Porto Venere

Traveling south from Genoa along the sea coast, Edward Hutton spent some time exploring among the coastal towns. He devoted a number of pages to an account of the poet Shelley's last days and tragic death off the coast of Lerici, but then devoted a short chapter to a visit to Porto Venere that brought out his love of the classical world. 

 

Thus died perhaps the greatest lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! “’tis Death is dead, not he,” for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as if it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the refreshment of his spirit. (53)

 

It is perhaps a more joyful day that may be spent at Porto Venere, the little harbour on the northern shores of the gulf. Starting early you come, still before the sea is altogether subject to the sun, to a little bay of blue clear still water flanked by gardens of vines, of agaves and olives. Here, in silence save for the lapping of the water… you land, and, following the path by the hillside, come suddenly on the little port with its few fishing-boats and litter of ropes and nets, above which rises the little town, house piled on house, from the ruined church rising high, sheer out of the sea to the church of marble that crowns the hill…. Climbing thus between the houses under that vivid strip of soft blue sky, the dazzling rosy beauty of the ruined ramparts suddenly bursts upon you, and beyond and above them the golden ruined church, and farther still, the glistening  shining splendour of the sea and the sun that has suddenly blotted out the soft sky. A flight of broken steps leads to a ruined wall, along which you pass to the old church, or temple is it, you ask yourself, so fair it looks, and without the humility of a Christian building. …As I stood leaning on the ruined wall looking on all this miracle of joy, a little child, who had hidden among the wind-blown cornflowers and golden bloom on the slope of the cliffs, slowly crept towards me with many hesitations and shy peerings; then, no longer afraid, almost naked as he was, he ran to me and took my hand.

 

“Will the Signore see the church?” said he, pulling me that way.

 

The Signore was willing. Thus it was, hand in hand with Eros, that I mounted the broken steps of the tower of Venus, his mother.

 

How may I describe the wonder of that place? …we came out of the stairway on to a platform on the top of the tower surrounded by a broken battlement. It was as though I had suddenly entered the last hiding place of Aphrodite, herself. …

 

Port Venere rises out of the sea like Tintagel—but a classic sea, a sea covered with broken blossoms. It was evening when I returned again to the Temple of Venus. The moon was like a sickle of silver, far away the waves fawned along the shore, as though to call the nymphs from the woods; the sun was set; out of the east night was coming. In the great caves, full of coolness and misery, the Tritons seemed to be playing with sea monsters, while from far away I thought I heard the lamentable voice of Ariadne weeping for Theseus. Ah no, they are not dead, the beautiful, fair gods. Here, in the temple of Aphrodite, on the threshold of Italy, I will lift up my heart. Though the songs we made are dead and the dances forgotten, though the statues are broken, the temples destroyed, still in my heart there is a song and in my blood a murmur as of dancing, and I will carve new statues and rebuild the temples every day. For I have loved you, O Gods, in the forest and on the mountains and by the seashore. I, too, am fashioned out of the red earth, and all the sea is in my heart, and my lover is the wind.  (54-56)

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa. second edition, London, 1908. 

Edward Hutton: Genoa to Spezia

Edward Hutton regarded the road from Genoa to Spezia as one of the most beautiful in the world. Below are excerpts from his description of the road that he seems to have traversed on foot and horseback.

 

It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante, among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. Forgotten, or for the most part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems to await you entrenched in silence among the wild flowers….

 

This forgotten way among the olive gardens on the lower slopes of the mountains over the sea, seems to me more joyful than any other road in the world. It leads to Italy. … to the land of heart’s desire, where Pisa lies in the plain under the sorrowful gesture of the mountains like a beautiful mutilated statue, where Arno, parted from Tiber, is lost in the sea, dowered with the glory of Florence, the tribute of the hills, the spoil of many streams, the golden kiss of the sun; while Tuscany, splendid with light and joy, stands neither for God nor for His enemies, but for man, to whom she has given everything really without an afterthought, the songs that shall not be forgotten; the pictures full of youth; and above all Beauty…

 

Thus I, thinking of the way, came to Nervi. Now the way from Genoa out of the Pisan gate to Nervi is none of the pleasantest, being suburb all the way; but those eight chilometri over and done with, there is nothing but delight between you and Spezia. Nervi itself, that surprising place where beauty is all gathered into a nosegay of sea and seashore, will not keep you long… so you set out, leaving Genoa and her suburb at last behind you, and, climbing among olive groves, orange gardens, and flaming oleanders, with here a magnolia flaming with blossom…after another five miles you come to Recco, a modest sleepy village, where it is good to eat and rest. In the afternoon, you may very pleasantly take boat for Camogli, that ancient seafaring place

 

Camogli

In the cool of the afternoon you leave Camogli and climb by the byways to Ruta, whence you may see all the Gulf of Genoa, with the proud city herself in the lap of the mountains… Far away below you lies Rapallo in the crook of the bay among the oleanders and the vines.  It is there you must sleep… Somehow it is always into a dreamless sleep  one falls in Rapallo, that beautiful and guarded place behind Portofino, where the sea is like a lake, so still it is, and all the flowers of the world seem to have run for shelter….

 

Rapallo

And if the road, so far, beggars description… what can I hope to say of the way from Rapallo to Chiavari? Starting early, … you climb … through a whole long day of sunshine, with the song of the cicale ever in your ears, the mysterious long-drawn-out melody of the rispetti of the peasant girls reaching you ever…. So in the twilight pursuing your way you follow the beautiful road to Sestri-Levante

 

Sestri Levante

Many days might be spent among the woods of Sestri, but the road calls from the mountains, and it is ever of Tuscany that you think as you set out at last,  leaving the sea behind you for the hills… It is a far journey from Sestri to Spezia, but with a good horse, in spite of the hill, you may cover it in a single long day from sunrise to sunset… evening finds you at La Foce, the last height before Spezia; and suddenly at a turning of the way the sunset flames before you, staining all the sea with colour, and there lies Tuscany, those fragile , stainless peaks of Carrara faintly glowing in the evening sun purple and blue and gold, with here a flush as of dawn, there the heart of the sunset. And all before you lies the sea, with Spezia and the great ships in its arms; while yonder, like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the bleak height of La Foce… one by one the lights of the city appear like great golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the great light of the Pharos throws its warmth over sea and seashore; gathering in the distance of the far horizon, the night, splendid with blue and gold, overwhelms the world, bringing coolness and as it were a sort of reconciliation. So it is quite dark when, weary, at last you find yourself in Spezia, at the foot of the Tuscan hills.

 

Spezia

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 41-46.

Genoa: Anthony Vandyck

According to Edward Hutton, Genoa had no school of painting of its own. It could only boast of foreign painters like Rubens and Anthony Vandyck who came there to work in the early seventeenth century. In particular, he believed that Vandyck's work was transformed and humanized by his experience in Italy. *

 

Anthony Vandyck: Self Portrait

The city of Genoa, herself without a school of painting, had welcomed Rubens not long before very gladly, nor had Vandyck any cause to complain of her ingratitude.  He appears to have set himself to paint in the style of Rubens, choosing similar subjects, at any rate, and thus to have won for himself… a reputation but little inferior to his master’s. Certainly at this time his work is very Flemish in character, and apparently it was not till he had been to Venice and Rome that the influence of Italy and the Italian masters may be really found in his work. A disciple of Titian almost from his youth, it is the work of that master which gradually emancipates him from Flemish barbarism, from a too serious occupation with detail, the over-emphasis on northern work, the mere boisterousness, without any real distinction, that often spoils Rubens for us, and yet is so easily excused and forgotten in the mere joy of life everywhere to be found in it. Well, with this shy and refined mind Italy is able to accomplish her mission; she humanizes him, gives him the Latin sensibility and clarity of mind, the Latin refinement too, so that we are ready to forget that he was Rubens’ countryman… 

 

Much of this enlightening effect that Italy has upon the northerner may be found in the work of Vandyck upon his return to Genoa, really a new thing in the world, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness, in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this journey to the south in the sketchbook in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all that we have come to consider as especially his own….

 

Gradually Vandyck, shy and of a quiet, serene spirit… led by the immeasurable glory of the Venetians slowly escapes from that “Flemish manner” to be master of himself; so that, after he has painted in the manner of Titian at Palermo, he returns to Genoa to begin that wonderful series of masterpieces we all know, in which he has immortalized the tragedy of a king, the sorrowful beauty, frail and lonely as a violet, of Henrietta Maria and the fate of the Princes of England. And though many of the pictures he painted in Genoa are dispersed, and many spoiled, some few remain to tell us of his passing. One, a Christ among the Pharisees, is in the Palazzo Bianco, not far from the Palazzo Rosso, on the opposite side of the Via Garibaldi. But here there is a fine Rubens too; a Gerard David… a good Ruysdael, with some characteristic Spanish pictures by Zurbaran, Ribera, and Murillo… it is characteristic of Genoa that our interest in this collection should be with the foreign work there.

 

Vandyck: Genoese Noblewoman
Palazzo Rosso

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 * Note: Edward Hutton had a special liking for King Charles I, the English King executed in 1641, his wife Henrietta Maria, and their two sons who would go on to become King Charles II, and King James I.

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 33-35.

Genoa: Arcades and the Duomo

 

Over a hundred years ago Edward Hutton saw Genoa as a living city. It had not become a museum or a tourist mecca. He especially liked the narrow arcaded streets lined with shopkeepers and artisans.

 

As you stand under those strange arcades that run under the houses facing the  port, all that most ancient story of Genoa seems actual, possible; it is as though in some extraordinarily vivid dream you had gone back to less uniform days, when the beauty and the ugliness of the world struggled for mastery, before the overwhelming victory of the machine had enthroned ugliness and threatened the dominion of the soul of man. In that shadowy place, where little shops like caverns open on either side, with here a woman grinding coffee, there a shoemaker at his last, yonder a smith making copper pipkins, a sailor buying ropes, and old woman cheapening apples, everything seems to have stood still from century to century. There you will surely see the mantilla worn as in Spain, while the smell of ships, whose masts every now and then you may see, a whole forest of them, in the harbour, the bells of the mules, the splendour of the most ancient sun, remind you only of old things, the long ways of the great sea, the roads and the deserts and the mountains, the joy that cometh with the morning, so that there at any rate Genoa is as she ever was, a city of noisy shadowy ways, cool in the heat full of life, movement, merchandise, and women. (23-24) …

 

These narrow shadowy ways full of men and women and joyful with children are the delight of Genoa. There is but little to see, you may think, --little enough but just life. For Genoa is not a museum; she lives, and the laughter of her children is the greatest of all the joyful poems of Italy, maybe the only one that is immortal.

 

With this thought in your heart… you return to the arcades, and turning to your left till you come to the Via S. Lorenzo, in which is the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its heart, hidden away among the houses of life. …

Within, the church is dark, and this I think is a disappointment, nor is it very rich or lovely. … the only remarkable thing in the church itself is the chapel of St. John Baptist, into which no woman may enter, because of the dancing of Salome, daughter of Herodias. There in a marble urn the ashes of the Messenger have lain for eight centuries, not without worship, for here have knelt Pope Alexander III, our own Richard Cordelion, Federigo Barbarossa, Henry IV after Canossa, Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St. Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of France, Don Juan of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows, Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of men and women crying in the silence to him who had cried in the wilderness. (26-7)

 

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