Edward Hutton: Cagli and the Furlo Pass

Toward the end of his tour of Romagna and the Marches Edward Hutton stopped in little Cagli where he saw something perhaps more beautiful than all the lovely landscapes and paintings he had seen on his journey. 

Now Cagli is the most delightful of all these little towns between Fabriano and Urbino, a shady, cool, quiet little place full of interesting buildings and beautiful pictures. ...

I shall not easily forget my arrival in Cagli. I had waited for the evening to set out on account of the heat, so that when I arrived at Cagli which is some distance from the station, it was quite dark. There was little or nothing near the house in the dark street where the posta put me down to indicate that here was an inn, and it was with some misgiving that I made my way up a dark staircase to the first floor. There, however, all my fears forsook me, for I was greeted by one of the most beautiful women it has ever been my good fortune to meet, and, what is rarer than physical beauty in Italy, she had one of the softest and most delicious voices I have ever heard anywhere. It was a great pleasure all the time I was in Cagli to be greeted every morning by this beautiful creature, and ‘twixt sleeping and waking, while the sun came in little daggers through the closed shutters, to hear her say “acqua, Signore.” I don’t think I had ever realized before what a language of liquid music Italian is, nor how true the old saying that “the devil tempted Eve in Italian.” This beautiful lady really managed the whole business of the inn, and with so glorious a dignity and so consummate a tact that even the Italian commercial travelers, about as horned a beast as flourished in the peninsula, forgot his vulgarity when she was by, mended his flamboyant manners, and tried to look like a man. Beauty herself never had a more wonderful power over the Beast; and indeed, the power of this young woman was an effect of sheer beauty in which, yes, even in hers, which was provocative enough, there was something of holiness…. (268-9)

After a pleasant stay, Hutton left Cagli and walked to Urbino, the last stop on his tour. He had to go through the spectacular Furlo Pass.

It was still very hot, and therefore, very early one summer morning when I set out from Cagli. Before me stretched the great white road, Via Flaminia, and above me presently rose the Furlo, its white brows just kissed by the sun in the dawn I could not see. It was not long before I was in the midst of a fantastic fairyland and of strange and horrid cliffs, threatening crags, changing lights, and tremendous gateways. I cannot hope to describe the enormous grandeur of those gates, eyries for eagles, as indeed they are. Presently I came to the remarkable tunnel or gallery which Rome hewed through the living rock to make a way for her armies, and which she knew as Petra Pertusa…. The work was achieved under Vespasian according to the inscription cut into the rock and was constructed in A.D. 75. …

Nothing in Italy is more amazing that this great Roman thing, which seems almost awful in its achievement, and curiously enough ends as suddenly and dramatically as it begins. One goes down towards Fossombrone through a smiling and delicious country of oak woods out of all that loneliness and silence, through which—yes, even through the impassable rock—Rome near two thousand years ago forged a way. (274-5)

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Image by David Orme

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Edward Hutton: Camerino and Matelica

This post is longer than usual because it offers Hutton's contrasting view of two towns: lofty Camerino, a shell despite  its spectacular views, and lowly Matelica which still retained its soul.   

Camerino

But Camerino is worth all the labours it costs to reach her. Of all the March cities she is the most characteristic, with the most to offer us, at any rate in the way of natural beauty. For even in a country which can boast of such a place as Fermo or Macerata she is easily queen—a noble, dark, medieval city set on the top of a mighty hill nearly two thousand feet over the sea, commanding a view of unsurpassed splendor and beauty, towering over her world. (244) …

No one who has ever looked out from the road beyond Porta Giulia at evening will ever forget what he has seen. It is as though all those dreams of landscape, which were all that Perugino really cared about, had suddenly been translated into a reality more beautiful and more wonderful than anything of which he had been able to conceive… (245)

Wandering about Camerino recalling these things to mind, one is touched by the melancholy of the city from which everything except the beauty of the world in which it stands seems to have fallen away. How empty are all these churches of which there are so many; all the pictures have gone, and the fragments only remain and these not in places for which they were painted, but gathered into another empty and desecrated church, now a museum…. (250)

The curious poverty of Camerino, that noble city, in works of art, cannot but strike every traveler; happily, not far away at the foot of that prodigious hill upon which Camerino stands, there is a little city in the valley of the Esina which is as rich in paintings as Camerino is poor; its name is Matelica…. (254)

I came as a stranger into Matelica, I took lunch at the inn, the Aquila d’Oro, a not very brilliant hostelry, and after lunch, in the very hour of the siesta, I demanded of all and sundry the way to the Museo expecting to see everything there was to see in an hour or two. The Museo was closed and I was directed by the barber, who had courteously accompanied me, to apply to Father Bigiaretti, the director. I did as I was bid. I found Father Bigiaretti, like any other decent and sane person at that hour of a summer day, taking his siesta. But do you think he sent me away? Not at all. Cheerfully and without complaint he brought his siesta to an end and issued out of his cool house into the appalling heat because a stranger wanted to see his beautiful city. Without a thought he devoted the whole of his leisure to showing me not only the Museo, but everything he thought I would care for in Matelica, and this not for the sake of my book, of which he was quite unaware, but because I was a stranger. (255)

Matelica Piazza

And now as to Matelica. I have said that no one who travels through the Marches should miss it… It is a little gay town, as gay as Camerino is melancholy, set about a fine open Piazza, where is a double loggia, a fountain of 1590, the great palazzo del Municipio and the church of S. Soffragio. This charming Piazza is the centre of Matelica; all of the churches, which are the great feature of Matelica, are to be sought from it, the Museo and the Duomo being but a few steps away. …. (256)

The soul of a city, the genius loci, least of all of such a quiet and retiring place as Matelica, cannot be taken by surprise… how often it escapes the assiduous and him who possesses no patience, but would see all in a moment, and pry into secrets that belong to the ages… His mind is a whirlwind and he has lost the command of his own heart. What are the flowers by the wayside to him, and what are the works of Lorenzo da Sanseverino, Crivelli, Palmezzano and the rest of the pictures which hide shyly in these little churches, but flowers? Just because these beautiful things have not been collected into a museum for those who come by railway, they are living still by their wayside, filling the little churches  with their beauty and their pageants, shining in the love of the lowly and the meek, who kneel shyly and silently before them, offering up their petitions and watching with a new wonder every morning the priest make Christ out of bread and wine—things they know, of which we are ignorant, things they find precious, for they are poor, and more precious still because they are the instruments of a Sacrament and a Sacrifice which has given a new meaning to life, which has involved even the hills in its mystery and lifted up forever the souls of men... let us tread softly by these peasants as they kneel with free hearts and bowed heads before Him who has made all that was so worthless most precious, in Whose honour and for Whose glory every picture in Matelica was painted…

Here, in Matelica, how the children linger in the churches, so that, though they be but peasants, they are acquainted with all that the highest culture can give as a reward alter long years—sweetness and light; so that from their earliest years they are used to the ways of a great court, the greatest court in the world, the sanctuary of the King of kings, with its beautiful ceremonies, precious robes and elaborate ritual. ... But because of this, which even in the humblest village, and assuredly in Matelica, the smallest and the poorest children may follow and love, there is about them a graciousness which one misses altogether in the north, that four hundred years ago was ours also, and is visible, for instance, in every gesture of Chaucer’s pilgrims, but that we have missed and shall perhaps never have again. (260-262)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Sanseverino and Madonna Pacis

In Sanseverino Edward Hutton found a beautiful work of art but more than anything else it was the city and its people, living things that a guide book could never express, that impressed him. 

Sanseverino, in the narrow valley of the Potenza, under the steep hill upon which its Castello still stands, wins you at once by its beauty, its smiling aspect, its air of the Middle Age, of whose works it is full, and of which it might well stand as an example in its picturesque and daring loveliness. The days one spends there wandering from the beautiful long Piazza so happily arcaded on the south, from church to church up to the old Castello, entered by that prodigious gateway, Porta S. Francesco, on the hill, are all days of delight and happiness. There can be no one who has ever wandered through these long valleys, or climbed these great hills, but has rejoiced to enter Sanseverino and regretted to depart, though it be for a city so marvelous as Camerino, or so hospitable and delicious as Matelica. For Sanseverino, in some wonderful way known only to itself, renews one’s youth and one’s first careless delight in Italy—in these beautiful hill cities always so surprising to an Englishman, who is wont to build his towns and villages anywhere rather than upon a hill; but, then, how much that is left to us in England is as old as Sanseverino? (235)

Madonna Pacis

This is the beautiful work of Pintoricchio, and it probably dates from about 1496. It represents in a beautiful landscape—a valley with far-away mountains and curious rocks beneath woods—Madonna seated with her little Son standing on a rich cushion on her knee, as He blesses the donor, a priest…who kneels humbly, his hands pointed in prayer. In Our Lord’s left hand is a crystal ball surmounted by a little cross; and on either side of Madonna is an angel. Above, in the lunette, appears God the Father, surrounded by the cherubim. This very noble work is called the Madonna of Peace, Madonna Pacis, and its effect upon one is just that; it is as though all the softness of Umbria had suddenly crept, on some summer afternoon, into this harder and more violent country of narrow, broken valleys, and precipitous mountains, and had left here for ever this much of its own beatitude…. (239)

When the traveler has seen these things he has seen perhaps the finer sights of Sanseverino, but no one should forget that the city remains—remains to be loved and for our delight. Anyone can follow a guide book, if he can find one, from church to church and picture to picture, but let not such an one deceive himself; when he has seen everything that is there set down there must always remain the city itself with its by-ways, shrines and, above all, its people and the life and happiness of the place. These, in such a book as this, I have not the space nor perhaps the skill to speak of, as they should be spoken of. They remain, when all is said, not merely what is best worth seeing in Sanseverino, but are rightly understood Sanseverino itself. For all that we look for and search out with so much industry is dead, after all, but these are living, and by our pleasure in them, ourselves may judge ourselves. (242)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Edward Hutton: Tolentino

Before the unification of Italy, Romagna and the Marches had been part of the Papal States for about a thousand years. Hutton viewed unification as a conquest of the South by the northern Kingdom of Piedmont, a conquest in which he believed more was lost than gained by cities like Tolentino.

St. Nicholas Basilica, Tolentino

The truth would seem to be that the cities under the Papal dominion enjoyed a far greater measure of real freedom than those subject to a mere Signore, and that the difference between being actually independent and being subject to the Pope was a negligible one. Says an historian of Tolentino: “The Accoramboni were never lords in Tolentino. It is false to assert it. We were always free under the Church. The people of Tolentino would never endure tyranny. The men of Camerino—yes; but we were made of different stuff.” And this feeling, which we may be sure was based on substantial fact, was really universal throughout the Romagna and the Marches. When the Piedmontese came in, in 1860, “the people of Ravenna,” we read, “were forced to the polling booth at the point of the bayonet.” And this new liberty was recommended to those who enjoyed the reality for ages! (229)

The most famous citizen of Tolentino was St. Nicholas (1245-1305), an Augustinian monk. 

Tolentino, it may be thought, as the birthplace of a great saint, may have been more Papal than her neighbors, but in fact this is not so. The great figure of S. Nicholas is not in any sense of the word political; its appeal is altogether human and universal…. 

Perugino: S. Nicholas

It might seem that in S. Nicholas of Tolentino we have an example of that rare sweetness of character which is perhaps in greater or lesser degree the portion of all the saints, but which in him was so overwhelming that men and women followed him, flocked to his Masses, or sought him in the confessional for no other reason. As a preacher, no doubt, he was amazingly successful, but rather by reason of some inward sweetness and charm than of the victorious eloquence of his mere words. For thirty years he lived in Tolentino in the Augustinian convent there, a star in the March, something which men could not explain or dismiss from their minds, women knelt to kiss his robe, and even those in the flower of their age gladly heard his voice, as though it had been some sweet far-away music. By the very beauty of his nature he drew thousands from the half-brutal worldliness in which they lived, and seems indeed to have brought to them something of the strange incomprehensible beauty of his own vision. (229-230)

On the way to Tolentino Hutton passed through tiny Monte San Giusto and mentioned a painting 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)

I wonder if he actually saw this magnificent painting by 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 a link to my account.

Lorenzo Lotto: Crucifixion detail

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Edward Hutton: Amandola

Edward Hutton's descriptions of Italian inns and the hospitality he found there are some of his most charming passages. As he noted, in Italy it would be wrong to judge by appearances even in the most humble town or inn.

It was already night when, after a brief halt at Comunaza , a wretched but beautifully situated village of the lower hills, the dilegenza came up to the gate of Amandola and stopped in a bleak Piazza at the foot of the little hill town, of which I could discern nothing but a gaunt and shadowy tower. There was no sign of an inn, but presently I was led by the hand over the cobbles, for it was very dark, to a little door that opened on a vast kitchen reeking with a most savoury smell of cooking. The place was full of light and warmth, and crowded with all kinds of people, peasants and a priest or two, but especially I noticed an amazingly ugly old woman, who presently came up to me and demanded my business. Then when she knew I desired a bed she took me by the hand and led me up a foul and broken stairway to the first floor of her home, where, to my astonishment, I saw that all was fair and clean, as was the room and bed she offered me. And here let me say at once that my days in Amandola were all days of delight and happiness. It is never well in Italy to judge by appearances, and in Amandola, as I soon found, least of all. Nowhere have I received greater kindness; nowhere have I found so nice a courtesy. Nothing I required was denied me; everything was done for my comfort and pleasure. I slept soft and I lived well, I found the best company in the world, among the shepherds and peasants and priests of the mountains. They brought me fruit out of their little store, the children danced and sang songs for me, the shepherds blew the mountain airs on their pipes and told me tales of the snow, of witches and the evil eye, and of the adventures of Our Lady fleeing with our little Lord from Herod and the Pharisees, which befell, it seems, but yesterday, as is indeed most true. And so I who had feared to stay a single night in Amandola, remained for my own delight a whole seven days, not one of which I reckoned ill-spent or unrepaid, though Amandola itself is little more than a village. (214-215) …

Figure to yourself a little place of rosy brick piled up on a great precipitous hillside, on the crest or saddle of which it is spread out eastward, threaded by rude and stony streets between gaunt houses. A wretched place enough, but filled with a people so hospitable and charming that when I think of the Marches Amandola appears in my mind as the heart and rose of a country which for friendliness and charm is second to none in Italy.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.