Perugia

 

 

 

Edward Hutton had high praise for the beauty of Perugia and its location but did not fail to mention its terrible and often bloody history. 

Perugia stands on her great isolated hills absolute queen of all this country, of old towered and terrible of aspect for all her beauty, ever at attention and with great anger ever searching out her enemies.

 

Of Etruscan origins, being indeed one of the principal cities of that mysterious people, we know nothing of Perugia till she submitted to Rome in 309 B.C. That is but the first of many surrenders—to the Popes, to many tyrants, to her own terrible sons, to the brutality of the mob, to Italy and the modern world. The hand of the Emperor Augustus has rested on her throat as certainly as that of the later tyrants, Baglioni or Pope. … Yet in spite of capitulation and outward obedience, she has ever nursed in her soul a fierce spirit of liberty, which has made her story one of the bloodiest in Italy. In the heyday of her power she owned no temporal sovereign and brooked no interference, but treated Pope and Emperor as mere pawns in her game for the Lordship of Umbria.

 

Though Perugia, Perusia Turrita, has, at least as you approach her today from the south and west, lost her imperial aspect, for not only have her towers vanished, but upon the very forehead of the city rises the huge modern Prefettura and the banal Grand Hotel Brufani, yet she is still the queen of hill cities, is still fiercely beautiful within and without her Etruscan walls on which Rome and the Middle Age and the Renaissance have not forgotten to leave their marks as beautiful if not as indestructible. … Within her palaces is some of the serenest work of Perugino, and Bonfigli, and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and her prospect is of a thousand hills and valleys. Far away to the north and west lie the bare mountains of the Senese, while to the south the hills are crowned with famous and lovely cities where Monte Subasio looks toward Rome with the city of S. Francis kneeling on its skirts, a religious, in the homely brown habit, vowed to God. Like a lily in the vale beneath hovers S. Mary of the Angels, delicate with the colour of the day—white, or almost rosy, or sombre under the sky. And far away to the west rise the mountains above Todi and Orvieto, and all between, the sweet Umbrian plain, the valley of Spoleto. And though in early morning this exquisite landscape is delicate and fragile and half-hidden in mist, at sunset it is filled with the “largeness of the evening earth,” and a serenity of silence and repose that is, as it were, suggested by the gesture of the mountains. It is, above all this perfection, absolute queen from horizon to horizon that Perugia stands regnant. …

Close to the statue of Pope Julius, where it now stands against the Cathedral wall, is the little pulpit from which S. Bernardino used to preach so passionately. … But S. Bernardino, with all his eloquence, preached in vain. The people wept to hear him, burnt their books and pictures and finery on the stones before the beautiful fountain, and then in a few days passionately cut each other’s throats in the very place where they had listened to the good saint, and even in the Duomo itself. And was it not here, too, that the dead body of Astorre Baglioni lay in state during two days, together with that of his murderer and cousin, Grifonetto. 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 158-159, 165.