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.

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.

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.  

 

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.