Montecassino

 

 

Edward Hutton brought "Naples and Campania Revisited" to an end with visits to three great monasteries, LaCava, Montevergine, and Montecassino. Below is his reflection on Montecassino, including an appendix detailing the destruction caused by the Italian campaign in 1944. During the war Hutton had served with the British army advising on which cultural and historical sites to avoid bombing. Apparently, his advice was not taken on Montecassino. 

Another and a greater abbey than La Cava, the great abbey of Montecassino, the greatest and the most ancient in Europe, stands on a mountain top in Campania Felice, 1.500 feet above the sea, about half way between Naples and Rome. It was the cradle of the Benedictine Order and dates from the first third of the sixth century…. (233)

 

Such was the abbey as I remembered it, all of which was seemingly swept away by the Allies in 1944. And as I climbed the long hill, crowned as I saw with new buildings, I wondered what I was going to find at the top.

 

Well, what I found was a reproduction as near as might be of the abbey that was destroyed in 1944. I suppose the monks were so deeply attached  to the destroyed buildings that they could not forgo reproducing them. Yet, though I could well understand this very natural sentimentality, I thought it unfortunate, for there was nothing of any artistic distinction in the buildings that were destroyed….

 

Every traveller to South Italy should come to Montecassino if only because of the immense influence  it has had in the history of Europe and indeed of mankind. Fourteen hundred years ago and more S. Benedict founded here the cradle of that Order of monks which transformed Europe, cut down its impenetrable forests, drained its impassable marshes, educated its barbarians and made them Christians. It was the monks of S. Benedict who converted the English, supplied the country with statesmen, counsellors and bishops and presently covered England with mighty houses, Glastonbury, Reading, Durham, and the like, to be utterly destroyed by a reckless and unhappy king, yet are now rising again, so that it is today possible to land at Dover, cross the country to the Atlantic, and sleep at a Benedictine monastery every night.

 

As you lie there on that mountain-side before the abbey newborn, looking over the deep valley where the Liri wanders under Aquino and Pontecorvo and I know not how many other ancient cities groved and garlanded with the ilex, the olive and the vine, where beyond, rises range after range of purple mountain chain, you may think on these things. (239)…

 

APPENDIX III. SOME OF THE CHURCHES DAMAGED IN CAMPANIA IN THE WAR, 1939-1945.

 

Perhaps the destruction of Montecassino was the most shocking moral outrage of the war in Italy, Mr. Majdalany points out in his excellent book (Cassino: Portrait of a Battle [1957]} that the Allied Command seems to have been astonished at the difficulties that faced our armies at Cassino, yet the Italian Military College had used Cassino for generations as an example of an impregnable defense barrier. In the tremendous and relentless bombing of the great monastery the Cathedral church was the first to be attacked and destroyed.  What was achieved by the destruction of the famous monastery? According to Mr. Majdalany, who took part in the attack. It “achieved nothing”, but the tenth German Army was able “to establish posts in the Abbey ruins”.

 

It might seem that the whole Italian campaign was a mistake, misconceived and eventually starved to death. The mere idea of waging modern war up the length of the peninsula through the beautiful cities which hold treasures of architecture, painting and sculpture, the inheritance of mankind, should, I imagine, have given pause to even the most philistine and obsessed political leader. It was, one regrets to recall, an English proposal. The Americans, merely for military reasons, disliked the Italian diversion, and Eisenhower finally brought it to an end by draining it of troops and material for the invasion of Normandy. (275-276)

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 235-239, 275-276.

Paestum

  

 

 

Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to Paestum, its history and its three spectacular, deserted temples: all that is left of an ancient Greek colony that predated the Romans. *

 

The great spectacle which La Cava or Salerno usually affords the traveller, which for the most part is the reason for a visit to them, is the Greek Temples of Paestum, twenty-four miles to the south of Salerno in the malarious marsh by the low seashore that stretches from Monte Giove on the north to Agropoli on the south. The traveller usually leaves La Cava or Salerno or even Naples in the morning, spends the best part of the day at Paestum, and returns in time for dinner; and this procedure, unsatisfactory as it is, forces one to see those marvellous sanctuaries in the company of a crowd of tourists and in the ugliest hours of the day, but is generally considered necessary on account of the unhealthy and malarious situation of Paestum itself.  Paestum, however, is worth any sort of trouble to see quietly, apart from the crowd, and best of all in the early morning, and therefore one should leave Salerno by automobile so as to get the early morning and if possible the rising sun over the Temples at Paestum, which alas, has been much sophisticated since I first knew it. In the old days I used to go to Eboli and drive from there. Eboli itself, the ancient Eburnum, on the hills to the north-east of the great Pianura di Pesto, I found to be full of interest. This almost unvisited little town boasted a quite possible hostelry in the Albergo Pastore, and from the grand old Castello offered the traveller glorious views of the great mountains and over the forest and the plain to the far-away temples and the sea….

 

The road from Eboli to Paestum very early in the morning was full of delight. The forest of Persano was of old of much greater extent and beauty than it is today; but in 1746 all the Bosco Grande was destroyed by fire: what remains is a vast ruin of the great forest of the Silarus…

 

But not the  wild desolation of the plain, nor its silence, nor its shadowy light, prepare one in any way at all for that vision of splendour and sadness which it still guards so well. One enters the gate of the desolate city, and there within the low over grown far-stretched walls of the place, in the immense silence of early morning, in the clear and tender light beside the sea, three temples stand that in their mysterious isolation and tragic beauty are like something wholly divine, at one with the sky and the earth and the sea, from which indeed they come, out of which they were hewn, and in honour of which they still stand, abandoned by man, after centuries of silence, in so great majesty.

 

Within a walled pentagon, near three miles in circumference, they are alone with the sun, the sea and the wind. What can that city have been like which boasted such sanctuaries as these? It cannot have been less, one might think, than the capital of Magna Graecia, beside which Cuma was a provincial town and Neapolis a village….

 

The three temples stand within the ruined walls in a rough and stony place, strewn with the debris of other buildings and overgrown with brambles and wild flowers, and among them the newly-planted twice-blossoming roses of which Virgil sings. The two principal temples stand there together in the south, their facades facing the agora, or market-place, the consecrated open space which in coast towns usually lay on the sea side of the city….

 

When all is said, however, the delight of Paestum lies in its appeal to the eye, in the sheer beauty of these golden buildings shining there in the dawn between the great mountains and the sea, in the midst of the wide plain, deserted and silent, where only the sun and the wind are at home.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 227-234.

*Note: Look at this image of a diver from a fresco now in the Paestum Museum provided by David Orme from England. What does it tell us about ancient Greece and Rome?

Salerno and the Tomb of Hildebrand

 

 

 

On his visit to Salerno, Edward Hutton visited the  famed cathedral and its tomb of Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand), one of the most important and controversial Popes in history.

 

Today the old city of Salerno has but one thing to boast of: its Cathedral. The modern town, the great promenade of the marina, now called Corso Garibaldi, is more than a mile long, and fine as it is lacks interest. The harbour which Manfred enlarged in 1260, and which was finished by Robert the Wise, has been improved out of all recognition, and the great Castello which Robert Guiscard stormed, some 900 feet up over the sea, is a mere vast heap of ruins. The old town under this enormous debris is, however, picturesque and dirty enough to delight anyone, its irregular, narrow, and steep streets, often mere staircases, being full of medieval corners, old shrines, and old memories. It is here in the midst, with its great and beautiful atrium before it, is set the Cathedral, at the top of a great flight of steps.

 

This glorious church was founded and built by Robert Guiscard in 1084 in honour of St. Matthew, whose body Salerno had possessed since 930, when it is said to have been brought hither from Paestum. Robert placed it in the crypt, where it remains to this day. The Norman, whose works always astonish us, had seen the ruins of Paestum, and these he plundered for the glory of the new church….

 

The church itself is guarded by great and beautiful doors of bronze, presented by Landolfo Butromile, and made in Constantinople in 1099. They are wonderfully adorned with the figures of six apostles and with crosses, and were all inlaid with silver. Within, unhappily, the church we see is altogether unworthy of these glories, for it has been entirely modernized. It still retains its tombs, however, and certain noble ornaments from of old….

Wax Effigy

 In the similar chapel to the right of the high altar lies the greatest of all the Popes, Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII. This was he who in the eleventh century conceived that wonderful dream which only the brutality of the time prevented him from realizing. He it was who would have summoned an army from all Christendom, which he would have led in person to the conquest of Byzantium, that the Greek and Latin Churches might have been united under one head, and this having been achieved, all Christendom under his leadership would have turned upon the Saracen and restored the Empire of Augustus and of Hadrian and of Constantine. The Pope forewent his dream. Instead, seeing the corruption of the world he began the reformation of the West. And first he made an army that nothing has ever been able to break. He established a celibate clergy, created the priesthood of Europe, and forbade alike the investiture of a married clergy-man or any other layman to any spiritual office. He claimed for the Church an absolute independence from the temporal power of Caesar; more, he declared and maintained the supremacy of the church over the State, and all this he made good; and above all shown the throne of Peter like the sun over the world. For he claimed and maintained and established the infallibility of the Church, he asserted and erected the name of Pope as incomparable with any other, the Pope alone could make and depose the emperor; all Princes must kiss his feet; he could release from their allegiance the subjects of those whom he had excommunicated, and his legates took precedence over all Bishops and ambassadors.

 

The first to face him and say him nay was the Emperor; at Canossa he was broken and humbled in the snow. It was Hildebrand who first flung Europe upon the Holy Sepulchre. But when he died in Salerno, having given a general absolution to mankind, excepting from this act of mercy Henry, so-called the King, and the usurping Pontiff Gregory and their abettors, his last words were: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.” But there was one to answer: “In exile thou canst not die. Vicar of Christ and His Apostle thou hast received the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”

 

This man, who more than any other before or since has expressed and summed up the claim of the church, was the son of a poor Tuscan carpenter. Here in Salerno let us salute him.

 

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 224-226.

Amalfi

  

 

 

I looked forward to Edward Hutton's description of Amalfi since my paternal grandparents both came from the little town of Agerola at the top of a winding road up the hills from the lovely coastal town of Amalfi. We have fond memories of our visits, one of which is coffee in the crowded piazza at the foot of the cathedral steps one Sunday after Mass.

 

And so the great adventurous road proceeds along this wild  and beautiful coast under the villages of Tovere, Vettica Minore, Lone and Pastena, down to the shore at last at Amalfi, which it enters through a great tunnel under the Cappuccini.

 

Approached thus at evening, with the last light from the west full upon it, Amalfi seems to stand about an ampitheatre of hills, its churches, campanili and white houses hanging on the face of the great cliff which towers up above it in an awful magnificence, the little white port under the eastern hill, and all before it the Homeric sea….

 

I found Amalfi delighted me as much at morning as in that first impression in the twilight. The history of the place knows nothing of any Greek or Roman city, and indeed it seems  to have had no existence in antiquity…. In truth, Amalfi seems to have been founded by—at any rate it first appears under the protection of—the Byzantine Empire…. Amalfi is thus one of the first Italian cities to erect herself into a republic, and indeed she can boast that she gave the signal for the awakening of the municipal spirit, the independence of the cities of Italy. She was able, too, to defy the Saracens, the Prince of Palermo, and even in some sort the Norman kings of Naples….

 

The glory of Amalfi, in so far as it is to be found not in her history but in her monuments, is the great Cathedral of Saint Andrew, where in the crypt lies the incorruptible body of the Apostle, brought from Constantinople in 1206. The glorious church, marred of course by time, by restoration and rebuildings, stands at the top of a great flight of steps, which lead up to its vestibule, upheld by the antique columns of Paestum. There in the façade are those wonderful bronze doors which are said to date from the year 1000, and from which those of Montecassino were copied….

The church itself is, in spite of all it has suffered, still a beautiful Norman-Byzantine building, rather picturesque than artistic, for the antique columns within were modernized and transformed in the eighteenth century. The two ancient ambones supported by antique columns remain, as does the font, an antique vase of porphyry. Close by are two sarcophagi, upon which are to be seen the Rape of Persephone and other pagan stories. From the too sophisticated nave you descend, in the south aisle, to the modernized and over-decorated crypt, where lies the body of S. Andrew the Apostle, which has been visited through the centuries by innumerable pilgrims, among others by S. Francis of Assisi in 1218, by Queen Giovanna I and by Pius II, in whose time Cardinal Bessarion brought the head of the apostle to S. Peter’s in Rome, where it still remains. Philip III of Spain presented the church with the huge bronze statue of the saint, the work of Nacchearino. To the north of the church stands the interesting cloister. The beautiful campanile of four stories, the last being round, under a cupola upheld by columns, and set about with four little turrets, was the work of archbishop Filippo Augustariccio in 1276.

View from Agerola

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Edward Hutton: Naples and Campania Revisited. London, 1958.Preface. Pp. 212-216.