Edward Hutton: Volterra

Edward Hutton's Siena and Southern Tuscany was published in 1910, over a hundred years ago. Walking from S. Gimignano to Volterra he encountered what he called "traveller's fear" before arriving at the gate of that ancient and storied city. Most of the chapter on Volterra deals with its long history.

 

The road for Volterra—for it was thither I was bound one fine October morning at dawn—descends from S. Gimignano into the valley, and climbing again through that quiet and delicate country that marks all the Val d’Elsa, joins the high road from Colle…Thence the way lies over vast and barren watersheds, across an uplifted wilderness of sterile clay hills, past blue-grey chasms of volcanic tufa, till at evening “lordly Volterra” rears itself up suddenly against the sky, haggard with loneliness and age like the dreadful spirit of this strange country so full of a sinister desolation. No traveler can, I think, approach this outraged stronghold of old time without a certain hesitation, a certain apprehension and anxiety. The way is difficult, precipitous, and threatening, full of dangers that cannot be named or realized; and long ere you climb the last great hill into the city an eerie dread has seized your heart. As far as the eye can reach that battered and tortured world rolls away in billow after billow of grey earth scantily covered with a thin dead herbiage that seems to have even burned with fire. On either side the way vast cliffs rise over immense crevices seamed and tortured into the shapes of raped and ruined cities: yonder a dreadful tower set with broken turrets totters on the edge of sheer nothing; here a tremendous gate leads into darkness, there a breached wall yawns over an abyss. If there is such a thing as traveller’s fear, it is here you will meet it, it is here it will make your heart a prize. As for me, I was horribly afraid, nor would any prayer I know bring my soul back into my keeping.

And if the way is so full of fear, what of that lofty city that stands at the high summit of that narrow road winding between the precipices? It too is a city of dread—a city of bitterness, outraged and very old. Seven hundred years before the fall of Troy it had already suffered siege. Surrounded in those days by walls forty feet high, 12 feet thick, and eight thousand yards in circumference, that have worn out three civilizations, and still in part remain, Volterra was one of the great cities of the Etruscan League. Like vast fortresses her gates were held impregnable. Enemy after enemy, army after army broke against those tremendous bastions; she scattered them, and they were lost in the desolation in which she is still entrenched. From the lower valley of the Arno to the forgotten citadel of “sea-girt Populonia,” which the Maremma has destroyed, she reigned supreme.... (39-40)

 

Encamped within these ruins he will find the debris of more than one later civilization—Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance—cheek by jowl with the fugitive and impermanent work of to-day. Still enthroned and guarded by the wall of the Etruscans, and entered by their gate, the shrunken medieval city of Volterra waits for him among the ruins of four different ages, like some herb hidden in a crevice of the temples of Karnak. (41)

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.  

Edward Hutton: S. Gimignano

 

Edward Hutton's tour of  southern Tuscany continued with S. Gimignano, the hill town still famous for its many towers. 

If we would know what a Tuscan hill town was like in the fourteenth century, we must go on foot or by carriage to S. Gimignano delle belle Torri, on the hills on the other side of the Elsa. There it is true, we shall find no remembrance of Boccaccio, but we shall be treading in the footsteps of Dante, and we shall find there, too, the memory of one of those little saints who once made sweet our world, but who, alas! Come no more down the long valleys at evening, singing of the love of God. Nevertheless, there are few refuges in all of Tuscany more secure from the rampages of our time that S. Gimignano.

 

To reach this wonder, to behold this banner of a lost cause, still valiant upon the hills, that is a good way which leaves Certaldo by crossing the river, and so climbs over the hills till the city “of the beautiful towers” rises before you like a vision, and you come at last, as to a forgotten shrine, into her quiet and shadowy gates….

 

The road from Certaldo, which was the way I took, is as lovely as any in the world. You climb hill after hill between the olives and the vines, where the grain and the grapes grow together. Often you descend into delicious valleys, where the vineyards are still with summer, and the silence is only broken by the faraway voice of some peasant singing stornelli; often, too, you look back on Val d’Elsa, where Certaldo smiles on its steep hill over the river, till suddenly at a turning of the way S. Gimignano rises before you on a lonely hill-top, covered with the silver of the olives, the gold of the corn, the green mantle of the vines, like a city out of a missal, crowned with her trophy of thirteen towers….

 

This little valiant town, so lonely on the hills, was once the centre of a vigorous life, civil and religious, even intellectual and artistic. It produced and employed painters; a poet was born here, little S. Fina stood for it among the blessed in heaven. Now the place is less than nothing, a curiosity for strangers; it has no life of its own, and is incapable of producing anything but a few labourers for the fields. As you pass through its narrow ways and look on the monuments of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, you find everything deserted and a cruel poverty the only tyrant left. Some virtue is gone out of it. Why?... (31)

 

S. Fina
Benozzo Gozzoli

She is poor, and her ways are quiet: how hospitable is her inn! She has the inevitable humility of those who have given up the struggle for pre-eminence, the inevitable grace of all those who have learned how to wait in meditation. Indeed, I have not told one-half of her sweetness, nor numbered the half of her treasures, nor told of her country byways, nor altogether understood why I love her so. Yet this I know: she has nothing to do with machinery or the getting of wealth. Come and see. (38)

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. 

Edward Hutton: Certaldo and Boccaccio

 Edward Hutton's chapter on Certaldo is mainly taken up with an extended account of the life of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Certaldo's most famous resident. In 1909, a year before he published Siena and Southern Tuscany, Hutton had written a biography of Boccaccio, a writer famous for his own life as well as for his Decameron, a collection of stories told by men and women trying to escape the ravages of the plague.

 

Long before you come to Certaldo on its great hill over the narrowing valley of the Elsa, which in fact it holds and closes, the Castello shines before you, still very far off, a rugged cluster of houses and towers against the sky. When at last you find yourself on that great and beautiful road beside the river, at the foot of the beautiful hill, it is to discover a town very like Castel-Fiorentino in this at least, that the Castello, the walled and ancient town, is on the hill and the modern borgo in the plain. But as you soon realise, Certaldo is more splendid, more rugged, and more ancient than her sister, though, as you see her from the north, you have the worst view of her, her true splendor looking southward. 

 

Most of us who in the modern hurry stay here, perhaps for a few hours on our way to Siena or to Florence, come not for any ancient loveliness she may have kept for us, but for Boccaccio’s sake, for he died here in the ancient house of his family still to be seen in the Castello….

 

Boccaccio:

 

That great and heroic man who has entranced the whole world with his stories, who gave Homer back to us, and was the first defender of Dante Alighieri, the devoted friend of Petrarch, the lover of Fiammetta; who remained poor his whole life long for the sake of learning, and who indeed is the most human and the most modest and heroic spirit of the earliest Renaissance…. (13-14)

 

In his fiftieth year he began to regret the irresponsibility of his past life. On the threshold of old age, poor and alone, he thought to love God with the same enthusiasm with which he had loved woman. He was not capable of it; his whole life rose up to deny him that impassioned consolation….

 

Boccaccio’s days of creation were, however, over. He retired to Certaldo to the house of his ancestors, and there read without ceasing the works of antiquity, annotating as he read…

 

In addition to all his other reading Boccaccio had never ceased to study the “Divine Comedy,” nor did he till his death… *

 

In 1373 he was called from his retirement in Certaldo to lecture publicly on the “Divine Comedy” in Florence. He began to read on 23 October, 1373, in the church of S. Stefano alla Badia, and continued on each succeeding day that was not a festival. He had got so far as the sixtieth lezione, when he was taken ill and had to cease. This was no sudden disease; he had never really recovered from his “conversion.” Really ill, he retired to Certaldo, where, utterly miserable and suffering from his disease, but more from the ignorance of doctors, he groped about far from Petrarch, looking for more certainty. He had thought he might find it in the monastic life, and it was in a solitude almost as profound that he came to die at last on this hill in Val d’Elsa in the house of his ancestors—a magician, as was said, like Virgil or Ovid to the folk of Naples and Sulmona, knowing all the secrets of nature. He must often have passed slowly, because of failing health, up and down the picturesque streets of the old town, which holds as many sudden peeps as Assisi; and at sunset, perhaps he lingered by the gates as we do, for they are wonderfully placed for beauty. From his room he looked over a world as fair as any in Tuscany—a land of hills about a quiet valley where the olives are tossed to silver in the wind and the grapes are kissed by the sun into gold and purple, where the corn whispers between the vines; till for him, too, at last the grasshopper became a burden.

 

There, on 21 December, 1375, he died, and was buried, as he had desired above the quiet waters of the Elsa which puts all to sleep. In passing through the old streets of Certaldo to-day, it is part of our heritage to remember him. (24-25).

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 Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. 

*Note: Click on this link to watch a seven minute video of Roberto Benigni, Italy's most famous modern comedian, reading the first canto of Dante's Divine Comedy.