Spoleto: Churches and Shrines

  

 

 

Edward Hutton visited many churches in Spoleto but his favorite was the Basilica of San Salvatore built on the remains of an ancient Roman temple.

 

It is, however, something quite different we find in San Salvatore, which has been built from the ruins of a Roman temple. From a picturesque and historical point of view, it delights me, as I have said, beyond any other piece of architecture in Spoleto. Today its façade guards the Campo Santo, with its hard white crosses and beady flowers, and all the frippery of modern death. Magnificent columns, Roman and pagan, group themselves round the choir and chancel; and the nave is ennobled by the remains of other shafts, now ruinous, that once bore the weight of some splendid roof. Pagan gods, not dead but living in exile, perhaps in the ilex woods that crown the city and envelop her in their sombre mantle, seem to creep into the warm sunshine that floods the church from the open door. They knock at our hearts; and gazing at the feeble and terrible “decorations” of the Christian altar between the majestic pillars of an alien religion, it is rather of the nobility of the past, which is so present everywhere in Italy—of its beauty and its sufficiency—that we think, than of its Christian successor.

And yet who here in Spoleto can resist the touching appeal of that little ugly shrine that greets the traveller on his way to San Paolo, that old thirteenth-century church? It is a picture of S. Maria Immacolata and bears the legend: Et macula originalis non est in Te. As I passed by at evening some children  were decking the shrine with wild flowers, gathered on the Umbrian hills. The cage that guarded the picture was starred with buttercups as lovely in their shining yellow as those which doubtless in old days sprang up beneath the white footsteps of Persephone as she crossed the rivers of Sicily on her way to Demeter, after her unwilling exile from our world. Will she not know and smile and understand, this Virgin that is the one goddess left to a sorrowful world? Be sure, if she is not mindful of the flowers of the maidens and children, if in that heaven where she is she does not smile to her Son upon His Throne of chrysoprase and jasper to see these, simple of heart, bringing the flowers of the field for her Festa—then Persephone never trod our world, nor was Demeter bereft and sorrowful; all is a lie—the beautiful, austere gods, the terrible love of Christ, the very Fatherhood of God, since even these so simple of heart may deceive themselves on their lovely way to death….

 

It was Holy Week when for the first time I came to Spoleto; a certain silence and wistful sadness, I remember, seemed to invest the city; the streets were very quiet, the churches sombre. At evening I watched the processions, with their torches and innumerable tapers, wind along the roads; all night as I lay in my bed I seemed to hear the melancholy chants that accompanied them up the Via Crucis. In reality it would seem that Christ had died that afternoon; now at last mankind was desolate. The tones of the Vexilla Regis seemed to wave like long streamers  from the church towers, and one heard the Mother, heart-broken, and weeping sigh to the world spread at our feet:

 

O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite 

     et videte, si est dolor, sicut dolor meus.

 

Then there was silence. Spoleto, with finger on her lip, awaited the dawn of Easter. At last it broke, very cool and sweet and full of promises. An immense hope seemed to have swept over the world. In the churches they sang again Alleluia, and I, with the whole city went to the Cathedral to greet the Christ, new risen from the  tomb, in the Easter Mass.

 

Out of my window, as I write, I can see S. Mary of the Angels gleaming in the sunlight beneath the mass of Subasio. It is only the mountains that hide Orvieto from me, and even perhaps Rome herself. Innumerable roads over plain and mountain to half a hundred cities that the world has forgotten. I seem to see them all in the soft lucidity of evening, that is the  most precious part of the day in this land where, every evening, God paints for us those pictures which taught Perugino all he knew—the magnificent spaciousness, his sense of luminous light.

 

Before the sunset Spoleto, like a tall and sweet maiden, kneels on her hill and seems to pray. Ever she has the attitude of prayer; and after dark when her little lights gleam far over the plain, I seem to know that they burn before the shrines of many saints whose prayers she has desired, simple  of heart as she is, kneeling at the head of her long valley under the soft sky.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 77-78, 79-80.

Spoleto and Filippo Lippi

  

 

 

Edward Hutton regarded Spoleto as a very special city, a treasure full of treasures.

 

Spoleto is a beautiful city of rose colour set on the slope of Monteluco. In a bend of the Tissino torrent, amid a cluster of  mountains which crown her with their exquisite grace. In her silent streets I began to understand her beauty and her joy, and, indeed, it is in a kind of sudden and overwhelming  joy that her towers pierce up into the sky—those rosy towers that at dawn and midday and sunset are musical with soft bells, and that fade away into the night from rose colour to violet and deep purple under a heaven of innumerable stars. Behind her rise, higher and higher, forests of primeval ilex, the sacred tree of the Latin race, shrouding her, as it were, in a mantle most rare of darkest green. Over her head, far away above the forests, a Franciscan convent soars like a brown bird floating on the wind, whose bells are not heard, but only seem to ring, or heard only in the most fortunate days when their sound is little more than the piping of those crested larks that sang S. Francis to heaven.

 

It was here in this valley, luminous beyond our northern dreams, that Blessed Angela of Foligno heard those breathless words of Christ: “I love thee more than any woman in the valley of Spoleto.” So in the vineyards and the valleys of Umbria of old, men and women talked with God, and indeed the whole land, even to the most superficial observer, seems blessed. Climb up to the great aqueduct that spans the profound ravine which isolates Spoleto on her round hill, and at evening  look across the valleys to the hills and the mountains, that luminous softness, a delicacy so magical that you had thought only the genius of Raphael or Perugino could imagine and express it, is just reality. With light, with fragile glory, with the wide and tender glance of the sky, every delicious form of hill and cloud and mountain is embraced. It is amidst these perfect hills that Spoleto sings for joy….

But on first coming to Spoleto it is to the Cathedral we climb, breathless, for her ways are steep and rough, to see the frescoes of one of the most delightful of the Florentine painters, Filippo Lippo. They are his last masterpieces, and tell the story in brief of the Blessed Virgin in her own Cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta. The chief fresco is that of her Coronation. Pale from the encounter with death, in which but a moment ago she has proved victorious, tall and slight, Regina Angelorum is crowned, not by Christ her Son, but by God the Father, in a heaven delicate as the petals of the flags in the valleys full of corn, powdered with stars that seem to have risen just out of the sea. The sun and the moon beneath her feet are lesser glories where she is. About her a company of angels sings, and dances for joy, since heaven is by so much richer than our earth. A few with a shy and timid grace, magically charming,  hand her a few flowers from the meadows of the woods of heaven, as though to ask her if they might be sweeter than the lilies she loved as a girl, or the wild flowers of Palestine. The rest of the frescoes—the Annunciation, in which she stands so surprised, so agitated, that she twists her fingers together and is not sure how to answer; the Nativity, a magnificent composition, now but a shadow; and the Death of the Virgin, where Christ Himself with a tenderness, but with a tenderness and love, bears His Mother to heaven—are much over-painted, and by a lesser hand, yet we catch some shadow of Filippo in them all, so that even in their ruin they are not the least among the precious things of Spoleto.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp.70-71, 74-75.