From Narni to Orvieto

  

 

 

Edward Hutton returned to Narni in the spring to complete his tour of Umbria

Narni

 

I had spent most of the winter in Rome, but when April came I returned to Narni, for I wanted to make the journey to Orvieto through Amelia and Lugnano across the uplands which lie between the Nera and the Tiber.

It was a fine spring morning, when I set out from Narni, and as I went, there came singing into my mind those lines which open the most beautiful of all the Odes of Horace:

 

          Diffugere nives, reduent jam gramine campis,

                 arboresque comae;

          mutat terra vices et decresentia ripas

                 flumina praetereunt;

          Gratia cum Nymphis geminiesque sororibus audit

                 ducere nuda choros.

          Immortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum

                 quae rapit hora diem… *

 

* Hutton's translation: The snows have fled away, already the grass returns to the fields and the leaves to the trees, the earth is going through her changes and the rivers with declining floods past their banks. The Grace ventures nude to lead the choir with the Nymphs and her twin sisters. The Seasons and the hour that robs us of the gracious day warn us not to look for an unending life.”

 

How is it that line Latin or Greek hammered into one at school, which meant less than nothing to us then, come back to us later with such a rush of emotion, so poignant a meaning as to bring tears to the eyes? Learned mechanically as part of a form “repetition” without a hint of their beauty and forgotten as soon as learned, suddenly they “come home to us”, as Newman says, and pierce the heart as nothing in our own tongue, familiar and beloved though it be, is able to do. Is this the secret of something we call classical? Does it explain why, when we first see the Parthenon, the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Age, all that has been built since antiquity, seem a mistake?

 

So I went on over the hills, Horace’s Ode in my heart and on my lips, often looking back on towered Narni and the broken bridge of Augustus. Yes, the snows were all fled away, already the grass was shining in the fields, the trees were green with the young leaf. … And presently, between the immense horizons here Monte Soracte rose, there the cone of Mount of Monte Cimino, and then before me I saw Amalia towering up on her hill, crowned by her Cathedral and surrounded by her magnificent walls….

Amalia

 

Yes, Amalia is poor in pictures, but in the church of San Francesco there is the tomb of Matteo and Elisabetta Geraldini which might be by Agostino di Duccio so lovely is it, while the church itself, which dates from the thirteenth century, has a fine ruddy façade, with a double rose, and a beautiful double cloister of the fifteenth century. 

Amalia Duomo

 

Nor is the Duomo, reconstructed though it has been in the eighteenth century, to be neglected, crowning the little city as it does with  its majestic twelve sided campanile, of the eleventh century still, as was once the church which it overshadows….

 

I went on over the mountains along the same wonderful road, through a richly cultivated or wooded country, to Lugnano. …

 

But it was the road that enchanted me. There, as from a lofty terrace over the Tiber valley, I could survey the world from Monte Soracte in the Campagna on the verge of the Patrimony to Mont’ Amiata in the Senese. That was what lay before me along the twenty miles  or so between Lugnano and Orvieto, till I descended into the Paglia valley and the evening light struck the mosaics of the Cathedral of Orvieto on its isolated pedestal of tufa and I went up to the city by its so long drawn our approach in the twilight.

Orvieto

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 126-130.

Christmas in Dolcedorme

  

 

 

 

Edward Hutton interrupted his tour of Umbria to spend the winter in Rome. But he did take time to visit Ulisse, his young traveling  companion, in the boy's hometown of Dolcedorme where they attending the Christmas Midnight Mass. Hutton's charming account is a unique historical document.

 

Ah! That Midnight Mass! … I am not likely to forget it. I had gone with Ulisse, who guided me through the dark and narrow ways, up to the Collegiata, enthroned above the city, under those enormous and precipitous rocks, like giant’s teeth, which distinguish Dolcedorme.

 

It is a large church, rebuilt after an earthquake, in the seventeenth century; but large and spacious though it was, it was full. And not only of the faithful, not only of the women and the poveri. The whole city seemed to be there when the bell sounded for the third time.

 

In their own place sat the women, young and old, devout enough, and for the most part already on their knees. Behind and about, against the pillars and side-altars, stood the men, a vast crowd. And the noise! The whole church was filled with it, and the air was already stifling.

 

Over all the tumult came at last the organ. In the cora they began to sing Te Deum. It was the end of Matins. Mass was about to begin.

 

Still the people came in under the heavy leather curtains. The church was packed. More candles were lighted: more music poured from the organ. Finally, in procession, behind the great Byzantine cross, came Sua Ecclenzia—the whole concourse bent like a field of corn under a wind—blessing as he came. He was to sing Mass. Over the Crucifix on the high altar his single candle shone.

 

Ulisse and I stood before a pillar on the Epistle side, half-way down the great nave. Mass began. Domine dixit ad me … Kyrie eleison … Christie eleison … Kyrie eleison.

 

Monsignor intoned the Gloria in excelsis. The organ burst out into a great peal of music, the bells rang, everyone sang or whistled. …Most whistled.

 

Whistled!

 

Not with the lips only as one whistles an air, but with the fingers in the mouth to make a noise, as much noise as possible. Still others had brought whistles with them, and were using them with all their might. 

 

I was astonished. I was scandalized. Surely my ears deceived me. It was so hot and the odour.…

 

But no, the whistling continued. There was Ulisse with both his fists at his mouth, whistling for all he was worth.

 

Ma come! Was this a theatre or a church? Was this some piece being hooted off the stage or the first Mass of Christmas? I turned to Ulisse.

 

“Ma si, signore, di qua e di la si fischia.”

 

“They’re whistling all over the place!” But why?

 

There was a little silence; the Gloria had finished itself.

 

Surely Monsignor would not continue? But no, the Mass proceeded as usual. The great Epistle proclaimed Him qui dedit semetipsium pro nobis, ut nos redimeret ab omni iniquitate….

 

The Gospel, known from childhood, unfolded itself from the edict of Caesar Augustus to the peace born on earth to men of good will.

 

Slowly we came to the Christmas Preface, the Christmas Sanctus, sung here to a strange dancing measure as in the picture of Botticelli. I had forgotten the unseemly interruption at the Gloria. I had forgotten everything.…

 

There it was again! Suddenly, at the Elevation! But worse than before, more exulting, more joyous, more insolently enthusiastic and rejoicing. It was beyond all possible bounds. In England….

 

“But what is it then?” I leant to Ulisse.

 

“Ma signore, it is the shepherds! E un pio ricordo dei suoni pastorali quando necque nostro Signore.” “A pious remembrance of the shepherds’ music when Our Lord was born.” But I… I, too, would whistle. I … I, too, whistled—only the sounds would not come. What could be the matter with my throat?

 

“Peccato!” whispered Ulisse, that one cannot hear also the voice of the ox and the ass.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 124-125.

Narni and the Ponte D'Augusto

  

 

 

Edward Hutton visited Narni to see the ruins of a famous roman bridge but he also found some spectacular mosaics in the cathedral.

 I came to Narni in the evening.

 

The inn at Narni is of no great pretensions, but the host is a good host and very rightly he is proud of his picturesque and antique city, but especially he is proud of his view, and the great Roman bridge, so magnificent a ruin, that strives in vain to grapple the shores of Nera! … and well he may be, the Ponte d’Augusto, is one of the most beautiful ruins in the world, chiefly perhaps because it has been left alone with age and death. In its youth and prime it carried the Via Flaminia; in its age it warns us of the far from desolate splendours that the Eternal City still guards. An outpost of the Campagna, it knows the gods are dead or dying in that once mysterious desert. What need is there of any splendid road to Rome, since the messengers of Christ, pursued by implacable victory, came, not with beauty and delight in gilded chariots and with horses, but in rags and with bleeding feet? Should this so noble bridge of Caesar Augustus bear on its back the brutal and barbaric armies of the Goth, or make the way smooth for the strange bedecked columns, gay with harlots and with silk, of Charles VIII on his way to Naples, there to find no kingdom but an immortal pestilence? The Ponte d’Augusto watches the traveller pass by on another way to Rome unheeding, while it remembers only splendid days….

One enters the city by the Porta  Ternana, of the end of the fifteenth century, with its portentous towers, to find Narni an almost completely medieval city frowning and picturesque on its olive-clad cliff above the Nera and commanding a wide prospect over the Conca Ternana and from its public garden a magnificent view…. Crowded now with the buildings of the Middle Age: towers, noble palaces, old churches and, over all, the great Rocca built by Cardinal Albornoz and restored by Pius II, before all these magnificent possessions remains its broken Roman bridge….

 

The Romanesqe Duomo of San Giovenale, with its heavy Campanile (1110), has a charming portico which is of the fifteenth century, as is the arch on the right with  its chapel, but the portal in the façade is still of the twelfth century, with a classical accent….

 One now comes to what is by far the most interesting and once the most beautiful work in the church, the shrine of SS. Giovenale and Coccio by masters of the Cosmati school. The whole shrine or chapel is very classical in form with its vertical design and its square framework, much of which still retains its mosaics. The two doorways are also decorated with mosaics. On either side above, two statues remain, a Pieta in wood on the left and San Giovenale on the right, but these are later works. Above the central doorway are two sculptured sheep on either side a central cross. All this, and the mosaic pavement beside it, are among the earliest works of the Roman school of marble craftsmen. Mosaic pavements of the same school are in Santa Maria in Pensole and San Domenico. For these works alone Narni is worth a visit. One of the masters of the school , Petrus Romanus, made the pavement in front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey in 1269 and the beautiful tomb of Henry III in the chapel of the Confessor….

Image courtesy of David Orme

I always come back to the great Roman bridge over the Nar. From there, and strolling along the stream, one understands the Narnia of old on its lofty hill, precipitous on more than one side and half encircled by those sulphurean waters, which rush through the deep-wooded gorge immediately beneath the city, as well described by Claudian:***

 

“Not far away from the strange coloured stream which gives the town its name, in sulphurous waters flowing in tortuous course between opposite mountains through those woods of ilex.”

 

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***Hutton, as usual, gives the Latin but I just supply his English translation. Note that the Latin name for Narni was Narnia, the name C.S. Lewis gave to the mythical Kingdom of his famous children's novels.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 100-105.

On the way to Narni

  

 

 

In "Assisi and Umbria Revisited", Edward Hutton recalled many incidents from his first visit to the area fifty years earlier. In Chapter XIII, entitled "Over the Somma to Narni", he even remembered an incident from his school days.

Through the valleys of oak and ilex I set out from Spoleto, I remember, before the sun was high, on a fair September morning as ever was, for Terni and her fall, which, as it happened, I was never to see; for I had scarcely gone five miles on my way when I was overtaken by rain that meant the end of the summer, for, as they say in Siena, the first rain after the Assumption is the first rain of winter. Was it not of such a tempest that Virgil warned us, so that we might note its coming?

 

But I was heedless; and, taken with the beauty of the way, I had not observed the signs infallible. Not till the murmur of the woods prevailed against the whisper of the summer day did I understand that nature was awake, her heart tumultuous with some passionate remembrance, and she herself singing upon the mountains….

Here he inserted eight lines in the original Latin from one of Virgil's pastoral poems usually called the Georgics.  I give the English translation that he supplied in a footnote.

"Often too there appears in the sky a mighty column of water and clouds--mustered from on high roll up a murky tempest of black showers; down falls the lofty heaven and with its deluge of rain washes away the happy crops and the labors of the oxen. The dykes fill: the deep channelled rivers swell and roar and the sea steams in its heaving. The Father himself in the midnight of storm clouds wields his bolts with flashing hand...."

 

Ah, but I used to know the whole of that Georgic by heart, hammered into me as it was at school, though even then I came to love Virgil, “so musical, so melancholy”, and I remember how at Blundell’s one of my form-masters, if we happened on  a passage of the Aeneid which Virgil had stolen from Homer, never missed the opportunity of sniffling viciously, and “Homer spoiled again” he would say. On one of these occasions I held up my hand and protested, a somewhat unusual thing for a boy to do in those days.

 

     “Yes, sir,” I said, “but-----”

     “Well, boy?”

     “Please, sir, I mean, sir, with what a grace he does it.”

     “That,” said my form-master, “is the most immoral remark I have ever heard in this form. And I might add it is all the worse for the small, the very small, measure of truth there is in it.” 

  

Happy days! But not so happy as that in the rain on the way to Terni.  Through the valley under the storm of rain I went rejoicing; it was one of the great days of my life. I crossed the Somma alone chanting Virgil’s lines. I was drenched to the skin, and the hailstones cut my face like a whip, and the lightning flashed about me. What cared I? The long road hissed before me, and suddenly, as it seemed, under the fury of the storm, was overcome and no longer resisted the invincible rain, but was musical with a million fountains. All nature sighed in the ecstasy of that embrace, and spoke in the  song of the storm of the antique tragedies of the gods. And I alone knew it all as I came down into the sacred groves of ilex in the old and beautiful valley, through which a little river ran boisterous before me.

But that was fifty years ago and today it was raining still, when I am ashamed to say, I crossed the Somma in an autobus and again I did not see the famous falls of which Childe Harold wrote.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 99-100.

Italian Tales

  

 

 

In a chapter entitled "Summer about Norcia" Edward Hutton recorded some delightful stories told by his young Italian companion Ulisse. Although Assisi and Umbria Revisited was written in 1953, this episode with Ulisse must have occurred decades earlier on an earlier journey to Umbria. These stories have now been forgotten but they did provide the subject matter for many a great work of art.

 

The heat was wonderful. It was not heavy, as any great heat in England always is, but vehement and marvelous with all the fierceness and vitality of fire, the pride and the beauty of the sun.  The hushed fields seemed about to burst into flame. The sun delighted and frightened me, it was wonderful and mysterious. Each day was like a hard, bright precious stone, more dazzling and more heartless than a diamond. Everything was still. And the nights were like sapphires. For three days now, everyone seemed to be in the pieve praying for rain….  

 

As I lay that evening just without the forest, not far from a little stream that, in spite of the drought, still ran secretly under the trees among the stones out into the parched valley, I heard a clear voice say softly, “Of what is the signore thinking, it is perhaps of his own country?”

 

Looking round, I saw a pair of eyes staring at me from under a tangle  of black hair, and Ulisse came close to me.

 

I lay back among the broom and answered, “Tell me a story, then, Ulisse—and I shall forget again.”

 

“But the signore has heard all the stories of the Frate Antonio, he has heard all the stories of my mother and my mother’s mother—what is there left to tell?”

 

“Tell me them over again.”

 

“Which of them all will the signore hear? But, indeed, he knows them all by heart! There is that one of the birth of Bambino Gesu—yes? And that of the Madonnina when she was a girl in school, and that of Sampietro who was always hungry, even as myself—which of them all shall I tell, then?”

 

And I said, “Tell me the Fuga in Egitto.”

 

“Signore, why do you always like that best? For my part I prefer those of Sampietro—how he put the devil’s head on the bella ragazza—

Gerard David: Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

“As the signore doubtless knows, Erode had ordered the massacre of the Innocenti, for he wished, ah, indeed how he wished! To kill the Bambino Gesu, who was a greater king than he. So Sangiuseppe and the Madonna had to flee away. Ah, the Madonnina…. She carried always in the nest of her arms, wrapped in her apron, Gesu our Saviour. And as she went, sitting on the ass which Sangiuseppe drove before him, as she went, the Pharisees met her and said, “Beautiful Lady, what do you carry in your apron?”

 

“And she answered, ‘I carry Il Gran’ Signore.’ 

 

“But the Pharisees mistook her, thinking she said, ‘Grano, Signori,’ and they answered, ‘Carry it, then, to the mill.’ So she passed on with Our Lord and Sangiuseppe.”…

 

Ulisse continued with a number of other stories about the Flight into Egypt: the bean field, the field of flax, the olive tree that hid the Holy family from the pursuers, and even the encounter with brigands who would eventually turn out to be the good thief and the bad thief on Calvary….

 

“Ulisse,” said I, after a time, “it is necessary that these tales be written down, since then have the sound of truth, so that they who know them not may hear them.”

 

“It is my opinion also, signore,” said Ulisse. “write them then—you who are always writing.”

 

“That,” said I, “is easier to say than to do; and if I do, be sure that not all who read them will understand them, because for some they are too difficult.”

 

“Indeed, yes,” said Ulisse; “yet I understand them, and they are good tales concerning Our Lord, the Madonna and the saints whom we love.”

 

“Ulisse,” said I, “it occurs to me to write them out tomorrow and to send them to the Inglesi.”

 

“That,” said Ulisse, “would be indeed a Christian act, worthy of the signore, because the Inglesi—scusi, signori—much more often than not are no Christians at all, and it would be well to turn their hearts.”

 

Now Ulisse had for some time been troubled about my countrymen and their probable fate as heretics, and had evidently been consulting Frate Antonio on the matter, for presently he said;

 

“Scusi, signore! It was not altogether the fault of the Inglesi that they became heretics. It was really the fault of their wicked King Enrico, who wanted to get rid of his good and very pious queen and marry another woman…. But Frate Antonio has said that even these Protestanti may by chance not go to hell.”

 

“What?” I said. “How is that?”

 

“Signore, senta! One day Il Gesu Christo was walking with Sampietro in Paridiso, as the padrone may walk with the fattore in the podere, and after a while He said—not as complaining exactly, but as stating a fact:

 

“Sampietro, I think this place has gone down.”

 

“Here Sampietro who is always impetuous and knew very well what He meant, dared to interrupt.

 

“’Il Santissimo can’t blame me,’ he said huffily; ‘Il Santissimo is not to suppose they all came in by the Gate, Che! Che!’

 

“’Not come in by the Gate, Sampietro? What do you mean?’ said Our Lord.

 

“’ If Il Santissimo will but step this way, round these bushes,’ said Sampietro, ‘He will see.’

 

“And sure enough He saw. For there was the Madonna drawing the souls up pell-mell, willy-nilly, anyhow, into Paradiso in a great bucket to their eternal gain and undeserved good.” O Clemens, O Pia, O Dulcis Virgo Maria.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 92-98.