Siena: Piazza and Palazzo Pubblico

 

Siena was one of Edward Hutton's favorite cities despite its often tragic history that he spent many pages recounting. But it was the city and its people that most impressed him as well as the spectacular views both within and without. Below find his descriptions of the famous Piazza and Palazzo Pubblico, as well as his impression of the view from the Torre.

What the Piazza Signoria is to Florence, that, and something more, the Piazza del Campo is to Siena: it is at once the most beautiful and the most characteristic thing in the city. However one approaches it—and since it is set at the junction of the three hills on which Siena lies there are many ways to approach—it is always suddenly, with surprise that one looks across that vast and beautiful space shaped like an open fan, enclosed on all sides by palaces, and radiating as it were from what one is often tempted, there at least, to proclaim the most beautiful palace in Tuscany, the Palazzo Pubblico, with its marvellous bell-tower soaring so adventurously, so confidently into the blue sky.

 

This piazza so spacious in form, so strange in its colour and loveliness, is, as it always has been, the heart of Siena. For work or for play, for council or for pleasure, in time of foreign war or civil riot, here the Sienese have always assembled. It was the market-place, the true piazza, the universal meeting-place of the city. But to-day it is almost deserted. One by one it has lost its uses till now but one remains to it; it is still a playground when, in August, on the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the Palio is run there over the smooth bricks round the central space enclosed by its great pavement…. (93)

 

A quietness but seldom broken now fills the Piazza with an exquisite peace. It is the only silent place, I think, in a city full of little noises beyond any other in Tuscany: the clang of metal on metal, the hammers of the coppersmiths that wake you so early, the plaintive cries high up among the old houses of innumerable swallows, the shouts of the hawkers, the shrill voices of children, the songs and laughter and endless loud, free talk of a Latin people not yet dominated by the stupefying thunder of machines…. (95)

 

There is something in the Torre del Mangia that is peculiarly Sienese. Whereas in looking at Giotto’s tower in Florence, like a tall lily beside the Duomo, we do in fact “consider the lilies of the field,” their candid beauty and humility, here we are reminded of something fearless, daring, and adventurous, as though into this one perfectly expressive thing the very soul of Siena had passed—that soul which, mystical as it was beyond any other Tuscan city, was so often boastful too and unstable, a little hysterical in its strange spiritual loveliness, so that it too easily came to naught. Something of all this we find almost everywhere in the city, and especially perhaps in the great unfulfilled boast of the Duomo, but nowhere so subtilely and completely expressed as in this rose-coloured tower soaring over the roofs of Siena…. (96)

 

Hence we climb to the top floor of the Palace, where after all the best of all awaits us… the very world itself, the vast contado of Siena, hill and valley and desert stretching away to where, in the evening mist, maybe, the pure, serene outline of Mont’ Amiata rises into the sky on the verge of the Patrimony, on the confines of Umbria, on the road to Rome. He who has once seen that majesty will never forget it. It seems to seal every one of the days one spends in Siena, or in the little cities of the south that were once her vassals. From here you may count them all: only you will not. You will look only on that mountain whose crest, shaped like the crescent moon, bears as of right the symbol of Mary, and in silence you will await the sunset. And as the bells once more, as of old, ring the Angelus, you will remind yourself, perhaps after many days of forgetfulness, of those things which alone have any reality—

 ### 

Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910.

Edward Hutton: S. Gimignano

 

Edward Hutton's tour of  southern Tuscany continued with S. Gimignano, the hill town still famous for its many towers. 

If we would know what a Tuscan hill town was like in the fourteenth century, we must go on foot or by carriage to S. Gimignano delle belle Torri, on the hills on the other side of the Elsa. There it is true, we shall find no remembrance of Boccaccio, but we shall be treading in the footsteps of Dante, and we shall find there, too, the memory of one of those little saints who once made sweet our world, but who, alas! Come no more down the long valleys at evening, singing of the love of God. Nevertheless, there are few refuges in all of Tuscany more secure from the rampages of our time that S. Gimignano.

 

To reach this wonder, to behold this banner of a lost cause, still valiant upon the hills, that is a good way which leaves Certaldo by crossing the river, and so climbs over the hills till the city “of the beautiful towers” rises before you like a vision, and you come at last, as to a forgotten shrine, into her quiet and shadowy gates….

 

The road from Certaldo, which was the way I took, is as lovely as any in the world. You climb hill after hill between the olives and the vines, where the grain and the grapes grow together. Often you descend into delicious valleys, where the vineyards are still with summer, and the silence is only broken by the faraway voice of some peasant singing stornelli; often, too, you look back on Val d’Elsa, where Certaldo smiles on its steep hill over the river, till suddenly at a turning of the way S. Gimignano rises before you on a lonely hill-top, covered with the silver of the olives, the gold of the corn, the green mantle of the vines, like a city out of a missal, crowned with her trophy of thirteen towers….

 

This little valiant town, so lonely on the hills, was once the centre of a vigorous life, civil and religious, even intellectual and artistic. It produced and employed painters; a poet was born here, little S. Fina stood for it among the blessed in heaven. Now the place is less than nothing, a curiosity for strangers; it has no life of its own, and is incapable of producing anything but a few labourers for the fields. As you pass through its narrow ways and look on the monuments of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, you find everything deserted and a cruel poverty the only tyrant left. Some virtue is gone out of it. Why?... (31)

 

S. Fina
Benozzo Gozzoli

She is poor, and her ways are quiet: how hospitable is her inn! She has the inevitable humility of those who have given up the struggle for pre-eminence, the inevitable grace of all those who have learned how to wait in meditation. Indeed, I have not told one-half of her sweetness, nor numbered the half of her treasures, nor told of her country byways, nor altogether understood why I love her so. Yet this I know: she has nothing to do with machinery or the getting of wealth. Come and see. (38)

 

###

 

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

Edward Hutton: Certaldo and Boccaccio

 Edward Hutton's chapter on Certaldo is mainly taken up with an extended account of the life of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Certaldo's most famous resident. In 1909, a year before he published Siena and Southern Tuscany, Hutton had written a biography of Boccaccio, a writer famous for his own life as well as for his Decameron, a collection of stories told by men and women trying to escape the ravages of the plague.

 

Long before you come to Certaldo on its great hill over the narrowing valley of the Elsa, which in fact it holds and closes, the Castello shines before you, still very far off, a rugged cluster of houses and towers against the sky. When at last you find yourself on that great and beautiful road beside the river, at the foot of the beautiful hill, it is to discover a town very like Castel-Fiorentino in this at least, that the Castello, the walled and ancient town, is on the hill and the modern borgo in the plain. But as you soon realise, Certaldo is more splendid, more rugged, and more ancient than her sister, though, as you see her from the north, you have the worst view of her, her true splendor looking southward. 

 

Most of us who in the modern hurry stay here, perhaps for a few hours on our way to Siena or to Florence, come not for any ancient loveliness she may have kept for us, but for Boccaccio’s sake, for he died here in the ancient house of his family still to be seen in the Castello….

 

Boccaccio:

 

That great and heroic man who has entranced the whole world with his stories, who gave Homer back to us, and was the first defender of Dante Alighieri, the devoted friend of Petrarch, the lover of Fiammetta; who remained poor his whole life long for the sake of learning, and who indeed is the most human and the most modest and heroic spirit of the earliest Renaissance…. (13-14)

 

In his fiftieth year he began to regret the irresponsibility of his past life. On the threshold of old age, poor and alone, he thought to love God with the same enthusiasm with which he had loved woman. He was not capable of it; his whole life rose up to deny him that impassioned consolation….

 

Boccaccio’s days of creation were, however, over. He retired to Certaldo to the house of his ancestors, and there read without ceasing the works of antiquity, annotating as he read…

 

In addition to all his other reading Boccaccio had never ceased to study the “Divine Comedy,” nor did he till his death… *

 

In 1373 he was called from his retirement in Certaldo to lecture publicly on the “Divine Comedy” in Florence. He began to read on 23 October, 1373, in the church of S. Stefano alla Badia, and continued on each succeeding day that was not a festival. He had got so far as the sixtieth lezione, when he was taken ill and had to cease. This was no sudden disease; he had never really recovered from his “conversion.” Really ill, he retired to Certaldo, where, utterly miserable and suffering from his disease, but more from the ignorance of doctors, he groped about far from Petrarch, looking for more certainty. He had thought he might find it in the monastic life, and it was in a solitude almost as profound that he came to die at last on this hill in Val d’Elsa in the house of his ancestors—a magician, as was said, like Virgil or Ovid to the folk of Naples and Sulmona, knowing all the secrets of nature. He must often have passed slowly, because of failing health, up and down the picturesque streets of the old town, which holds as many sudden peeps as Assisi; and at sunset, perhaps he lingered by the gates as we do, for they are wonderfully placed for beauty. From his room he looked over a world as fair as any in Tuscany—a land of hills about a quiet valley where the olives are tossed to silver in the wind and the grapes are kissed by the sun into gold and purple, where the corn whispers between the vines; till for him, too, at last the grasshopper became a burden.

 

There, on 21 December, 1375, he died, and was buried, as he had desired above the quiet waters of the Elsa which puts all to sleep. In passing through the old streets of Certaldo to-day, it is part of our heritage to remember him. (24-25).

###

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

*Note: Click on this link to watch a seven minute video of Roberto Benigni, Italy's most famous modern comedian, reading the first canto of Dante's Divine Comedy. 

Edward Hutton: Castel Fiorentino

Edward Hutton devoted at least two books to Tuscany. We will deal with Florence and Northern Tuscany in a future series but today we turn to Siena and Southern Tuscany, published in 1910. He began his tour at Castle-Fiorentino.

 

Happy Castel-Fiorentino! She was able and content to till her fields always as she does today, to tend her vineyards, to sow the corn under the olives, and to gather it in with songs, while the armies of Germany, the companies of adventure, the gay chivalry of France thundered by to destruction. Is not her story, which will never be told, one of those which should console us most in a world so busy about resounding trifles? She has no history; but in her untold story the romance of Europe lies hid—the story of men like ourselves going up and down day by day about their business, laboring in the fields in a hard partnership with Nature, chafering in the market-place, rising at dawn, resting at midday, singing at evening, loving a little and weeping much—if we could but read it!

 

But if Castel-Fiorentino is without a history, if she never produced a great man or a great artist, she is by no means devoid of the consolation of beauty. She herself is as charming and picturesque as can be; her churches are spacious and full of light, and there, too, you may find many a picture of a rare and exquisite country grace that only her lovers have discovered. 

 

Among those churches was the Convent of S. Chiara.

 

To-day, however, the convent is in the occupation of the Osservanti. It was one of them— “a friar of orders grey,” who seemed, indeed, to have stepped out of the song, so jovial and fat was he—who, in answer to my call, came out of his siesta to show me the church. The church is delightful, filled with a country peace and scattered with sun and shade. Over an altar on the left I found one of those things I love best—a splendid Giotto-esque Crucifix into which the love and faith of the thirteenth century seem immediately to have passed….

 

The quiet beauty of the church, the eager chatter of Fra Lorenzo, caused me to linger here, and that was my good fortune. For just as I was about to leave, as I said farewell to Fra Lorenzo at the church door, a woman came towards us, and greeting the friar, at once knelt down on the threshold, just under the lintel of the door, and prepared herself to be churched. With her came two ragged urchins and a little black dog. In the great shady nave the children played with the dog, quite at home in the house of their Father, while Fra Lorenzo, excusing himself, went into the sacristy and brought forth a great taper, which he placed in the good woman’s hand, and a large book, all in Latin, out of which he proceeded to read some prayers. I cannot tell you what a charming and old world picture this made, recalling happier days. The children in the shadow playing with the little black dog; the good woman who had just brought forth a child kneeling in the sunshine holding her taper carefully, on the threshold of the church; Fra Lorenzo in his surplice, unctuous and sleek, reciting the Office—it was as though by some good fortune certain centuries had never happened and we were back in those scarcely remembered days when everything could be accounted for, when there was still a unity in Europe, and we accepted the love of God and the offices of the Church as matters of course. Only I seemed to be out of the picture. And so quietly I slipped away without so much as “thank you” to Fra Lorenzo, to whom I owed this consoling glimpse of life in Tuscany.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. Pp. 4-8.