Edward Hutton regarded Spoleto as a very special city, a treasure full of treasures.
Spoleto is a beautiful city of rose colour set on the slope of Monteluco. In a bend of the Tissino torrent, amid a cluster of mountains which crown her with their exquisite grace. In her silent streets I began to understand her beauty and her joy, and, indeed, it is in a kind of sudden and overwhelming joy that her towers pierce up into the sky—those rosy towers that at dawn and midday and sunset are musical with soft bells, and that fade away into the night from rose colour to violet and deep purple under a heaven of innumerable stars. Behind her rise, higher and higher, forests of primeval ilex, the sacred tree of the Latin race, shrouding her, as it were, in a mantle most rare of darkest green. Over her head, far away above the forests, a Franciscan convent soars like a brown bird floating on the wind, whose bells are not heard, but only seem to ring, or heard only in the most fortunate days when their sound is little more than the piping of those crested larks that sang S. Francis to heaven.
It was here in this valley, luminous beyond our northern dreams, that Blessed Angela of Foligno heard those breathless words of Christ: “I love thee more than any woman in the valley of Spoleto.” So in the vineyards and the valleys of Umbria of old, men and women talked with God, and indeed the whole land, even to the most superficial observer, seems blessed. Climb up to the great aqueduct that spans the profound ravine which isolates Spoleto on her round hill, and at evening look across the valleys to the hills and the mountains, that luminous softness, a delicacy so magical that you had thought only the genius of Raphael or Perugino could imagine and express it, is just reality. With light, with fragile glory, with the wide and tender glance of the sky, every delicious form of hill and cloud and mountain is embraced. It is amidst these perfect hills that Spoleto sings for joy….
But on first coming to Spoleto it is to the Cathedral we climb, breathless, for her ways are steep and rough, to see the frescoes of one of the most delightful of the Florentine painters, Filippo Lippo. They are his last masterpieces, and tell the story in brief of the Blessed Virgin in her own Cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta. The chief fresco is that of her Coronation. Pale from the encounter with death, in which but a moment ago she has proved victorious, tall and slight, Regina Angelorum is crowned, not by Christ her Son, but by God the Father, in a heaven delicate as the petals of the flags in the valleys full of corn, powdered with stars that seem to have risen just out of the sea. The sun and the moon beneath her feet are lesser glories where she is. About her a company of angels sings, and dances for joy, since heaven is by so much richer than our earth. A few with a shy and timid grace, magically charming, hand her a few flowers from the meadows of the woods of heaven, as though to ask her if they might be sweeter than the lilies she loved as a girl, or the wild flowers of Palestine. The rest of the frescoes—the Annunciation, in which she stands so surprised, so agitated, that she twists her fingers together and is not sure how to answer; the Nativity, a magnificent composition, now but a shadow; and the Death of the Virgin, where Christ Himself with a tenderness, but with a tenderness and love, bears His Mother to heaven—are much over-painted, and by a lesser hand, yet we catch some shadow of Filippo in them all, so that even in their ruin they are not the least among the precious things of Spoleto.
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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp.70-71, 74-75.
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