Certaldo and Boccaccio

  Edward Hutton's chapter on Certaldo is mainly taken up with an extended account of the life of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Certaldo's most famous resident. In 1909, a year before he published Siena and Southern Tuscany, Hutton had written a biography of Boccaccio, a writer famous for his own life as well as for his Decameron, a collection of stories told by men and women trying to escape the ravages of the plague.

 

Long before you come to Certaldo on its great hill over the narrowing valley of the Elsa, which in fact it holds and closes, the Castello shines before you, still very far off, a rugged cluster of houses and towers against the sky. When at last you find yourself on that great and beautiful road beside the river, at the foot of the beautiful hill, it is to discover a town very like Castel-Fiorentino in this at least, that the Castello, the walled and ancient town, is on the hill and the modern borgo in the plain. But as you soon realise, Certaldo is more splendid, more rugged, and more ancient than her sister, though, as you see her from the north, you have the worst view of her, her true splendor looking southward. 

 

Most of us who in the modern hurry stay here, perhaps for a few hours on our way to Siena or to Florence, come not for any ancient loveliness she may have kept for us, but for Boccaccio’s sake, for he died here in the ancient house of his family still to be seen in the Castello….

 

 

That great and heroic man who has entranced the whole world with his stories, who gave Homer back to us, and was the first defender of Dante Alighieri, the devoted friend of Petrarch, the lover of Fiammetta; who remained poor his whole life long for the sake of learning, and who indeed is the most human and the most modest and heroic spirit of the earliest Renaissance…. (13-14)

 

In his fiftieth year he began to regret the irresponsibility of his past life. On the threshold of old age, poor and alone, he thought to love God with the same enthusiasm with which he had loved woman. He was not capable of it; his whole life rose up to deny him that impassioned consolation….

 

Boccaccio’s days of creation were, however, over. He retired to Certaldo to the house of his ancestors, and there read without ceasing the works of antiquity, annotating as he read…

 

In addition to all his other reading Boccaccio had never ceased to study the “Divine Comedy,” nor did he till his death… *

 

In 1373 he was called from his retirement in Certaldo to lecture publicly on the “Divine Comedy” in Florence. He began to read on 23 October, 1373, in the church of S. Stefano alla Badia, and continued on each succeeding day that was not a festival. He had got so far as the sixtieth lezione, when he was taken ill and had to cease. This was no sudden disease; he had never really recovered from his “conversion.” Really ill, he retired to Certaldo, where, utterly miserable and suffering from his disease, but more from the ignorance of doctors, he groped about far from Petrarch, looking for more certainty. He had thought he might find it in the monastic life, and it was in a solitude almost as profound that he came to die at last on this hill in Val d’Elsa in the house of his ancestors—a magician, as was said, like Virgil or Ovid to the folk of Naples and Sulmona, knowing all the secrets of nature. He must often have passed slowly, because of failing health, up and down the picturesque streets of the old town, which holds as many sudden peeps as Assisi; and at sunset, perhaps he lingered by the gates as we do, for they are wonderfully placed for beauty. From his room he looked over a world as fair as any in Tuscany—a land of hills about a quiet valley where the olives are tossed to silver in the wind and the grapes are kissed by the sun into gold and purple, where the corn whispers between the vines; till for him, too, at last the grasshopper became a burden.

 

There, on 21 December, 1375, he died, and was buried, as he had desired above the quiet waters of the Elsa which puts all to sleep. In passing through the old streets of Certaldo to-day, it is part of our heritage to remember him. (24-25).

###

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

*Note: Click on this link to watch a seven minute video of Roberto Benigni, Italy's most famous modern comedian, reading the first canto of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Tuscany: Castel Fiorentino

 Edward Hutton devoted at least two books to Tuscany. We will deal with Florence and Northern Tuscany in a future series but today we turn to Siena and Southern Tuscany, published in 1910. He began his tour at Castel-Fiorentino.

 

Happy Castel-Fiorentino! She was able and content to till her fields always as she does today, to tend her vineyards, to sow the corn under the olives, and to gather it in with songs, while the armies of Germany, the companies of adventure, the gay chivalry of France thundered by to destruction. Is not her story, which will never be told, one of those which should console us most in a world so busy about resounding trifles? She has no history; but in her untold story the romance of Europe lies hid—the story of men like ourselves going up and down day by day about their business, laboring in the fields in a hard partnership with Nature, chafering in the market-place, rising at dawn, resting at midday, singing at evening, loving a little and weeping much—if we could but read it!

 

But if Castel-Fiorentino is without a history, if she never produced a great man or a great artist, she is by no means devoid of the consolation of beauty. She herself is as charming and picturesque as can be; her churches are spacious and full of light, and there, too, you may find many a picture of a rare and exquisite country grace that only her lovers have discovered. 

 

Among those churches was the Convent of S. Chiara.

 

To-day, however, the convent is in the occupation of the Osservanti. It was one of them— “a friar of orders grey,” who seemed, indeed, to have stepped out of the song, so jovial and fat was he—who, in answer to my call, came out of his siesta to show me the church. The church is delightful, filled with a country peace and scattered with sun and shade. Over an altar on the left I found one of those things I love best—a splendid Giotto-esque Crucifix into which the love and faith of the thirteenth century seem immediately to have passed….

 

The quiet beauty of the church, the eager chatter of Fra Lorenzo, caused me to linger here, and that was my good fortune. For just as I was about to leave, as I said farewell to Fra Lorenzo at the church door, a woman came towards us, and greeting the friar, at once knelt down on the threshold, just under the lintel of the door, and prepared herself to be churched. With her came two ragged urchins and a little black dog. In the great shady nave the children played with the dog, quite at home in the house of their Father, while Fra Lorenzo, excusing himself, went into the sacristy and brought forth a great taper, which he placed in the good woman’s hand, and a large book, all in Latin, out of which he proceeded to read some prayers. I cannot tell you what a charming and old world picture this made, recalling happier days. The children in the shadow playing with the little black dog; the good woman who had just brought forth a child kneeling in the sunshine holding her taper carefully, on the threshold of the church; Fra Lorenzo in his surplice, unctuous and sleek, reciting the Office—it was as though by some good fortune certain centuries had never happened and we were back in those scarcely remembered days when everything could be accounted for, when there was still a unity in Europe, and we accepted the love of God and the offices of the Church as matters of course. Only I seemed to be out of the picture. And so quietly I slipped away without so much as “thank you” to Fra Lorenzo, to whom I owed this consoling glimpse of life in Tuscany.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. Pp. 4-8. 

Rome: The Campagna

Edward Hutton ended his book on Rome with a chapter on the Campagna, the desolate countryside outside the hills of Rome. Here is his paean to the Campagna. I suspect that he would be shocked today by the belt-ways and urban sprawl that have overtaken what he called "the soul of Rome." I add some images from nineteenth century painters who saw the Campagna as Hutton saw it.

George Inness: View of the Campagna

Rome possesses nothing half so lovely, half so precious, half so venerable, as the Campagna, in which she lies like a ship in the midst of the sea, now just visible over the billows, now lost altogether in that vast solitude of which, for the most part, she is oblivious. My happiest hours during all my sojourn in Rome have been spent in the Campagna, at all hours of the day, at every season of the year.

 

The immense and universal thing which lies unregarded at the gates of the Eternal City is the one Roman thing that I have been able to love absolutely without reserve or any after thought. I loved it at first sight, and to leave it still brings tears to my eyes. And yet, I have felt no intimacy with it, as I have with the Umbrian valleys, and the moorlands, the hills and the sea of the west Country whence I am sprung. It is too vast and too silent for intimacy but it has my fear and love as God has them, because it is greater than I, and in some sort has produced me. It has, too, the indefinite beauty of all supernatural things. One may find there always all that is in one’s heart, and each will find what he brings and the reward of which he is worthy. It is too beautiful to praise and too mysterious, too holy, to explain or to describe…. For, as the sea is the secret of England, so the Campagna is the secret of Rome; it haunts the City, and the majesty and largeness of its silence are the springs of its immortality. Nor may you long escape it, for all the great ways lead to it at last, and it surges against every gate….

 

Corot: View of the Campagna

From wherever you first see it, it calls you instantly in its solemn immensity, its vast indwelling strength, its ruined splendor, across which the broken arches of the aqueducts stagger still, and the vague white roads, lined with empty and rifled tombs, wander aimlessly, losing themselves in the silence and vastness that only the mountains may contain. And it is the mountains which hem in the Campagna, the most beautiful mountains in the world.

 

Wherever you may go in Rome, after that first revelation, whatever you may see, before whatever shrines you may kneel, it is the Campagna which is in your heart, for you have discovered Rome, the soul of Rome…. 

 

It is this one comes to realise at last, as day after day, week after week, one passes along that ancient Appian Way, between the crumbling tombs. Here and there we may find them still, the likeness of our brother carved in relief, some thought of his about it all, a few Latin words, part of an inscription, half hidden with the grass and the flowers. And as night overtakes one on that marvelous road, when the splendor of sunset is faded, and the stars one by one have scattered the heavens with hope, our thoughts turn almost in self defence, in that solemn loneliness, from death to resurrection. In the immense silence that nothing may break our imagination sinks beneath the lonely majesty of that desert, littered with the monsters of old forgotten religions, full of the dead things of Paganism and Christianity, the bones of Saints, the mighty trunks of forgotten gods.

 

What more is there to come out of that vast grave, that marvelous solitude?

 

###

Rome: Villa Borghese

Edward Hutton's discussion of the Roman villas and their gardens included a tour of the Borghese Gallery and its wonderful art collection, the highlight of which was Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.***

But if the palaces are, in spite of their size and splendor, a little dull, a little lacking in interest and beauty, so that nowhere in Rome may we find one that moves us as the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena does, or as many of these wonderful buildings on the Grand Canal in Venice contrive to do, it is quite otherwise with the Villas. Rome is unique among the cities of the world in possessing them, and they are unique in their loveliness and charm. They have nothing in common with anything in England, but one might feel something of their charm if Hampton Court Palace with its gardens were suddenly to be found in the midst of London…. 

The Roman villa garden…has an air of the eighteenth century; it is full of silence. The cypresses are set thickly in a half-circle about a statue, or in long alley-ways that lead to a fountain; vista passes into vista, till you are led to lose yourself in the twilight of the bosco, in the midst of which you find yourself suddenly at the foot of a magical staircase of stone, wide and spacious and beautiful, and passing up it, you come at last to a little summer-house of marble, just above the tree-tops, and there, far below you, is Rome…. 

But of all these villas with their marvelous gardens which were once the glory of Rome, but few remain. Of these which are still left to us, perhaps the best known are the Villa Pamphili, the Villa Medici, and the Villa Borghese. The first is of an incomparable loveliness, the second of an incomparable mystery, the third is less rare, and of late has become one of the playgrounds of Rome, larger, and more spaciously beautiful but less fashionable than the Pincio. But in truth the Villa Borghese, with its gardens and park, is still one of the most enchanting things in the City… and then it adds to its other delights a treasure of art, a collection of pictures that is the finest in the City after that of the Vatican….

But the real glory of the gallery consists not only, or even chiefly, in the work of Raphael, but in three works by the greatest master of that or any other period, Titian, who is represented by three pictures, the first belonging to his youth, the others to his old age.

The Sacred and Profane Love, painted about 1512 for Niccolo Aurelio, Grand Chancellor of Venice, is the highest achievement of Titian’s art at the end of its Giorgionesque period…. In fact, the name it now bears, which has so puzzled the world, does not occur till the end of the eighteenth century, when it seems to have been given it by the Germans. For us, at least, it can have no authority, the subject of the picture being merely a moment of beauty, --a moment gone, but for Titian’s genius, while we try to apprehend it, in the golden summer heat, under the trees by a fountain of water….

But, after all, what we have come here to see is the Sacred and Profane Love, by Titian, and that will lead us, not from picture to picture in a sudden enthusiasm for painting, but most certainly back again into the gardens, where the world is so sleepily golden in the heat, and the shade so cool and grateful. There we shall linger till, from the far-away city, the Ave Mary rings from all the cupolas, and we must return down the long alleys in the softly fading light, stealing softly, half-reluctantly, out of the world of dreams back into the streets and the ways of man. 

###

*** Note: Hutton rejected the accepted title of Titian's painting and saw the subject as "merely a moment of beauty." Almost a hundred years later, I stood in front of the famous painting and had an intuition that the two women were actually Mary Magdalen before and after her conversion. Research confirmed this intuition and my interpretation can be found at academia.edu.



Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922. Pp. 327-335.