Edward Hutton described Crema as "a little place, no one goes there" even though it was easy to go from Cremona there and back by train in a day. He gave a brief description of the Cathedral, "no church more beautiful in all Lombardy," but devoted more attention to a church outside the walls.*
When one does pluck up courage to leave Cremona at last, to forgo quietness for the noise of the railway, and the sunshine and delight of that exquisite town for the chances of travel, it must, of course, be for Crema that one sets out—Crema that has almost no history worth knowing, but remains one of the dearest and most hidden places in all this wide and beautiful Lombard country.
I often wonder now I am set down to write about Lombardy, as I did when I made my way along the Lombard roads, whether we who go our ways up and down from city to city, from church to church, from one building to another, ever really are aware how beautiful a countryside Lombardy is under its wide incomparable sky, half lost in its own vastness…. But Lombardy is hard to see, difficult to find out and impossible to possess oneself of, without much fatigue, weariness, mud and dust. The roads are all endless there, the cities always far away, and often when they are but market towns, worse than nothing—places from which one hurries away in the first train that comes by, places that one tries to forget…. But the country: I think, indeed, no one ever sees that in the great plain. It is too big, too vague, to empty to allure us from the security and curiosity of the towns; yet it is a background full of peace to all those peaceful and lovely places: Cremona in the green meadows, Mantua amid the quietness of the lagoons, and last but not least Crema, where the white oxen gather in the streets at evening, drawing their great creaking carts laden with all the wealth of the purple vintage that shall presently, by the winepress, stain the streets and perfume the whole city. …
If there is little for the mere tourist in the streets of Crema…there is undoubtedly a church without her walls that will astonish him. I mean the round church of S. Maria della Croce, which is rather polygonal than round after all, and built of brick in the true Renaissance manner, and reminds one of nothing so much as of that heavenly building Raphael saw in the background of his picture in the Brera. It is a work by Giovanni Battagio of Lodi, a disciple of Bramante’s. I say it reminds one of nothing so much as of Raphael’s there in his picture of the Sposalizio. Well, it has just the tranquillity, the lightness, and the graceful dignity of that visionary building and it stands under its clustered domes and cupolas really like something in a dream, something not made with hands, that would actually be impossible in any other land but this. And if it be true, as Pater has told us, that “all art aspires toward the condition of music,” here, I think, for once it has been completely successful. For it is as though suddenly as we listened. Some Magnificat by Palestrina or Marenzio had taken visible shape and “materialized itself,” as we say, before our eyes in a temple not made with hands, in which it might please the Queen of the angels a little to abide our coming.
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| Raphael: Sposalizio. Brera, Milan |
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*There is no church more beautiful in all Lombardy than the cathedral of Crema…it is a thing to love and be proud of , and the people of Crema justly hold it high in their affections, for it is not only beautiful and full of daring, it is also unique: there is nothing like it in all the world.
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