Italian Tales

  

 

 

In a chapter entitled "Summer about Norcia" Edward Hutton recorded some delightful stories told by his young Italian companion Ulisse. Although Assisi and Umbria Revisited was written in 1953, this episode with Ulisse must have occurred decades earlier on an earlier journey to Umbria. These stories have now been forgotten but they did provide the subject matter for many a great work of art.

 

The heat was wonderful. It was not heavy, as any great heat in England always is, but vehement and marvelous with all the fierceness and vitality of fire, the pride and the beauty of the sun.  The hushed fields seemed about to burst into flame. The sun delighted and frightened me, it was wonderful and mysterious. Each day was like a hard, bright precious stone, more dazzling and more heartless than a diamond. Everything was still. And the nights were like sapphires. For three days now, everyone seemed to be in the pieve praying for rain….  

 

As I lay that evening just without the forest, not far from a little stream that, in spite of the drought, still ran secretly under the trees among the stones out into the parched valley, I heard a clear voice say softly, “Of what is the signore thinking, it is perhaps of his own country?”

 

Looking round, I saw a pair of eyes staring at me from under a tangle  of black hair, and Ulisse came close to me.

 

I lay back among the broom and answered, “Tell me a story, then, Ulisse—and I shall forget again.”

 

“But the signore has heard all the stories of the Frate Antonio, he has heard all the stories of my mother and my mother’s mother—what is there left to tell?”

 

“Tell me them over again.”

 

“Which of them all will the signore hear? But, indeed, he knows them all by heart! There is that one of the birth of Bambino Gesu—yes? And that of the Madonnina when she was a girl in school, and that of Sampietro who was always hungry, even as myself—which of them all shall I tell, then?”

 

And I said, “Tell me the Fuga in Egitto.”

 

“Signore, why do you always like that best? For my part I prefer those of Sampietro—how he put the devil’s head on the bella ragazza—

Gerard David: Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

“As the signore doubtless knows, Erode had ordered the massacre of the Innocenti, for he wished, ah, indeed how he wished! To kill the Bambino Gesu, who was a greater king than he. So Sangiuseppe and the Madonna had to flee away. Ah, the Madonnina…. She carried always in the nest of her arms, wrapped in her apron, Gesu our Saviour. And as she went, sitting on the ass which Sangiuseppe drove before him, as she went, the Pharisees met her and said, “Beautiful Lady, what do you carry in your apron?”

 

“And she answered, ‘I carry Il Gran’ Signore.’ 

 

“But the Pharisees mistook her, thinking she said, ‘Grano, Signori,’ and they answered, ‘Carry it, then, to the mill.’ So she passed on with Our Lord and Sangiuseppe.”…

 

Ulisse continued with a number of other stories about the Flight into Egypt: the bean field, the field of flax, the olive tree that hid the Holy family from the pursuers, and even the encounter with brigands who would eventually turn out to be the good thief and the bad thief on Calvary….

 

“Ulisse,” said I, after a time, “it is necessary that these tales be written down, since then have the sound of truth, so that they who know them not may hear them.”

 

“It is my opinion also, signore,” said Ulisse. “write them then—you who are always writing.”

 

“That,” said I, “is easier to say than to do; and if I do, be sure that not all who read them will understand them, because for some they are too difficult.”

 

“Indeed, yes,” said Ulisse; “yet I understand them, and they are good tales concerning Our Lord, the Madonna and the saints whom we love.”

 

“Ulisse,” said I, “it occurs to me to write them out tomorrow and to send them to the Inglesi.”

 

“That,” said Ulisse, “would be indeed a Christian act, worthy of the signore, because the Inglesi—scusi, signori—much more often than not are no Christians at all, and it would be well to turn their hearts.”

 

Now Ulisse had for some time been troubled about my countrymen and their probable fate as heretics, and had evidently been consulting Frate Antonio on the matter, for presently he said;

 

“Scusi, signore! It was not altogether the fault of the Inglesi that they became heretics. It was really the fault of their wicked King Enrico, who wanted to get rid of his good and very pious queen and marry another woman…. But Frate Antonio has said that even these Protestanti may by chance not go to hell.”

 

“What?” I said. “How is that?”

 

“Signore, senta! One day Il Gesu Christo was walking with Sampietro in Paridiso, as the padrone may walk with the fattore in the podere, and after a while He said—not as complaining exactly, but as stating a fact:

 

“Sampietro, I think this place has gone down.”

 

“Here Sampietro who is always impetuous and knew very well what He meant, dared to interrupt.

 

“’Il Santissimo can’t blame me,’ he said huffily; ‘Il Santissimo is not to suppose they all came in by the Gate, Che! Che!’

 

“’Not come in by the Gate, Sampietro? What do you mean?’ said Our Lord.

 

“’ If Il Santissimo will but step this way, round these bushes,’ said Sampietro, ‘He will see.’

 

“And sure enough He saw. For there was the Madonna drawing the souls up pell-mell, willy-nilly, anyhow, into Paradiso in a great bucket to their eternal gain and undeserved good.” O Clemens, O Pia, O Dulcis Virgo Maria."

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 92-98. 

Cascia and St. Rita

 

 

In a chapter entitled, "The Road to Norcia", Edward Hutton introduces the charming Italian boy, Ulisse, who would  explain many things to him as they wandered about the beautiful countryside. 

 I found a possible lodging in Norcia in the house of a couple whose nephew, a young boy, was paying them a visit from his home in Dolcedorme, and he became my daily companion. We explored Norcia and the surrounding country together, wandering in the woods, penetrating into the mountains and visited Cascia. He was, I suppose, in some sort my servant, but no one could have had a better or more charming companion. His name was Ulisse….

 

One day we made a more serious expedition to Castelluccio, a very high village with an inn above the Piano Grande, at the base of the Monti Sibillini, right under towering Monte Vettore. It was cooler up there at over 4,000 feet.

Cascia

Then there was the journey to Cascia, which we managed by taking the electric train from Norcia to Serravalle and proceeding from there by bus.

Cascia is over 2,000 feet above the sea and stands on the slope of a hill over the Corno stream. It is a remarkable little place with a few hundred inhabitants, and entirely given over  to Santa Rita, who is its whole existence. And no wonder, for as Ulisse impressed upon me again and again, Santa Rita is the saint dell’ impossibile. “If you are in despair, if you are at your wits’ end, if everything seems lost e buona notte, and only a miracle—but not an ordinary miracle, an ‘impossible miracle--can save you, go to Santa Rita. Or, if that is impossible, then make your petition to her, however extraordinary, unheard of, impossible of fulfillment it may be, and you will see!”

 

“Yes,” said I, “I think I see. If you have lost the love of your life, if you are in such a position that only the end of the world can save you, if you are absolutely broke and in more than desperate need of money-----”

 

“Ah,” said Ulisse, “momentino, signore. Tutti I santi and even Santa Rita are difficult about money. Si, signore. Although she will do the impossible for you, she seems to have the same feelings about money, signore, as S. Francesco had, who, as the signore will remember, refused to touch it except with a stick.”

 

“Yes,” said I, “I was forgetting Santa Rita was an Augustinian nun and had a high opinion of poverty and certainly thought, and it might almost seem still thinks, it good for one.”

 

“Signore,” said Ulisse, “the only saint who is good for money is Sangiuseppe, who was a family man and understood the difficulties one meets with in the world. And even he-----" …

Here, Hutton broke off to tell the very interesting story of the life of St. Rita, but let us return to Ulisse. 

 

It was as we returned one perfect night from the Cappuccini, and the mountains seemed more wonderful than ever under the full moon, that I remarked on the marvel of this to Ulisse. “O signore,” said he, “but the signore should see our moon at Dolcedorme.”

 

A strange answer surely, connoting I know not what, pointing beyond the Middle Age, beyond all recorded ages. But men have always believed strange things of the moon, the planets and the stars….

 

In spite of the moon it was dark in the forest, and Ulisse had taken my hand. Italians do not care to be out in the countryside after dark.

 

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Spoleto: Holy Week

   

 

 

Edward Hutton visited many churches in Spoleto but his favorite was the Basilica of San Salvatore built on the remains of an ancient Roman temple.

 

It is, however, something quite different we find in San Salvatore, which has been built from the ruins of a Roman temple. From a picturesque and historical point of view, it delights me, as I have said, beyond any other piece of architecture in Spoleto. Today its façade guards the Campo Santo, with its hard white crosses and beady flowers, and all the frippery of modern death. Magnificent columns, Roman and pagan, group themselves round the choir and chancel; and the nave is ennobled by the remains of other shafts, now ruinous, that once bore the weight of some splendid roof. Pagan gods, not dead but living in exile, perhaps in the ilex woods that crown the city and envelop her in their sombre mantle, seem to creep into the warm sunshine that floods the church from the open door. They knock at our hearts; and gazing at the feeble and terrible “decorations” of the Christian altar between the majestic pillars of an alien religion, it is rather of the nobility of the past, which is so present everywhere in Italy—of its beauty and its sufficiency—that we think, than of its Christian successor.

And yet who here in Spoleto can resist the touching appeal of that little ugly shrine that greets the traveller on his way to San Paolo, that old thirteenth-century church? It is a picture of S. Maria Immacolata and bears the legend: Et macula originalis non est in Te. As I passed by at evening some children  were decking the shrine with wild flowers, gathered on the Umbrian hills. The cage that guarded the picture was starred with buttercups as lovely in their shining yellow as those which doubtless in old days sprang up beneath the white footsteps of Persephone as she crossed the rivers of Sicily on her way to Demeter, after her unwilling exile from our world. Will she not know and smile and understand, this Virgin that is the one goddess left to a sorrowful world? Be sure, if she is not mindful of the flowers of the maidens and children, if in that heaven where she is she does not smile to her Son upon His Throne of chrysoprase and jasper to see these, simple of heart, bringing the flowers of the field for her Festa—then Persephone never trod our world, nor was Demeter bereft and sorrowful; all is a lie—the beautiful, austere gods, the terrible love of Christ, the very Fatherhood of God, since even these so simple of heart may deceive themselves on their lovely way to death….

 

It was Holy Week when for the first time I came to Spoleto; a certain silence and wistful sadness, I remember, seemed to invest the city; the streets were very quiet, the churches sombre. At evening I watched the processions, with their torches and innumerable tapers, wind along the roads; all night as I lay in my bed I seemed to hear the melancholy chants that accompanied them up the Via Crucis. In reality it would seem that Christ had died that afternoon; now at last mankind was desolate. The tones of the Vexilla Regis seemed to wave like long streamers  from the church towers, and one heard the Mother, heart-broken, and weeping sigh to the world spread at our feet:

 

O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite 

     et videte, si est dolor, sicut dolor meus.

 

Then there was silence. Spoleto, with finger on her lip, awaited the dawn of Easter. At last it broke, very cool and sweet and full of promises. An immense hope seemed to have swept over the world. In the churches they sang again Alleluia, and I, with the whole city went to the Cathedral to greet the Christ, new risen from the  tomb, in the Easter Mass.

 

Out of my window, as I write, I can see S. Mary of the Angels gleaming in the sunlight beneath the mass of Subasio. It is only the mountains that hide Orvieto from me, and even perhaps Rome herself. Innumerable roads over plain and mountain to half a hundred cities that the world has forgotten. I seem to see them all in the soft lucidity of evening, that is the  most precious part of the day in this land where, every evening, God paints for us those pictures which taught Perugino all he knew—the magnificent spaciousness, his sense of luminous light.

 

Before the sunset Spoleto, like a tall and sweet maiden, kneels on her hill and seems to pray. Ever she has the attitude of prayer; and after dark when her little lights gleam far over the plain, I seem to know that they burn before the shrines of many saints whose prayers she has desired, simple  of heart as she is, kneeling at the head of her long valley under the soft sky.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 77-78, 79-80.

Spoleto and Filippo Lippo

  

 

 

Edward Hutton regarded Spoleto as a very special city, a treasure full of treasures.

 

Spoleto is a beautiful city of rose colour set on the slope of Monteluco. In a bend of the Tissino torrent, amid a cluster of  mountains which crown her with their exquisite grace. In her silent streets I began to understand her beauty and her joy, and, indeed, it is in a kind of sudden and overwhelming  joy that her towers pierce up into the sky—those rosy towers that at dawn and midday and sunset are musical with soft bells, and that fade away into the night from rose colour to violet and deep purple under a heaven of innumerable stars. Behind her rise, higher and higher, forests of primeval ilex, the sacred tree of the Latin race, shrouding her, as it were, in a mantle most rare of darkest green. Over her head, far away above the forests, a Franciscan convent soars like a brown bird floating on the wind, whose bells are not heard, but only seem to ring, or heard only in the most fortunate days when their sound is little more than the piping of those crested larks that sang S. Francis to heaven.

 

It was here in this valley, luminous beyond our northern dreams, that Blessed Angela of Foligno heard those breathless words of Christ: “I love thee more than any woman in the valley of Spoleto.” So in the vineyards and the valleys of Umbria of old, men and women talked with God, and indeed the whole land, even to the most superficial observer, seems blessed. Climb up to the great aqueduct that spans the profound ravine which isolates Spoleto on her round hill, and at evening  look across the valleys to the hills and the mountains, that luminous softness, a delicacy so magical that you had thought only the genius of Raphael or Perugino could imagine and express it, is just reality. With light, with fragile glory, with the wide and tender glance of the sky, every delicious form of hill and cloud and mountain is embraced. It is amidst these perfect hills that Spoleto sings for joy….

But on first coming to Spoleto it is to the Cathedral we climb, breathless, for her ways are steep and rough, to see the frescoes of one of the most delightful of the Florentine painters, Filippo Lippo. They are his last masterpieces, and tell the story in brief of the Blessed Virgin in her own Cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta. The chief fresco is that of her Coronation. Pale from the encounter with death, in which but a moment ago she has proved victorious, tall and slight, Regina Angelorum is crowned, not by Christ her Son, but by God the Father, in a heaven delicate as the petals of the flags in the valleys full of corn, powdered with stars that seem to have risen just out of the sea. The sun and the moon beneath her feet are lesser glories where she is. About her a company of angels sings, and dances for joy, since heaven is by so much richer than our earth. A few with a shy and timid grace, magically charming,  hand her a few flowers from the meadows of the woods of heaven, as though to ask her if they might be sweeter than the lilies she loved as a girl, or the wild flowers of Palestine. The rest of the frescoes—the Annunciation, in which she stands so surprised, so agitated, that she twists her fingers together and is not sure how to answer; the Nativity, a magnificent composition, now but a shadow; and the Death of the Virgin, where Christ Himself with a tenderness, but with a tenderness and love, bears His Mother to heaven—are much over-painted, and by a lesser hand, yet we catch some shadow of Filippo in them all, so that even in their ruin they are not the least among the precious things of Spoleto.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp.70-71, 74-75. 

Trevi and Clitumnus

 

In the vicinity of Trevi Edward Hutton visited the Temple of the ancient river god, Clitumnus.* In this brief chapter he quoted the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as Roman authors Pliny and Virgil.

 

 

The way from Foligno to Trevi takes one at once almost into Virgilian country, the valley of the Clitumnus. If the night is spent at Montefalco—not so daring an adventure as it seems—one must drive to Trevi by a way as pleasant as any in the world, following the river as it flows, and crossing both river and railway to climb up to Trevi. But the way by San Martino is beautiful exceedingly, and the torrents after the rain only add to the charm of the road. All travellers have wondered at Trevi since she perched herself on the top of her precipitous hill, and though few of them visited her on her lonely height, she impressed her memory upon them even from a distance….

 

Well, I was tired, too, when I came to Trevi at sunset, and the inn was poor even for an Umbrian albergo. But I forgot the poverty of my room in the relief of being able to sleep; and, indeed, the bed was soft and clean, things common in Italy even in the poorest places….

 

In this Virgilian country, Hutton quoted eight lines from Virgil's second Georgic that mentioned snowy flocks and sacred bulls bathing in the river.

 

The white, the snowy flocks of Clitumnus, where are they now? And the bull that bathed in the sacred stream before it was led the chiefest victim to the temples of the gods, the triumphs of Rome; and those temples, are they quite gone from our world? Let us see.

 

As you set out for Spello, if you are wise enough to go by road--it is but twelve miles--when you have passed a third of the way you come to a tiny Temple high over the stream, which here among the trees and the grass has its source. And it is the Temple of the river god that you look on, in all its little splendour of silence and ruin. At least, I hope it is; but some speak of a Christian building and will not listen to Pliny. But however that may be, it is a place too beautiful for any to pass by. I confess that, following the advice of the younger Pliny, I bathed there beneath the glancing, whispering poplars, and found, as he had said, the water as cold as snow. But in vain, in vain, I looked for the god Clitumnus and could not find him, though Pliny said that he was there, “not naked but adorned with the toga”. And then in the shade, within sound of the beautiful river, I read again in Virgil. Is it not thus one might desire to spend endless days?

But for the traveller by road the sun is ever something of a god; imperious as he is, he commands our days. He was slanting down the sky, reminding me that Spello was still far and I alone, and night would follow him. So I set out at last with regret; and later I came to San Giacomo in Poseta, where I saw some of the finest Lo Spagnas in Italy, especially a Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, his masterpiece, though stolen from Filippo Lippi. And so I came to the gates of Spoleto.

 

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*Note. The river is now called the Clitunno and flows into a tributary of the Tiber.

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 67-69. 

Montefalco and Benozzo Gozzoli

   

 

 

Montefalco is noted for its spectacular views of the surrounding countryside, as well as for its fine wines, but Edward Hutton visited the mountain of falcons to view the famous fresco cycle of the life of S. Francis by Benozzo Gozzoli.

 So the summer days passed, and when it was too hot in the valley I went up to Montefalco and found there coolness and silence.

 

The road to Montefalco is beautiful with views of the ever-changing valley and the mountains; and the little city herself stands high on her hill. Her unfrequented streets are still as of old, and she seems to look across the wide valley to Assisi as a daughter towards her mother. It is not Giotto who has clothed her with glory while telling the legend of S. Francis, but Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, with his simple literalism and delightful sense of the loveliness of such natural things as flowers and animals, who has painted for her the same immortal story—not in vain, for his influence is found again and again in such men as Bonfigli, Niccolo da Foligno, whose work one has learned to care for in Foligno and Assisi, and in Fiorenzo di Lorenzo.  Nor, as it seems to me, did Pintoricchio wholly escape his charm; much of his delight in these natural beauties which crowd his pictures is, it may well be, owing to the work of this Tuscan painter.

 It is in the little church of San Francesco—desecrated now and used as a picture-gallery—in which was once the choir, that we find the frescoes of the life of S. Francis, painted in the middle of the fifteenth century by Benozzo Gozzoli. It is here for the first time almost we come upon the growth, that development into some half-apprehended ideal, which every legend seems to follow. S. Francis was a man so like to Christ as almost to be mistaken for Him; it is therefore certain that he too, like the Prince of Life, was born in a stable. And even as old Simeon and Anna had prophesied of Christ, so a pilgrim tells of S. Francis, and a poor man spreads his coat for the saint to tread on. Thus gradually in the minds of men S. Francis became even in lesser things, a kind of imitation of Jesus of Nazareth….The frescoes continue the life of the saint almost as in the upper church at Assisi, where the traditional works of Giotto were doubtless known to Benozzo Gozzoli. These Montefalco frescoes are particularly interesting as the early work of a man who, brought by Fra Angelico to Rome and Orvieto—where, as here, his work is really an imitation of his master—was later to develop a more individual style, as in the frescoes in the Riccardi chapel, or at San Gimignano, or in his ruined masterpieces at Pisa, where he painted from 1469 to 1487. Here in Montefalco he is strictly the pupil of Fra Angelico. But in that attitude of the scholar to one who was so worthy of his allegiance, it may well be, we find his work really finer than when he had become himself a little master. … In his early work, however, under the influence of Angelico, he, having had a glimpse of heaven, turning to the earth he found it every whit as fair. … He tells the story of S. Francis, here in Montefalco, like a romantic almost, in which the spirit of adventure, the call of the road, the magical persistence of tomorrow blend very happily with the lovely life of the little poor man. Looking on these frescoes… his work is so boyish, as it were, as almost to disarm criticism, and in that very freshness, without ulterior ideas about art, he comes nearer perhaps than Giotto to realizing for us the romantic beauty of S. Francis’s life. He certainly realizes that, and strives to make us realise it as no other painter of the Franciscan legend has been able to do, before the far more exquisite and spiritual work of Sasseta. And so, though for no other cause yet for this, I return to Montefalco again and again.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 57-58

Spello: S. Francis and S. Clare

 After visiting some churches outside Spello's walls, Edward Hutton concluded his brief account of the town with a touching story about S. Francis and S. Clare.

It is delightful to walk to San Girolamo under the olives outside Porta Montanara with its frescoes, a Nativity by Perugino and others by followers of Pintoricchio and Mezzastris. Or to wander out of Porta Fontevecchia to Santa Maria della Rotunda, a fine Renaissance church, a Greek cross under an octagonal dome dating from 1517. Or to go to San Claudio, a small Romanesque and curiously asymmetrical  church of the twelfth century and to the Roman amphitheatre.

 

They say it was one day at Spello, when S. Francis and S. Clare were walking together and came to some osteria or other where they were given a morsel of bread, that as they sat there on the stones the people began to point at them with diffidenza and no little suggestion of evil and bisbigli malevoli, indirect allusions and jokes.

 

They went away in silence.

 

It was a winter’s day and the ground was covered with snow. Evening came on under the grey sky as they went. Presently S. Francis said:

 

“Sister Clare, hast thou understood what they were saying to us?”

 

S. Clare did not reply, for her heart was sorrowful, and she felt, if she had spoken, she could not have restrained her tears.

 

     “We must never do this again,” said, S. Francis at last.

 

S. Clare knelt down in the path on the desolate countryside.

 

     “What, never, Father? When then shall we meet again?”

 

     “When?” said S. Francis. “When the roses bloom in January.”

 

Marvellous and divine miracle! In a moment, a second of time, the whole mountainside was covered with roses, so that the air was filled with their perfume.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 48-9.