Edward Hutton: Cremona

 

 

 

 

Leaving Mantua, Hutton took the road to Cremona. On the way to that "beautiful and harmonious city," he stopped at the unique  shrine of S. Maria delle Grazie.

 

About three and a half miles from Mantua stands one of the most astonishing pilgrimage churches in all Italy. S. Maria delle Grazie was first built in 1399 by Francesco Gonzaga, who wished to render thanks to the Madonna for having freed the city of Mantua from the plague…. In 1419 the place was enlarged and became one of the most important religious houses in Lombardy. The whole place is a shrine of the Madonna, full of every sort of votive offering, from cannon balls that fell harmless into Mantua in the famous siege of 1322…to piles of crutches, shoes, wax arms, and legs, silver hearts and the usual litter of a shrine. More amazing is it that  not so much the worshipped as the worshipper is represented here in effigy. For, on coming into the church, you find yourself in an avenue of figures, life-size, and dressed in every sort of costume, in niches along the walls. These are they whom the Madonna has heard and answered here in the Church of the Graces. Among these favored petitioners we find figures of Pope Pius II.,  the Emperor Charles V, and the pillager of Rome, the Constable Bourbon, whom Cellini swears he shot. Beneath each figure the story of his petition is told in rude verse, evidently of local manufacture. Here, amid all this amazement, lie the princes of the House of Gonzaga: and among them the pattern of courtiers, Baldassare Castiglione, the author of Il Cortigiano, which in those happier days was as eagerly read in the best and most cultured society throughout Europe as the French novel is on the Continent, or the Daily Mail newspaper in England to-day. For the tomb of this man, who was literally the first gentleman in Europe, Bembo composed this epitaph, for the body of Castiglione had been brought at his own desire all the way from Toledo, where he died, in order that it might be laid here on the tomb of his young wife.[220]

 

Non ego nunc vivo, quae in ambiguo reliquit, utrum

Corpore namquae  tuo fate meum abstulerunt;

Sed vitam, tumulo cum tecum condar in isto,

Jungenturque tuis ossibus ossa mea. ***

 

I can never make up my mind which is the most beautiful city in Lombardy, whether it be Bergamo, Mantua or Cremona, but I know that I love Cremona best. Picture to yourself a city like a pale rose growing in the midst of the great green plain, that, when the mulberry flowers, is all a sea of white blossom. You enter this city and find it silent, but not forlorn, smiling through the grass grown in its beautiful great Piazza and the wide streets which the sun fills with gold; the great palaces are often deserted, the tall and beautiful towers that here and there rise to watch the plain are crumbling and make no sign, for Cremona is very old, the oldest Roman town in all the plain, and, in truth, here in Cisalpine Gaul she seems in her nobility like a stranger, some old centurion still on guard amid the dykes and the endless ways, in the service of the Senate and the Roman people.

 

   *** Note: Below is a rough translation from Google.

 

I am not living now, which has left me in doubt whether

For with your body they took away my destiny;

But life, I will build a grave with you in this,

And my bones shall be joined to your bones.

 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 220-221.

 

###