Edward Hutton: Volterra

Edward Hutton's Siena and Southern Tuscany was published in 1910, over a hundred years ago. Walking from S. Gimignano to Volterra he encountered what he called "traveller's fear" before arriving at the gate of that ancient and storied city. Most of the chapter on Volterra deals with its long history.

 

The road for Volterra—for it was thither I was bound one fine October morning at dawn—descends from S. Gimignano into the valley, and climbing again through that quiet and delicate country that marks all the Val d’Elsa, joins the high road from Colle…Thence the way lies over vast and barren watersheds, across an uplifted wilderness of sterile clay hills, past blue-grey chasms of volcanic tufa, till at evening “lordly Volterra” rears itself up suddenly against the sky, haggard with loneliness and age like the dreadful spirit of this strange country so full of a sinister desolation. No traveler can, I think, approach this outraged stronghold of old time without a certain hesitation, a certain apprehension and anxiety. The way is difficult, precipitous, and threatening, full of dangers that cannot be named or realized; and long ere you climb the last great hill into the city an eerie dread has seized your heart. As far as the eye can reach that battered and tortured world rolls away in billow after billow of grey earth scantily covered with a thin dead herbiage that seems to have even burned with fire. On either side the way vast cliffs rise over immense crevices seamed and tortured into the shapes of raped and ruined cities: yonder a dreadful tower set with broken turrets totters on the edge of sheer nothing; here a tremendous gate leads into darkness, there a breached wall yawns over an abyss. If there is such a thing as traveller’s fear, it is here you will meet it, it is here it will make your heart a prize. As for me, I was horribly afraid, nor would any prayer I know bring my soul back into my keeping.

And if the way is so full of fear, what of that lofty city that stands at the high summit of that narrow road winding between the precipices? It too is a city of dread—a city of bitterness, outraged and very old. Seven hundred years before the fall of Troy it had already suffered siege. Surrounded in those days by walls forty feet high, 12 feet thick, and eight thousand yards in circumference, that have worn out three civilizations, and still in part remain, Volterra was one of the great cities of the Etruscan League. Like vast fortresses her gates were held impregnable. Enemy after enemy, army after army broke against those tremendous bastions; she scattered them, and they were lost in the desolation in which she is still entrenched. From the lower valley of the Arno to the forgotten citadel of “sea-girt Populonia,” which the Maremma has destroyed, she reigned supreme.... (39-40)

 

Encamped within these ruins he will find the debris of more than one later civilization—Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance—cheek by jowl with the fugitive and impermanent work of to-day. Still enthroned and guarded by the wall of the Etruscans, and entered by their gate, the shrunken medieval city of Volterra waits for him among the ruins of four different ages, like some herb hidden in a crevice of the temples of Karnak. (41)

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 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)

 

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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).

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 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.

 

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

Edward Hutton's Rome: the Campagna

 

Edward Hutton ended his book on Rome with a chapter on the Campagna, the desolate countryside outside the hills of Rome. Here is his paean to the Campagna. I suspect that he would be shocked today by the belt-ways and urban sprawl that have overtaken what he called "the soul of Rome." I add some images from nineteenth century painters who saw the Campagna as Hutton saw it.

George Inness: View of the Campagna

Rome possesses nothing half so lovely, half so precious, half so venerable, as the Campagna, in which she lies like a ship in the midst of the sea, now just visible over the billows, now lost altogether in that vast solitude of which, for the most part, she is oblivious. My happiest hours during all my sojourn in Rome have been spent in the Campagna, at all hours of the day, at every season of the year.

 

The immense and universal thing which lies unregarded at the gates of the Eternal City is the one Roman thing that I have been able to love absolutely without reserve or any after thought. I loved it at first sight, and to leave it still brings tears to my eyes. And yet, I have felt no intimacy with it, as I have with the Umbrian valleys, and the moorlands, the hills and the sea of the west Country whence I am sprung. It is too vast and too silent for intimacy but it has my fear and love as God has them, because it is greater than I, and in some sort has produced me. It has, too, the indefinite beauty of all supernatural things. One may find there always all that is in one’s heart, and each will find what he brings and the reward of which he is worthy. It is too beautiful to praise and too mysterious, too holy, to explain or to describe…. For, as the sea is the secret of England, so the Campagna is the secret of Rome; it haunts the City, and the majesty and largeness of its silence are the springs of its immortality. Nor may you long escape it, for all the great ways lead to it at last, and it surges against every gate….

 

Corot: View of the Campagna

From wherever you first see it, it calls you instantly in its solemn immensity, its vast indwelling strength, its ruined splendor, across which the broken arches of the aqueducts stagger still, and the vague white roads, lined with empty and rifled tombs, wander aimlessly, losing themselves in the silence and vastness that only the mountains may contain. And it is the mountains which hem in the Campagna, the most beautiful mountains in the world.

 

Wherever you may go in Rome, after that first revelation, whatever you may see, before whatever shrines you may kneel, it is the Campagna which is in your heart, for you have discovered Rome, the soul of Rome…. 

 

It is this one comes to realise at last, as day after day, week after week, one passes along that ancient Appian Way, between the crumbling tombs. Here and there we may find them still, the likeness of our brother carved in relief, some thought of his about it all, a few Latin words, part of an inscription, half hidden with the grass and the flowers. And as night overtakes one on that marvelous road, when the splendor of sunset is faded, and the stars one by one have scattered the heavens with hope, our thoughts turn almost in self defence, in that solemn loneliness, from death to resurrection. In the immense silence that nothing may break our imagination sinks beneath the lonely majesty of that desert, littered with the monsters of old forgotten religions, full of the dead things of Paganism and Christianity, the bones of Saints, the mighty trunks of forgotten gods.

 

What more is there to come out of that vast grave, that marvelous solitude?

 

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Edward Hutton: Rome's Borghese Gallery

Edward Hutton's discussion of the Roman villas and their gardens included a tour of the Borghese Gallery and its wonderful art collection, the highlight of which was Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.***

But if the palaces are, in spite of their size and splendor, a little dull, a little lacking in interest and beauty, so that nowhere in Rome may we find one that moves us as the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena does, or as many of these wonderful buildings on the Grand Canal in Venice contrive to do, it is quite otherwise with the Villas. Rome is unique among the cities of the world in possessing them, and they are unique in their loveliness and charm. They have nothing in common with anything in England, but one might feel something of their charm if Hampton Court Palace with its gardens were suddenly to be found in the midst of London….

The Roman villa garden…has an air of the eighteenth century; it is full of silence. The cypresses are set thickly in a half-circle about a statue, or in long alley-ways that lead to a fountain; vista passes into vista, till you are led to lose yourself in the twilight of the bosco, in the midst of which you find yourself suddenly at the foot of a magical staircase of stone, wide and spacious and beautiful, and passing up it, you come at last to a little summer-house of marble, just above the tree-tops, and there, far below you, is Rome….

But of all these villas with their marvelous gardens which were once the glory of Rome, but few remain. Of these which are still left to us, perhaps the best known are the Villa Pamphili, the Villa Medici, and the Villa Borghese. The first is of an incomparable loveliness, the second of an incomparable mystery, the third is less rare, and of late has become one of the playgrounds of Rome, larger, and more spaciously beautiful but less fashionable than the Pincio. But in truth the Villa Borghese, with its gardens and park, is still one of the most enchanting things in the City… and then it adds to its other delights a treasure of art, a collection of pictures that is the finest in the City after that of the Vatican….

But the real glory of the gallery consists not only, or even chiefly, in the work of Raphael, but in three works by the greatest master of that or any other period, Titian, who is represented by three pictures, the first belonging to his youth, the others to his old age.

The Sacred and Profane Love, painted about 1512 for Niccolo Aurelio, Grand Chancellor of Venice, is the highest achievement of Titian’s art at the end of its Giorgionesque period…. In fact, the name it now bears, which has so puzzled the world, does not occur till the end of the eighteenth century, when it seems to have been given it by the Germans. For us, at least, it can have no authority, the subject of the picture being merely a moment of beauty, --a moment gone, but for Titian’s genius, while we try to apprehend it, in the golden summer heat, under the trees by a fountain of water….

But, after all, what we have come here to see is the Sacred and Profane Love, by Titian, and that will lead us, not from picture to picture in a sudden enthusiasm for painting, but most certainly back again into the gardens, where the world is so sleepily golden in the heat, and the shade so cool and grateful. There we shall linger till, from the far-away city, the Ave Mary rings from all the cupolas, and we must return down the long alleys in the softly fading light, stealing softly, half-reluctantly, out of the world of dreams back into the streets and the ways of man. 

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*** Note: Hutton rejected the accepted title of Titian's painting and saw the subject as "merely a moment of beauty." Almost a hundred years later, I stood in front of the famous painting and had an intuition that the two women were actually Mary Magdalen before and after her conversion. Research confirmed this intuition and my interpretation can be found at academia.edu.



Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922. Pp. 327-335.

Edward Hutton: The Fountains of Rome

 

No one can visit Rome without falling in love with its fountains. In his chapter on the fountains, Edward Hutton traced their origins back to ancient Rome, described their destruction during the Dark Ages, and then their revival by the Papacy in the Renaissance. He then took his readers on a walking tour of his favorites.

Horace tells us somewhere that he is the friend of fountains, and, indeed, no true Roman whether of the ancient or the modern world, can ever have been without some sentiment for them, since, in fact, they are the joy of Rome, her voice, as it were, a pleasant and a joyful voice; for no city in Europe is so truly a city of running waters. All day long they waken in the heart some mystery of delight and refreshment; -- the slender jets of water wavering between the cypresses in the shadow, flashing in the sun, splashing among the statues on the cold marble. And their song in the cool, diaphanous mornings of spring is a song of life, of joy, of the brief joy of life…. 

 

 

In the fifteenth century the Popes of the Renaissance, wishing to return to her the leadership of the world, gave her back her waters, and suddenly, in a moment, as though by enchantment, she arose once more out of the wilderness and the ruins, healed and whole at the sound of that song. 

 

Often very early in those spring mornings which are so fair in Rome, or maybe on an autumn evening, under a moon great and golden as the sun, I have wandered through the city of fountains for the sake of their song. It begins with the strange artificial voice of Bernini’s Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna, where the Acqua Vergine falls humbly at the feet of Madonna, that gallery of war shooting forth from her guns, not death, but refreshment. Then, as I pass into the silence  up the beautiful Scala di Spagna, and turn towards the Pincio, presently, still far off, I hear the most beautiful voice in Rome, the single melody, languid and full of mystery, and all enchantment, of the fountain before the Villa Medici, where, under the primeval ilex, a single jet of water towers like some exquisite slender lily, to droop, to fall in unimagined loveliness into the brimming vase of marble, so admirably simple and in place under these sacred trees, before that lofty villa, which, in some sort, dominates the whole City, and whence one may look across the towers and domes to the Capitol, to S. Peter’s, to the Campagna stretching away to the sea.

 

No other fountain in Rome is at once so simple and so beautiful as this, nor is there another which commands so wide and so majestic a prospect. And yet, if one passes down the slope of the Pincio into the Piazza del Popolo, and so crosses the Ponte Margherita, and passes at last under the height of the Vatican, comes at last into the Piazza di S. Pietro, one finds there…two fountains, quite as beautiful in their way, though truly less simple, singing ever before the threshold of the shrine of the Apostle. Rising in the shape, as it were, of fleurs de lys, the water harmonises perfectly, not only with the fountains themselves, but with the beautiful piazza in which they are so marvelously placed, forming together with it the masterpiece of Bernini. 

 

                                              

We come to the Piazza Navona, where stands the most extraordinary, perhaps of all Bernini’s works, the brilliant but bizarre fountain with its obelisk and statues personifying the four great rivers of the world.

 

It is again to a work of Bernini we come, as, passing on through the City, we stand at last before the fountain of Trevi, which resembles the Acqua Paolina, and which may be heard above all the noise of the piazza. And it is fitting that, since Rome is the city of fountains, to make sure of one’s return to her, it should be necessary to make an offering, not at the grave of Romulus, nor at the shrine of s. Peter, but to the greatest and most famous of her fountains, for it is said, whoever, at the hour of departure, drinks a cup of the water of Trevi and pays for it, has not looked on Rome for the last time. ### 

  

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922, pp. 318-323.