowd. And the noise! The whole church was filled with it, and the air was already stifling.

 

Over all the tumult came at last the organ. In the cora they began to sing Te Deum. It was the end of Matins. Mass was about to begin.

 

Still the people came in under the heavy leather curtains. The church was packed. More candles were lighted: more music poured from the organ. Finally, in procession, behind the great Byzantine cross, came Sua Ecclenzia—the whole concourse bent like a field of corn under a wind—blessing as he came. He was to sing Mass. Over the Crucifix on the high altar his single candle shone.

 

Ulisse and I stood before a pillar on the Epistle side, half-way down the great nave. Mass began. Domine dixit ad me … Kyrie eleison … Christie eleison … Kyrie eleison.

 

Monsignor intoned the Gloria in excelsis. The organ burst out into a great peal of music, the bells rang, everyone sang or whistled. …Most whistled.

 

Whistled!

 

Not with the lips only as one whistles an air, but with the fingers in the mouth to make a noise, as much noise as possible. Still others had brought whistles with them, and were using them with all their might. 

 

I was astonished. I was scandalized. Surely my ears deceived me. It was so hot and the odour.…

 

But no, the whistling continued. There was Ulisse with both his fists at his mouth, whistling for all he was worth.

 

Ma come! Was this a theatre or a church? Was this some piece being hooted off the stage or the first Mass of Christmas? I turned to Ulisse.

 

“Ma si, signore, di qua e di la si fischia.”

 

“They’re whistling all over the place!” But why?

 

There was a little silence; the Gloria had finished itself.

 

Surely Monsignor would not continue? But no, the Mass proceeded as usual. The great Epistle proclaimed Him qui dedit semetipsium pro nobis, ut nos redimeret ab omni iniquitate….

 

The Gospel, known from childhood, unfolded itself from the edict of Caesar Augustus to the peace born on earth to men of good will.

 

Slowly we came to the Christmas Preface, the Christmas Sanctus, sung here to a strange dancing measure as in the picture of Botticelli. I had forgotten the unseemly interruption at the Gloria. I had forgotten everything.…

 

There it was again! Suddenly, at the Elevation! But worse than before, more exulting, more joyous, more insolently enthusiastic and rejoicing. It was beyond all possible bounds. In England….

 

“But what is it then?” I leant to Ulisse.

 

“Ma signore, it is the shepherds! E un pio ricordo dei suoni pastorali quando necque nostro Signore.” “A pious remembrance of the shepherds’ music when Our Lord was born.” But I… I, too, would whistle. I … I, too, whistled—only the sounds would not come. What could be the matter with my throat?

 

“Peccato!” whispered Ulisse, that one cannot hear also the voice of the ox and the ass.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 124-125.

Monza: The Iron Crown

   

 

 

 

 

After leaving Pavia, Edward Hutton travelled to Monza to view its relics, the most famous of which was the "Iron Crown of Lombardy," originally conferred on Queen Theodolinda, the Apostle to the Lombards, by Pope Gregory I around the year 600.

Some ten miles to the north of Milan, still in the plain but within sight of the hills, stands Monza, which in its immortal, its beautiful relics, its thirteenth century Broletto, recalls for us the earliest Lombardy, for it was here from the eleventh century, in the first city within the Italian border, that the emperors-elect were crowned kings with the “iron crown of Lombardy,” still holy and still preserved over the high altar of the Duomo, before they set out on that long march to Rome, there to receive the Imperial title and consecration of the Pope. …

Standing on both banks of the Lambro, … Monza is a fair city. If the ancients knew her not, for she is a city of the Fall, to the men of the Middle Age she was as famous as any town in Italy, and the great church which Theodolinda, the Apostle of the Lombards, built beside her own palace remained through all its rebuildings the one true coronation church that has ever been erected south of the alps. …

In the chapel to the left of the choir in a large monstrance in the shape of a cross is preserved the holy and famous Iron Crown of Lombardy, which it is said Gregory the Great gave to Theodolinda. It consists of an inner circlet of iron beaten out of one of the nails of the Cross: this precious relic is encased in a circle of gold and jewels. It is one of the most sacred and priceless treasures—even from a merely historical point of view—to be found in Italy, for it has circled the brows of Theodolinda, of Charlemagne, of Frederick Barbarossa, of Charles V, and of Napoleon I. In itself it seems to bind Europe indissolubly into one; and if ever the Empire be re-erected it is with this majestic and holy symbol we shall crown our Emperor. Not with it has the modern Italian kingdom been consecrated, a newer and a more brittle ring of gold suffices it. This symbol of iron, as old and as indestructible as Europe, awaits, let us believe it, him who shall make us one. 

 

And here in this holy place under the  crown lies she who brought light and strength to her kingdom, the Apostle of the Lombards, Queen Theodolinda, the friend of Gregory. Her tomb, a sarcophagus resting upon four pillars of marble, is a work of the fourteenth century, and the four frescoes of scenes from her life are from the fifteenth, restored in our own day. More interesting are her gifts to the church—the few that remain—in the treasury: a hen with seven chickens of silver-gilt, her crown and comb of gold filigree and fan of painted leather, and best of all, the “precious Gospel book” and cross which Gregory gave her when her son was baptized; it was his last gift before his death.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 162-.

Pavia: Treasures

 

 

 

 

Two of the treasures that Edward Hutton saw in Pavia were its famed University, and the tomb of Saint Augustine. 

From the cathedral one proceeds up the Corso to the Piazza d’Italia and the University, which it is said Charlemagne founded in 774. However that may be, the University of Pavia owes almost everything to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who endowed it with many privileges in 1390 and is regarded as its founder. Nevertheless, Pavia was able to boast of learning and philosophy before the Visconti were thought of. Is not Boethius her son, and did he not write here in his captivity the De Consolazione Philosophiae that our King Alfred loved? And was not Lanfranc, Norman William’s Archbishop of Canterbury, born here, and did he not make the legal and philosophical school of Pavia famous through all Europe? To Giovanni Visconti we owe, however, the presence here of Petrarch, who was so often his guest; and the Visconti foundation can at least boast of a name famous through the world, for in 1447 Christopher Columbus was at the University.*** …

The great treasure of Pavia, however, is to be found in that church close to the Castello which is called S. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, which with its magnificent west front and polygonal tower is itself a wonder, but is altogether glorious because it is the casquet—as far as the body of the church goes a poor one—of one of the five great shrines of Italy—that of S. Augustine—comparable in splendour with those of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio in Milan, of S. Domenico at Bologna, of S. Donato at Arezzo, and of Our Lady in Or S. Michele at Florence…. 

 

The body of S. Augustine, with the fall of the Roman Empire, was brought in 430 from Hippo in the province of Africa, then in the hands of the Vandals, to Cagliari in Sardinia… where it remained for more than two centuries, till indeed Sardinia was overrun by the Saracens… Then the great Liutprand, King of the Lombards, bought the body of the infidel for 60,000 golden crowns. And in 710 had it borne to his church of S. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia…

In appearance the shrine is a vast oblong tomb covered by a canopy borne by square piers. The whole is of marble and in every part is elaborately carved and niched and set above with statues and reliefs. On the top of the tomb, beneath the gabled canopy, the marble effigy of the Saint lies in a linen pall upheld by angels….it is in itself a monument, an everlasting witness to the nobility of the age which produced, and to the men who desired and loved such a work as this.

 

It is easy to measure the enormous abyss which separates our time from theirs, and us from them, when we realise that nowhere in the world could such a work as this  be carried out today; but then we no longer hold the Christian philosophy and have so far ceased to be European. It is little wonder, then, that when we would build a monument we erect such a vulgarity as the Victoria Memorial, or such a heavy ineptitude as the Admiralty Arch at Charing Cross, and this though no saint that has ever existed is capable of exciting in us the love and reverence we had for Queen Victoria. Nor are we alone in this; industrialism has set its loathsome seal upon all our hearts, that without love or speech or sight or hearing we may pass gloomily through a gloomy and unhappy world without hope and without beauty.

 

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*** A rare mistake. Columbus was born in 1451 and said he went to sea at the age of 14.

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 157-161.