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.