Pietrasanta

Continuing his journey into Tuscany, Edward Hutton found Pietrasanta a welcome relief from the horrors of Carrara. He dawdled there awhile among the people and countryside he loved, but then set out for Pisa, the first great city of Tuscany.

 

Pietrasanta is set at the foot of the hills of Paradise, littered with marble, planted with figs and oleanders, full of the sun. For hours you may climb among the olives on the hills, terraced for vines, shimmering in the heat; and coming there, watch the sleepy sea lost in a silver mist, the mysterious blue hills, listening to the songs of the maidens in the gardens. Thus watching the summer pass by, caught by her beauty, lying on an old wall beautiful with lichen and the colours of many autumns, suddenly you may be startled by the stealthy, unconcerned approach of a great snake three feet long at least, winding along the gully by the roadside. Half fascinated and altogether fearful, you watch her pass by till she disappears bit by bit in an incredibly small fissure in the vineyard wall, leaving you breathless. Or all day long you will lie under the olives waiting for the coolness of evening, listening to the sound of everlasting summer, the piping of a shepherd, the little lovely song of a girl, the lament of a cicale. Then returning to Pietrasanta, you will sit in the evening perhaps in the Piazza there, quite surrounded by the old walls, with its medieval air, its lovely Municipio and fine old Gothic churches. Here you may watch all the city, the man and his wife and children, the young girls laughing together, conscious of the shy admiration of the youth of the place; and you will be struck by the beauty of these people, peasants and workmen, their open, frank faces, their grace and strength, their unconscious delight in themselves, their air of distinction too, coming to them from a long line of ancestors, who have lived with the earth, the mountains, and the sea.

 

Then in the early morning, perhaps, you will enter S. Martino and hear the early Mass, where there are still so many worshippers, and then, lingering after the service, you will admire the pulpit, carved really by one of those youths whose frankness and grace surprised you in the Piazza on the night before—Stagio Stagi, a native of this place, a fine artist whose work continually meets you in Pietrasanta. …

Even on the dusty way from Pietrasanta, at every turn of the road one has half expected to see the leaning tower and the Duomo. And it is really with an indescribable patience you spend the night in Viareggio. Starting at dawn, still without a glimpse of Pisa, you enter the Pineta before the sun, that lovely, green, cool forest full of  silver shadows, with every here and there a little farm for the pine cones, about which they are heaped in great banks. Coming out of this wood on the dusty road in the golden heat, between fields of cucumbers, you meet market carts and contadini returning form the city. Then you cross the Serchio in the early light, still and mysterious as a river out of Malory. And at last, suddenly, like a mirage, the towers of Pisa rise before you, faint and beautiful as in a dream. As you turn to look behind you at the world you are leaving, you find that the mountains, those marvellous Apuan Alps with their fragile peaks, have been lost in the distance and the sky; and so, with half a regret, full of expectancy and excitement nevertheless, you quicken your pace, and even in the heat set out quickly for the white city before you, -- Pisa, once lord of the sea, the first great city of Tuscany.

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 71-76. 

Carrara

Edward Hutton's visit to the marble quarries of Carrara provided a rare unpleasant experience. In fact, his description of going up the mountain reads like an ascent into Hell.

John Singer Sargent: Bringing Down the Marble

 In all Carrara and the valley of Torano I saw no beautiful or distinguished faces, --the women were without sweetness, the men a mere gang of workmen. Now, common as this is in any manufacturing city of the North, it is very uncommon in Italy, where humanity has not been injured and enslaved by machinery as it has with us….

 

I understood this better when, about four o’clock on the next morning, I went in the company of a lame youth into the quarries themselves. There are some half-dozen of them, glens of marble that lead you into the heart of the mountains, valleys without shade, full of a brutal coldness, an intolerable heat, a dazzling light, a darkness that may be felt. Torano, that littler town you come upon, at the very threshold of the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Ages, full of stones and refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all sorts…among which the people live. Thus busy with frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the mountains, where no green thing has ever grown, or even a bird build her nest, where in summer the sun looks down like some enormous moloch, and in winter the frost and the cold scourge them to their labour in the horrid ghostly twilight, the people work. The roads are mere tracks among the blocks and hills of broken marble…which are hauled on enormous trolleys by a line of bullocks in which you may often find a horse or a pony. Staggering along this way of torture, sweating, groaning, rebelling, under the whips and curses and kicks of the labourers, who either sit cursing on the wagon among the marble, or, armed with great whips, slash and cut at the poor, patient brutes, the oxen drag these immense wagons over the sharp boulders and dazzling rocks, … pulling as though to break their hearts under the tyranny of the stones, … Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin about our cities. Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise like the shrieking of iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture are sawn out of the rock. There is no joy in this labour, and the savage, harsh yell of the machines drown any song that of old might have lightened the toil. Blasted out of the mountains by slaves, some 13,000 of them, dragged by tortured and groaning animals, the marble that might have built a Parthenon is sold to the manufacturer to decorate the houses of the middle classes, the studios of the incompetent, the streets of our trumpery cities. Do you wonder why Carrara has never produced a sculptor? The answer is here in the quarries that, having dehumanized man, have themselves become obscene…. The quarries are worked for money, not for art. The stone is cut not that Rodin may make a splendid statue, but that some company may earn a dividend. As you climb higher and higher, past quarry after quarry, it is a sense of slavery and death that you feel….an anxious and disastrous silence surrounds you, the violated spirit of the mountains that has yielded only to the love of Michelangelo seems to be about to overwhelm you in some frightful tragedy…. Then, as you return through the sinister town of Torano with its sickening sights and smells, you come into the pandemonium of the workshops, where nothing has a being but the shriek of the rusty saws drenched with water, driven by machinery, cutting the marble into uniform slabs to line urinals or pave a closet. At last, in a sort of despair, overwhelmed with heat and noise, you reach your inn, and though it be midday in July, you seize your small baggage and set out for where the difficult road leads out of this spoiled valley to the olives and the sea.

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 66-69. 

Shelley and Porto Venere

Traveling south from Genoa along the sea coast, Edward Hutton spent some time exploring among the coastal towns. He devoted a number of pages to an account of the poet Shelley's last days and tragic death off the coast of Lerici, but then devoted a short chapter to a visit to Porto Venere that brought out his love of the classical world. 

 

Thus died perhaps the greatest lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! “’tis Death is dead, not he,” for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as if it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the refreshment of his spirit. (53)

 

It is perhaps a more joyful day that may be spent at Porto Venere, the little harbour on the northern shores of the gulf. Starting early you come, still before the sea is altogether subject to the sun, to a little bay of blue clear still water flanked by gardens of vines, of agaves and olives. Here, in silence save for the lapping of the water… you land, and, following the path by the hillside, come suddenly on the little port with its few fishing-boats and litter of ropes and nets, above which rises the little town, house piled on house, from the ruined church rising high, sheer out of the sea to the church of marble that crowns the hill…. Climbing thus between the houses under that vivid strip of soft blue sky, the dazzling rosy beauty of the ruined ramparts suddenly bursts upon you, and beyond and above them the golden ruined church, and farther still, the glistening  shining splendour of the sea and the sun that has suddenly blotted out the soft sky. A flight of broken steps leads to a ruined wall, along which you pass to the old church, or temple is it, you ask yourself, so fair it looks, and without the humility of a Christian building. …As I stood leaning on the ruined wall looking on all this miracle of joy, a little child, who had hidden among the wind-blown cornflowers and golden bloom on the slope of the cliffs, slowly crept towards me with many hesitations and shy peerings; then, no longer afraid, almost naked as he was, he ran to me and took my hand.

 

“Will the Signore see the church?” said he, pulling me that way.

 

The Signore was willing. Thus it was, hand in hand with Eros, that I mounted the broken steps of the tower of Venus, his mother.

 

How may I describe the wonder of that place? …we came out of the stairway on to a platform on the top of the tower surrounded by a broken battlement. It was as though I had suddenly entered the last hiding place of Aphrodite, herself. …

 

Port Venere rises out of the sea like Tintagel—but a classic sea, a sea covered with broken blossoms. It was evening when I returned again to the Temple of Venus. The moon was like a sickle of silver, far away the waves fawned along the shore, as though to call the nymphs from the woods; the sun was set; out of the east night was coming. In the great caves, full of coolness and misery, the Tritons seemed to be playing with sea monsters, while from far away I thought I heard the lamentable voice of Ariadne weeping for Theseus. Ah no, they are not dead, the beautiful, fair gods. Here, in the temple of Aphrodite, on the threshold of Italy, I will lift up my heart. Though the songs we made are dead and the dances forgotten, though the statues are broken, the temples destroyed, still in my heart there is a song and in my blood a murmur as of dancing, and I will carve new statues and rebuild the temples every day. For I have loved you, O Gods, in the forest and on the mountains and by the seashore. I, too, am fashioned out of the red earth, and all the sea is in my heart, and my lover is the wind.  (54-56)

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa. second edition, London, 1908.  

Genoa to Spezia

 

Edward Hutton regarded the road from Genoa to Spezia as one of the most beautiful in the world. Below are excerpts from his description of the road that he seems to have traversed on foot and horseback.

 

It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante, among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. Forgotten, or for the most part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems to await you entrenched in silence among the wild flowers….

 

This forgotten way among the olive gardens on the lower slopes of the mountains over the sea, seems to me more joyful than any other road in the world. It leads to Italy. … to the land of heart’s desire, where Pisa lies in the plain under the sorrowful gesture of the mountains like a beautiful mutilated statue, where Arno, parted from Tiber, is lost in the sea, dowered with the glory of Florence, the tribute of the hills, the spoil of many streams, the golden kiss of the sun; while Tuscany, splendid with light and joy, stands neither for God nor for His enemies, but for man, to whom she has given everything really without an afterthought, the songs that shall not be forgotten; the pictures full of youth; and above all Beauty…

 

Thus I, thinking of the way, came to Nervi. Now the way from Genoa out of the Pisan gate to Nervi is none of the pleasantest, being suburb all the way; but those eight chilometri over and done with, there is nothing but delight between you and Spezia. Nervi itself, that surprising place where beauty is all gathered into a nosegay of sea and seashore, will not keep you long… so you set out, leaving Genoa and her suburb at last behind you, and, climbing among olive groves, orange gardens, and flaming oleanders, with here a magnolia flaming with blossom…after another five miles you come to Recco, a modest sleepy village, where it is good to eat and rest. In the afternoon, you may very pleasantly take boat for Camogli, that ancient seafaring place

 

Camogli

In the cool of the afternoon you leave Camogli and climb by the byways to Ruta, whence you may see all the Gulf of Genoa, with the proud city herself in the lap of the mountains… Far away below you lies Rapallo in the crook of the bay among the oleanders and the vines.  It is there you must sleep… Somehow it is always into a dreamless sleep  one falls in Rapallo, that beautiful and guarded place behind Portofino, where the sea is like a lake, so still it is, and all the flowers of the world seem to have run for shelter….

 

Rapallo

And if the road, so far, beggars description… what can I hope to say of the way from Rapallo to Chiavari? Starting early, … you climb … through a whole long day of sunshine, with the song of the cicale ever in your ears, the mysterious long-drawn-out melody of the rispetti of the peasant girls reaching you ever…. So in the twilight pursuing your way you follow the beautiful road to Sestri-Levante

 

Sestri Levante

Many days might be spent among the woods of Sestri, but the road calls from the mountains, and it is ever of Tuscany that you think as you set out at last,  leaving the sea behind you for the hills… It is a far journey from Sestri to Spezia, but with a good horse, in spite of the hill, you may cover it in a single long day from sunrise to sunset… evening finds you at La Foce, the last height before Spezia; and suddenly at a turning of the way the sunset flames before you, staining all the sea with colour, and there lies Tuscany, those fragile , stainless peaks of Carrara faintly glowing in the evening sun purple and blue and gold, with here a flush as of dawn, there the heart of the sunset. And all before you lies the sea, with Spezia and the great ships in its arms; while yonder, like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the bleak height of La Foce… one by one the lights of the city appear like great golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the great light of the Pharos throws its warmth over sea and seashore; gathering in the distance of the far horizon, the night, splendid with blue and gold, overwhelms the world, bringing coolness and as it were a sort of reconciliation. So it is quite dark when, weary, at last you find yourself in Spezia, at the foot of the Tuscan hills.

 

Spezia

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 41-46.

Genoa and Vandyck

 According to Edward Hutton, Genoa had no school of painting of its own. It could only boast of foreign painters like Rubens and Anthony Vandyck who came there to work in the early seventeenth century. In particular, he believed that Vandyck's work was transformed and humanized by his experience in Italy. *

 

Anthony Vandyck: Self Portrait

The city of Genoa, herself without a school of painting, had welcomed Rubens not long before very gladly, nor had Vandyck any cause to complain of her ingratitude.  He appears to have set himself to paint in the style of Rubens, choosing similar subjects, at any rate, and thus to have won for himself… a reputation but little inferior to his master’s. Certainly at this time his work is very Flemish in character, and apparently it was not till he had been to Venice and Rome that the influence of Italy and the Italian masters may be really found in his work. A disciple of Titian almost from his youth, it is the work of that master which gradually emancipates him from Flemish barbarism, from a too serious occupation with detail, the over-emphasis on northern work, the mere boisterousness, without any real distinction, that often spoils Rubens for us, and yet is so easily excused and forgotten in the mere joy of life everywhere to be found in it. Well, with this shy and refined mind Italy is able to accomplish her mission; she humanizes him, gives him the Latin sensibility and clarity of mind, the Latin refinement too, so that we are ready to forget that he was Rubens’ countryman… 

 

Much of this enlightening effect that Italy has upon the northerner may be found in the work of Vandyck upon his return to Genoa, really a new thing in the world, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness, in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this journey to the south in the sketchbook in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all that we have come to consider as especially his own….

 

Gradually Vandyck, shy and of a quiet, serene spirit… led by the immeasurable glory of the Venetians slowly escapes from that “Flemish manner” to be master of himself; so that, after he has painted in the manner of Titian at Palermo, he returns to Genoa to begin that wonderful series of masterpieces we all know, in which he has immortalized the tragedy of a king, the sorrowful beauty, frail and lonely as a violet, of Henrietta Maria and the fate of the Princes of England. And though many of the pictures he painted in Genoa are dispersed, and many spoiled, some few remain to tell us of his passing. One, a Christ among the Pharisees, is in the Palazzo Bianco, not far from the Palazzo Rosso, on the opposite side of the Via Garibaldi. But here there is a fine Rubens too; a Gerard David… a good Ruysdael, with some characteristic Spanish pictures by Zurbaran, Ribera, and Murillo… it is characteristic of Genoa that our interest in this collection should be with the foreign work there.

 

Vandyck: Genoese Noblewoman
Palazzo Rosso

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 * Note: Edward Hutton had a special liking for King Charles I, the English King executed in 1641, his wife Henrietta Maria, and their two sons who would go on to become King Charles II, and King James I.

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 33-35.

Genoa: Arcades and a Chapel

 

 

Over a hundred years ago Edward Hutton saw Genoa as a living city. It had not become a museum or a tourist mecca. He especially liked the narrow arcaded streets lined with shopkeepers and artisans.

 

As you stand under those strange arcades that run under the houses facing the  port, all that most ancient story of Genoa seems actual, possible; it is as though in some extraordinarily vivid dream you had gone back to less uniform days, when the beauty and the ugliness of the world struggled for mastery, before the overwhelming victory of the machine had enthroned ugliness and threatened the dominion of the soul of man. In that shadowy place, where little shops like caverns open on either side, with here a woman grinding coffee, there a shoemaker at his last, yonder a smith making copper pipkins, a sailor buying ropes, and old woman cheapening apples, everything seems to have stood still from century to century. There you will surely see the mantilla worn as in Spain, while the smell of ships, whose masts every now and then you may see, a whole forest of them, in the harbour, the bells of the mules, the splendour of the most ancient sun, remind you only of old things, the long ways of the great sea, the roads and the deserts and the mountains, the joy that cometh with the morning, so that there at any rate Genoa is as she ever was, a city of noisy shadowy ways, cool in the heat full of life, movement, merchandise, and women. (23-24) …

 

These narrow shadowy ways full of men and women and joyful with children are the delight of Genoa. There is but little to see, you may think, --little enough but just life. For Genoa is not a museum; she lives, and the laughter of her children is the greatest of all the joyful poems of Italy, maybe the only one that is immortal.

 

With this thought in your heart… you return to the arcades, and turning to your left till you come to the Via S. Lorenzo, in which is the Duomo all of white and black marble, a jewel with mystery in its heart, hidden away among the houses of life. …

Within, the church is dark, and this I think is a disappointment, nor is it very rich or lovely. … the only remarkable thing in the church itself is the chapel of St. John Baptist, into which no woman may enter, because of the dancing of Salome, daughter of Herodias. There in a marble urn the ashes of the Messenger have lain for eight centuries, not without worship, for here have knelt Pope Alexander III, our own Richard Cordelion, Federigo Barbarossa, Henry IV after Canossa, Innocent IV, fugitive before Federigo II, Henry VII of Germany, St. Catherine of Siena, and often too, St. Catherine Adorni, Louis XII of France, Don Juan of Austria after Lepanto, and maybe, who knows, Velasquez of Spain, Vandyck from England, and behind them, all the misery of Genoa through the centuries, an immense and pitiful company of men and women crying in the silence to him who had cried in the wilderness. (26-7)

 

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Genoa, Gateway to Italy

 

The first edition of Edward Hutton's, Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, appeared in 1907. He began his tour with Genoa, which he regarded as the gateway to Italy. Appropriately, it was named after Janus, the Roman guard of gates from whom the month of January also gets its name. These highlights are taken from the second edition of 1908.

 

The traveller who on his way to Italy passes along the Riviera di Ponente through Marseilles, Nice, and Mentone to Ventimiglia, or crossing the Alps touches Italian soil, though scarcely Italy indeed, at Turin, on coming to Genoa finds himself really at last in the South, the true South, of which Genoa la Superba is the gate, her narrow streets, the various life of her port, her picturesque colour and dirt, her immense palaces of precious marbles, her oranges and pomegranates and lemons, her armsful of children, and above all the sun, which lends an eternal gladness to all these characteristic or delightful things, telling him at once that the North is far behind, that even Cisalpine Gaul is crossed and done with, and that here at last by the waves of that old and great sea is the true Italy, that beloved and ancient  land to which we owe almost everything that is precious and valuable in our lives, and in which still, if we be young, we may find all our dreams. …

And so, in some dim way I cannot explain, to come to Italy is like coming home, as though after a long journey one were to come suddenly upon one’s mistress at a corner of a lane in a shady place.

 

It is perhaps with some such joy in the heart as this that the fortunate traveller will come to Genoa the Proud, by the sea, lying on the bosom of the mountains, whiter than the foam of her waves, the beautiful gate of Italy.

 

The history of Genoa, its proud and adventurous story, is almost wholly a tale of the sea, full of mystery, cruelty, and beauty, a legend of sea power, a romance of ships. It is a narrative in which sailors, half merchants, half pirates, adventurers every one, put out from the city and return laden with all sorts of spoil,--gold from Africa, slaves from Tunis or Morocco, the booty of the Crusades; with here the vessel of the Holy Grail bought at a great price, there the stolen dust of a great Saint.

 

The spirit of adventure, which established the power of Genoa in the East, which crushed Pisa and almost overcame Venice, was held in check and controlled by the spirit of gain, the dream of the merchant, so that Columbus, the very genius of adventure almost without an after-thought, though a Genoese, was not encouraged, was indeed laughed at; and Genoa, splendid in adventure but working only for gain, unable on this account to establish any permanent colony, losing gradually all her possessions, threw to the Spaniard the dominion of the New World, just because she was not worthy of it….

 

Thus Genoa appears to us of old and now, too, as a city of merchants. … What Philip of Spain did for God’s sake, what Visconti did for power, what Cesare Borgia did for glory, Genoa has done for gold. She is a merchant adventurer. Her true work was the bank of St. George. One of the most glorious and splendid cities of Italy, she is, almost in that home of humanism, without a school of art or a poet or even a philosopher. Her heroes are the great admirals, and adventurers—Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, Fieschi, men whose names linger in many a ruined castle along the coast who of old met piracy with piracy. Even today a Grimaldi spoils Europe at Monaco, as his ancestors did of old.

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp.1-5.

San Sepolcro and Piero della Francesca

 Edward Hutton concluded "Siena and Southern Tuscany" in Arezzo, but in that chapter he did include a side trip by rail to Borgo San Sepolcro to see the famous Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

 

But the most beautiful of all these treasures to which Arezzo holds the key is Borgo San Sepolcro in the Tiber Valley. … There are very few things more lovely in the world than the upper valley of the Arno, but one of them is, I think, the upper valley of the Tiber. It is a landscape more virile than Umbria—a landscape by Piero della Francesca, in fact, and in Borgo it is his work you find, for the little town is his birthplace.

 

That “Resurrection of Christ” in the Municipio is perhaps the most beautiful representation of the triumph of Christ in the world. …

 

The fresco of the resurrection comes upon us with a kind of surprise; we had not suspected Piero of so much thoughtfulness. It is as though he had listened to some voice, or seen a vision, or on some fortunate day had been led away the captive of Love, … In the cold light of the earliest morning, mere sunless dawn as yet, Christ has risen and is standing in His tomb. His experience is in His face, the dawn of knowledge, perhaps of the sorrows of humanity. It is as though for the first time He had really understood the power of evil, to which, after all, we are so unwillingly the slaves, the hopeless misery of that state of imperfect love. The noise of Hell has furrowed His face, and He has only just escaped into our quiet world. Beneath that terrible and beautiful figure… lie four soldiers, sleeping in the noiseless twilight. Behind the green trees on the right the first exquisite frail light of dawn is coming to comfort the world, and with the return of the Prince of Life the first day of spring has come; already the flowers have blossomed and the trees have budded behind Him as he came out of the sunrise, and when he shall turn at last into the garden, where Mary will find Him, those bare boughs, that naked hill-side, that brown and sterile earth will quicken, too, even as the hills that He has already crossed. All the passion of the encounter with Death and the dead is graven on His face, and though men sleep He can know no rest; He is up before them, and the whole long day is waiting for Him…. For Piero has expressed not only the old magical truths of Paganism and Christianity, the joy of the world at the coming of Spring, the triumph of the Prince of Life in a world pallid with the fear of Death, but the subtler and more terrible thoughts, too, of the age of thought that was just then dawning on the world. …

 

It was as such things as these in my heart that I made my way back to Arezzo, and, regretting them, took my leave of Southern Tuscany.

 

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Arezzo

 Edward Hutton completed his tour of Siena and southern Tuscany with a long chapter on Arezzo. He devoted most of the chapter to an account of the works of Piero della Francesca that he found in its churches: the Legend of the True Cross, and an image of Mary Magdalen.  

 

Rome, Florence, Siena, Assisi are what they are because of the nature of the country in which they lie. It is the same with Arezzo. Her incommunicable allure strikes you at once as soon as you enter her gates—a certain smiling aspect, subtle and discreet and yet very charming and simple seeming in its welcome, its pleasantness and serenity. Yet nothing, I think, in the history of Arezzo…would lead you to expect an aspect so happy, so merely delightful. Nothing in her history! But I am wrong, for it was here both Maecenas and Petrarch were born. It would be impossible to doubt it even though we had no irrefutable proof of the fact, and indeed I think no men have better expressed their birthplace unless—well, unless it be Vasari, who was also an Aretine. These three men perfectly explain Arezzo; its orderliness, its delight, its extraordinary charm, its profound disregard of anything that matters, of anything but a certain décor and endless gossip. … (297)

 

It is as a city of profound quiet  that we find her today, set with trees and great open spaces within her fair walls of brick at the head of those three valleys at the foot of the mountains.

 

Full of monuments as she is to her illustrious dead, it is not to them but to her churches we look for evidence of her splendour. Nor are we disappointed, for her churches perfectly reflect her history—they are full of the best works of alien masters.

 

There is S. Francesco, for instance, which one comes to first on leaving the station: a Franciscan church, of course, built nobly in the Franciscan style in 1322…. But what we come to S. Francesco to see is not the work of such masters as these, but the strong and beautiful work of Piero della Francesca in the choir—work that one cannot better anywhere in Tuscany, nor, indeed, easily find its match.

 

The legend of the Holy Cross, its history from the beginning of the world until it was discovered by the Emperor Heraclius and later by S. Helena, which Piero della Francesca has painted here—by far the most considerable piece of work that he achieved during his whole life—is one of the most curious dreams of the Christian mind. No longer upheld in its entirety by the Catholic church, it is nevertheless true in its intention, since, for the Middle Age, at least, the Cross was indeed a lovely branch of the Tree of Life which is in the midst of the Paradise of God…. (306)

 

It is this golden legend that Piero has painted so vigorously  here in the choir of S. Francesco. How far are we in contemplating these frescoes from the passionate asceticism, the unearthly beauty of Fra Angelico or Simone Martini! It is as though a new desire had suddenly been born into the world—a desire for life where Simone, after all, would have been content with beauty. What magnificent vitality have those beautiful women, how valiant are those men, how puissant those angels! And, above all, Piero has filled heaven and earth with radiant light. It is in the clear and nimble air, in the fair white light of our real and beautiful daylight, that he alone of his contemporaries has dared at last to paint man and woman in all the sweet energy of life, full of that long breath of God which at dawn in a garden first gave us light…. (311)

One lonely and magnificent figure he left behind him at Arezzo in the Cathedral—a figure of S. Mary Magdalen, very noble and reticent. She adorns no altar, but in a quiet corner of the great church… she stands very sorrowful, she alone of all those clouds on clouds of saints really understands. Well, it is always so; we find Piero emotionally under the influence of the Middle Age, and yet himself perhaps a kind of emancipator or deliverer from its mysticism… For he, too, was occupied rather with his art than with the expression of ideas about religion. He was the first painter, perhaps, to study perspective scientifically. Problems of light, the action of light on beautiful faces or hair, the action of light upon light, would certainly seem to have fascinated him almost all his life long. And yet he has not discarded the ideas that were then gradually becoming less insistent in the world, but in all their modesty and beauty he has used them without question as a means of attaining a beauty bought with much toil and feverish endeavour. His Magdalen is not the ecstatic and splendid courtesan that we see in Titian’s canvas, but a beautiful and lonely woman, who will ever remember that lingering dawn in the garden, when, in the midst of her passionate  weeping, the gardener came so quietly and spoke her name, and in a moment she knew Him whom she had loved. (313)

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Cortona

Edward Hutton had his own favorite travel guide. He quoted him as an introduction to his visit to Cortona. but when he got there, his interests  differed from those of his guide.  He preferred a magnificent Annunciation by Far Angelico, and then spent most of this chapter on a life and appreciation of Cortona's St. Margaret.

“Traveller, thou art approaching Cortona! Dost thou reverence age—that fullness of years which as Pliny says, ‘in man is venerable, in cities sacred’? Here is that which demands thy reverence. Here is a city, compared to which Rome is but of yesterday—to which most other  cities of ancient renown are fresh and green. Thou mayest have wandered far and wide through Italy—nothing hast thou seen more venerable than Cortona. Ere the days of Hector and Achilles, ere Troy itself arose—Cortona was…. Hast thou respect for fallen greatness? Yon solemn city was once the proudest and mightiest in the land, the metropolis of Etruria and now—but enter its gates and look around.”  

 

Dear Dennis, companion of my boyhood, I have done thy bidding, and if I have forsaken what thou hast loved so eloquently for things that were hidden from thee—forgive me, master. It was thy hand led me thither, and in thy name I went. Also I did thy bidding. I “looked around,” and it seemed to me that Corythus was nothing to me, but Frate Elias very much, and as for heaven-born Dardanus, what was he after all beside S. Margaret, Sister of the Seraphs, Lily of the Fields? … 

 

Nothing, I think, in all Tuscany will impress and astonish the traveller more than his walks up and down Cortona through that maze of narrow precipitous streets between the sombre palaces founded on the naked tock, and cliffs and boulders that a hundred generations have been powerless to wear away. Cortona is indeed, as Dennis says, the most ancient of cities, nor is there any city in Italy that has kept so medieval an aspect. …

 

It will thus be seen that Cortona has much to offer us, a wall of immense antiquity, streets narrow and precipitous, palaces and buildings of the Middle Age. Happily, too, she possesses many of those more human works which smile at us from the early Renaissance. … 

 

Opposite the Duomo is the Church of Il Gesu, the baptistry built in 1505, and here, in fact, are preserved the great treasures of Cortona.

 

The finest of these is the exquisite Annunciation from S. Domenico, which under a delicate loggia just without the house at sunset in the cool of the day Madonna has been reading, when suddenly over the flowers Gabriel has come to her with his Ave Gratia Plena, and she has crossed  her white hands on her bosom, and, the book still open on her knee, has leaned a little breathlessly forward as though to escape, And indeed as the angel has said, the Lord is with her, the Dove hovers sweetly over her bright head, and God the Father Himself overhears His own message passing down under the arches. In the background, as though to show us quite clearly what is happening, we see as in a vision our first parents expelled from Paradise, that Eden to which Mary is about to win for us admission again …. 

 

It is strange that Cortona should have held almost at that same time two such different Franciscans as Frate Elias and S. Margaret—the one a great statesman who abhorred poverty, the other a poor woman who loved it. Elias built here in the city a vast palace full of every sort of splendour that later became the Vescovado, Margarita built the hospital and restored the church which, after being rebuilt, was to bear her name. And it is she who is the victor, not he, for all his power and wealth and greatness of mind. He is forgotten by all men save a few historians, while her name is still familiarly dear on the lips of the peasants and children, who invoke her, their all-powerful friend, as we may any day in the fields or the byways about her home:--

 

“O Lily of the fields,

 O violet of humility,

 O little Sister of the Seraphs,

           Ora pro nobis”

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Edward Hutton, Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910, pp. 281-294. 

Chiusi

                                       Southern Tuscany: Chiusi

 

On his tour of Siena and Southern Tuscany Edward Hutton found beautiful views most everywhere. Ancient Chiusi was no exception. The town and its views were so exceptional that he had little interest in its famed Etruscan remains.

Nothing, I suppose, can well be more venerable than Chiusi, and as for the beautiful view you see thence, men must have loved it for some thousands of years. To the right rises Monte Cetona, like a vast pyramid shining in the sun, while to the left Citta del Pieve hides among the woods of its dear hills. Between, the valley opens north and south, the wide and fruitful valley of the Chiana, through a sweet and quiet world of villages and homesteads and sweetly breaking hills. How softly the evening falls there, and how wonderful is the light over hill and valley and mountain! It is easy to tell one is here on the verge of Umbria; one has but to go down into the valley, and in something less than a hundred yards one finds oneself in that mysterious country, “dim with valleys,” which Perugino, the landscape painter, has shown us in all his pictures well. Chiusi is, and has always been, the Mecca of the archaeologist, yet I am sure he never found anything there so lovely, half so consoling as that view over the valley and the light on the fair hills. And whatever Chiusi may be or may come to be for the world, a vast Etruscan necropolis or a huge factory town and railway terminus… for me she will ever remain what she was to me in those two brief days in which I sat like a lord in the Leone d’Oro, and, like my fathers before me, washed my goat’s cheese down with Montepulciano and smoked sigari on the doorstep as I watched the evening procession of the maidens and the beautiful ladies, who there, as in every other Italian town and village, take their constitutional after the work of the day. Chiusi is merely the best and loveliest of places in Tuscany because you may look from it as from a window on Umbria. It is a place from which you may overlook grey olives and green vineyards and golden corn, and beyond a fairy lake, and beyond the hills and then the mountains. I could watch just that for ever. I did my best. They came to me and spoke of Etruscan tombs, they told me of an Etruscan Museum….

 But what have I to do with the Etruscans or the Etruscans with me? My world, the world I love, lies before my eyes. May I not look at it and enjoy it a little before it is taken away from me, or spoiled for ever by some fool who wants to make money and benefit his country, as they say, by making it miserable and wretched? (273)…

 

As you wander through the place, quiet enough at any time of year, through the great empty piazza at the top of the town from red brick Church of S. Francesco, it is less of Chiusi than of the beautiful world in which she stands, scarcely more than an ancient graveyard, that you think. History here is but a tale that is told….Beside that marvellous and eternal beauty no trumpery tale of a dead civilization, of which we know nothing and can know nothing, is worth consideration for a moment. For here are the sun and the wind and the soft sky: let us lift up our hearts and rejoice in them, for too soon we also shall be of as little account as the Etruscans. (278)

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.  

Radicofani

                                      

 

Edward Hutton's tour of southern Tuscany eventually took him to Radicofani, the hilltop stronghold of Ghino di Tacco, the thirteenth century bandit made famous by Dante and Boccaccio. Hutton tells Ghino's story but also finds much to value in this tiny town with the spectacular view.

Today Radicofani is a little naked village straggling round the jagged hill under the fortress, with three churches, a fine clock-tower, many old houses, and a beautiful palace, evidently the Palazzo del Governo, now a prison, covered with coats of arms; while without the gates are a Capuchin convent, a pretty place enough, among trees too, now secularized... 

Of the three churches within the walls,… S. Pietro has a wealth of beautiful things, the work of the Robbias, whom, as I suppose, the Sforza of Santa Fiora brought here… But then, since all the guide-books have ignored Radicofani, as they have ignored Mont’ Amiata, one expects to find nothing there, whereas both Radicofani and Santa Fiora are as rich in della Robbia ware as any city in Tuscany, save Florence…. (255)

The great thing to be had at Radicofani is the view—such a view as I think you may find nowhere else in all Tuscany, so wide it is, so majestic, and so beautiful. Let us remind ourselves of it. Across the deep and bitter ravine to the west rises Mont’ Amiata, an incredibly great and lovely thing, with Abbadia S. Salvatore just visible on the verge of the woods. To the north lies the Senese with its shining cities, with Siena itself visible at evening on the skirts of the farthest hills. To the east lies the splendid range of Cetona, with its tiny scattered villages and lofty, sweeping outline, shutting out Umbria and her hills. And to the south? To the south lies the whole breadth of the Patrimony.* No one who has once looked southward from Radicofani is ever likely to forget what he has seen. It is one of the great vistas of the world. It almost gives you Rome. Evening is the hour when that world stretched for your joy at your feet is the most lovely, and strangely enough most visible, for in the heat of the day a veil of mist hides it from the boldest eyes. But at night, when far and far away across the Umbrian hills, like a horn of pallid gold, like a silver sickle for some precious harvest, the moon hangs over the world, then little by little in her light that world at your feet becomes visible, at first never so faintly, as though still hidden in some impalpable but lovely veil…. Far away Lago di Bolsena shines like a jewel, Monte Cimino rises like a ghost beside Monte Venere, eternally separated the one from the other by the faint line of hills like a bow, against which Montefiascone rises  like a lovely thought in the unbreakable silence, the papal city of Viterbo lies like a white rose. And last of all in the farthest distance Monte Soracte, the lovely mountain, guards the desert of the Campagna and the immortal thing which it has brought forth—the City of Rome. (265-6)

 

 

* The Patrimony refers to the Papal States, that huge chunk of central Italy governed by the Pope for over 1000 years until it was forcibly taken over by the Italian government in the nineteenth century unification movement.

Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.  

Montalcino and S. Antimo

 

Edward Hutton loved everything about Montalcino but above all, he praised the inn of the Lily (Il Giglio). He did not mention that Montalcino is the home of Brunello, one of the world's great wines. On leaving he made sure to visit the nearby twelfth century Abbey of S. Antimo, a site that my wife and I agree should not be missed. 

There is much talk in every guidebook, from Herr Baedeker through Murray to Joanne, of hotels—first-class, second-class, and tolerable, as they say in their curt, unexpansive way; but what does the ordinary traveller always on the look-out for the disgusting luxury of the “Ritz” or the “Carlton “ or the “Waldorf Astoria” understand I should like to know, of inns? Pure nothing…. Such places have nothing to say to travellers. Let us thank God for it. The inns I know in half a hundred places in Italy… are human places, where you will find friends, a soft bed, well-cooked food, a good wine, and a welcome. These places should be treasured in the memory and not too easily or widely published abroad; for an inn may be spoiled by its guests. Nevertheless, for once, out of pure charity and love of my fellow-men, I will praise the inn of the Lily… at Montalcino. I will say that it is the best I know, that I have been happy there, and that there I lived like a king. At night I slept soft and clean, I ate well punctually at the hours I had appointed, I was welcomed and I made friends, and from there I issued forth to see the magnificent town of Montalcino, tomb of the Sienese Republic; thither again I returned when I would, glad at heart, as to my own home. …

How can I praise you as I ought, O inn of the Lily, or wish you well enough? May you prosper always but not too much, may you ever be full of the world about you, may you gather in many strangers but not too many, and may S. Cristofano see to it that all these things come true for you. …

 

Seeing, then, that all these things are as they are, it is no wonder that one finds Montalcino delightful. And, indeed, who could find it anything else? It clings to the great hills high up like the nest of an eagle; it is set above the woods, across the olive gardens it looks to the desert, over the vineyards it looks to the hills…. (246)

 

The road which leaves the city thus by the hills will bring you in some eight miles to the forgotten abbey of S. Antimo.

 

The Abbey of S. Antimo was in the Middle Age one of the greater Benedictine monasteries in Italy, and indeed it was the most formidable ecclesiastical feud in Tuscany… Moreover, it was, and still is even in its ruin, one of the best examples in Italy of Romanesque architecture, or rather of that kind of Romanesque peculiar to the eleventh century…. We may note that one of the most notable features of this new style was the substitution of the vaulted stone roofs for the older wooden ones; now though this was of slow growth, beginning with the covering of the aisles when the nave was still roofed with wood, it became at last universal, though the mixed style was long used in Italy even in the twelfth century, when it seems the Abbey of S. Antimo was built.

 

As we see it today even, the Church of S. Antimo seems to us perhaps the most beautiful interior in Tuscany, though the cathedrals of Pisa and Lucca are maybe more firmly established in our hearts. But in any case it is so fine that it is worth any trouble to see, and since it lies within an easy drive  of Montalcino and on the direct road to the railway it should on no account be missed. (250-251)

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