Cities of Lombardy

 Edward Hutton's book on Lombardy, published in 1912, was the first of his Italian guides that I ever read. My Aunt Nan gave it to me on the death of her husband, Joseph Foppiani, over 30 years ago. His mother must have given it to him when he was young with this inscription, "Joseph, know thy country." Hutton began his tour with a discussion of the early history of Cisalpine Gaul, the name of the region during Roman times.

 

When I think of Lombardy, there comes back into my mind a country wide and gracious, watered by many a great river, and lying, a little vaguely, between always far-away mountains, a world that is all a garden, where one passes between fair hedgerows, from orchard to orchard, among the vines, where the fields are green with promise or shining with harvest, and there are meadows on the lower slopes of the mountains. And the whole of this wide garden seems to me, as is no other country in the world, to be subject to the sun, the stars and the great and beautiful clouds of an infinite sky; every landscape is filled with them, and beneath them the cities seem but small things, not cities truly, but rather sanctuaries, hidden in that garden for our delight, reverence and meditation, at the end of the endless ways, where only the restless poplars tell the ceaseless hours.

 

It is my purpose in this book to consider the nature and the history of this country, to recapture and to express as well as I may my delight in it, so that something of its beauty and its genius may perhaps disengage itself from my pages, and the reader feel what I have felt about it though he never stir ten miles from his own home. … (1)

 

The Pax Romana: it is the work of the Empire; a thing in our Europe hard to conceive of, but proper to Christendom, and perhaps if we could but see it to-day only awaiting our recognition. 

 

Those first four centuries of our era in which Christendom was founded  and Europe appeared, not as we know it to-day as a mosaic of hostile nationalities, but as one perfect whole, have never been rightly understood; they still lack an historian, and the splendour of their achievement, their magnitude and importance are wholly misconceived or ignored. In our modern self-conceit we are ignorant both of what they were  in themselves and of what we owe to them; and largely through the collapse of Europe in the sixteenth century and its appalling results both in thought and in politics we are led, too often by the wilful lying of our historians, to regard them rather as the prelude to the decline and fall of the Empire than as the great and indestructible foundation of all that is worth having in the world.

 

For rightly understood, these first four centuries gave us not only our culture, our constitutions,  our civilization, and our Faith, but ensured  them to us that they should always endure. They established for ever the great  lines upon which our art was to develop, to change, and yet not to suffer annihilation or barrenness. They established the supremacy of the idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, defeat, nor decay. They, and they alone, established us in the secure possession of our own souls, so that we alone in the world develop from within to change but never to die and to be--yes alone in the world—Christians. 

 

And if the whole empire then took on a final and heroic form in those years of the Empire and the peace, Cisalpine Gaul more than any other province then came to fruition….and if we turn to the province itself, there is scarcely a town in that wide plain that did not expand and increase in a fashion almost miraculous during that period. It was then the rivers were embanked, the canals and our communications established for ever. There is no industry that did not grow incredibly in strength, there is not a class that did not increase in well-being beyond our dreams of progress.  There is scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives and in our politics  that was not then created that it might endure. It was then that our religion, the soul of Europe, was born, and little absorbed us so that it became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which, rightly understood is Europe. Our ideas of justice, our ideas of law, our conception of human dignity and the structure of our society were then conceived and with such force that while we endure they can never die. (17-19)

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912.  

 

 

 

 

Over the Garfagnana

Edward Hutton ended "Florence and Northern Tuscany" with an account of his walk out of Tuscany through the mountains of the Garfagnana. As he took his leave of Italy, he encountered not only the mountains but an exceptional "old-fashioned" inn-keeper.

 

It is into this country of happiness you come, a happiness so vaguely musical, when, leaving Lucca in the summer heat, you climb into the Garfagnana. For to your right Bagni di Lucca lies under Barga, with its church and great pulpit; and indeed, the first town you enter is Borgo a Mazzano by Sorchio; then, following still the river, you come to Gallicano, and then by a short steep road to Castelnuovo di Garfagnana at the foot of the great pass. The mountains have clustered round you, bare and threatening, and though you be still in the woods it is their tragic nudity you see all day long, full of the disastrous gestures of death, that can never change or be modified or recalled. It is under these lonely and desolate peaks that the road winds to Piazza al Serchio. …

It is very early in the morning maybe, as you climb out of this shadow and receive suddenly the kiss of the morning sun over a shoulder of the great mountains, a kiss like the kiss of the beloved. From the village of Piazza al Serchio, where the inn is rough, truly but pulito, it is a climb of some six chilometri into the pass, where you leave the river, then the road, always winding about the hills, runs level for four miles, and then drops for five miles into Fivizzano. All the way the mountains stand over you frightenly motionless and threatening, till the woods of Fivizzano, that magical town, hide you in their shadow, and evening comes as you climb the last hill that ends in the Piazza before the door of the inn.

Here are hospitality, kindness, and a welcome; you will get a great room for your rest, and the salone of the palace, for palace it is, for your sojourn, and an old-fashioned host whose pleasure is your comfort, who is, as it were, a daily miracle.  He it will be who will make your bed in the chamber where Grand Duke Leopold slept, he will wait upon you at dinner as though you were the Duke’s Grace  himself,  and if your sojourn be long, he will make you happy, and if your stay be short, you will go with regret. For his pride is your delight, and he, unlike too many famous Tuscans, has not forgotten the past…. There all day long in the pleasant heat the fountain of Cosimo III plays in the Piazza outside your window, cooling your room with its song.  And, indeed, in all Tuscany it would be hard to find a place more delightful or more lovely in which to spend the long summer that is so loath to go here in the south. Too soon, too soon the road called me from those meadows and shadowy ways, the never-ending whisper of the woods, the sound of streams, the song of the mountain shepherd girls, the quiet ways of the hills.

It was an hour after sunrise when I set out for Fordinovo on the Malaspina, for Sarzana, for Spezia, for England…. Thence by a way steep and dangerous I came into the valley of Bardine, only to mount again into Tendola and at last to Foce Cucco, where on all sides the valleys filled with woods fell away from me, and suddenly at a turning of the way, I spied out Fordinovo, lordly still on its bastion of rock, guarding Val di Magna, looking towards Luna and the sea….

It was thence for the first time for many months I looked on a land that was not Tuscany. Already autumn was come in that high place; a flutter of leaves and the wind of the mountains made a sad music round about the old walls… And then, as I sat there above the woods towards evening, from some bird passing overhead there fell a tiny feather, whiter than snow, that came straight into my hand. Was it a bird, or my angel, whose beautiful, anxious wings trembled lest I should fall in a land less simple than this? 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 426-428. 

Lucca

 Edward Hutton stopped at Lucca before taking leave of Tuscany. He particularly liked the Duomo and its sculptures.

 

But to-day Lucca is like a shadowy pool hidden behind the Pisan hills, like a forgotten oasis in the great plain at the foot of the mountains, a pallid autumn rose, smiling subtly among the gardens that girdle her round about with a sad garland of green, a cincture of silver, a tossing sea of olives. However you come to her, you must pass through those delicate ways, where always the olives whisper together, and their million leaves, that do not mark the seasons, flutter one by one to the ground; where the cicale die in the midst of their song, and the flowers of Tuscany scatter the shade with the colours of their beauty. In the midst of this half-real world, so languidly joyful, in which the sky counts for so much, it is always with surprise that you come upon the tremendous perfect walls of this city—walls planted all around with plane-trees, so that Lucca herself is hidden by her crown—a crown that changes at the year changes, mourning all the winter long, but in spring is set with living emeralds, a thousand and a thousand points of green fire that burst into summer’s own coronet of flame-like leaves, that fades at last into the dead and sumptuous gold of autumn. …

All that is best in Lucca, all that is sweetest and most naïve, may be found in the beautiful Duomo, which Pope Alexander II consecrated in 1070,--Pope Alexander II, who had once been bishop of Lucca….

It is, however, the façade that takes you at once by its ancient smiling aspect, the three great unequal arches, over which, in three tiers, various with beautiful columns, rise the open galleries we have so loved at Pisa.  Built, as it is said, in 1204 by Guidetto, much work remains in that beautiful frontispiece to one of the most beautiful churches in Italy…

The most beautiful and the most wonderful treasure that the church holds, that Lucca itself can boast of, is the great tomb in the north transept, carved to hold forever the beautiful Ilaria del Caretto, the wife of Paulo Guinigi,  whose tower still blossoms in the spring, since she has sat there. It is the everlasting work of Jacopo della Quercia, the Sienese. On her bed of marble the young Ilaria lies, like a lily fallen on a rock of marble, and in her face is the sweet gravity of all the springs that have gone by, and in her hand the melody of all the songs that have been sung; her mouth seems about to speak some lovely affirmation, and her body is a tower of ivory. Can you wonder that the sun lingers here softly, softly, as it steps westward, so that night creeps over her, kissing her from head to foot slowly like a lover? …

Hutton went on to discuss another sculptor, Matteo Civitali,  whose work could be found not only in the Duomo but throughout Lucca.

Matteo Civitali, the one artist of importance that Lucca produced, was born in 1435. He remains really the one artist, out of the territory of Florence, who has worked in the manner of the fifteenth-century sculptors of that city. His work is everywhere in Lucca,--here in the Duomo, in S. Romano. In S. Michele, in S. Frediano, and in the Museo in Palazzo Manzi. Certainly without the strength, the constructive ability that sustains even the most delicate work of the Florentines, he has yet a certain flower-like beauty, a beauty that seems ever about to pass away, to share its life with the sunlight that ebbs so swiftly out of the great churches where it is; and concerned as it is for the most part with the tomb, to rob death itself of a sort of immortality, to suggest in some faint and subtle way that death itself will pass away and be lost, as the sun is lost at evening in the strength of the sea.*

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*Note. A friend from the UK pointed out that Hutton had overlooked Lucca's most singular possession, the Volto Santo, perhaps the oldest wooden crucifix. However, it was my oversight. Not only did Hutton discuss the famous object, he also provided the whole legend.

Matteo Civitali: It was he who built the marble parapet, all of red and white, round the choir, the pulpit, and the Tempietto in the nave, gilded and covered with ornaments to hold the Volto Santo, setting there the beautiful statue of St. Sebastian, which we look at to-day with joy while we turn away from that strange and marvellous shrine of the holy face of Jesus which we no longer care to see. Yet one might think that crucifix strange  and curious for a pilgrimage, beautiful, too, as it is, with the lost beauty of an art as subtle and lovely as the work of the Japanese. (416)

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 413-418.