Roman Vision

 Edward Hutton began his book on Rome with a retrospective account of a personal vision that came to him as he looked over the city from the Janiculum. 

It was on an April evening in my earliest manhood, as I stood on the vast bastion of the Janiculum in the sudden silence of the hour after the sunset—Rome was looking terrible as a crater under the conflagration of the sky—that I seemed to realise for the first time the true aspect of a place so augustly familiar, which, as Dante has perceived, nature herself has formed for universal dominion… and out of which has risen all Europe and our Faith, all that is really worth having in the world.

It was my last evening in Rome. On the morrow I was to return to the North. All day I had wandered aimlessly about looking for my lost illusions, till, weary at last, I had come towards evening to sit beside the parapet of the Janiculum, turning all things over in my heart as I watched the sun set over the City. How will I remember it?

It seems to me that I was but a child then, that I had believed in everything, and was altogether discouraged and dismayed, for Rome had been like a stranger to me. With an incredible loyalty I had dreamed of her in the North (shall I confess it?) as the city of Horatius, of the Gracchi, of Scipio Africanus, of Sulla and Marius, of Caesar, of that spiritual Caesar, too, who for so many ages has appointed there his dwelling, communing with the eternal in an eternal place. And I had found there a new city, spoiled by old things, full of all the meanness and ugliness of modern life, the rush and noise of electric trams, even in the oldest and narrowest ways, a place of change and destruction.

Take heart, I had continually told myself, even on the first morning beside the imprisoned Tiber bridged with iron, among the new slums about the Vatican, in the brickfield of the Forum: take heart, the Capitol remains. Therefore, not without thankfulness… I had made my way along the ruined Corso to the Piazza Venezia.

Well, I had rejoiced too soon. I was prepared for destruction…but for destruction heaped on destruction, for a rascal impudence that might put Phocas to shame, I confess it at once, I was not prepared…. For there, where long and long ago the Temple of Juno passed into the gentler dominion of the Madonna Mary, the modern barbarian had raised indeed a fitting monument to his king, who resembles great Caesar in this alone that in the heaven of the populace he has become divine. Was it a temple or a tomb, that ghastly erection of ghostly stone, that, standing on a ruined convent, seemed to bellow like Behemoth… It has remained, however, I told myself, for the kingdom of Italy to surpass both Caesar and Popes in vulgarity, rapacity, and insolence…

It was these things, I remember, that rose before me at the close of my last day in the City as I waited for the sunset by the parapet of the Janiculum. So that I said in my heart: Rome is not any more immortal; all that is gone for ever. It is finished. Let us pass by and be silent.

Nevertheless, it was in this moment of despair, of denial, that I began to understand.

An incredible majesty had descended upon the City and the hills…. the City loomed out of the night like some mysterious and lovely symbol, a visible gesture of the infinite, decisive and affirmative, never to be recalled or modified.

The material world, that close, impassable prison, seemed just then to be dissolving before my eyes, and it was as though in the silence, I had heard again these words, so full of assurance and all gladness: Sed confidite, Ego vici mundum: be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. And all my heart was changed suddenly, and in a moment I was comforted.

But that was long ago. Today as I look down on Rome in the long summer that is so quiet still within her walls—is it that I have grown wiser, or may be only older? —I find her immortality not alone in the continuity of Nature or in such a vision as that of which I have spoken, but in the City herself, in the life of the City I have come in some dim way to understand and to reconcile with my dreams…. I feel the eternity of Rome as I feel the brief sweetness of every passing moment there; she seems to me as eternal and persistent as life, as strangely various, as mysteriously secret.

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Edward Hutton: Rome. 1922, fourth edition, pp. 1-4. The first edition appeared in October 1907. 

Edward Hutton Bibliography

Last weeks post on Edward Hutton's Italy was the last in a series that began  on March 19, 2020. On that date I began transcribing passages that I thought were the best from his many books on Italian towns and regions. Most were written early in the twentieth century when the Englishman found his second home in Italy. Now, old age and poor eyesight prevent me from continuing to transcribe passages from his other volumes. 

However, I intend to continue by repeating past posts starting from the beginning. Hopefully, new readers who were not around three years ago will appreciate seeing Italy through Hutton's eyes, and older readers might also enjoy re-reading these passages. I find it always a pleasure to read Hutton's descriptions of Italian art, culture, religion, history, and scenery over and over again.

Below is a list of books from which I have excerpted passages over the past three years. These books and others can still be purchased on the web, or even read online. Next week we begin again with Venice.

Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911.

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

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

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

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

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

    Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953.

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Gubbio: St. Francis

                                                                                                                                      

 

 

Edward Hutton concluded Assisi and Umbria Revisited in Gubbio. As usual, he related the history of the town, and visited the various churches. He also quoted at length the familiar story of the taming of a ferocious wolf by St. Francis. But here is a less familiar story as well as the ending of Hutton's book.  I also include two end notes that might be of interest to followers of Hutton. 

Just before I crossed the watershed I came on the hill-top to a mass of building with tower and bell-turret which proved to be the Badia di Vallengegno, but of old was the monastery of San Verecondo, where it is said S. Francis was employed as a scullion after he had been thrown into a ditch full of snow by brigands on his first wandering to Gubbio. He was thus employed, according to Thomas of Celano, for several days, “wearing nothing but a wretched shirt and desired to be filled at least with broth. But when, meeting with no pity there, he could not even get any old clothing, he left the place (not moved by anger but by need) and came to the city of Gubbio, where he got him a small tunic from a former friend of his. But afterwards,” says Thomas, “when the fame of the man of God was spreading everywhere, and his name was noised abroad among the people, the prior of the aforesaid monastery, remembering and realizing how the man of God had been treated, came to him and humbly begged forgiveness for himself, and his monks.” …

 

It is said of S. Francis that death, which is to all men terrible, and hateful, he praised, calling her by name: “Death, my sister, welcome be thou”; and that one of those best-loved brothers saw his soul pass to heaven in the manner of a star, “like to the moon in quantity, and to the sun in clearness”. And however we may think of him, whether he is to us the most beloved saint in all the calendar, or whether he is merely a delightful figure, a little ailing, a little mad from the Middle Age, he went honourably upon the stones, as Voragine reminds us. “He gadryd the wormes out of the ways, by cause they should not be trodden with the feet of them that passed by.” He called the beasts his brethren; and in all that age of passion and war, of immense ambition and brutal hate, he loved us as Christ has done, and was content if he might be an imitation of Him. “He beheld the Sonne, the Mone, and the Starres, and summoned them to the Love of their Maker.”

 

As we pass up and down the Umbrian ways, it is his figure which goes ever before us.

 

                                         Que pacis crescit oliva

                               Regnat amor, concors, gratia, vera fides.*

 

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*           Where the olive tree of peace grows

           Love, concord, grace, and true faith reign.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 221,233-234.

Note 1: In his introduction to the above volume, Hutton alluded to one of his first books, The Cities of Umbria, written in 1907.

"When I was a young man I wrote a book, Cities of Umbria, which went into eight or more editions and finally fell out of print in the war of 1939-45. I have not thought to reprint it. Since it was written I have wandered about Umbria many times and most recently spent some months of spring, summer and autumn in that country where one cannot go a mile but one finds oneself in the footsteps of Saint Francis. and now that my life has nearly completed its circle, the pages which follow recount these fortunate wanderings and recall those happier still, of earlier days."

Note 2: I would also like to mention that Hutton included in this volume an appendix in which he discussed the controversy surrounding the frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi. In the course of that discussion he mentioned that before the First World War, he and his friend, F. Mason Perkins had been working on a critical edition of Vasari's Lives of the Painters.

"Mr. Perkins and the present writer were engaged on a critical edition of the Lives of Vasari. The new English translation of the text was made by Mr. De Vere and was published by the Medici Society. It was to be followed by three or four volumes of critical notes by Mr. Perkins, but though the first volume of these notes was set up and printed, the war of 1914 prevented publication and the type was distributed."