Vesuvius

 For Edward Hutton Mt. Vesuvius was best viewed from afar.

 

If upon the west of Naples lies the wonder of the Phlegraean fields in the paradise of the bay of Pozzuoli, to the east there stands a marvel at once more astonishing and not less beautiful—I mean the great burning mountain of Vesuvius, with the exception of Etna, the greatest of the active volcanoes in Europe. Vesuvius, indeed, fills the mind and the imagination in Naples of native and stranger alike; it dominates and gives its character to the whole of this corner of Campania, and there is no moment of the day or night but men lift their eyes to it in fear or wonder. Goethe has spoken of it as “a peak of hell rising out of paradise”, but at least we must admit that it is the most beautiful thing therein, the one thing of which we can never have enough, whose image remains always in our minds, and lends to this great bay its unique interest, and more than half its strange beauty. Without Vesuvius, Naples—the bay of Naples—would lose its identity, would become almost as any other gulf upon the Tyrrhene Sea, and the proverb which sums up the absolutely unique splendour of this place would lose all its meaning, and appear as a mere empty boast signifying nothing but vanity.

 

This being so, to visit Vesuvius, to ascend the cone, and gaze down into the restless crater, which continually delights and threatens Naples and all her villages with beauty and terror, would seem to be encumbent upon the traveller, and yet I think no one has ever made that journey without weariness and some disappointment. Vesuvius is best appreciated from afar, from Naples itself, from the forum of Pompeii, or the baths of Queen Giovanna at Sorrento. Thence it appears of so marvellous and strange a beauty, a great purple smoking pyramid in the sun, breathing fire in the darkness, exquisite at all times alike in form and colour, that nothing else in Europe, I think, is to be compared with it, for nothing else that we know is at once so beautiful and so evil, so suggestive of those half-realized forces latent within the body of the earth, which we have always regarded as malign, whose action is always catastrophic and tragical for us and our world,  the expression of the hatred and the ill-will of the spirit of evil, of chaos, towards God, and the beauty He has made for His and our delight. To visit Vesuvius, as one did till yesterday, and after driving for hours through the dingiest suburbs of Naples, through the dreariest of the old lava fields, to arrive at the foot of the funicular railway, which took one within a few hundred feet of the top, was to lose all one’s sense of wonder, in the mere vulgarity of the surroundings, the crowd of touts and tourists, the insatiable guides, hawkers, singers, beggars, and general rascaldom, which has always infested this mountain, and for all the ease of the autostrada it is not much less tiring today.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp. 171-2. 

Death of Cicero

After his stay in Naples, Edward Hutton toured the Campania. He visited ancient Sessa Aurunca and nearby Formia, the site of the villa of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman lawyer, writer, and orator. Here is his account of the tragic death of that famous man.

   

There used to be places in the world as it were enchanted: one of these was Sessa Aurunca. Sessa remained to us from the Golden Age and perhaps in the Golden Age all Italy was as spellbound. The little town lay in a groin of antique lava, a combe rather, of the old volcano Roccamonfina, and was the ancient centre of the Aurunci who have left their name to the half ruined but still serviceable Roman bridge, whose majestic ivy-clad arches I used so often to visit.

 

And what a scene was there! The Gulf of Gaeta lay before one, not to be outdone for beauty. The coast curved like a sickle and Gaeta on its great headland, visionary, seemingly immaterial, half divined, closed the view westward. There in the inmost curve of the coast lay Formia where from his villa Cicero was used so often to write to Atticus. Southwood Monte Massico closed the view caressed by the bluest of seas. Somewhere there the Liris wandered. One seemed to be living in a picture by Claude, in a landscape serene and ideal like something in a dream. Here were the gracious trees, the broken fountain, the lonely stone-pine on the hillside. And there surely under the cypress a goatherd watched his sparse flock—I seemed to hear the faint notes of his pipe, while all the earth lay Danae to the sun….

 

Where has it gone? The broad black tarmac motor road has blotted out the dust and the stones of the Via Appia, the exhaust of the automobiles have silenced my shepherd’s pipe, the ruins of the Romans, rather tidied up, remain amid the ruins of my vision. …

 

I left Minturno in the evening light which glorified the exquisite classic landscape through which I passed almost in a dream, to Formia. There to find my friend and to sleep for I had had a long day, and, though the distance was not great, the days when I used to tramp all over Italy and scarcely feel tired were now long ago.  So Formia it was;  and after dinner I went to bed and as one will when weary began to think over the day, and then of Cicero and his villa here at Formia and his letters to Atticus and of the horrible end that came of it all in this very place.

 

It was Petrarch who loved and reproached him in one of those strange letters he wrote to Cicero’s Shade—it was Petrarch who asked him: “Why did you entangle yourself in so much contention, in such utterly profitless quarrels? Why did you forsake the leisure more suited to your age, your profession and your station in life? What madness drove you to assail Antony?”

 

Oh, have we not all asked him that?

 

But when he delivered those Philippics he was at the height of his glory, overwhelmed by rapturous applause, the very hero of the scene. … But those with whom he was dealing—did he not divine, did he not know, they were all selfish, cold-hearted place-seekers, politicians eager only to be in with the victor whoever and whatever he might be? And so when the fatal news arrived of the union of Lepidus with Antony, the defection of Octavianus, who was actually marching on Rome itself, it was evident that all was lost. The usurpers were triumphant, and the lists of the proscribed—well, they could not but include the name of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

 

Warned of his danger at his Tusculan villa, he set out for the coast and embarked at Antium, but like Marius was driven by weather to land and make his way to Formiae, where sick in body and mind he sought his beloved villa, resolved no longer to fly from his fate. “Let me die in the country I have so often saved.” But as Antony’s murderers approached, his attendants forced him into a litter and hurried him through the woods towards the shore. They were overtaken and prepared to defend their master with their lives. But the old man bade them set down the litter and, holding his chin with his left hand as his wont was, he looked steadily on his murderers being as he was all squalid and unshorn; his countenance wasted with care; and stretching out of the litter he called upon his murderers to strike.

 

They cut off his head and his hands, which had written the Philippics, and bore them to Rome, where by the orders of Antony they were nailed to the Rostra after Fulvia, Antony’s wife, had thrust a hairpin through the tongue.

 

Cicero was in his sixty-fourth year. No one, not even those who have loved him best, can altogether defend the weakness of his character, inconsistent and irresolute as it was. But his death was courageous…and his death pays for all the weaknesses of his life. He was a good man. Besides, perhaps we owe to him and to Vergil the survival of Latin culture and civilization.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 137-144. 

Port of Naples

  

Edward Hutton found the port of Naples the most interesting part of the city.

 

On coming out of the Castel Nuovo I like to stroll down to the Porto, the real centre of Naples, and wander along the quays, crowded with shipping, the view dusky with masts, quite round the Porto Mercantile, built first in 1302 by Charles II of Anjou, as far as the Villa del Popolo and the Porta del Carmine. Nothing in Naples is more interesting than the life of the harbour, and no monument in the strait ways of the city more beautiful than these living ships moving and sighing against the quays, as though longing for the open sea. And if life will not content one, there is to the south beyond the Castel Nuovo and the Porto Militaire the old Arsenale di Marina and the Darsena erected and contrived in 1577 by the Viceroy Don Inigo de Mendoza; there is the Faro, founded in the fourteenth century at the end of the Molo Angioino; and there is the Porto Piccolo, the representative perhaps of the Greek harbour of Neapolis; while at the east end of the Port stands the Castel del Carmine, which Ferdinand I of Aragon built in 1484, which was seized by Masaniello when he led the revolt of the people in 1647, and which now has come to nothing—a military bakehouse.

 

Close by the Castello is the Porta del Carmine, through which one re-enters the city and comes into perhaps the most famous of all the piazzas of Naples, the Piazza del Mercato, … From the Castel del Carmine and the famous piazza one passes by the picturesque and characteristic  Strada di Lavinaio or the broad Corso Garibaldi to the Castel Capuano, La Vacaria and the great Porta Capuano…. not only the finest gate in Naples, but being as it is the entry to the oldest and most crowded  part of the city, affords such a spectacle of the life of the people as is not to be matched. The whole street within and without the great and beautiful gate, together with the Via dei Tribunale, which leads to it is a continual fair and pandemonium of noise; jostling carts, barrows, caravans of mules, herds of goats, ox wagons and innumerable companies of peasants  throng in and out; the fruiterers, the sellers of shell-fish and nauseous coloured sweet drinks, of pottery, of images and rosaries, of every kind and sort of sweetmeats and biscuits, of chestnuts and the unknowable delicacies of the people, drive a furious trade accompanied by a universal yelling and gesticulation, that in the dust and blazing sun make certainly one of the most amazing spectacles the city affords. To all of which today are added the noise and chaos of every kind of motor-car.

 

The beautiful Gate was built in the end of the fifteenth century by Giuliano da Maiano for Ferdinand I of Aragon, whose arms still adorn it. By this way Charles V entered the city in 1535 when it was splendidly decorated with statues by Giovanni da Nola. Towering over it is the cupola of the Florentine church of Santa Caterina a Formello

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 34-35.

Lorenzo Lotto: Crucifixion

Today, we interrupt our posts on Edward Hutton's visit to Naples and the Campania to put up a post from his visit to Monte san Giusto and its famed painting of the Crucifixion by Lorenzo Lotto.  

"Beyond Pausula, by a rough and hilly road across the Cremone valley, we come to the little walled town of Monte San Giusto, and there in the church of S. Maria is a Crucifixion by Lotto, painted in 1531." (227)

He did not describe the painting and I wonder if he actually saw this magnificent work of the Venetian master. The small church of S. Maria in Telusiano is hard to find and the painting would have been difficult to see before the invention of coin-operated lighting. A few years ago my wife and I visited Monte San Giusto to see the painting. Here is my account.

Italian Renaissance master Lorenzo Lotto was born in Venice around 1480 but spent most of his long career working in provincial towns. Perhaps this is why he is not as well known as Giorgione and Titian, both of whom were born outside of Venice but did most of their work in the great city

Lotto’s most powerful and dramatic work was a Crucifixion that still stands in its original site in the little church of Santa Maria in Telusiano in the small, out of the way, hill town of Monte San Giusto, located in that part of Italy known as the Marche. The town is not too far from Loreto, the religious center where Lotto eventually spent the last years of his life.

Lotto’s Crucifixion shows that he could hold his own with the greatest of Renaissance masters. My wife and I saw the painting a few years ago as we traveled down the Adriatic coast. Our old guidebook called Lotto’s painting in Monte San Giusto “ the most dramatic and powerful of all his large-scale works,” and so we decided to take a side trip out of our way in hope of finding it.  Although we are very thankful for the wonderful works of art preserved in Italian museums, it is always special to see a work “in situ”, where it was originally meant to be seen.

It was not easy to find the church and we finally had to go into a local bank where a patron kindly offered to lead us there through the curvy narrow streets of the town. We parked outside a long stone staircase that went up and up between stone buildings packed closely together on each side. 

It was hard to immediately recognize the church but we finally found a door that led into what was no more than a large chapel. It was dark inside and the church was empty except for a couple of ladies who seemed to be cleaning. We could hardly see the painting behind the only altar but one of the ladies pointed to a little box. We put a coin in and immediately the huge magnificent painting (450x250cm) that took up almost the whole back wall was revealed.

Revealed is an understatement. The light, color, movement, physicality, and dramatic intensity virtually jumped out at us. A crowd of guards and onlookers stand beneath and around the three crosses that reach high into a dark sky. Jesus is in the middle flanked by the two thieves.

Standing in Santa Maria it is hard to examine the huge painting closely because the impression is so overwhelming. But on reflection we can see that Lotto has depicted the moment right after the death of Jesus. We can see the Roman centurion Longinus on his white horse immediately after he has placed the point of his lance in the side of Jesus to verify his death. He has released the lance and it is about to fall. He reaches both hands toward Jesus in the act of shouting, “truly, this man was the Son of God.”

The death of Jesus is also marked by a great wind that causes the loin cloths of Jesus and the thieves to billow as well as the Roman banner on the right where one can just make our the first letters of the name of Caesar Augustus. In the foreground, the disciple John, robed in green, seems to lead the grieving Mother right out of the picture. Behind them red-haired Mary Magdalene dressed in blue stretches out her arms in grief.

Today, it is hard to imagine what churchgoers back in an obscure provincial town must have thought when they beheld this magnificent painting. They could never have seen anything like it before and must have known that a great master had done it. Going to Mass in Santa Maria in Telusiano would never be the same. At the Consecration of the Mass, as the priest at the altar raised high the host, their eyes would behold the sacrificial victim raised high on Calvary in the dramatic and breathtaking altarpiece behind. 

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Note: A friend sent me a fine Youtube video with excellent commentary.

Neapolitans

 Here are some of Edward Hutton's observations of the people of Naples.

 

In this boiling cauldron, after a little, when one’s first distress had passed, there remained an extraordinary fascination. The life of Naples was and is the life of the streets, of the decumani, salite, scale, rampe, of which it is full; everything takes place there in these narrow ways, even the toilet; and little by little one is compelled by the obscene spirit of the city to wander continually, and, only half ashamed, to watch these poor people in all their pathetic poverty and animalism, their amazing unself-consciousness, their extraordinary and meaningless violence of gesture and speech—and yes, their joy of life. Was the Neapolitan of antiquity like this?...

 

For the Neapolitan is indeed a highly composite person. Humanity and cruelty, bravery and cowardice , openness and deceit, thrift and prodigality are all jumbled together in him and it is a puzzle to know which predominates. He is among Italy’s best soldiers—always light-hearted, facetious and pertinacious, marvellously expressive, too, in his features and gestures. He is not more dishonest than anyone else, nor does he lie maliciously, but to glorify himself and to be agreeable. He is too easy-going to be vindictive, he is emotional, but not revengeful. And to call him lazy is the most absurd and ridiculous charge ever brought against people who are essentially indefatigable. Watch the facchini at the port; the boatmen and fishermen, too, toil for hours at the oar on a bit of bread and a crock of water. And the peasants have only to be seen at work, laborious and untiring in the blazing heat, to convince one of their energy. The Neapolitan is, however, a gambler, though not perhaps more than his brother of the English working-class. He is cruel to animals, but not to children….

 Observe a Neapolitan of the upper class; he never walks, he strolls. If he is in a hurry, if he is pressed for time, he takes a cab or a taxi, but generally he strolls; passiare, he calls it. He stops to speak with a friend or greets an acquaintance with an eloquent gesture, loiters past the shop windows, lingers in the Galleria scanning the cafes, stays to read the placards before the newspaper kiosks and the bills displayed before the theatres and of course arrives late at his destination. For the Neapolitan is a flaneur of flaneurs, yet with something Spanish too, which is not surprising considering his history. …

 

This strolling, this passiare, often turns to good account, for it is the long tradition of the Neapolitans to conduct their affairs in the open air, whether it be the toilet or a business transaction. In this they are still as Greek as their remote ancestors. There in the street, in the piazza, in the Galleria the Neapolitan is most likely to be fortunate in a combinazione. And who will say he is wrong, since the open air is that which glorifies this great southern city set in the most beautiful landscape in the world.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp. 3-6.

Disillusion in Naples

 

Revisiting Naples in 1957 after an absence that spanned two world wars, Edward Hutton's initial response was disillusion.

 

To come to Naples from Rome through the now fallen majesty of the Campagna, along that sombre road under Anagni and Montecassino, or by the Pontine Marshes under the Valerian hills, past spellbound Norma and the lilied meres of Ninfa, or to enter it first without warning out of the loneliness, the silence and the beauty of the sea is to experience an astonishing disillusion.

 

For there is nothing, I think, in all the South, nothing certainly in Italy, quite like Naples in its sordid and yet tremendous vitality, a vitality that is sterile, that wastes itself upon itself. It is still, as Bergeret the friend of Fragonard found it, the most animated city in Europe. A place so restless and noisy and confused that it might be pandemonium, so drab that it is not really redeemed even by the Castel dell’ Ovo, the Castel Nuovo and Sant’ Elmo.

 

All this meanness is emphasized and accentuated  by the unrivalled beauty of the world in which Parthenope stands, the spacious and perfect loveliness of the great bay, shining and yet half lost in all the gold of the sun, between the dreamy headlands of Sorrento, of Posilipo, of Misenum; the threatening gesture, the incomparable outline of Vesuvius, the vision of Capri, of Procida and Ischia rising out of the sea, the colour of sea and sky, of valley and mountain and curved shore. For this is Campania, the true Arcady of the Romans, and here more than anywhere else, perhaps, the forms of the past clothed in our dreams are indestructible, and will outface even such a disillusion as Naples affords.

 

In this incomparable landscape Naples stands, not like Genoa nobly about an amphitheatre of hills, nor like Palermo in an enchanted valley, but in the deepest curve of her vast and beautiful bay, at the foot of the hills and upon their slopes, beneath the great and splendid fortress of Sant’ Elmo, which towers up over the city in shining beauty and pride, the noble feature of a place that, but for it, would be almost without any monumental splendour.

 

Sant’ Elmo towers there over the city upon the west; farther away and to the north, upon a scarcely lesser height, stands the great Bourbon palace of Capodimonte, while to the east, upon the far side of the fruitful valley of the Sebethus, rises the violent pyramid of Vesuvius now without its silver streamer of smoke. Seen from afar, and especially from the sea, there can be but few places in the world comparable with this; the vast and beautiful bay closed on the west by Capo Miseno, with its sentinel islands Ischia and Procida, and on the east by the by the great headland of Sorrento more than twenty miles away as the gull flies, and defended, as it were, seaward by the island of Capri, is dominated in the very midst by the height and beauty and strangeness of Vesuvius….

Once in the city, Hutton described the pandemonium of its streets.

 

These long streets the colour of mud, built from the lava of Vesuvius, lined with tall, forbidding houses balconied with iron; those narrow salite climbing up towards Sant’ Elmo or descending to the harbour and Santa Lucia, crowded and squalid and hung everywhere with ragged clothes drying in the squalid air;…the noise that here more than any other city in the world overwhelms everything in its confusion and meanness, the howling of children, the cries of the women, the shouting of the men vainly competing with the hooting of horns, the explosion of the open exhausts of the motor vehicles, the cracking of whips, the beating of hoofs, the sirens of steamers, the innumerable bells—not only those, here so harsh, of the churches, but as I remember them the brutal gongs of trams, the bells of cows and goats; the mere hubbub of human speech that seems more deafening than it is by reason of the appalling emphasis of gesture; all this horrified and confused the stranger, chiefly perhaps, because he could find nothing definite in its confusion for the mind to seize upon—the mind indeed being half paralyzed by the flood of undistinguishable things, not one of which was characteristic, but rather all together. The mere extent of the place too, shapeless as it is, stretching for miles in all its sordidness along the seashore, appalled one; for its disorder was a violent disorder, its voice the voice of the mob, cruel, blatant, enormous, signifying nothing. 

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp.  1-3. 

Naples Revisited

  

 

 

 

Edward Hutton returned to Naples in 1957 having first visited the city sixty years before. Although Italy had changed dramatically, especially after the Second World War, there was something unchanging about Naples. Here I reproduce his Preface to Naples and Campania Revisited.

 

While Italy is still the most delightful of all countries to live in, I must admit that with the rapid democratization of the world since the Second World War a rather saddening change has befallen her.

 

The age of the traveller is gone; even the age of the tourist too. Now the tripper, decanted in crowds from charabanc and motor-coach, descends on the lovely cities, and passes like a flood from Cathedral to gallery and museum, open-mouthed or indifferent; or masquerading as a pilgrimage swamps such a city as Assisi, so that it is only possible to enjoy the place in peace in the winter from November to March. Pandemonium resumes her reign at Easter.

 

And then there is the sophistication of the countryside. Even the Via Appia, the “Queen of Roads”, the backbone of Campania, is outraged with every sort of commercial placard and advertisement. And all its antiquity has been sacrificed to the motor-car.

 

It is, of course, petrol and perhaps America that are the great levellers.

 

The noise everywhere in the cities has not only increased but has changed its nature. It is no longer human but mechanical. Every city, every town proclaims at its gates: Zona di Silenzio, which means that it is forbidden to sound the motor-horn in its streets. But what is the good of that when every car, every lorry, every Vespa, every motor-cycle is driven with open exhaust to make as much noise as possible? For the Italian seems to believe that noise is power. In many cities, in Florence for instance and in Rome, too, it is difficult to get any sleep till the not so early hours of the morning, and then at five or six o’clock it begins all over again.

 

Naples, save Rome the only capitol city in the peninsula, seems largely oblivious of those incursions, which are absorbed perhaps by the Cathedral of S. Januarius, and the museum, but chiefly I suspect by Pompeii and Capri. At any rate the churches of Naples, full of pictures of the seventeenth century and Neapolitan Baroque, are for the most part unvisited, and if the Toledo once no doubt “inexpressively Neapolitan” has been commercialized till it is entirely anonymous and has really become the “Via Roma”, that is to say like any other main street in Milan or Turin, there still remains as unvisited as the churches, and almost as I remember them when I first came to Naples sixty years ago, many strade, vichi, salite, fondaci, and not least the Via del Tribunale and the speccanapoli—the Via San Biagio and the Piazza Capuana with its lovely Tuscan gate and its market entirely Neapolitan neither vulgarized nor emasculate.

 

To stroll in those narrow streets filled with light and shade between the lofty balconied houses from church to church, from the majolica cloister of the Clarisse of Santa Chiara to the arcaded and fountained garden of San Gregorio Armeno under its many coloured dome, from the Guglia of the Immacolata to the Guglia of San Domenico, from the shrine of the blood of S. Gennaro to the ossuary of Sant’ Agostino alla Zecca, from the tomb of Tino di Camaino in the Donna Regina to the strange Baroque statues of San Severo, to leave Donatello in Sant’ Angelo a Nilo to find Antonio Rossellino in Monte Oliveto, to search for the pictures of Caravaggio, of Caracciolo, of Stanzione, will fill many a morning with quiet unhustled happiness, as though today were yesterday, and almost as though the Regno had never passed away. For in Naples certainly the old songs are the best.

 

                                                   O dolce Napoli,

                                                   O suol beato,

                                                   Ove sorridere

                                                   Volle il creato!

                                                   Tu sei l’impero

                                                   Dell’ armonia—

                                                   Santa Lucia!

                                                   Santa Lucia! 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Preface. Pp. vii-viii.