Camerino and Matelica

 This post is longer than usual because it offers Hutton's contrasting view of two towns: lofty Camerino, a shell despite its spectacular views, and lowly Matelica which still retained its soul.   

Camerino

But Camerino is worth all the labours it costs to reach her. Of all the March cities she is the most characteristic, with the most to offer us, at any rate in the way of natural beauty. For even in a country which can boast of such a place as Fermo or Macerata she is easily queen—a noble, dark, medieval city set on the top of a mighty hill nearly two thousand feet over the sea, commanding a view of unsurpassed splendor and beauty, towering over her world. (244) …

No one who has ever looked out from the road beyond Porta Giulia at evening will ever forget what he has seen. It is as though all those dreams of landscape, which were all that Perugino really cared about, had suddenly been translated into a reality more beautiful and more wonderful than anything of which he had been able to conceive… (245)

Wandering about Camerino recalling these things to mind, one is touched by the melancholy of the city from which everything except the beauty of the world in which it stands seems to have fallen away. How empty are all these churches of which there are so many; all the pictures have gone, and the fragments only remain and these not in places for which they were painted, but gathered into another empty and desecrated church, now a museum…. (250)

The curious poverty of Camerino, that noble city, in works of art, cannot but strike every traveler; happily, not far away at the foot of that prodigious hill upon which Camerino stands, there is a little city in the valley of the Esina which is as rich in paintings as Camerino is poor; its name is Matelica…. (254)

I came as a stranger into Matelica, I took lunch at the inn, the Aquila d’Oro, a not very brilliant hostelry, and after lunch, in the very hour of the siesta, I demanded of all and sundry the way to the Museo expecting to see everything there was to see in an hour or two. The Museo was closed and I was directed by the barber, who had courteously accompanied me, to apply to Father Bigiaretti, the director. I did as I was bid. I found Father Bigiaretti, like any other decent and sane person at that hour of a summer day, taking his siesta. But do you think he sent me away? Not at all. Cheerfully and without complaint he brought his siesta to an end and issued out of his cool house into the appalling heat because a stranger wanted to see his beautiful city. Without a thought he devoted the whole of his leisure to showing me not only the Museo, but everything he thought I would care for in Matelica, and this not for the sake of my book, of which he was quite unaware, but because I was a stranger. (255)

Matelica Piazza

And now as to Matelica. I have said that no one who travels through the Marches should miss it… It is a little gay town, as gay as Camerino is melancholy, set about a fine open Piazza, where is a double loggia, a fountain of 1590, the great palazzo del Municipio and the church of S. Soffragio. This charming Piazza is the centre of Matelica; all of the churches, which are the great feature of Matelica, are to be sought from it, the Museo and the Duomo being but a few steps away. …. (256)

The soul of a city, the genius loci, least of all of such a quiet and retiring place as Matelica, cannot be taken by surprise… how often it escapes the assiduous and him who possesses no patience, but would see all in a moment, and pry into secrets that belong to the ages… His mind is a whirlwind and he has lost the command of his own heart. What are the flowers by the wayside to him, and what are the works of Lorenzo da Sanseverino, Crivelli, Palmezzano and the rest of the pictures which hide shyly in these little churches, but flowers? Just because these beautiful things have not been collected into a museum for those who come by railway, they are living still by their wayside, filling the little churches  with their beauty and their pageants, shining in the love of the lowly and the meek, who kneel shyly and silently before them, offering up their petitions and watching with a new wonder every morning the priest make Christ out of bread and wine—things they know, of which we are ignorant, things they find precious, for they are poor, and more precious still because they are the instruments of a Sacrament and a Sacrifice which has given a new meaning to life, which has involved even the hills in its mystery and lifted up forever the souls of men... let us tread softly by these peasants as they kneel with free hearts and bowed heads before Him who has made all that was so worthless most precious, in Whose honour and for Whose glory every picture in Matelica was painted…

Here, in Matelica, how the children linger in the churches, so that, though they be but peasants, they are acquainted with all that the highest culture can give as a reward alter long years—sweetness and light; so that from their earliest years they are used to the ways of a great court, the greatest court in the world, the sanctuary of the King of kings, with its beautiful ceremonies, precious robes and elaborate ritual. ... But because of this, which even in the humblest village, and assuredly in Matelica, the smallest and the poorest children may follow and love, there is about them a graciousness which one misses altogether in the north, that four hundred years ago was ours also, and is visible, for instance, in every gesture of Chaucer’s pilgrims, but that we have missed and shall perhaps never have again. (260-262)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.