Narni and the Ponte D'Augusto

  

 

 

Edward Hutton visited Narni to see the ruins of a famous roman bridge but he also found some spectacular mosaics in the cathedral.

 I came to Narni in the evening.

 

The inn at Narni is of no great pretensions, but the host is a good host and very rightly he is proud of his picturesque and antique city, but especially he is proud of his view, and the great Roman bridge, so magnificent a ruin, that strives in vain to grapple the shores of Nera! … and well he may be, the Ponte d’Augusto, is one of the most beautiful ruins in the world, chiefly perhaps because it has been left alone with age and death. In its youth and prime it carried the Via Flaminia; in its age it warns us of the far from desolate splendours that the Eternal City still guards. An outpost of the Campagna, it knows the gods are dead or dying in that once mysterious desert. What need is there of any splendid road to Rome, since the messengers of Christ, pursued by implacable victory, came, not with beauty and delight in gilded chariots and with horses, but in rags and with bleeding feet? Should this so noble bridge of Caesar Augustus bear on its back the brutal and barbaric armies of the Goth, or make the way smooth for the strange bedecked columns, gay with harlots and with silk, of Charles VIII on his way to Naples, there to find no kingdom but an immortal pestilence? The Ponte d’Augusto watches the traveller pass by on another way to Rome unheeding, while it remembers only splendid days….

One enters the city by the Porta  Ternana, of the end of the fifteenth century, with its portentous towers, to find Narni an almost completely medieval city frowning and picturesque on its olive-clad cliff above the Nera and commanding a wide prospect over the Conca Ternana and from its public garden a magnificent view…. Crowded now with the buildings of the Middle Age: towers, noble palaces, old churches and, over all, the great Rocca built by Cardinal Albornoz and restored by Pius II, before all these magnificent possessions remains its broken Roman bridge….

 

The Romanesqe Duomo of San Giovenale, with its heavy Campanile (1110), has a charming portico which is of the fifteenth century, as is the arch on the right with  its chapel, but the portal in the façade is still of the twelfth century, with a classical accent….

 One now comes to what is by far the most interesting and once the most beautiful work in the church, the shrine of SS. Giovenale and Coccio by masters of the Cosmati school. The whole shrine or chapel is very classical in form with its vertical design and its square framework, much of which still retains its mosaics. The two doorways are also decorated with mosaics. On either side above, two statues remain, a Pieta in wood on the left and San Giovenale on the right, but these are later works. Above the central doorway are two sculptured sheep on either side a central cross. All this, and the mosaic pavement beside it, are among the earliest works of the Roman school of marble craftsmen. Mosaic pavements of the same school are in Santa Maria in Pensole and San Domenico. For these works alone Narni is worth a visit. One of the masters of the school , Petrus Romanus, made the pavement in front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey in 1269 and the beautiful tomb of Henry III in the chapel of the Confessor….

Image courtesy of David Orme

I always come back to the great Roman bridge over the Nar. From there, and strolling along the stream, one understands the Narnia of old on its lofty hill, precipitous on more than one side and half encircled by those sulphurean waters, which rush through the deep-wooded gorge immediately beneath the city, as well described by Claudian:***

 

“Not far away from the strange coloured stream which gives the town its name, in sulphurous waters flowing in tortuous course between opposite mountains through those woods of ilex.”

 

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***Hutton, as usual, gives the Latin but I just supply his English translation. Note that the Latin name for Narni was Narnia, the name C.S. Lewis gave to the mythical Kingdom of his famous children's novels.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 100-105.

On the way to Narni

  

 

 

In "Assisi and Umbria Revisited", Edward Hutton recalled many incidents from his first visit to the area fifty years earlier. In Chapter XIII, entitled "Over the Somma to Narni", he even remembered an incident from his school days.

Through the valleys of oak and ilex I set out from Spoleto, I remember, before the sun was high, on a fair September morning as ever was, for Terni and her fall, which, as it happened, I was never to see; for I had scarcely gone five miles on my way when I was overtaken by rain that meant the end of the summer, for, as they say in Siena, the first rain after the Assumption is the first rain of winter. Was it not of such a tempest that Virgil warned us, so that we might note its coming?

 

But I was heedless; and, taken with the beauty of the way, I had not observed the signs infallible. Not till the murmur of the woods prevailed against the whisper of the summer day did I understand that nature was awake, her heart tumultuous with some passionate remembrance, and she herself singing upon the mountains….

Here he inserted eight lines in the original Latin from one of Virgil's pastoral poems usually called the Georgics.  I give the English translation that he supplied in a footnote.

"Often too there appears in the sky a mighty column of water and clouds--mustered from on high roll up a murky tempest of black showers; down falls the lofty heaven and with its deluge of rain washes away the happy crops and the labors of the oxen. The dykes fill: the deep channelled rivers swell and roar and the sea steams in its heaving. The Father himself in the midnight of storm clouds wields his bolts with flashing hand...."

 

Ah, but I used to know the whole of that Georgic by heart, hammered into me as it was at school, though even then I came to love Virgil, “so musical, so melancholy”, and I remember how at Blundell’s one of my form-masters, if we happened on  a passage of the Aeneid which Virgil had stolen from Homer, never missed the opportunity of sniffling viciously, and “Homer spoiled again” he would say. On one of these occasions I held up my hand and protested, a somewhat unusual thing for a boy to do in those days.

 

     “Yes, sir,” I said, “but-----”

     “Well, boy?”

     “Please, sir, I mean, sir, with what a grace he does it.”

     “That,” said my form-master, “is the most immoral remark I have ever heard in this form. And I might add it is all the worse for the small, the very small, measure of truth there is in it.” 

  

Happy days! But not so happy as that in the rain on the way to Terni.  Through the valley under the storm of rain I went rejoicing; it was one of the great days of my life. I crossed the Somma alone chanting Virgil’s lines. I was drenched to the skin, and the hailstones cut my face like a whip, and the lightning flashed about me. What cared I? The long road hissed before me, and suddenly, as it seemed, under the fury of the storm, was overcome and no longer resisted the invincible rain, but was musical with a million fountains. All nature sighed in the ecstasy of that embrace, and spoke in the  song of the storm of the antique tragedies of the gods. And I alone knew it all as I came down into the sacred groves of ilex in the old and beautiful valley, through which a little river ran boisterous before me.

But that was fifty years ago and today it was raining still, when I am ashamed to say, I crossed the Somma in an autobus and again I did not see the famous falls of which Childe Harold wrote.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 99-100.