Sessa Aurunca and Cicero

After his stay in Naples, Edward Hutton toured the Campania. He visited ancient Sessa Aurunca and nearby Formia, the site of the villa of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman lawyer, writer, and orator. Here is his account of the tragic death of that famous man.

   

There used to be places in the world as it were enchanted: one of these was Sessa Aurunca. Sessa remained to us from the Golden Age and perhaps in the Golden Age all Italy was as spellbound. The little town lay in a groin of antique lava, a combe rather, of the old volcano Roccamonfina, and was the ancient centre of the Aurunci who have left their name to the half ruined but still serviceable Roman bridge, whose majestic ivy-clad arches I used so often to visit.

 

And what a scene was there! The Gulf of Gaeta lay before one, not to be outdone for beauty. The coast curved like a sickle and Gaeta on its great headland, visionary, seemingly immaterial, half divined, closed the view westward. There in the inmost curve of the coast lay Formia where from his villa Cicero was used so often to write to Atticus. Southwood Monte Massico closed the view caressed by the bluest of seas. Somewhere there the Liris wandered. One seemed to be living in a picture by Claude, in a landscape serene and ideal like something in a dream. Here were the gracious trees, the broken fountain, the lonely stone-pine on the hillside. And there surely under the cypress a goatherd watched his sparse flock—I seemed to hear the faint notes of his pipe, while all the earth lay Danae to the sun….

 

Where has it gone? The broad black tarmac motor road has blotted out the dust and the stones of the Via Appia, the exhaust of the automobiles have silenced my shepherd’s pipe, the ruins of the Romans, rather tidied up, remain amid the ruins of my vision. …

 

I left Minturno in the evening light which glorified the exquisite classic landscape through which I passed almost in a dream, to Formia. There to find my friend and to sleep for I had had a long day, and, though the distance was not great, the days when I used to tramp all over Italy and scarcely feel tired were now long ago.  So Formia it was;  and after dinner I went to bed and as one will when weary began to think over the day, and then of Cicero and his villa here at Formia and his letters to Atticus and of the horrible end that came of it all in this very place.

 

It was Petrarch who loved and reproached him in one of those strange letters he wrote to Cicero’s Shade—it was Petrarch who asked him: “Why did you entangle yourself in so much contention, in such utterly profitless quarrels? Why did you forsake the leisure more suited to your age, your profession and your station in life? What madness drove you to assail Antony?”

 

Oh, have we not all asked him that?

 

But when he delivered those Philippics he was at the height of his glory, overwhelmed by rapturous applause, the very hero of the scene. … But those with whom he was dealing—did he not divine, did he not know, they were all selfish, cold-hearted place-seekers, politicians eager only to be in with the victor whoever and whatever he might b? And so when the fatal news arrived of the inion of Lepidus with Antony, the defection of Octavianus, who was actually marching on Rome itself, it was evident that all was lost. The usurpers were triumphant, and the lists of the proscribed—well, they could not but include the name of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

 

Warned of his danger at his Tusculan villa, he set out for the coast and embarked at Antium, but like Marius was driven by weather to land and make his way to Formiae, where sick in body and mind he sought his beloved villa, resolved no longer to fly from his fate. “Let me die in the country I have so often saved.” But as Antony’s murderers approached, his attendants forced him into a litter and hurried him through the woods towards the shore. They were overtaken and prepared to defend their master with their lives. But the old man bade them set down the litter and, holding his chin with his left hand as his wont was, he looked steadily on his murderers being as he was all squalid and unshorn; his countenance wasted with care; and stretching out of the litter he called upon his murderers to strike.

 

They cut off his head and his hands, which had written the Philippics, and bore them to Rome, where by the orders of Antony they were nailed to the Rostra after Fulvia, Antony’s wife, had thrust a hairpin through the tongue.

 

Cicero was in his sixty-fourth year. No one, not even those who have loved him best, can altogether defend the weakness of his character, inconsistent and irresolute as it was. But his death was courageous…and his death pays for all the weaknesses of his life. He was a good man. Besides, perhaps we owe to him and to Vergil the survival of Latin culture and civilization.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 137-144.

Christmas Prophesy

 

 

 

Occasionally Edward Hutton would report on discussions he had with Italian friends. On one spring day he visited a friend at a Camaldoli monastery outside of Naples, and found him engaged in a heated discussion with a visiting French professor. They were discussing the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, Hutton's favorite Roman poet, in which the poet, only 40 years before the birth of Christ, had mentioned the birth of a son who would usher in a Golden Age. Here is his account of part of the discussion.

 

Now during the latter part of the discussion that learned professor from Naples whom everyone reveres had arrived on the terrazza unseen by any but myself. We had exchanged glances. He now came forward and was introduced. When he was seated he turned to Dom Costanzo his host and then to the Professor from abroad.

 

“I have heard,” he said, “part of your discussion, and if you permit… It seems to me there are two ways of interpreting this lovely Eclogue of Virgil’s. Looking at in in one way it becomes a supernatural prophecy; looking at it in another way it is merely historical and deals with events of Virgil’s own time. Both ways are right. But those who would interpret the poem simply historically, for the most part modern scholars, would generally deny that there is such a thing as the supernatural and consequently must interpret the poem simply historically or leave it alone. That is surely unfortunate. Nevertheless I think they may be right, not in their prejudice, but in their interpretation, without thereby condemning their opponents as wrong. To say of any verse of Vergil’s that we have got to the bottom of it is dangerous. I think in fact that this poem is a prophecy of the birth of Christ, but I do not think Vergil knew what he was saying. In other words I believe Virgil was supernaturally inspired, but was in himself in ignorance. …”

 

“In any case,” I said, “Vergil has prophesied the Birth of Christ whether he knew it or not, whether he intended it or not, whether he was acquainted with the Messianism of the Jews, or of the time, or not, and whether we like it or not. The Fourth Eclogue as Reinach has said is ‘la premiere en date des oeuvres chretienne’.”

 

“After all,” said the Professor from Naples, “a prophecy is something which is to be fulfilled. Vergil’s poem in its Christian sense has been fulfilled. Moreover a prophesy is largely what one can make of it. Now historically one can make nothing of the fourth Eclogue. What has the birth of a son to Pollio come to? And why should the birth of a son to Pollio bring in a Golden Age? On the other hand the whole of Christian antiquity with the exception of S. Jerome, from Constantine, Lactantius, S. Augustine, Abelard, Dante and Innocent III, to Marsilio Ficino and even to Alexander Pope has accepted the poem as a prophecy that has been fulfilled in the birth of Christ. It is only now, when Christianity and with it the supernatural are denied altogether, that the supernatural content of the poem is passionately and eagerly refuted, rather through hatred and material interpretation of things than for any other reason. If the critics are right then Virgil was wrong. Credo in Virgilium.

 

Does anyone believe that the authors of Ecclesiasticus or of the Song of Songs knew they were prophesying of the Blessed Virgin? Yet assuredly they were, as the whole world for more than a millennium has testified; or that Isaiah had any but at most the vaguest notion that the Puer natus est of whom he chanted was to be the Jesus Parvulus born in a stable at Bethlemen.?

 

A prophecy is to be tested by its fulfillment, and its fulfillment is to be tested by the judicum orbis terrarium. Few are the prophets who understand what they are prophesying."

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 99-100.

Port of Naples

  

 

 

Edward Hutton found the port of Naples the most interesting part of the city.

 

On coming out of the Castel Nuovo I like to stroll down to the Porto, the real centre of Naples, and wander along the quays, crowded with shipping, the view dusky with masts, quite round the Porto Mercantile, built first in 1302 by Charles II of Anjou, as far as the Villa del Popolo and the Porta del Carmine. Nothing in Naples is more interesting than the life of the harbour, and no monument in the strait ways of the city more beautiful than these living ships moving and sighing against the quays, as though longing for the open sea. And if life will not content one, there is to the south beyond the Castel Nuovo and the Porto Militaire the old Arsenale di Marina and the Darsena erected and contrived in 1577 by the Viceroy Don Inigo de Mendoza; there is the Faro, founded in the fourteenth century at the end of the Molo Angioino; and there is the Porto Piccolo, the representative perhaps of the Greek harbour of Neapolis; while at the east end of the Port stands the Castel del Carmine, which Ferdinand I of Aragon built in 1484, which was seized by Masaniello when he led the revolt of the people in 1647, and which now has come to nothing—a military bakehouse.

 

Close by the Castello is the Porta del Carmine, through which one re-enters the city and comes into perhaps the most famous of all the piazzas of Naples, the Piazza del Mercato, … From the Castel del Carmine and the famous piazza one passes by the picturesque and characteristic  Strada di Lavinaio or the broad Corso Garibaldi to the Castel Capuano, La Vacaria and the great Porta Capuano…. not only the finest gate in Naples, but being as it is the entry to the oldest and most crowded  part of the city, affords such a spectacle of the life of the people as is not to be matched. The whole street within and without the great and beautiful gate, together with the Via dei Tribunale, which leads to it is a continual fair and pandemonium of noise; jostling carts, barrows, caravans of mules, herds of goats, ox wagons and innumerable companies of peasants  throng in and out; the fruiterers, the sellers of shell-fish and nauseous coloured sweet drinks, of pottery, of images and rosaries, of every kind and sort of sweetmeats and biscuits, of chestnuts and the unknowable delicacies of the people, drive a furious trade accompanied by a universal yelling and gesticulation, that in the dust and blazing sun make certainly one of the most amazing spectacles the city affords. To all of which today are added the noise and chaos of every kind of motor-car.

 

The beautiful Gate was built in the end of the fifteenth century by Giuliano da Maiano for Ferdinand I of Aragon, whose arms still adorn it. By this way Charles V entered the city in 1535 when it was splendidly decorated with statues by Giovanni da Nola. Towering over it is the cupola of the Florentine church of Santa Caterina a Formello

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 34-35.

Neapolitans

  

 

 

 

Here are some of Edward Hutton's observations of the people of Naples.

 

In this boiling cauldron, after a little, when one’s first distress had passed, there remained an extraordinary fascination. The life of Naples was and is the life of the streets, of the decumani, salite, scale, rampe, of which it is full; everything takes place there in these narrow ways, even the toilet; and little by little one is compelled by the obscene spirit of the city to wander continually, and, only half ashamed, to watch these poor people in all their pathetic poverty and animalism, their amazing unself-consciousness, their extraordinary and meaningless violence of gesture and speech—and yes, their joy of life. Was the Neapolitan of antiquity like this?...

 

For the Neapolitan is indeed a highly composite person. Humanity and cruelty, bravery and cowardice , openness and deceit, thrift and prodigality are all jumbled together in him and it is a puzzle to know which predominates. He is among Italy’s best soldiers—always light-hearted, facetious and pertinacious, marvellously expressive, too, in his features and gestures. He is not more dishonest than anyone else, nor does he lie maliciously, but to glorify himself and to be agreeable. He is too easy-going to be vindictive, he is emotional, but not revengeful. And to call him lazy is the most absurd and ridiculous charge ever brought against people who are essentially indefatigable. Watch the facchini at the port; the boatmen and fishermen, too, toil for hours at the oar on a bit of bread and a crock of water. And the peasants have only to be seen at work, laborious and untiring in the blazing heat, to convince one of their energy. The Neapolitan is, however, a gambler, though not perhaps more than his brother of the English working-class. He is cruel to animals, but not to children….

 Observe a Neapolitan of the upper class; he never walks, he strolls. If he is in a hurry, if he is pressed for time, he takes a cab or a taxi, but generally he strolls; passiare, he calls it. He stops to speak with a friend or greets an acquaintance with an eloquent gesture, loiters past the shop windows, lingers in the Galleria scanning the cafes, stays to read the placards before the newspaper kiosks and the bills displayed before the theatres and of course arrives late at his destination. For the Neapolitan is a flaneur of flaneurs, yet with something Spanish too, which is not surprising considering his history. …

 

This strolling, this passiare, often turns to good account, for it is the long tradition of the Neapolitans to conduct their affairs in the open air, whether it be the toilet or a business transaction. In this they are still as Greek as their remote ancestors. There in the street, in the piazza, in the Galleria the Neapolitan is most likely to be fortunate in a combinazione. And who will say he is wrong, since the open air is that which glorifies this great southern city set in the most beautiful landscape in the world.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp. 3-6.

Edward Hutton revisits Naples

  

 

 

 

Revisiting Naples in 1957 after an absence that spanned two world wars, Edward Hutton's initial response was disillusion.

 

To come to Naples from Rome through the now fallen majesty of the Campagna, along that sombre road under Anagni and Montecassino, or by the Pontine Marshes under the Valerian hills, past spellbound Norma and the lilied meres of Ninfa, or to enter it first without warning out of the loneliness, the silence and the beauty of the sea is to experience an astonishing disillusion.

 

For there is nothing, I think, in all the South, nothing certainly in Italy, quite like Naples in its sordid and yet tremendous vitality, a vitality that is sterile, that wastes itself upon itself. It is still, as Bergeret the friend of Fragonard found it, the most animated city in Europe. A place so restless and noisy and confused that it might be pandemonium, so drab that it is not really redeemed even by the Castel dell’ Ovo, the Castel Nuovo and Sant’ Elmo.

 

All this meanness is emphasized and accentuated  by the unrivalled beauty of the world in which Parthenope stands, the spacious and perfect loveliness of the great bay, shining and yet half lost in all the gold of the sun, between the dreamy headlands of Sorrento, of Posilipo, of Misenum; the threatening gesture, the incomparable outline of Vesuvius, the vision of Capri, of Procida and Ischia rising out of the sea, the colour of sea and sky, of valley and mountain and curved shore. For this is Campania, the true Arcady of the Romans, and here more than anywhere else, perhaps, the forms of the past clothed in our dreams are indestructible, and will outface even such a disillusion as Naples affords.

 

In this incomparable landscape Naples stands, not like Genoa nobly about an amphitheatre of hills, nor like Palermo in an enchanted valley, but in the deepest curve of her vast and beautiful bay, at the foot of the hills and upon their slopes, beneath the great and splendid fortress of Sant’ Elmo, which towers up over the city in shining beauty and pride, the noble feature of a place that, but for it, would be almost without any monumental splendour.

 

Sant’ Elmo towers there over the city upon the west; farther away and to the north, upon a scarcely lesser height, stands the great Bourbon palace of Capodimonte, while to the east, upon the far side of the fruitful valley of the Sebethus, rises the violent pyramid of Vesuvius now without its silver streamer of smoke. Seen from afar, and especially from the sea, there can be but few places in the world comparable with this; the vast and beautiful bay closed on the west by Capo Miseno, with its sentinel islands Ischia and Procida, and on the east by the by the great headland of Sorrento more than twenty miles away as the gull flies, and defended, as it were, seaward by the island of Capri, is dominated in the very midst by the height and beauty and strangeness of Vesuvius….

Once in the city, Hutton described the pandemonium of its streets.

 

These long streets the colour of mud, built from the lava of Vesuvius, lined with tall, forbidding houses balconied with iron; those narrow salite climbing up towards Sant’ Elmo or descending to the harbour and Santa Lucia, crowded and squalid and hung everywhere with ragged clothes drying in the squalid air;…the noise that here more than any other city in the world overwhelms everything in its confusion and meanness, the howling of children, the cries of the women, the shouting of the men vainly competing with the hooting of horns, the explosion of the open exhausts of the motor vehicles, the cracking of whips, the beating of hoofs, the sirens of steamers, the innumerable bells—not only those, here so harsh, of the churches, but as I remember them the brutal gongs of trams, the bells of cows and goats; the mere hubbub of human speech that seems more deafening than it is by reason of the appalling emphasis of gesture; all this horrified and confused the stranger, chiefly perhaps, because he could find nothing definite in its confusion for the mind to seize upon—the mind indeed being half paralyzed by the flood of undistinguishable things, not one of which was characteristic, but rather all together. The mere extent of the place too, shapeless as it is, stretching for miles in all its sordidness along the seashore, appalled one; for its disorder was a violent disorder, its voice the voice of the mob, cruel, blatant, enormous, signifying nothing. 

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Pp.  1-3.

Naples Revisited

  

 

 

 

Edward Hutton returned to Naples in 1957 having first visited the city sixty years before. Although Italy had changed dramatically, especially after the Second World War, there was something unchanging about Naples. Here I reproduce his Preface to Naples and Campania Revisited.

 

While Italy is still the most delightful of all countries to live in, I must admit that with the rapid democratization of the world since the Second World War a rather saddening change has befallen her.

 

The age of the traveller is gone; even the age of the tourist too. Now the tripper, decanted in crowds from charabanc and motor-coach, descends on the lovely cities, and passes like a flood from Cathedral to gallery and museum, open-mouthed or indifferent; or masquerading as a pilgrimage swamps such a city as Assisi, so that it is only possible to enjoy the place in peace in the winter from November to March. Pandemonium resumes her reign at Easter.

 

And then there is the sophistication of the countryside. Even the Via Appia, the “Queen of Roads”, the backbone of Campania, is outraged with every sort of commercial placard and advertisement. And all its antiquity has been sacrificed to the motor-car.

 

It is, of course, petrol and perhaps America that are the great levellers.

 

The noise everywhere in the cities has not only increased but has changed its nature. It is no longer human but mechanical. Every city, every town proclaims at its gates: Zona di Silenzio, which means that it is forbidden to sound the motor-horn in its streets. But what is the good of that when every car, every lorry, every Vespa, every motor-cycle is driven with open exhaust to make as much noise as possible? For the Italian seems to believe that noise is power. In many cities, in Florence for instance and in Rome, too, it is difficult to get any sleep till the not so early hours of the morning, and then at five or six o’clock it begins all over again.

 

Naples, save Rome the only capitol city in the peninsula, seems largely oblivious of those incursions, which are absorbed perhaps by the Cathedral of S. Januarius, and the museum, but chiefly I suspect by Pompeii and Capri. At any rate the churches of Naples, full of pictures of the seventeenth century and Neapolitan Baroque, are for the most part unvisited, and if the Toledo once no doubt “inexpressively Neapolitan” has been commercialized till it is entirely anonymous and has really become the “Via Roma”, that is to say like any other main street in Milan or Turin, there still remains as unvisited as the churches, and almost as I remember them when I first came to Naples sixty years ago, many strade, vichi, salite, fondaci, and not least the Via del Tribunale and the speccanapoli—the Via San Biagio and the Piazza Capuana with its lovely Tuscan gate and its market entirely Neapolitan neither vulgarized nor emasculate.

 

To stroll in those narrow streets filled with light and shade between the lofty balconied houses from church to church, from the majolica cloister of the Clarisse of Santa Chiara to the arcaded and fountained garden of San Gregorio Armeno under its many coloured dome, from the Guglia of the Immacolata to the Guglia of San Domenico, from the shrine of the blood of S. Gennaro to the ossuary of Sant’ Agostino alla Zecca, from the tomb of Tino di Camaino in the Donna Regina to the strange Baroque statues of San Severo, to leave Donatello in Sant’ Angelo a Nilo to find Antonio Rossellino in Monte Oliveto, to search for the pictures of Caravaggio, of Caracciolo, of Stanzione, will fill many a morning with quiet unhustled happiness, as though today were yesterday, and almost as though the Regno had never passed away. For in Naples certainly the old songs are the best.

 

                                                   O dolce Napoli,

                                                   O suol beato,

                                                   Ove sorridere

                                                   Volle il creato!

                                                   Tu sei l’impero

                                                   Dell’ armonia—

                                                   Santa Lucia!

                                                   Santa Lucia!

 

1957

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958. Preface. Pp. vii-viii. 

Canossa: End of the Journey

  

 

 

 

Edward Hutton ended his tour of Lombardy with a visit to Canossa, and a stirring account of the once-famous meeting between the Emperor Henry, and Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand). Here are some excerpts from his account.

 

Canossa remains in the imagination of the world as the symbol of the mighty work that Rome achieved during the Dark Ages, I mean the creation of the Papacy that was not only to dominate  but to civilize Europe, and when Hildebrand on that bare and pallid rock broke Henry in the cruel winter of 1077 that creation was proclaimed to Europe and the two succeeding centuries were already secured….

 

At Ciano you may get a mule or you may walk to Rosetta to that magnificent and isolated spot where the destiny of Europe for more than two centuries was decided. All the way is fair, and nothing in the world is more inspiring than the splendid climb from Ciano to Canossa. The lords of Canossa held in their day not only these mountains and all the passes into Italy across them, but a vast part of Lombardy, including Parma, Reggio, Mantua and Brescia, to say nothing of Tuscany and Spoleto. One feels at once on leaving Reggio and entering the region of the hills that one is at least really in their country.

 

Matilda…was the greatest of her house, the gran donna d’Italia, the friend of Hildebrand and the handmaid and protectress of the Papacy and the Church, she who reminded Dante of Persephone as she went alone singing and plucking flower after flower that strewed her way. We shall meet her again at Canossa. She lived a virgin, and on her death her vast inheritance passed by her will to the Holy See…. 

 

If you set out from Reggio…by road you will pass the Quattro Castella….but the Quattro Castella offers the traveller one of the most astonishing spectacles in Italy. Four conical hills rise from the vast hillside all in a line barring the way, and each crowned by a castle. They are the first outworks of that vast system of defense which guarded Canossa. [299]…

 

After Rossena, the great white and naked rock of Canossa crowned by its ruin comes in sight, in wonderful contrast with Rossena itself. Here in the winter of 1077 the two great forces of the world met in combat, and the emperor fell.

 

It is almost impossible for us in our confused and wholly material age to understand the drama that was played out upon this naked upland, as it were upon the top of the world, in the three days and nights of that bitter January. The emperor had come from his Germany into Italy with the intention of making the Pope prisoner. He knew not what he was proposing. To humble the Latin world, which the Papacy expressed, was in itself a barbarian, if an honourable, adventure; but to break the heart and soul of Europe was to achieve what even Attila had failed to do. As the event proved,  when the two men were face to face it was the barbarian who was to go down, and that not by force of arms but by force of will….

 

At Canossa everything was ready for an attack. Azzo d’Este was there and Hugh, Abbot of Clugny, and over them all the great Countess [Matilda]. Uplifted before all Europe, the Emperor and the Pope faced one another to decide who should be master.

 

Henry came. Was it the mountains that had broken him, or the astonishment of Italy, or the hand of God? Whatever it was, he was broken. His first act was to beg intercession from Matilda, who with Hugh the Abbot met him when he begged it at Bianello. The countess, who was his cousin, undertook to plead his cause.

 

Then Hildebrand said:  “If Henry is indeed repentant, let him lay down crown and sceptre, and declare that he is unworthy of the name of king.”

 

There spoke the soul of Europe that cannot be broken.

 

Henry did as he was ordered. It was the end of January; the earth was covered with snow, the streams were silent with frost. In the thin garb of a penitent, in a shirt of white linen, the successor of the Caesars, nay Caesar himself, slowly climbed the rocky path to the outer gate of Canossa. And they all looked upon him as he stood before the closed inner gate. There; in the bitter weather, he waited fasting for three days and three nights. On the fourth day, half dead with cold, the wretched Emperor was brought into the presence of God’s Vice-gerent. He prostrated himself in the dust, crying for pardon….

 

That scene will live forever in the mind of man, for it is the most perfect expression of that Europe out of which we are come and to which we shall return. Canossa is its monument, a place worthier of pilgrimage by us who are European than ever was Becket’s tomb of Canterbury, holy though that was and famous through the world. Canossa was a bigger victory than Canterbury, and Italy a bigger stage than England.

Look you, then, how the mountains shine hence, and all Lombardy is spread out before them, and Italy far away thrice guarded there to the south. It is well that our journey should draw to an end in such a famous place as this, where we may look back upon our many days of going, and possess them all in a single heart’s beat, a single glance, as Hildebrand looked over the world.

 

There lies Cisalpine Gaul, jewelled with cities--Modena, Parma, Verona, Mantua; girdled with her mighty river, the glistening belt of the Po; islanded by the Euganeans, and ringed and fortressed by the Alps. Here are the Apennines, yonder is Italy; and the story of Europe, that noble tale of great Rome turned Christian, and all our past, at our feet. 

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 297-303.

Parma and Correggio

 

 

 

For some reason that he could not fully explain, Parma was one of the few little cities in Italy that he "had never been able to love." Still there was the "Duomo in its noble piazza," and the magnificent work of Correggio. 

 

 

The church is a cruciform building under an open octagon surmounted by a dome; the choir is raised above a crypt, and from the outside the arcaded apse is, I think, its most beautiful feature. But the church as seen from the street is arcaded everywhere: on the façade we have a triple columnar gallery; each which ends with a quadrilateral, itself arcaded, to which is added a semicircular apse again arcaded. Nothing more noble, rich and charming can be imagined. …

The great spectacle of the church, however, is of course the overwhelming frescoes of Correggio in the dome, which everyone who comes at all to Parma comes to see. For myself, they are beyond anything else to be found in Parma, and indeed among the most astonishing things in all Lombardy. 

 

Correggio’s first frescoes had been painted  for the Camera di S. Paulo, fortunate and lovely works, and later he had decorated the cupola of S. Giovanni Evangelista. It was therefore with a full knowledge of his work that in 1522 he began to cover the dome of the Cathedral with these frescoes of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, to whom the church was dedicated, while below stand the Apostles and the four patron saints of Parma.

 

Nothing else, I suppose, in European art has quite the sense we find here, the sense of flight. Madonna caught up from death, from the earth and all earthly things, is borne in an ecstasy, her arms stretching open wide, by a glad crowd of angels and cherubs, one of whom, laughing for joy, nestles in her bosom, into the heaven of heavens, a vast dome of light, built of angels, circle after circle, up to the brightness which is the smile of God. And out of that dazzling firmament one peerless archangel, Gabriel, god’s messenger, has hurled him down, trembling for joy, to meet her and welcome her, the Queen of all. Nothing else in Europe, I think, expressed so fully and so unreservedly that sense of flight—the eagerness, the joy, and the confident, radiant power of flight—as does this matchless fresco. It is impossible to look upon it without emotion or to doubt for a moment that the painter had seen a vision. One simply disregards the painter’s foibles and weaknesses; the thing is a rhapsody more wonderful than a Magnificat by Marenzio, almost inarticulate, if you like, for joy; a musical rapture that is beyond music, hat is the expression once and for all of the highest religious emotion. And to those who would criticize it, I would give the reply Titian, who had also painted an Assumption, gave; “Turn it upside down and fill it with gold, and you will still come short of its proper price.” It has been tended with careless hands, and it is to-day but a wreck of what it once was. Yet in colour still, as in gesture and delight, it remains something beyond the power of words to express, something that never was in the world or is here in no satisfying quantity.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 273-274. 

Piacenza: Pordenone, Ss. Roch and Columban

 

 

 

At Piazenza's S. Maria di Campagna, Edward Hutton found a veritable shrine to Pordenone, the great Renaissance master. Then, he told the story of S. Roch, "one of the true patrons and benefactors of Piacenza." Finally, he took a short but arduous trip to nearby Bobbio to see the famous Abbey associated with S. Columban. 

 

The younger contemporary of Lotto, always impetuous, full of aristocratic prejudices and worldly, was his complete opposite both in his life and in his art. Born at Pordenone in 1483, he died at Ferrara in 1539. He has been compared with Rubens, both on account of the vivacity of his temperament, and his love of colossal and well-developed forms. But as Morelli rightly reminds us, while the Fleming was prolific, prudent and calculating, the Italian was “passionate, excitable, ill-regulated and swayed by pride and ambition.” It is certain that he never attained the position of ease and luxury which Rubens won, but at the same time he never sunk into conventionality. “Original, highly gifted at times, even strikingly grand, he at one period sought, not unsuccessfully, to rival Titian.” His great strength lay in fresco painting, and his most interesting frescoes are, I think, these in Piacenza; at any rate they are more accessible than those near Conegliano and those at Treviso.

We see something of his gifts in the curious figure of S. Augustine by the entrance, and more in that splendid Adoration of the Magi in the first chapel on the north side of the church, in the Nativity in the lunette, and on the wall the birth of the Blessed Virgin, and above it the Flight into Egypt; and again in the Chapel of S. Catherine, which he entirely painted, even the altarpiece of the Marriage of S. Catherine being from his hand. But what are we to say of those marvellous Prophets and Sibyls on the cupola, but that there fresco painting actually passes into a kind of glorious music, into movement, colour and light.

 

Hard to see as these works are, badly as they have been treated, they remain masterpieces that we come back to again and again, that return to the mind when one is far away, as indeed do all his admirable works in this church. Piacenza is to be loved for them; and because of them we are not too sorrowful that the church of S. Sisto here no longer holds that “Sistine” Madonna which Raphael painted for it in 1515, and which was sold in 1753 for 20,000 ducats to the King of Poland, who was also Elector of Saxony, and which remains in Dresden….

 

Whatever else one does at Piacenza, one should not omit to visit that most famous shrine of a great British or rather Irish saint at the old and splendid Abbey of Bobbio….

But what the reader may ask, is Bobbio, and why should one go there? After all, the British Isles are full of forgotten shrines of early British saints and no one marks them; indeed, these same early British saints are more utterly neglected and forgotten than any other sort of beings. All the same, if you care anything for holiness, if you care at all for great achievement, if you have any reverence for learning, and the old great masters of letters, you must go to Bobbio, for there S. Columban had his home and thence “all the palimpsests known in the world have emerged.” I wish in three words, I could make known to you this Irishman who was as it were S. Benedict and S. Francis and S. Bernard all in one. I wish in three hundred words, or even in three thousand, I could tell you the man he was, and the great Abbot and leader, and above all the great Saint….

 

That Bobbio which he had founded became the most famous and the most intellectual of the monasteries of Italy; it was the hope of the seventh century, and may be said to have achieved as much in the salvation of Europe as any other place whatsoever. When that was accomplished in the eleventh century it began to decline, later its precious library was distributed, and in the seventeenth century it was but a shadow of itself….

 

Yet Bobbio is a place to linger in, to remember our Saint, and to search out the mountains as he did, and stray about the woods where the dawn is all yours and the sunset and the night, and where one day telleth another of the ancient glory of God.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 252-261.

Piacenza

  

 

 

When Edward Hutton crossed the Po river to get to Piacenza, he was no longer in Lombardy proper. As usual he discussed the history of the city, part of the famed Duchy of Parma, but noted that the most famous thing in the city was its Piazza de' Cavalli.

It is but twenty-two miles, less than an hour’s journey in the train from Lodi, through Caesale Pusterlengo and Codegno, and so across the Po for the first time in our journey, into Piacenza, an old and a famous city of the Romans. Even though one comes by train that crossing of the Po impresses itself upon the mind, while by road the passage is never to be forgotten, for you make it by a bridge of boats, with the swirling, cruel river within a few feet of you, and horribly strong and overwhelming. And it is well that this should be so; for, by crossing the Po, we leave Lombardy proper and come into that part of the new province of Emilia, which, since the sixteenth century, has been known as the Duchy of Parma, over which ruled the House of Farnese. …

 

Piacenza can never claim to be, I think, one of the most beautiful cities of Lombardy, yet it is one of the most picturesque by reason of its colouring and its vast, empty piazzas, churches and palaces, the beautiful vistas of its streets and the sense of space and bigness everywhere.

 

The most famous thing in it is its great Piazza—Piazza de’ Cavalli—which seems so large, so romantic and so like something on the stage, or in a dream, with its magnificent Palazzo del Comune thrust out into it on one side, the modern Palazzo delle Preture on another, the weirdly uncompromising façade of S. Francesco on a third, and everywhere long vistas of streets opening out of it on all sides, and at every angle and corner. Nor is this all. The Palazzo del Comune is perhaps the finest palace of the sort in Italy: yet how much its effect here in this Piazza is enlarged  and added to by the great bronze equestrian statues which rear before the great façade—“insignificant men, exaggerated horses, flying drapery”—yes, as baroque as you please, but splendid here, both in gesture and in colour—vivid green against the terra-cotta—and placed there by a master. 

 

Nothing in Piacenza is half so well worth seeing as this Piazza seemed to me to be on an autumn evening after rain. It then literally is a vision that slowly vanishes away in the twilight, from glory down to glory into the blue night: and this once seen can never be forgotten. But when we return in the morning sunlight, though the Piazza still remains magnificent, it is no longer a vision : all its poor details stand out in the harsh glitter of light, that nevertheless, I think, alone can reunite us with those affected equestrian statues of the dukes Alessandro and Ranuccio Farnese, seventeenth century work from Tuscany, all but the colour of which and gesture of which is veiled by the evening. …

 

From the ridiculous statues of the Farnese we turn to the noble Palazzo del Comune. This was built when Piacenza was a free city. It dates from 1281, and is one of the earliest and noblest Gothic buildings in Italy. Below is an open arcade, in which pillars of marble, supporting pointed arches, support the palace proper, consisting of brick with six round-arched windows of terra-cotta, and over all a marble cornice and battlements, with a tower at the angles.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 243-250.