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.