Orvieto and Its Cathedral

  

 

 

Edward Hutton tells the story of Orvieto and its Cathedral in great detail. Here is the first of two posts.

Image by David Orme

D’Annunzio has well described Orvieto: “Imagine a rock in the middle of a melancholy valley, and on the top of the rock a city, so deathly silent as to give the impression of being uninhabited—every window closed—grass growing in the dusty grey streets—a Capuchin friar crosses a piazza—a priest descends from a closed carriage in front of a hospital, all in black, and with a decrepit old servant to open the door; here a tower against the rain-sodden clouds—there a clock slowly striking the hour, and suddenly at the end of a street, a miracle—the Duomo!”

 

Peace and silence: that is what the traveller will find in Orvieto, for far from the contemporary uproar she still dreams of the miracle of Bolsena which her Cathedral was built to commemorate. …

Image by David Orme

The Cathedral … is the most beautiful in Umbria, and the flaming façade is perhaps the loveliest in Italy. The church stands on a marble platform in a wide piazza. Facing it are the Palazzo Faina and the Palazzo dell’ Opera del Duomo, founded in 1359, with a great Baroque façade of the seventeenth century, then the Ospedale. 

 

The glory of the Duomo is of course the façade, which was perhaps first imagined by Arnolfo di Cambio with but a single and central pediment or gable, but in 1310 the Sienese master, Lorenzo Maitani, gave it the three triangular pediments we see, and its marvellous colour and decoration in mosaic and sculpture, between 1327 and 1337; and his work was continued by Andrea Pisani, Orcagna and others till 1388. The uppermost story was added by Antonio Federighi of Siena (1444-90). 

 

The sculptures in bas-relief on the façade were executed between 1310 and 1327, in part by Lorenzo Maitani and in part under his supervision. They belong therefore to the golden age of the art of Siena, the age of Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti. They are perhaps the greatest achievement of the Sienese school of sculpture and are among the most lovely things in Italy. …

The whole story of the Creation and the Fall of Man is represented on this façade.  A little conventionally, you might say, these Sienese artists deal with their art, and yet what pathos in that figure of Adam whom God approaches so eagerly, so graciously in the garden. The astonished angels wait, with how profound an agitation, for this new thing. And again, when that deep sleep fell upon our father, and God with blessing—for He does bless her—draws woman from his side, and two angels hesitate in the garden among the trees, the one seeming to tell the other of all that has gone before, when Adam lay a marvellous shape of dust waiting the touch of the finger of God; as you look on the sublime scene the picture of Michelangelo comes to you as he painted this very thing on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There Adam, half alive, lies over the world and stretches out his finger—how languidly—to touch the finger of God; he is almost unconscious, still wrapped round by dreams, yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice to awaken him to life itself, and all that God holds, woman and the future, in the fold of His garment. But here Christ is the chief figure in that act of creation, God the Father being represented by a hand, while the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove with outspread wings hovers over the waters and the earth and the stars.

Sienese work though this is, there is energy and realism in that figure of Adam where he stands with Eve for a moment beneath the Tree of Knowledge, and God, with a kind of severity, forbids them to eat of that fruit. Eve listens with a curious meekness, an easy acquiescence. But Adam stands at his full height and looks God in the eyes as a beloved son, and really understands that this tree which he touched with his fingers bears the forbidden fruit. Here is a poem as noble as Milton’s Paradise Lost.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 131-134. 

From Narni to Orvieto

   

 

 

Edward Hutton returned to Narni in the spring to complete his tour of Umbria

Narni

 

I had spent most of the winter in Rome, but when April came I returned to Narni, for I wanted to make the journey to Orvieto through Amelia and Lugnano across the uplands which lie between the Nera and the Tiber.

It was a fine spring morning, when I set out from Narni, and as I went, there came singing into my mind those lines which open the most beautiful of all the Odes of Horace:

 

          Diffugere nives, reduent jam gramine campis,

                 arboresque comae;

          mutat terra vices et decresentia ripas

                 flumina praetereunt;

          Gratia cum Nymphis geminiesque sororibus audit

                 ducere nuda choros.

          Immortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum

                 quae rapit hora diem… *

 

* Hutton's translation: The snows have fled away, already the grass returns to the fields and the leaves to the trees, the earth is going through her changes and the rivers with declining floods past their banks. The Grace ventures nude to lead the choir with the Nymphs and her twin sisters. The Seasons and the hour that robs us of the gracious day warn us not to look for an unending life.”

 

How is it that line Latin or Greek hammered into one at school, which meant less than nothing to us then, come back to us later with such a rush of emotion, so poignant a meaning as to bring tears to the eyes? Learned mechanically as part of a form “repetition” without a hint of their beauty and forgotten as soon as learned, suddenly they “come home to us”, as Newman says, and pierce the heart as nothing in our own tongue, familiar and beloved though it be, is able to do. Is this the secret of something we call classical? Does it explain why, when we first see the Parthenon, the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Age, all that has been built since antiquity, seem a mistake?

 

So I went on over the hills, Horace’s Ode in my heart and on my lips, often looking back on towered Narni and the broken bridge of Augustus. Yes, the snows were all fled away, already the grass was shining in the fields, the trees were green with the young leaf. … And presently, between the immense horizons here Monte Soracte rose, there the cone of Mount of Monte Cimino, and then before me I saw Amalia towering up on her hill, crowned by her Cathedral and surrounded by her magnificent walls….

Amalia

 

Yes, Amalia is poor in pictures, but in the church of San Francesco there is the tomb of Matteo and Elisabetta Geraldini which might be by Agostino di Duccio so lovely is it, while the church itself, which dates from the thirteenth century, has a fine ruddy façade, with a double rose, and a beautiful double cloister of the fifteenth century. 

Amalia Duomo

 

Nor is the Duomo, reconstructed though it has been in the eighteenth century, to be neglected, crowning the little city as it does with  its majestic twelve sided campanile, of the eleventh century still, as was once the church which it overshadows….

 

I went on over the mountains along the same wonderful road, through a richly cultivated or wooded country, to Lugnano. …

 

But it was the road that enchanted me. There, as from a lofty terrace over the Tiber valley, I could survey the world from Monte Soracte in the Campagna on the verge of the Patrimony to Mont’ Amiata in the Senese. That was what lay before me along the twenty miles  or so between Lugnano and Orvieto, till I descended into the Paglia valley and the evening light struck the mosaics of the Cathedral of Orvieto on its isolated pedestal of tufa and I went up to the city by its so long drawn our approach in the twilight.

Orvieto

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 126-130.

Narni and the Ponte d'Augusto

 Edward Hutton visited Narni to see the ruins of a famous Roman bridge but he also found some spectacular mosaics in the cathedral.

 I came to Narni in the evening.

 

The inn at Narni is of no great pretensions, but the host is a good host and very rightly he is proud of his picturesque and antique city, but especially he is proud of his view, and the great Roman bridge, so magnificent a ruin, that strives in vain to grapple the shores of Nera! … and well he may be, the Ponte d’Augusto, is one of the most beautiful ruins in the world, chiefly perhaps because it has been left alone with age and death. In its youth and prime it carried the Via Flaminia; in its age it warns us of the far from desolate splendours that the Eternal City still guards. An outpost of the Campagna, it knows the gods are dead or dying in that once mysterious desert. What need is there of any splendid road to Rome, since the messengers of Christ, pursued by implacable victory, came, not with beauty and delight in gilded chariots and with horses, but in rags and with bleeding feet? Should this so noble bridge of Caesar Augustus bear on its back the brutal and barbaric armies of the Goth, or make the way smooth for the strange bedecked columns, gay with harlots and with silk, of Charles VIII on his way to Naples, there to find no kingdom but an immortal pestilence? The Ponte d’Augusto watches the traveller pass by on another way to Rome unheeding, while it remembers only splendid days….

One enters the city by the Porta  Ternana, of the end of the fifteenth century, with its portentous towers, to find Narni an almost completely medieval city frowning and picturesque on its olive-clad cliff above the Nera and commanding a wide prospect over the Conca Ternana and from its public garden a magnificent view…. Crowded now with the buildings of the Middle Age: towers, noble palaces, old churches and, over all, the great Rocca built by Cardinal Albornoz and restored by Pius II, before all these magnificent possessions remains its broken Roman bridge….

 

The Romanesqe Duomo of San Giovenale, with its heavy Campanile (1110), has a charming portico which is of the fifteenth century, as is the arch on the right with  its chapel, but the portal in the façade is still of the twelfth century, with a classical accent….

 One now comes to what is by far the most interesting and once the most beautiful work in the church, the shrine of SS. Giovenale and Coccio by masters of the Cosmati school. The whole shrine or chapel is very classical in form with its vertical design and its square framework, much of which still retains its mosaics. The two doorways are also decorated with mosaics. On either side above, two statues remain, a Pieta in wood on the left and San Giovenale on the right, but these are later works. Above the central doorway are two sculptured sheep on either side a central cross. All this, and the mosaic pavement beside it, are among the earliest works of the Roman school of marble craftsmen. Mosaic pavements of the same school are in Santa Maria in Pensole and San Domenico. For these works alone Narni is worth a visit. One of the masters of the school , Petrus Romanus, made the pavement in front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey in 1269 and the beautiful tomb of Henry III in the chapel of the Confessor….

Image courtesy of David Orme

I always come back to the great Roman bridge over the Nar. From there, and strolling along the stream, one understands the Narnia of old on its lofty hill, precipitous on more than one side and half encircled by those sulphurean waters, which rush through the deep-wooded gorge immediately beneath the city, as well described by Claudian:***

 

“Not far away from the strange coloured stream which gives the town its name, in sulphurous waters flowing in tortuous course between opposite mountains through those woods of ilex.”

 

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***Hutton, as usual, gives the Latin but I just supply his English translation. Note that the Latin name for Narni was Narnia, the name C.S. Lewis gave to the mythical Kingdom of his famous children's novels.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 100-105.

Feast of St. Francis

 

October 4 is the feast day of St. Francis, and so I would like to depart from my regular sequence of posts, and post an excerpt from Edward Hutton's account of his visit to La Verna, the rocky hilltop where St. Francis received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ on his body. Hutton wrote of the enduring significance of the man that still resonates in our troubled world.

It was with a certain hesitation that I first came to La Verna, as though something divine that was hidden in the life of the Apostle of Humanity might be lost for me in the mere realism of  his sacred places. But it was not so. In Italy, it might seem even to-day, St. Francis is not a stranger, and, in fact, I had got no further than the Cappella degli Uccelli before I seemed to understand everything, and in a place so lonely as this to have found again, yes, that Jesus whom I had lost in the city. … 

Everywhere you go in La Verna you feel that S. Francesco has been there before you; and where there is no tradition to help you, surely you will make one for yourself. Can he who loved everything that had life had failed to love, too, that world he saw from La Penna—

                    “Nel crudo sasso, intra Tevere ed Arno”

--Casentino and its woods and streams, Val d’Arno, Val di Tevere, the hills of Perugia, the valleys of Umbria, the lean, wolfish country of the Marche, the rugged mountains of Romagna. There on the summit of La Verna, you look down on the broken fortresses of countless wars, the passes through which army after army, company upon company, has marched to victory or fled in defeat; every hilltop seems to bear some ruined Rocca, every valley to be a forgotten battlefield, every stream has run red with blood. All is forgotten, all is over, all is done with. The victories led to nothing; the defeats are out of mind. In the midst of the battle the peasant went on ploughing his field; somewhere not far away the girls gathered the grapes. All this violence was of no account; it achieved nothing, and every victory was but the tombstone of an idea. Here; on La Verna, is the only fortress that is yet living in all Tuscany of that time so long ago. It is a fortress of love. The man who built it had flung away his dagger, and already his sword rusted in that little house in Assisi; he conquered the world by love. His was the irresistible and lovely force, the immortal, indestructible confidence of the Idea, the Idea which cannot die. If he prayed in Latin, he wrote the first verses of Italian poetry. Out of his tomb grew the rose of the Renaissance, and filled the world with its sweetness. He was the son of a burgess in Assisi, and is now the greatest saint in our heaven. With the sun he loved his name has shown round the world, and there is no land so far that it has not heard it. And we who look upon the ruined castles of the Conti Guidi, are here because of him, and speak with his brethren as we gaze.

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 381-384.

On the Road to Narni

  

In "Assisi and Umbria Revisited", Edward Hutton recalled many incidents from his first visit to the area fifty years earlier. In Chapter XIII, entitled "Over the Somma to Narni", he even remembered an incident from his school days.

Through the valleys of oak and ilex I set out from Spoleto, I remember, before the sun was high, on a fair September morning as ever was, for Terni and her fall, which, as it happened, I was never to see; for I had scarcely gone five miles on my way when I was overtaken by rain that meant the end of the summer, for, as they say in Siena, the first rain after the Assumption is the first rain of winter. Was it not of such a tempest that Virgil warned us, so that we might note its coming?

 

But I was heedless; and, taken with the beauty of the way, I had not observed the signs infallible. Not till the murmur of the woods prevailed against the whisper of the summer day did I understand that nature was awake, her heart tumultuous with some passionate remembrance, and she herself singing upon the mountains….

Here he inserted eight lines in the original Latin from one of Virgil's pastoral poems usually called the Georgics.  I give the English translation that he supplied in a footnote.

"Often too there appears in the sky a mighty column of water and clouds--mustered from on high roll up a murky tempest of black showers; down falls the lofty heaven and with its deluge of rain washes away the happy crops and the labors of the oxen. The dykes fill: the deep channelled rivers swell and roar and the sea steams in its heaving. The Father himself in the midnight of storm clouds wields his bolts with flashing hand...."

 

Ah, but I used to know the whole of that Georgic by heart, hammered into me as it was at school, though even then I came to love Virgil, “so musical, so melancholy”, and I remember how at Blundell’s one of my form-masters, if we happened on  a passage of the Aeneid which Virgil had stolen from Homer, never missed the opportunity of sniffling viciously, and “Homer spoiled again” he would say. On one of these occasions I held up my hand and protested, a somewhat unusual thing for a boy to do in those days.

 

     “Yes, sir,” I said, “but-----”

     “Well, boy?”

     “Please, sir, I mean, sir, with what a grace he does it.”

     “That,” said my form-master, “is the most immoral remark I have ever heard in this form. And I might add it is all the worse for the small, the very small, measure of truth there is in it.” 

  

Happy days! But not so happy as that in the rain on the way to Terni.  Through the valley under the storm of rain I went rejoicing; it was one of the great days of my life. I crossed the Somma alone chanting Virgil’s lines. I was drenched to the skin, and the hailstones cut my face like a whip, and the lightning flashed about me. What cared I? The long road hissed before me, and suddenly, as it seemed, under the fury of the storm, was overcome and no longer resisted the invincible rain, but was musical with a million fountains. All nature sighed in the ecstasy of that embrace, and spoke in the  song of the storm of the antique tragedies of the gods. And I alone knew it all as I came down into the sacred groves of ilex in the old and beautiful valley, through which a little river ran boisterous before me.

But that was fifty years ago and today it was raining still, when I am ashamed to say, I crossed the Somma in an autobus and again I did not see the famous falls of which Childe Harold wrote.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 99-100.

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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