Edward Hutton: Chiusi

                                       Southern Tuscany: Chiusi

 

On his tour of Siena and Southern Tuscany Edward Hutton found beautiful views most everywhere. Ancient Chiusi was no exception. The town and its views were so exceptional that he had little interest in its famed Etruscan remains.

Nothing, I suppose, can well be more venerable than Chiusi, and as for the beautiful view you see thence, men must have loved it for some thousands of years. To the right rises Monte Cetona, like a vast pyramid shining in the sun, while to the left Citta del Pieve hides among the woods of its dear hills. Between, the valley opens north and south, the wide and fruitful valley of the Chiana, through a sweet and quiet world of villages and homesteads and sweetly breaking hills. How softly the evening falls there, and how wonderful is the light over hill and valley and mountain! It is easy to tell one is here on the verge of Umbria; one has but to go down into the valley, and in something less than a hundred yards one finds oneself in that mysterious country, “dim with valleys,” which Perugino, the landscape painter, has shown us in all his pictures Well. Chiusi is, and has always been, the Mecca of the archaeologist, yet I am sure he never found anything there so lovely, half so consoling as that view over the valley and the light on the fair hills. And whatever Chiusi may be or may come to be for the world, a vast Etruscan necropolis or a huge factory town and railway terminus… for me she will ever remain what she was to me in those two brief days in which I sat like a lord in the Leone d’Oro, and, like my fathers before me, washed my goat’s cheese down with Montepulciano and smoked sigari on the doorstep as I watched the evening procession of the maidens and the beautiful ladies, who there, as in every other Italian town and village, take their constitutional after the work of the day. Chiusi is merely the best and loveliest of places in Tuscany because you may look from it as from a window on Umbria. It is a place from which you may overlook grey olives and green vineyards and golden corn, and beyond a fairy lake, and beyond the hills and then the mountains. I could watch just that for ever. I did my best. They came to me and spoke of Etruscan tombs, they told me of an Etruscan Museum….

 But what have I to do with the Etruscans or the Etruscans with me? My world, the world I love, lies before my eyes. May I not look at it and enjoy it a little before it is taken away from me, or spoiled for ever by some fool who wants to make money and benefit his country, as they say, by making it miserable and wretched? (273)…

 

As you wander through the place, quiet enough at any time of year, through the great empty piazza at the top of the town from red brick Church of S. Francesco, it is less of Chiusi than of the beautiful world in which she stands, scarcely more than an ancient graveyard, that you think. History here is but a tale that is told….Beside that marvellous and eternal beauty no trumpery tale of a dead civilization, of which we know nothing and can know nothing, is worth consideration for a moment. For here are the sun and the wind and the soft sky: let us lift up our hearts and rejoice in them, for too soon we also shall be of as little account as the Etruscans. (278)

 

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

Radicofani and the della Robbia

                                      

 

Edward Hutton's tour of southern Tuscany eventually took him to Radicofani, the hilltop stronghold of Ghino di Tacco, the thirteenth century bandit made famous by Dante and Boccaccio. Hutton tells Ghino's story but also finds much to value in this tiny town with the spectacular view.

Today Radicofani is a little naked village straggling round the jagged hill under the fortress, with three churches, a fine clock-tower, many old houses, and a beautiful palace, evidently the Palazzo del Governo, now a prison, covered with coats of arms; while without the gates are a Capuchin convent, a pretty place enough, among trees too, now secularized... 

Of the three churches within the walls,… S. Pietro has a wealth of beautiful things, the work of the Robbias, whom, as I suppose, the Sforza of Santa Fiora brought here… But then, since all the guide-books have ignored Radicofani, as they have ignored Mont’ Amiata, one expects to find nothing there, whereas both Radicofani and Santa Fiora are as rich in della Robbia ware as any city in Tuscany, save Florence…. (255)

The great thing to be had at Radicofani is the view—such a view as I think you may find nowhere else in all Tuscany, so wide it is, so majestic, and so beautiful. Let us remind ourselves of it. Across the deep and bitter ravine to the west rises Mont’ Amiata, an incredibly great and lovely thing, with Abbadia S. Salvatore just visible on the verge of the woods. To the north lies the Senese with its shining cities, with Siena itself visible at evening on the skirts of the farthest hills. To the east lies the splendid range of Cetona, with its tiny scattered villages and lofty, sweeping outline, shutting out Umbria and her hills. And to the south? To the south lies the whole breadth of the Patrimony.* No one who has once looked southward from Radicofani is ever likely to forget what he has seen. It is one of the great vistas of the world. It almost gives you Rome. Evening is the hour when that world stretched for your joy at your feet is the most lovely, and strangely enough most visible, for in the heat of the day a veil of mist hides it from the boldest eyes. But at night, when far and far away across the Umbrian hills, like a horn of pallid gold, like a silver sickle for some precious harvest, the moon hangs over the world, then little by little in her light that world at your feet becomes visible, at first never so faintly, as though still hidden in some impalpable but lovely veil…. Far away Lago di Bolsena shines like a jewel, Monte Cimino rises like a ghost beside Monte Venere, eternally separated the one from the other by the faint line of hills like a bow, against which Montefiascone rises  like a lovely thought in the unbreakable silence, the papal city of Viterbo lies like a white rose. And last of all in the farthest distance Monte Soracte, the lovely mountain, guards the desert of the Campagna and the immortal thing which it has brought forth—the City of Rome. (265-6)

 

 

* The Patrimony refers to the Papal States, that huge chunk of central Italy governed by the Pope for over 1000 years until it was forcibly taken over by the Italian government in the nineteenth century unification movement.

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

Montalcino and S. Antimo

 

Edward Hutton loved everything about Montalcino but above all, he praised the inn of the Lily (Il Giglio). He did not mention that Montalcino is the home of Brunello, one of the world's great wines. On leaving he made sure to visit the nearby twelfth century Abbey of S. Antimo, a site that my wife and I agree should not be missed. 

There is much talk in every guidebook, from Herr Bardeker through Murray to Joanne, of hotels—first-class, second-class, and tolerable, as they say in their curt, unexpansive way; but what does the ordinary traveller always on the look-out for the disgusting luxury of the “Ritz” or the “Carlton “ or the “Waldorf Astoria” understand I should like to know, of inns? Pure nothing…. Such places have nothing to say to travellers. Let us thank God for it. The inns I know in half a hundred places in Italy… are human places, where you will find friends, a soft bed, well-cooked food, a good wine, and a welcome. These places should be treasured in the memory and not too easily or widely published abroad; for an inn may be spoiled by its guests. Nevertheless, for once, out of pure charity and love of my fellow-men, I will praise the inn of the Lily… at Montalcino. I will say that it is the best I know, that I have been happy there, and that there I lived like a king. At night I slept soft and clean, I ate well punctually at the hours I had appointed, I was welcomed and I made friends, and from there I issued forth to see the magnificent town of Montalcino, tomb of the Sienese Republic; thither again I returned when I would, glad at heart, as to my own home. …

How can I praise you as I ought, O inn of the Lily, or wish you well enough? May you prosper always but not too much, may you ever be full of the world about you, may you gather in many strangers but not too many, and may S. Cristofano see to it that all these things come true for you. …

 

Seeing, then, that all these things are as they are, I it is no wonder that one finds Montalcino delightful. And, indeed, who could find it anything else? It clings to the great hills high up like the nest of an eagle; it is set above the woods, across the olive gardens it looks to the desert, over the vineyards it looks to the hills…. (246)

 

The road which leaves the city thus by the hills will bring you in some eight miles to the forgotten abbey of S. Antimo.

 

The Abbey of S. Antimo was in the Middle Age one of the greater Benedictine monasteries in Italy, and indeed it was the most formidable ecclesiastical feud in Tuscany… Moreover, it was, and still is even in its ruin, one of the best examples in Italy of Romanesque architecture, or rather of that kind of Romanesque peculiar to the eleventh century…. We may note that one of the most notable features of this new style was the substitution of the vaulted stone roofs for the older wooden ones; now though this was of slow growth, beginning with the covering of the aisles when the nave was still roofed with wood, it became at last universal, though the mixed style was long used in Italy even in the twelfth century, when it seems the Abbey of S. Antimo was built.

 

As we see it today even, the Church of S. Antimo seems to us perhaps the most beautiful interior in Tuscany, though the cathedrals of Pisa and Lucca are maybe more firmly established in our hearts. But in any case it is so fine that it is worth any trouble to see, and since it lies within an easy drive  of Montalcino and on the direct road to the railway it should on no account be missed. (250-251)

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Southern Tuscany: Pienza

 

Pienza is my favorite town in Italy. It was probably Edward Hutton's description that prompted my wife and I to visit on more than one occasion. The charming little town, now the self-proclaimed cheese capitol of Tuscany, still has its spectacular views. In Hutton's time the town did not have a inn, but now there is the lovely Hotel Corsignano.

A little later  I came to a great castle at a turning of the way over the bare hills, and then at last and suddenly Pienza came into full view, still some miles away, so I set out with renewed heart and won the gate at sunset.

And as it happened my angel went with me, for as I came up the one long street of the place into the piazza where the Duomo stands and the Palazzo del Municipio and the Palazzo Piccolomini, and indeed all the great buildings of Pienza, he led me, and I swear I knew nothing about it, behind the great church on to a narrow terrace, and there I watched the sunset. I could not have had greater good fortune. For it was not only the sunset I saw, but the sunset over a great bare world of mountains and valley—Mont’Amiata, now quite close, and Val d’Orcia—a world actually as beautiful and as strong as Castile, as beautiful, too, and as stony, as tremendous for its marvelous significance. Desolate beyond expression, that wide and desert valley, full of twilight, lay before me, and out of it rose Mont’Amiata, the greatest mountain in Tuscany, and its foundations were as the foundations of a nation. … (230-231)

 

The story of Pienza is like the fairy tale of Cinderella, which after all has Christian authority, for is it not written that the last shall be first? Before Pienza changed her name, before her wonderful, her incredible good fortune befell her, she was but a little good-for-nothing village of a few hundred inhabitants, and her name was Corsignano. Then in the first years of the fifteenth century a certain poor nobleman, exiled from Siena, came to the village to live by cultivating the few wretched acres which alone remained to him, for he was ruined.  With him came his young wife, as noble as himself, and presently in their little homestead she gave birth to a son, whom they called Enea Silvio. This child of the race of the Piccolomini, after a life of adventure, managing his affairs with great astuteness, and meeting with much good fortune, was presently elected Pope, and taking, in memory of Aeneas, after whom he was named, the title of Pius, and of his vanity, in the twinkling of an eye, as only a Pope can he turned the disreputable and dirty little village of Corsignano into the city of Pienza, building there a cathedral and certain palaces, and setting over to govern it a Bishop, that his name might be remembered for ever and his birth place be held in honour in saecula saeculorum…. (231-2)

Having settled this matter, let me hasten to add that as a village Pienza is one of the most charming and delightful places in the world, exceptional too, as villages go, in the possession of a fine cathedral and several palaces, to say nothing of pictures and a museum; and yet with all these, which Pius gave her, the finest thing and incomparably the loveliest and the best which she possesses was the gift of God—I mean  the great view she has of the mountains and the Val d’Orcia from the hill-side. For this she should give thanks daily, and we with her, for the rest, we can accept it with a certain complacence, seeing that it is there, not for our sakes at all, but to satisfy the vanity of Enea Silvio, the most human of the Popes who, in the name of Pius II, filled St. Peter’s Chair not unworthily from 1458 to 1464. (232-3)***

 

 

*** Pictured above is one of the three volumes of the autobiographical Commentaries of Pope Pius II published by the I Tatti Renaissance Library. They are more readable and delightful than any Papal encyclical, and provide an essential down to earth guide  to anyone interested in the Renaissance. 

Here is the Pope's description of his home town.

From Sarteano the pope went to Cortigiano. There is a great mountain in the Val d’Orcia which rises up to a narrow plateau about a mile long. At the southeast corner stands a little town, not much to speak of, but possessed of a healthful climate, excellent wine, and all the other necessities of life. Traveling from Siena to rome, one passes Cortigiano on the road to Radicofani, just after the castle of San Quirico. The town sits on a gentle rise three miles from the main road. (V. I, 281)

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