Urbino

 Urbino was the last stop on Edward Hutton's tour of Romagna and the Marches. It was not the most beautiful city he had seen but it had a fabled past.

Of Urbino, who can speak as he should or conjure up in words, for the pleasure of him who has not seen it, that dark and gaunt city crouched upon its double hill, never venturing to tower up into the sky, but stooping there gazing over the tangled valleys to S. Marino, to S. Leo, to Pesaro, to the great peaks of the Apennines and to the sea? Bleak and rain-sodden, battered by the wind, burnt by the sun, Urbino seems the last place in Italy to have nourished a court renowned for its grace and courtesy. … 

For, astonishing though it may seem, civilization, the ritual of life—life itself being, as some of those great candid minds of the Renaissance were not slow to observe, a kind of religious service-- was very punctually and strictly observed at Urbino in the sixteenth century.  Here on the hills, in this rain-swept, sun-baked place, the Renaissance in all its liberty, beauty and splendor, was played out in its curious medley of contrasts, almost like a play. The most learned and refined of all the courts of Italy, the court of Urbino gathered to itself all the wit and genius of this imperishable Latin people, filled itself with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen of Italy, while its Duke and Duchess lived a life that reads almost like a fairy tale, till Cesare Borgia blasted the place like a lightning flash and nothing was ever really quite the same again…. (276-7)

The Duke and Duchess named by Hutton are Federigo da Montefeltro (1422-1482) and his wife, Battista Sforza both pictured in this famous painting by Piero della Francesca that now hangs in the Uffizi. Federigo was succeeded by his son, Guidobaldo (1472-1508) who though driven out by Cesare Borgia returned to continue the courtly tradition. * (See Note)

Suddenly, almost as suddenly as Cesare Borgia had leapt upon Urbino, Alexander VI died. In a moment Cesare’s magical empire departed from him, and he himself was a fugitive. Guidobaldo returned to Urbino, and… passed the rest of his life among his treasures in the retirement of his court. It was then that the Golden Age began for Italy which in its expression and production has never since been equaled. Every sort of scholar came to Urbino; great poets, painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, doctors, priests, quacks of every kind, fools and nobles, dancing-masters and beautiful women, musicians and preachers flocked to the court of one of the most humane princes Italy had ever seen. It was then that Castiglione wrote his Cortegiano and his life of Guidobaldo; it was then that Santi entertained Piero della Francesca, that Melozzo da Forli came to court, and Luca Signorelli painted his work in San Spirito. … (284)

But who could hope to sum up the riches of this stormy, wind-battered, rain-sodden, sun-baked acropolis? This, at least, should not be forgotten. I mean the church of S. Bernardino. This is a little convent of the Zoccolanti which stands at the end of a dusty road on a hill-top opposite Urbino, from which there is a notable view of the city, but not of the palace. S. Bernardino stands under the cypress-ringed Campo Santo of the Urbanati. It has itself always been a graveyard, and here, in the little cruciform church under its blind, round lantern, a truly Bramantesque dream of a church all in rosy brick, the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo lie….

Church of San Bernardino**

It was there I took farewell of Urbino, before I set out down the long road for Pesaro, the railway, and home. All that way was pleasantly filled, as I came into the valleys, with great bullock wagons piled up with vast barrels or boxes with the family sitting on top, for it was the time of vintage. The happiness of all that!

At evening, my head full of songs, I came into Pesaro by the Rimini gate, thronged today with bullock-waggons loaded with grapes….and when a few days later I set out for home, it was in the new bubbling wine my health was pledged, and in the new pressed grapes I, too, drank to all my friends. (295)

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

*Note: When he was still young, Federigo, who was destined to attain to so much splendor, was sent as a kind of hostage to Venice. It was while in that city that he came under the influence of Vittorino de' Ramboldoni da Feltre, the learned professor of Mantua. This great man was a Greek scholar of no mean attainment, and his ideal of education soon took possession of the greatest princes in Italy. He taught Greek, Latin, Grammar, Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, music, and Dancing at the Casa Goija, the "House of Joy," where he had settled in 1425 at the invitation of Gianfrancesco II of Mantua.... such scholars as could not afford to pay him he taught for the "love of God." His pupils included the noblest names in Italy; all the children of the Gonzaga house were educated at Casa Goija, and no doubt met the Duke Federigo in the lecture rooms and the meadows. Later, Duke Federigo placed the great scholars portrait in his palace at Urbino with this inscription: "In honor of his saintly master Vittorino da Feltre, who by word and example instructed him in all human excellence, Federigo has set this here."

**Image courtesy of David Orme.

Cagli and the Furlo Pass

 

Toward the end of his tour of Romagna and the Marches Edward Hutton stopped in little Cagli where he saw something perhaps more beautiful than all the lovely landscapes and paintings he had seen on his journey. 

Now Cagli is the most delightful of all these little towns between Fabriano and Urbino, a shady, cool, quiet little place full of interesting buildings and beautiful pictures. ...

I shall not easily forget my arrival in Cagli. I had waited for the evening to set out on account of the heat, so that when I arrived at Cagli which is some distance from the station, it was quite dark. There was little or nothing near the house in the dark street where the posta put me down to indicate that here was an inn, and it was with some misgiving that I made my way up a dark staircase to the first floor. There, however, all my fears forsook me, for I was greeted by one of the most beautiful women it has ever been my good fortune to meet, and, what is rarer than physical beauty in Italy, she had one of the softest and most delicious voices I have ever heard anywhere. It was a great pleasure all the time I was in Cagli to be greeted every morning by this beautiful creature, and ‘twixt sleeping and waking, while the sun came in little daggers through the closed shutters, to hear her say “acqua, Signore.” I don’t think I had ever realized before what a language of liquid music Italian is, nor how true the old saying that “the devil tempted Eve in Italian.” This beautiful lady really managed the whole business of the inn, and with so glorious a dignity and so consummate a tact that even the Italian commercial travelers, about as horned a beast as flourished in the peninsula, forgot his vulgarity when she was by, mended his flamboyant manners, and tried to look like a man. Beauty herself never had a more wonderful power over the Beast; and indeed, the power of this young woman was an effect of sheer beauty in which, yes, even in hers, which was provocative enough, there was something of holiness…. (268-9)

After a pleasant stay, Hutton left Cagli and walked to Urbino, the last stop on his tour. He had to go through the spectacular Furlo Pass.

It was still very hot, and therefore, very early one summer morning when I set out from Cagli. Before me stretched the great white road, Via Flaminia, and above me presently rose the Furlo, its white brows just kissed by the sun in the dawn I could not see. It was not long before I was in the midst of a fantastic fairyland and of strange and horrid cliffs, threatening crags, changing lights, and tremendous gateways. I cannot hope to describe the enormous grandeur of those gates, eyries for eagles, as indeed they are. Presently I came to the remarkable tunnel or gallery which Rome hewed through the living rock to make a way for her armies, and which she knew as Petra Pertusa…. The work was achieved under Vespasian according to the inscription cut into the rock and was constructed in A.D. 75. …

Nothing in Italy is more amazing that this great Roman thing, which seems almost awful in its achievement, and curiously enough ends as suddenly and dramatically as it begins. One goes down towards Fossombrone through a smiling and delicious country of oak woods out of all that loneliness and silence, through which—yes, even through the impassable rock—Rome near two thousand years ago forged a way. (274-5)

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Image by David Orme

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

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.

Amandola

 

Edward Hutton's descriptions of Italian inns and the hospitality he found there are some of his most charming passages. As he noted, in Italy it would be wrong to judge by appearances, even in the most humble town or inn.

It was already night when, after a brief halt at Comunaza , a wretched but beautifully situated village of the lower hills, the dilegenza came up to the gate of Amandola and stopped in a bleak Piazza at the foot of the little hill town, of which I could discern nothing but a gaunt and shadowy tower. There was no sign of an inn, but presently I was led by the hand over the cobbles, for it was very dark, to a little door that opened on a vast kitchen reeking with a most savoury smell of cooking. The place was full of light and warmth, and crowded with all kinds of people, peasants and a priest or two, but especially I noticed an amazingly ugly old woman, who presently came up to me and demanded my business. Then when she knew I desired a bed she took me by the hand and led me up a foul and broken stairway to the first floor of her home, where, to my astonishment, I saw that all was fair and clean, as was the room and bed she offered me. And here let me say at once that my days in Amandola were all days of delight and happiness. It is never well in Italy to judge by appearances, and in Amandola, as I soon found, least of all. Nowhere have I received greater kindness; nowhere have I found so nice a courtesy. Nothing I required was denied me; everything was done for my comfort and pleasure. I slept soft and I lived well, I found the best company in the world, among the shepherds and peasants and priests of the mountains. They brought me fruit out of their little store, the children danced and sang songs for me, the shepherds blew the mountain airs on their pipes and told me tales of the snow, of witches and the evil eye, and of the adventures of Our Lady fleeing with our little Lord from Herod and the Pharisees, which befell, it seems, but yesterday, as is indeed most true. And so I who had feared to stay a single night in Amandola, remained for my own delight a whole seven days, not one of which I reckoned ill-spent or unrepaid, though Amandola itself is little more than a village. (214-215) …

Figure to yourself a little place of rosy brick piled up on a great precipitous hillside, on the crest or saddle of which it is spread out eastward, threaded by rude and stony streets between gaunt houses. A wretched place enough, but filled with a people so hospitable and charming that when I think of the Marches Amandola appears in my mind as the heart and rose of a country which for friendliness and charm is second to none in Italy.

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

Fermo and Monte Giorgio

 Edward Hutton loved the hill towns of the Marches. He was especially impressed with Fermo: "The little walled city with its curious acropolis so wonderfully lifted up above its neighbors is the queen of all this country." In nearby Monte Giorgio he found a special treasure. 

Fermo

But, after all, Fermo is to be loved not for the works of art or architecture or painting which it has to show, bur for itself, for its own beauty and nobility, its wonderful command of the glorious world in which it stands up like a great tower or bastion looking so proudly across the mountains and the sea. No one, certainly, who has ever spent a few days within its walls can leave it without a real regret. For to live within its gates is to be made a partaker of the sky, to breathe an air so large and noble that even the greatest work of art, did it possess it, would be at last unregarded while we turned to Nature itself, here for once wholly satisfying and able, without leaving us a single resentment, to absorb us into herself, to overwhelm us with her largeness, her majesty, her sweetness. Those lines of hills that lead our eyes up to the great mountains, those mysterious sweet valleys, those silver gardens of olives against the darkness of the cypresses yonder, the spaciousness of the sky where God dwells, the largeness of the earth He has surely especially blessed; where in the world shall we possess them with such completeness as here, or where shall we be made at one with them so profoundly and without an afterthought? (195-6)…

Monte Giorgio

I know not rightly how to speak of this place which I love so much, nor how to persuade him who is secure in Fermo and set down at an inn more or less furnished with modern comforts, to visit a place so humble, so poor and so holy. For holy it is. Figure to yourself a little white village shining on the hills under the stainless sky above a thousand valleys—beautiful with vineyards and olive gardens, and surrounded by hills greater than its own, crowned by villages scarcely less fair. Such is Monte Giorgio, whose heart is the convent of S. Francis, which should be one of the most famous Franciscan shrines in Italy, for it was there that the Fioretti were written by the Ugolino da Monte Giorgio, who as he looked out of the window of his cell, could see shining across this blessed country all the little holy places of the March, humble Franciscan dwellings which figure in his beautiful book: Massa, Fallerone, Penna S. Giovanni, Fermo, Monterubbiano.

The convent, as we see it to-day, is fair enough and holy still and full of manuscripts, and there and in the olive garden about the place, one may, better than anywhere else in the world, turn the pages of that matchless volume in which all the simplicity and and charm of the Middle Age which produced S. Francis lies hid, as in no other book… the Fioretti is for all, for ever—for all who may find in their hearts, even in middle life, even in old age, that something of the little child, without which no one can enter the kingdom of heaven. (196-197)

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

A Walk to Recanati

 In his travels in Italy Edward Hutton often walked from town to town. Below he describes a nighttime walk and its surprising aftermath. While in Recanati, he also saw Lorenzo Lotto's Annunciation, "one of the most interesting pictures in the Marches."

Night had already fallen and hidden the sea, when I left Loreto to walk in the summer moonlight up to Recanati some seven miles away in the hills. Over all that great world of mountain and valley, darkness had fallen like a transparent veil, the luminous darkness of summer, out of which there came to me as I went the soft noises of the night, the hoot of an owl, the bark of a fox, the curious and bitter song of the night cecco among the olives, the wind among the leaves. I shall not forget the beauty of that way. The road lay over the hills; high in heaven, the moon, crescent still, hung like the immaculate Host in an invisible monstrance about which were set, for candles, innumerable stars. One by one as I went the little cities far away each on a hill-top shone out full of lights, glittered and was lost between the infinity of earth and sky….

Presently I came to the big gate, deserted and silent in the midst of the night. Up and up I passed through the paved, deserted streets between the tall houses, looking for the inn; missed it and had to return, back through the silent street, to find it at last with the help of another benighted like myself.

The first appearance of the Albergo della Pace was anything but promising. The entrance was at the bottom of a dirty, dark court, lighted only by a small lamp burning before an image of the Madonna; but it was too late and I too tired to trouble about appearances, and when the door was opened and a room was shown me I accepted it without demur and was soon in bed….

When I awoke it was to find the room still in darkness, for the window was closely shuttered. I jumped out of bed, and unhooked the iron fastening and thrust back the creaking casement, to be almost blinded by the sudden blaze of light. But when my eyes had grown accustomed to the sun, what a sight met my gaze! The whole world seemed to be spread out at my feet. The inn, it appeared, was set upon the city wall; fifty or sixty feet sheer below me the road wound down toward Loreto, and before me on their hill-tops rose half a hundred little cities, half lost in the sunlight, in a great world of mountain and valley backed by the far dim peaks of the central Apennine. It was a sight almost to stop the heart, so great it was; a landscape indeed, if it were a landscape, and not rather something in a dream, that could never be forgotten, and its gentle serene nobility won me at once. How often and how long I sat in that window in Recanati that I might never forget the lines of the hills, the sunlight and the shadow over the olive gardens, the visionary glory of those far-away peaks! (179-181)…

Lorenzo Lotto: Annunciation

But undoubtedly the most interesting work of art to be found in Recanati is Lotto’s picture of the Annunciation in the little church of S. Maria sopra Mercanti…. In a great and high room, very different from the Santa Casa, and open under a lofty round arch to a garden full of trees and a pergola, Madonna, who has been kneeling in prayer at a prie-dieu upon which lies an open book of hours, has suddenly turned away with uplifted protesting hands in astonishment and even fear at the sudden entrance of the archangel, S. Gabriel, whose streaming hair tells of the swiftness of his flight. So suddenly, indeed, has been the advent of the angel that Madonna’s little cat, asleep till then in some corner, scampers in terror across the room.  Under the arch appears God the Father, a majestic figure, His two hands stretched forth like those of a swimmer; He seems indeed to have dived down from heaven. The room is furnished with almost Flemish realism and completeness… (182-3)

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The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Loreto and the Santa Casa

 Edward  Hutton was warned by friends not to visit Loreto and its famous shrine because of the hordes of mutilated beggars that could be found there. He went anyway and found his friends were mistaken. He tells the whole story of the origins of the Holy House and then records his own impressions of the city and its shrine.

Loreto, which all the world sought these many centuries, is not only one of the holiest, but one of the most beautiful places in Italy. The most sacred shrine of the Blessed Virgin in the West, though not the only one which professes to hold something of the nature of a relic of the Mother of God, it is set most gloriously on its olive-clad hill looking eastward over the sea. It was on a summer afternoon that I came from Osimo to the golden house of Our Lady so strangely to be found in this little town of the March…. (164)

The Santa Casa of Loreto is the house in which the Blessed Virgin was born in Nazareth, miraculously transported hither by angels in the thirteenth century; since when it has been one of the major places of pilgrimage in Europe….

The pilgrims still come to it from all lands and in all seasons; not a week passes in the year but some kneel there who perhaps during their whole lives have dreamed of little else but the journey and the great sight at the end of it—the House of Her who is the Mother of God, the Mother of us all. …

It is a place for tears, and if there be any consolation here you will find it. For in its universal human appeal, it resolves all the bitterness of life for a moment into sweetness, all its pettiness into an act of worship, all its insecurity into security, all its doubt and hatred into assurance and love….

The Holy House of Loreto, if you choose to regard it as a superstition, must be one of that human and kindly sort which in every age has refreshed the weary, for its fruits have been altogether noble. It has produced a series of great works of art by some of the greatest masters of a great time, it has produced the Litany of the blessed Virgin, than which nothing lovelier was ever sung in heaven, and all over the world it has brought men together in love, and has comforted millions who were without consolation….

No shrine in all the world that I have ever seen is half so impressive as this little House of rude brick polished bright with kisses. Without, upon the marble of the platform about the Santa Casa, the sacristan points out two deep grooves in the marble that in the course of centuries have been worn so deep by the knees of the waiting pilgrims. I do not wonder. Here is a sanctuary claiming a holiness and antiquity beyond any other in Europe… Here, so the peasants think, as S. Ignatius and S. Carlo Borromeo thought, is the House of Mary, and the maiden from the Abruzzi comes here and dreams of the girlhood of Her who was to be the Mother of God, and crouched there, with beating heart, sees Gabriel in all the splendor of his snowy white wings, kneeling before Our Lady, hears the words that redeemed the world, AVE MARIA GRATIA PLENA, DOMINUS TECUM BENEDICTA TU IN MULIERIBUS… Indeed, I think he who is less simple of heart than this child should not enter that little House, sacred at least to the childhood of the world and hallowed now if only by the faith, the love, and the lives of such as she.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925. 164-173.

Pesaro and Gradara

 Edward Hutton's The Cities of Romagna and the Marches was written over 100 years ago and although Italy has changed, a traveler today can still appreciate the way he loved to sit, listen and observe the country and its people.  

Pesaro

It was a rainy morning when I left Rimini at last, and by train on account of the weather, for Pesaro; but I had not been in that delightful little city—one of the pleasantest in all the Marches—more than a few hours when the sun shone out again and Pesaro showed me a smiling face, as indeed I cannot but think she does to every one who enters her gates. I do not rightly know what it is in Pesaro that makes me feel always so happy there; whether it be the charm of her wide Piazza with its beautiful Palazzo della Prefettura, or the kindness and hospitality of her citizens, and not least of these who keep the inn, the Albergo Zongo, that noble old palace once a cardinal’s, dark and forbidding at first, but always to be remembered with pleasure and gratitude, or whether, after all,  one’s pleasure lies not so much in Pesaro herself as in the delight of the country in which she lies. Perhaps the happiness and lightness of heart that always comes to me in this little city by that shining morning sea is the result of all these charming things, for once to be had altogether and enjoyed without an afterthought.

Titian: Venus detail

For you may spend your morning pottering about the old town where there is nothing very serious to see, but where everything that meets your eye is graceful and charming. Your afternoon you may spend in the delightful rooms, gardens and terraces of the Villa Imperiale, where that Leonora, whom it is said Titian painted as Venus, as you may see in the Uffizi Gallery to this day, will seem to pass and repass, waiting the return of Francesco Maria of Urbino, or you may drive out to the great Rocca of Gradara, which the Malatesta built and held so long where there are two priceless treasures that certainly Pesaro cannot match *…. 

And for the evening, one strolls out of the great shadowy rooms of the Albergo Zongo and down the rough way into the Piazza and sits in the caffe under the arches of the Prefettura, listening to a country song, watching the people and catching now and then the tinkle of a mandolin, the throb of a guitar. All one’s days and nights in Pesaro are full of melodies, of form and colour and sound, and no one can be the least surprised that Rossini was born there, for the whole city and the hills and woods about it are full of music, to which the sea continually beats a grave and sober accompaniment gently breaking in a line of foam along the shore. (129-130)

*One of the art works in Gradara is a Della Robbia altarpiece.

The Robbia altarpiece is in a little desecrated chapel half-way up the Rocca. There we see the Madonna and Child with S. Jerome and Mary Magdalen, S. Catherine and S. Bonaventure, and beneath, in the predella, three scenes—S. Francis receiving the Stigmata, the Annunciation, and S. Mary Magdalen in the desert communicated by an angel. (137)

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

Bologna: Accademia and Museo Civico

 Edward Hutton's art sympathies were with the pre-Raphaelites, as evidenced by his appraisal of Raphael's St. Cecilia. Below are highlights from his tour of Bologna's Accademia and Museo Civico.

Of the school of Bologna, the school painting that is native to the city…there can be nothing to say, for until very late times there was no tradition of art peculiar to Bologna, which for the most part leant almost entirely upon Ferrara…We therefore learn without surprise that in the second half of the fifteenth century the Ferrarese Francesco Costa established himself here in Bologna and was followed in 1483 by his countryman Lorenzo Costa. It was from them that the first Bolognese painter to show any sign of genius learnt his art. This man was Francesco di Maria Raibolini, whom all the world knows as Francia. ...

 

Francia

Bologna is rich in his work, the Accademia possessing no less than nine of his works… the too refined and eclectic art of Francia cannot recompense us for the fact that the unself-conscious art of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century is not to be had in Bologna.

Raphael: St. Cecilia

Through Timoteo Viti, who was, after Giovanni Santi Raphael’s first master, we reach Raphael, by whom there is here the famous S. Cecilia, from the church of S. Giovanni in Monto, where it adorned the altar dedicated in honour of Beata Cecilia Duglioli. There, as we know, S. Cecilia stands in the midst, a small organ reversed in her hands, her eyes lifted to heaven, her own music quite put out by the songs she heard of the angels. About her stand S. John, S. Augustine, and S. Paul and S. Mary Magdalen. The picture has suffered greatly, and we are not sure how much of it was even due to Raphael himself, and this, I suppose, must excuse our disappointment in it. Indeed we turn from it with a real eagerness to that Madonna and Child in Glory with S. Michael, S. John, S. Catherine, and S. Apollonia by Perugino which hangs in this same room, and curiously enough was painted for the same church, but in 1498, whereas Raphael’s picture is, I think, of 1516….

Perugino

The excellent Museo Civico is not so disappointing as the Academia, for it does not promise so much. It contains too, what I should suppose is one of the finest collections of Etruscan antiquities in existence, but, for me it holds but two things of real delight, I mean the two reliefs of Jacopo della Quercia, the first a relief of the Birth of the Virgin in Sala xv, the other a relief of the Madonna and child in Sala xvi. For these in their beauty no words are good enough, nor may one ever really forget them. 

Jacopo della Quercia

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925. Pp. 86-88.

Edward Hutton: Bologna

 Edward Hutton published The Cities of Romagna and the Marches in 1925 shortly after the conclusion of World War I, then know as the Great War. The cities and towns he visited seemed hardly effected by the War. He started in Ravenna and ended in Urbino. This first post records his change of mind about Bologna.*

I had been in Bologna  many times and had never really liked this somber and learned city, with its gloomy arcaded streets and grotesque leaning towers, its sober brown churches, its gallery full of late pictures, its general air of disillusion, when circumstances compelled me spend a month there, and it was only then I discovered, not without astonishment, that I had never really understood  Bologna at all—how essentially charming she is, how cool and delightful those arcaded streets, how glowing those numberless churches, where the people worship with so simple an earnestness,  how beautiful her environment, that countryside neither of the plains nor of the mountains, among the foothills of the Apennines.

And certainly my experience is not unique. Very many travelers, I think, have felt much the same disappointment in Bologna, nor is it strange perhaps that this should be so. For the most part we come to this sober university town from all the dancing light and colour of Venice, from the sheer beauty of Florence, or from the inexhaustible interest and strength of Milan, and we feel that Bologna beside them is insipid and without a character of her own, a place to which one can only be indifferent.

But, indeed, if approached in the right way, Bologna may be loved at once, and without an afterthought. Only to come to her directly, with the best of all in your heart, is too hard a test. Let the traveler who would understand her great delight come to her not from Venice or Florence, but from the cities of the plain, from Ferrara, or best of all along the great Roman road, the Via Emilia, from Picenza, through Parma, Reggio and Modena; only then can he truly appreciate her dry superiority and that strange beauty of hers which is neither of the plain nor of the mountains, but of the marriage here made between them. (61-62) …

The Towers

…the strangest sight in Bologna, the Leaning Towers in the Piazza di Porta Ravagnana… why these towers were built, and more especially why they lean, whether this be accidental or of set purpose, we do not know. As of everything else in Italy that was notable and strange, Dante has spoken of these towers also. …

these strange towers, which stand within twenty feet of one another in the small Piazza where seven ways meet, leave a more lasting impression on the mind than anything else in the city. (81)

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The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.