Salerno and Hildebrand

  

 

 

On his visit to Salerno, Edward Hutton visited the  famed cathedral and its tomb of Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand), one of the most important and controversial Popes in history.

 

Today the old city of Salerno has but one thing to boast of: its Cathedral. The modern town, the great promenade of the marina, now called Corso Garibaldi, is more than a mile long, and fine as it is lacks interest. The harbour which Manfred enlarged in 1260, and which was finished by Robert the Wise, has been improved out of all recognition, and the great Castello which Robert Guiscard stormed, some 900 feet up over the sea, is a mere vast heap of ruins. The old town under this enormous debris is, however, picturesque and dirty enough to delight anyone, its irregular, narrow, and steep streets, often mere staircases, being full of medieval corners, old shrines, and old memories. It is here in the midst, with its great and beautiful atrium before it, is set the Cathedral, at the top of a great flight of steps.

 

This glorious church was founded and built by Robert Guiscard in 1084 in honour of St. Matthew, whose body Salerno had possessed since 930, when it is said to have been brought hither from Paestum. Robert placed it in the crypt, where it remains to this day. The Norman, whose works always astonish us, had seen the ruins of Paestum, and these he plundered for the glory of the new church….

 

The church itself is guarded by great and beautiful doors of bronze, presented by Landolfo Butromile, and made in Constantinople in 1099. They are wonderfully adorned with the figures of six apostles and with crosses, and were all inlaid with silver. Within, unhappily, the church we see is altogether unworthy of these glories, for it has been entirely modernized. It still retains its tombs, however, and certain noble ornaments from of old….

Wax Effigy

 In the similar chapel to the right of the high altar lies the greatest of all the Popes, Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII. This was he who in the eleventh century conceived that wonderful dream which only the brutality of the time prevented him from realizing. He it was who would have summoned an army from all Christendom, which he would have led in person to the conquest of Byzantium, that the Greek and Latin Churches might have been united under one head, and this having been achieved, all Christendom under his leadership would have turned upon the Saracen and restored the Empire of Augustus and of Hadrian and of Constantine. The Pope forewent his dream. Instead, seeing the corruption of the world he began the reformation of the West. And first he made an army that nothing has ever been able to break. He established a celibate clergy, created the priesthood of Europe, and forbade alike the investiture of a married clergy-man or any other layman to any spiritual office. He claimed for the Church an absolute independence from the temporal power of Caesar; more, he declared and maintained the supremacy of the church over the State, and all this he made good; and above all shown the throne of Peter like the sun over the world. For he claimed and maintained and established the infallibility of the Church, he asserted and erected the name of Pope as incomparable with any other, the Pope alone could make and depose the emperor; all Princes must kiss his feet; he could release from their allegiance the subjects of those whom he had excommunicated, and his legates took precedence over all Bishops and ambassadors.

 

The first to face him and say him nay was the Emperor; at Canossa he was broken and humbled in the snow. It was Hildebrand who first flung Europe upon the Holy Sepulchre. But when he died in Salerno, having given a general absolution to mankind, excepting from this act of mercy Henry, so-called the King, and the usurping Pontiff Gregory and their abettors, his last words were: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.” But there was one to answer: “In exile thou canst not die. Vicar of Christ and His Apostle thou hast received the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”

 

This man, who more than any other before or since has expressed and summed up the claim of the church, was the son of a poor Tuscan carpenter. Here in Salerno let us salute him.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 224-226.

Amalfi

  

 

 

I looked forward to Edward Hutton's description of Amalfi since my paternal grandparents both came from the little town of Agerola at the top of a winding road up the hills from the lovely coastal town of Amalfi. We have fond memories of our visits, one of which is coffee in the crowded piazza at the foot of the cathedral steps one Sunday after Mass.

 

And so the great adventurous road proceeds along this wild  and beautiful coast under the villages of Tovere, Vettica Minore, Lone and Pastena, down to the shore at last at Amalfi, which it enters through a great tunnel under the Cappuccini.

 

Approached thus at evening, with the last light from the west full upon it, Amalfi seems to stand about an ampitheatre of hills, its churches, campanili and white houses hanging on the face of the great cliff which towers up above it in an awful magnificence, the little white port under the eastern hill, and all before it the Homeric sea….

 

I found Amalfi delighted me as much at morning as in that first impression in the twilight. The history of the place knows nothing of any Greek or Roman city, and indeed it seems  to have had no existence in antiquity…. In truth, Amalfi seems to have been founded by—at any rate it first appears under the protection of—the Byzantine Empire…. Amalfi is thus one of the first Italian cities to erect herself into a republic, and indeed she can boast that she gave the signal for the awakening of the municipal spirit, the independence of the cities of Italy. She was able, too, to defy the Saracens, the Prince of Palermo, and even in some sort the Norman kings of Naples….

Amalfi Cathedral and Steps

 

The glory of Amalfi, in so far as it is to be found not in her history but in her monuments, is the great Cathedral of Saint Andrew, where in the crypt lies the incorruptible body of the Apostle, brought from Constantinople in 1206. The glorious church, marred of course by time, by restoration and rebuildings, stands at the top of a great flight of steps, which lead up to its vestibule, upheld by the antique columns of Paestum. There in the façade are those wonderful bronze doors which are said to date from the year 1000, and from which those of Montecassino were copied….

The church itself is, in spite of all it has suffered, still a beautiful Norman-Byzantine building, rather picturesque than artistic, for the antique columns within were modernized and transformed in the eighteenth century. The two ancient ambones supported by antique columns remain, as does the font, an antique vase of porphyry. Close by are two sarcophagi, upon which are to be seen the Rape of Persephone and other pagan stories. From the too sophisticated nave you descend, in the south aisle, to the modernized and over-decorated crypt, where lies the body of S. Andrew the Apostle, which has been visited through the centuries by innumerable pilgrims, among others by S. Francis of Assisi in 1218, by Queen Giovanna I and by Pius II, in whose time Cardinal Bessarion brought the head of the apostle to S. Peter’s in Rome, where it still remains. Philip III of Spain presented the church with the huge bronze statue of the saint, the work of Nacchearino. To the north of the church stands the interesting cloister. The beautiful campanile of four stories, the last being round, under a cupola upheld by columns, and set about with four little turrets, was the work of archbishop Filippo Augustariccio in 1276.

View from Agerola

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 212-216. 

Capri

   

 

 

On a tour centered on Sorrento my wife and I took a one day excursion to the beautiful Isle of Capri but sadly failed to venture to the Blue Grotto.

 

The great excursion from Sorrento must always be that  to Capri, only an hour away by steamer. Starting in the morning at ten when the boat comes in from Naples, a whole day may be spent on the island and the return made at four o’clock; but no one who gives thus but a few hours to Capri can really expect to see anything with pleasure, not even the Blue Grotto.

 

Capri stands but three miles from Capo Campanella, and, as Pliny knew, is about eleven miles in circuit. It is, like the mountain range here to the south of the bay of Naples, of which it is indeed a part, formed wholly of limestone, a great precipitous limestone rock rising abruptly out of the sea, and in many places to a considerable height, especially in the western part, now called Anacapri... 

 

Many are the other ruins upon this island and innumerable are its delights, and especially its glorious views over the sea and the mainland; but the most famous spectacle upon the island, even more famous than the Villa San Michele, is the Blue Grotto, usually visited from the steamer, and therefore as good as not seen at all, for it requires time to enjoy it, and that is just what the steamer will not spare.

 

The best way to visit this beautiful cavern and to avoid disappointment, a disappointment most often due to hurry and a noisy crowd, is to engage a boat at the Marina any tranquil afternoon and to row past the Baths of Tiberius, whose vast ruins may still be seen from the sea, to the Blue Grotto, a journey of something under an hour. The arch by which one enters the cavern is scarcely three feet high, and it is therefore necessary to lie down in the boat as it passes through the low and narrow opening into this cave of marvels. At first nothing remarkable will appear, but little by little, as the eyes accustom themselves to the light, the wonderful colour of the grotto will be seem, and after about a quarter of an hour the whole cave will assume an exquisite sapphire blue, especially if the entrance is blocked by another boat. The grotto is about 160 feet by 100 feet, and at its loftiest some 40 feet. To the right is a platform leading to a broken stairway and tunnel in the rock, which of old led up to the villa of Tiberius above, or so they say.

 

This grotto, which is worth some trouble to see in leisurely fashion, is, however, the only one worth a visit upon the island. It makes a delightful giro, all of a summer morning, to voyage in a small boat quite round Capri; but the Green Grotto, the Red Grotto, and the White Grotto are merely ordinary caves, and require the imagination to fill them with the various colours of which they boast in their names. He is wise who lets them go and gives himself up to the delights of the voyage, which, it is needless to say, can be extended in what direction you will, to Amalfi or to Ischia, with perfect confidence and safety, so the weather be fair and settled; for the sailors of Capri are famous, and know the bay as none other do on the mainland. And what more delicious way of spending the summer days can there be than in such voyages as these between dawn and ten o’clock between afternoon and midnight?  

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 200-204.

Sorrento

  

Edward Hutton praised the beautiful views along winding roads along the southern Italian coast, and praised the ancient cliffside town of Sorrento which today seems to be heavily populated by Englishmen.

   

But undoubtedly the greatest delight which Castellammare has to bestow upon the traveller is the coast road to Sorrento, of which she holds the key. There are in all Europe but three other routes corniches with which this can be compared—that between Nice and Mentone upon the French Riviera, that between Genova and Sestri upon the Riviera di Levante, and that, really a continuation of this from Castellammare to Sorrento, the road from Sorrento to Amalfi and on to Vietri. Each of these has its own peculiar charm and delight, and one is inclined to declare each in turn the most beautiful; but knowing them all, I think at least this may be said, that for variety and astonishment, for beauty of colour and old romance, those of the South surpass altogether those of the Rivieras. Nothing could well be more different from the road between Positano and Vietri than this between Castellammare and Sorrento, and here at any rate one mist give the apple to the former. …

 

The city of Sorrento, the city of S. Antonino, and its bishop, is one of the most curiously situated towns in Europe. It stands upon a great platform 300 feet or more over the sea out of which the great cliffs stand up sheer with only the narrowest  of beaches… The town is wholly delightful and full of the happiness of busy people strawplaiting, lace-making, or carving the olive wood here so plentifully provided. The whole place is a garden enclosed, Saracen in appearance with its white houses and flat roofs and shining cupolas, and especially in this that every garden is enclosed within a white wall, every orange grove is hidden, and so completely that but for the overpowering scent of orange blossom which fills all the by-ways you would not suspect the gardens you cannot see. Certainly there is something secret—how shall I say?—something sacred and withdrawn about Sorrento, so that you are not surprised to learn that of old, with its territory, all this piana was consecrated to Minerva, whose especial sanctuary was the great and famous temple set upon the promontory, which bore her name, Minervae Promontorium, and which we today call the Punta della Campanella…

 

Today Sorrento owes everything to its surroundings, which are so full of delight that a whole summer spent here cannot exhaust them. …the picturesque remains called the Bagno della Regina Giovanna, an ancient arched piscina, afford one of the noblest views of the great bay with Vesuvius rising beyond the blue sea. Thence eastward one may wander along the cliffs or up to the Deserto, the old Franciscan convent, whence there is another glorious view embracing the two bays of Naples and of Salerno, with Capri and in the background Monte Sant’ Angelo.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.  Pp. 195-199.

Pompeii

  

 

 

Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to Pompeii and Herculaneum, two small Roman towns destroyed by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. He paid particular attention to Pompeii, a "Roman pleasure resort" whose magnificent wall paintings were preserved under volcanic ash until modern times.

Photo courtesy of David Orme

Nothing, I think, to be seen anywhere else in Europe is at once so monstrously dreary and so moving as this strange city of Pompeii with its broken houses and narrow, paved lanes, which once boasted some 20,000 inhabitants. It is, of course, a great misfortune for us of the modern world that Pompeii was not overwhelmed by Vesuvius in A.D. 62 before she was overthrown by an earthquake, rather than in A.D. 79, when the final catastrophe actually happened. What we see is not the ruin of the town that Cicero loved, but the town half rebuilt by the ruined inhabitants in the Roman style, upon the old site, and largely with the old remains. It is, partly for this reason, then, very disappointing. And yet what else in all Europe can be compared with it?...

One is altogether overwhelmed by these magnificent paintings. They seem to suggest that Pompeii must have been something more than a third-rate provincial town, or that a provincial town in antiquity must have been very different  from a provincial town in modern Europe. That is certainly so. Bourgeois life in Pompeii, the houses attest it , was at once more private and more public than we know today. Those paintings, so light, so airy, so exquisite in their grace and their gaiety, suggest a civilization and a culture far above anything known in the middle-class, commercial town of the medieval or modern world….

Yet they knew how to live in their happy slave State, in their sunny town with its ample theatre and ampitheatre, its games, gladiatorial shows, its light-hearted paintings, its delightful bronzes, its airy homes and beautiful temples. Here are the very ways up which Cicero passed, the ruts of the wagon wheels still deep in the stones—those narrow ways, across which you may leap without effort from side to side. Here stands the two public edifices, the temple and the brothel. Here in these little houses, sometimes just drawn as it were from the grave, the frescoes still fresh on the walls, the little sculptures in their place beside the fountain, and about the atrium even flowers—here they lived. And if you go out by the Herculanean gate you may see their tombs all beside the way, a long avenue, where lie the ancestors of those who saw the catastrophe. And if you have the courage to creep into that new museum by the gate you may see the images of those who suffered it, who fled too late from the amphitheatre by the Porta di Sarno, who returned for their gold or their treasure, to look for their children or to find a friend, or who never left home upon that tragic day when the mountain bellowed with thunder and the darkness and vileness  of the heart of the earth rose suddenly and descended upon this place in the face of the sun. There they lie, the young matron beside the slave, the master by the daughter, close together…. Ah, why should our curiosity demand so horrible an outrage as this?

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 181, 191-193. 

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.