FROM ROME TO TERNI

We left Rome in clear sunset light.  The Alban Hills defined themselves like a cameo of amethyst upon a pale blue distance; and over the Sabine Mountains soared immeasurable moulded domes of alabaster thunderclouds, casting deep shadows, purple and violet, across the slopes of Tivoli.  To westward the whole sky was lucid, like some half-transparent topaz, flooded with slowly yellowing sunbeams.  The Campagna has often been called a garden of wild-flowers.  Just now poppy and aster, gladiolus and thistle, embroider it with patterns infinite and intricate beyond the power of art.  They have already mown the hay in part; and the billowy tracts of greyish green, where no flowers are now in bloom, supply a restful groundwork to those brilliant patches of diapered fioriture.  These are like praying-carpets spread for devotees upon the pavement of a mosque whose roof is heaven.  In the level light the scythes of the mowers flash as we move past.  From their bronzed foreheads the men toss masses of dark curls.  Their muscular flanks and shoulders sway sideways from firm yet pliant reins.  On one hill, fronting the sunset, there stands a herd of some thirty huge grey oxen, feeding and raising their heads to look at us, with just a flush of crimson on their horns and dewlaps.  This is the scale of Mason’s and of Costa’s colouring.  This is the breadth and magnitude of Rome.

Thus, through dells of ilex and oak, yielding now a glimpse of Tiber and S. Peter’s, now opening on a purple section of the distant Sabine Hills, we came to Monte Rotondo.  The sun sank; and from the flames where he had perished, Hesper and the thin moon, very white and keen, grew slowly into sight.  Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying, turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself.  This changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to valley, hill, and lustrous heaven.  There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the clouds are floating.  Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astride upon a sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fiery waves.  The orange deepens into dying red.  The green divides into daffodil and beryl.  The blue above grows fainter, and the moon and stars shine stronger.

Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit for Francia and the early Umbrian painters.  Low hills to right and left; suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of plain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in the mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting water.  The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this scene.  No painting could convey their influences.  Sometimes both luminaries tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river.  Sometimes they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere.  And here and there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuft of shrubs upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallor of the West.  The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey monochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and woods, all floating in aerial twilight.  There is no definition of outline now.  The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcely perceptible pale greenish yellow.

We have passed Stimigliano.  Through the mystery of darkness we hurry past the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni.

THE CASCADES OF TERNI

The Velino is a river of considerable volume which rises in the highest region of the Abruzzi, threads the upland valley of Rieti, and precipitates itself by an artificial channel over cliffs about seven hundred feet in height into the Nera.  The water is densely charged with particles of lime.  This calcareous matter not only tends continually to choke its bed, but clothes the precipices over which the torrent thunders with fantastic drapery of stalactite; and, carried on the wind in foam, incrusts the forests that surround the falls with fine white dust.  These famous cascades are undoubtedly the most sublime and beautiful which Europe boasts; and their situation is worthy of so great a natural wonder.  We reach them through a noble mid-Italian landscape, where the mountain forms are austere and boldly modelled, but the vegetation, both wild and cultivated, has something of the South-Italian richness.  The hillsides are a labyrinth of box and arbutus, with coronilla in golden bloom.  The turf is starred with cyclamens and orchises.  Climbing the staircase paths beside the falls in morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage that command their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might be compared in its effect upon the mind to the impression left by a symphony or a tumultuous lyric.  The turbulence and splendour, the swiftness and resonance, the veiling of the scene in smoke of shattered water-masses, the withdrawal of these veils according as the volume of the river slightly shifted in its fall, the rainbows shimmering on the silver spray, the shivering of poplars hung above impendent precipices, the stationary grandeur of the mountains keeping watch around, the hurry and the incoherence of the cataracts, the immobility of force and changeful changelessness in nature, were all for me the elements of one stupendous poem.  It was like an ode of Shelley translated into symbolism, more vivid through inarticulate appeal to primitive emotion than any words could be.

MONTEFALCO

The rich land of the Clitumnus is divided into meadows by transparent watercourses, gliding with a glassy current over swaying reeds.  Through this we pass, and leave Bevagna to the right, and ascend one of those long gradual roads which climb the hills where all the cities of the Umbrians perch.  The view expands, revealing Spello, Assisi, Perugia on its mountain buttress, and the far reaches northward of the Tiber valley.  Then Trevi and Spoleto came into sight, and the severe hill-country above Gubbio in part disclosed itself.  Over Spoleto the fierce witch-haunted heights of Norcia rose forbidding.  This is the kind of panorama that dilates the soul.  It is so large, so dignified, so beautiful in tranquil form.  The opulent abundance of the plain contrasts with the severity of mountain ranges desolately grand; and the name of each of all those cities thrills the heart with memories.

The main object of a visit to Montefalco is to inspect its many excellent frescoes; painted histories of S. Francis and S. Jerome, by Benozzo Gozzoli; saints, angels, and Scripture episodes by the gentle Tiberio d’Assisi.  Full justice had been done to these, when a little boy, seeing us lingering outside the church of S. Chiara, asked whether we should not like to view the body of the saint.  This privilege could be purchased at the price of a small fee.  It was only necessary to call the guardian of her shrine at the high altar.  Indolent, and in compliant mood, with languid curiosity and half an hour to spare, we assented.  A handsome young man appeared, who conducted us with decent gravity into a little darkened chamber behind the altar.  There he lighted wax tapers, opened sliding doors in what looked like a long coffin, and drew curtains.  Before us in the dim light there lay a woman covered with a black nun’s dress.  Only her hands, and the exquisitely beautiful pale contour of her face (forehead, nose, mouth, and chin, modelled in purest outline, as though the injury of death had never touched her) were visible.  Her closed eyes seemed to sleep.  She had the perfect peace of Luini’s S. Catherine borne by the angels to her grave on Sinai.  I have rarely seen anything which surprised and touched me more.  The religious earnestness of the young custode, the hushed adoration of the country-folk who had silently assembled round us, intensified the sympathy-inspiring beauty of the slumbering girl.  Could Julia, daughter of Claudius, have been fairer than this maiden, when the Lombard workmen found her in her Latin tomb, and brought her to be worshipped on the Capitol?  S. Chiara’s shrine was hung round with her relics; and among these the heart extracted from her body was suspended.  Upon it, apparently wrought into the very substance of the mummied flesh, were impressed a figure of the crucified Christ, the scourge, and the five stigmata.  The guardian’s faith in this miraculous witness to her sainthood, the gentle piety of the men and women who knelt before it, checked all expressions of incredulity.  We abandoned ourselves to the genius of the place; forgot even to ask what Santa Chiara was sleeping here; and withdrew, toned to a not unpleasing melancholy.  The world-famous S. Clair, the spiritual sister of S. Francis, lies in Assisi.  I have often asked myself, Who, then, was this nun?  What history had she?  And I think now of this girl as of a damsel of romance, a Sleeping Beauty in the wood of time, secluded from intrusive elements of fact, and folded in the love and faith of her own simple worshippers.  Among the hollows of Arcadia, how many rustic shrines in ancient days held saints of Hellas, apocryphal, perhaps, like this, but hallowed by tradition and enduring homage!

FOLIGNO

In the landscape of Raphael’s votive picture, known as the Madonna di Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain at the edge of some blue hills.  Allowing for that license as to details which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of subordinate importance, Raphael’s sketch is still true to Foligno.  The place has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth century.  Indeed, relatively to the state of Italy at large, it is still the same as in the days of ancient Rome.  Foligno forms a station of commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great Flaminian Way.  At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into the Umbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the Tiber, and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascent beneath the walls of Spoleto.  An army advancing from the north by the Metaurus and the Furlo Pass must find itself at Foligno; and the level champaign round the city is well adapted to the maintenance and exercises of a garrison.  In the days of the Republic and the Empire, the value of this position was well understood; but Foligno’s importance, as the key to the Flaminian Way, was eclipsed by two flourishing cities in its immediate vicinity, Hispellum and Mevania, the modern Spello and Bevagna.  We might hazard a conjecture that the Lombards, when they ruled the Duchy of Spoleto, following their usual policy of opposing new military centres to the ancient Roman municipia, encouraged Fulginium at the expense of her two neighbours.  But of this there is no certainty to build upon.  All that can be affirmed with accuracy is that in the Middle Ages, while Spello and Bevagna declined into the inferiority of dependent burghs, Foligno grew in power and became the chief commune of this part of Umbria.  It was famous during the last centuries of struggle between the Italian burghers and their native despots, for peculiar ferocity in civil strife.  Some of the bloodiest pages in mediaeval Italian history are those which relate the vicissitudes of the Trinci family, the exhaustion of Foligno by internal discord, and its final submission to the Papal power.  Since railways have been carried from Rome through Narni and Spoleto to Ancona and Perugia, Foligno has gained considerably in commercial and military status.  It is the point of intersection for three lines; the Italian government has made it a great cavalry depot, and there are signs of reviving traffic in its decayed streets.  Whether the presence of a large garrison has already modified the population, or whether we may ascribe something to the absence of Roman municipal institutions in the far past, and to the savagery of the mediaeval period, it is difficult to say.  Yet the impression left by Foligno upon the mind is different from that of Assisi, Spello, and Montefalco, which are distinguished for a certain grace and gentleness in their inhabitants.

My window in the city wall looks southward across the plain to Spoleto, with Montefalco perched aloft upon the right, and Trevi on its mountain-bracket to the left.  From the topmost peaks of the Sabine Apennines, gradual tender sloping lines descend to find their quiet in the valley of Clitumnus.  The space between me and that distance is infinitely rich with every sort of greenery, dotted here and there with towers and relics of baronial houses.  The little town is in commotion; for the working men of Foligno and its neighbourhood have resolved to spend their earnings on a splendid festa - horse-races, and two nights of fireworks.  The acacias and paulownias on the ramparts are in full bloom of creamy white and lilac.  In the glare of Bengal lights these trees, with all their pendulous blossoms, surpassed the most fantastic of artificial decorations.  The rockets sent aloft into the sky amid that solemn Umbrian landscape were nowise out of harmony with nature.  I never sympathised with critics who resent the intrusion of fireworks upon scenes of natural beauty.  The Giessbach, lighted up at so much per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and a crowd of cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle.  But where, as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself a festival, where there are multitudes of citizens and soldiers and country-people slowly moving and gravely admiring, with the decency and order characteristic of an Italian crowd, I have nothing but a sense of satisfaction.

It is sometimes the traveller’s good fortune in some remote place to meet with an inhabitant who incarnates and interprets for him the genius loci as he has conceived it.  Though his own subjectivity will assuredly play a considerable part in such an encounter, transferring to his chance acquaintance qualities he may not possess, and connecting this personality in some purely imaginative manner with thoughts derived from study, or impressions made by nature; yet the stranger will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the central figure in a composition which derives from him its vividness.  Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to the creation of a picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself no knowledge.  On one of these nights I had been threading the aisles of acacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the Bengal lights kept changing.  My mind instinctively went back to scenes of treachery and bloodshed in the olden time, when Gorrado Trinci paraded the mangled remnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on mule-back, through Foligno, for a warning to the citizens.  As the procession moved along the ramparts, I found myself in contest with a young man, who readily fell into conversation.  He was very tall, with enormous breadth of shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo’s favourite models.  His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair.  Low forehead, and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely bright fierce eyes.  The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a statue of Hadrian’s age.  The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate above a firm round chin.  He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers, and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a peasant’s slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed panther.  He told me that he was just about to join a cavalry regiment; and I could well imagine, when military dignity was added to that gait, how grandly he would go.  This young man, of whom I heard nothing more after our half-hour’s conversation among the crackling fireworks and roaring cannon, left upon my mind an indescribable impression of dangerousness - of ’something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst forth.’  Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the fifteenth century.  Gattamelata, who began life as a baker’s boy at Narni and ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in Padua, was of this breed.  Like this were the Trinci and their bands of murderers.  Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at Venice.  Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being ‘perfettamente tristo.’  Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason; how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her into servitude!  Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and with a nobler national ideal, for the formation of heroic armies.  Of such stuff, doubtless, were the Roman legionaries.  When will the Italians learn to use these men as Fabius or as Cæsar, not as the Vitelli and the Trinci used them?  In such meditations, deeply stirred by the meeting of my own reflections with one who seemed to represent for me in life and blood the spirit of the place which had provoked them, I said farewell to Cavallucci, and returned to my bedroom on the city wall.  The last rockets had whizzed and the last cannons had thundered ere I fell asleep.

SPELLO

Spello contains some not inconsiderable antiquities - the remains of a Roman theatre, a Roman gate with the heads of two men and a woman leaning over it, and some fragments of Roman sculpture scattered through its buildings.  The churches, especially those of S.M.  Maggiore and S. Francesco, are worth a visit for the sake of Pinturicchio.  Nowhere, except in the Piccolomini Library at Siena, can that master’s work in fresco be better studied than here.  The satisfaction with which he executed the wall paintings in S. Maria Maggiore is testified by his own portrait introduced upon a panel in the decoration of the Virgin’s chamber.  The scrupulously rendered details of books, chairs, window seats, &c., which he here has copied, remind one of Carpaccio’s study of S. Benedict at Venice.  It is all sweet, tender, delicate, and carefully finished; but without depth, not even the depth of Perugino’s feeling.  In S. Francesco, Pinturicchio, with the same meticulous refinement, painted a letter addressed to him by Gentile Baglioni.  It lies on a stool before Madonna and her court of saints.  Nicety of execution, technical mastery of fresco as a medium for Dutch detail-painting, prettiness of composition, and cheerfulness of colouring, are noticeable throughout his work here rather than either thought or sentiment.  S. Maria Maggiore can boast a fresco of Madonna between a young episcopal saint and Catherine of Alexandria from the hand of Perugino.  The rich yellow harmony of its tones, and the graceful dignity of its emotion, conveyed no less by a certain Raphaelesque pose and outline than by suavity of facial expression, enable us to measure the distance between this painter and his quasi-pupil Pinturicchio.

We did not, however, drive to Spello to inspect either Roman antiquities or frescoes, but to see an inscription on the city walls about Orlando.  It is a rude Latin elegiac couplet, saying that, ’from the sign below, men may conjecture the mighty members of Roland, nephew of Charles; his deeds are written in history.’  Three agreeable old gentlemen of Spello, who attended us with much politeness, and were greatly interested in my researches, pointed out a mark waist-high upon the wall, where Orlando’s knee is reported to have reached.  But I could not learn anything about a phallic monolith, which is said by Guerin or Panizzi to have been identified with the Roland myth at Spello.  Such a column either never existed here, or had been removed before the memory of the present generation.

EASTER MORNING AT ASSISI

We are in the lower church of S. Francesco.  High mass is being sung, with orchestra and organ and a choir of many voices.  Candles are lighted on the altar, over-canopied with Giotto’s allegories.  From the low southern windows slants the sun, in narrow bands, upon the many-coloured gloom and embrowned glory of these painted aisles.  Women in bright kerchiefs kneel upon the stones, and shaggy men from the mountains stand or lean against the wooden benches.  There is no moving from point to point.  Where we have taken our station, at the north-western angle of the transept, there we stay till mass be over.  The whole low-vaulted building glows duskily; the frescoed roof, the stained windows, the figure-crowded pavements blending their rich but subdued colours, like hues upon some marvellous moth’s wings, or like a deep-toned rainbow mist discerned in twilight dreams, or like such tapestry as Eastern queens, in ancient days, wrought for the pavilion of an empress.  Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces - ineffably pure - adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth.  Men and women of whom the world was not worthy - at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret.  Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco.  Over the whole scene - in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on the people, in the incense, from the chiming bells, through the music - broods one spirit:  the spirit of him who was ’the co-espoused, co-transforate with Christ;’ the ardent, the radiant, the beautiful in soul; the suffering, the strong, the simple, the victorious over self and sin; the celestial who trampled upon earth and rose on wings of ecstasy to heaven; the Christ-inebriated saint of visions supersensual and life beyond the grave.  Far down below the feet of those who worship God through him, S. Francis sleeps; but his soul, the incorruptible part of him, the message he gave the world, is in the spaces round us.  This is his temple.  He fills it like an unseen god.  Not as Phoebus or Athene, from their marble pedestals; but as an abiding spirit, felt everywhere, nowhere seized, absorbing in itself all mysteries, all myths, all burning exaltations, all abasements, all love, self-sacrifice, pain, yearning, which the thought of Christ, sweeping the centuries, hath wrought for men.  Let, therefore, choir and congregation raise their voices on the tide of prayers and praises; for this is Easter morning - Christ is risen!  Our sister, Death of the Body, for whom S. Francis thanked God in his hymn, is reconciled to us this day, and takes us by the hand, and leads us to the gate whence floods of heavenly glory issue from the faces of a multitude of saints.  Pray, ye poor people; chant and pray.  If all be but a dream, to wake from this were loss for you indeed!

PERUSIA AUGUSTA

The piazza in front of the Prefettura is my favourite resort on these nights of full moon.  The evening twilight is made up partly of sunset fading over Thrasymene and Tuscany; partly of moonrise from the mountains of Gubbio and the passes toward Ancona.  The hills are capped with snow, although the season is so forward.  Below our parapets the bulk of S. Domenico, with its gaunt perforated tower, and the finer group of S. Pietro, flaunting the arrowy ‘Pennacchio di Perugia,’ jut out upon the spine of hill which dominates the valley of the Tiber.  As the night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky, these buildings seem to form the sombre foreground to some French etching.  Beyond them spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria.  Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements.  Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain.  The slowly moving population - women in veils, men winter-mantled - pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky.  Bells ring.  The bugles of the soldiers blow retreat in convents turned to barracks.  Young men roam the streets beneath, singing May songs.  Far, far away upon the plain, red through the vitreous moonlight ringed with thundery gauze, fires of unnamed castelli smoulder.  As we lean from ledges eighty feet in height, gas vies with moon in chequering illuminations on the ancient walls; Etruscan mouldings, Roman letters, high-piled hovels, suburban world-old dwellings plastered like martíns’ nests against the masonry.

Sunlight adds more of detail to this scene.  To the right of Subasio, where the passes go from Foligno towards Urbino and Ancona, heavy masses of thundercloud hang every day; but the plain and hill-buttresses are clear in transparent blueness.  First comes Assisi, with S.M. degli Angeli below; then Spello; then Foligno; then Trevi; and, far away, Spoleto; with, reared against those misty battlements, the village height of Montefalco - the ‘ringhierà dell’ Umbria,’ as they call it in this country.  By daylight, the snow on yonder peaks is clearly visible, where the Monti della Sibilla tower up above the sources of the Nera and Velino from frigid wastes of Norcia.  The lower ranges seem as though painted, in films of airiest and palest azure, upon china; and then comes the broad green champaign, flecked with villages and farms.  Just at the basement of Perugia winds Tiber, through sallows and grey poplar-trees, spanned by ancient arches of red brick, and guarded here and there by castellated towers.  The mills beneath their dams and weirs are just as Raphael drew them; and the feeling of air and space reminds one, on each coign of vantage, of some Umbrian picture.  Every hedgerow is hoary with May-bloom and honeysuckle.  The oaks hang out their golden-dusted tassels.  Wayside shrines are decked with laburnum boughs and iris blossoms plucked from the copse-woods, where spires of purple and pink orchis variegate the thin, fine grass.  The land waves far and wide with young corn, emerald green beneath the olive-trees, which take upon their under-foliage tints reflected from this verdure or red tones from the naked earth.  A fine race of contadini, with large, heroically graceful forms, and beautiful dark eyes and noble faces, move about this garden, intent on ancient, easy tillage of the kind Saturnian soil.

LA MAGIONE

On the road from Perugia to Cortona, the first stage ends at La Magione, a high hill-village commanding the passage from the Umbrian champaign to the lake of Thrasymene.

It has a grim square fortalice above it, now in ruins, and a stately castle to the south-east, built about the time of Braccio.  Here took place that famous diet of Cesare Borgia’s enemies, when the son of Alexander VI. was threatening Bologna with his arms, and bidding fair to make himself supreme tyrant of Italy in 1502.  It was the policy of Cesare to fortify himself by reducing the fiefs of the Church to submission, and by rooting out the dynasties which had acquired a sort of tyranny in Papal cities.  The Varani of Camerino and the Manfredi of Faenza had been already extirpated.  There was only too good reason to believe that the turn of the Vitelli at Città di Castello, of the Baglioni at Perugia, and of the Bentivogli at Bologna would come next.  Pandolfo Petrucci at Siena, surrounded on all sides by Cesare’s conquests, and specially menaced by the fortification of Piombino, felt himself in danger.  The great house of the Orsini, who swayed a large part of the Patrimony of S. Peter’s, and were closely allied to the Vitelli, had even graver cause for anxiety.  But such was the system of Italian warfare, that nearly all these noble families lived by the profession of arms, and most of them were in the pay of Cesare.  When, therefore, the conspirators met at La Magione, they were plotting against a man whose money they had taken, and whom they had hitherto aided in his career of fraud and spoliation.

The diet consisted of the Cardinal Orsini, an avowed antagonist of Alexander VI.; his brother Paolo, the chieftain of the clan; Vitellozzo Vitelli, lord of Città di Castello; Gian-Paolo Baglioni, made undisputed master of Perugia by the recent failure of his cousin Grifonetto’s treason; Oliverotto, who had just acquired the March of Fermo by the murder of his uncle Giovanni da Fogliani; Ermes Bentivoglio, the heir of Bologna; and Antonio da Venafro, the secretary of Pandolfo Petrueci.  These men vowed hostility on the basis of common injuries and common fear against the Borgia.  But they were for the most part stained themselves with crime, and dared not trust each other, and could not gain the confidence of any respectable power in Italy except the exiled Duke of Urbino.  Procrastination was the first weapon used by the wily Cesare, who trusted that time would sow among his rebel captains suspicion and dissension.  He next made overtures to the leaders separately, and so far succeeded in his perfidious policy as to draw Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Paolo Orsini, and Francesco Orsini, Duke of Gravina, into his nets at Sinigaglia.  Under pretext of fair conference and equitable settlement of disputed claims, he possessed himself of their persons, and had them strangled - two upon December 31, and two upon January 18, 1503.  Of all Cesare’s actions, this was the most splendid for its successful combination of sagacity and policy in the hour of peril, of persuasive diplomacy, and of ruthless decision when the time to strike his blow arrived.

CORTONA

After leaving La Magione, the road descends upon the lake of Thrasymene through oak-woods full of nightingales.  The lake lay basking, leaden-coloured, smooth and waveless, under a misty, rain-charged, sun-irradiated sky.  At Passignano, close beside its shore, we stopped for mid-day.  This is a little fishing village of very poor people, who live entirely by labour on the waters.  They showed us huge eels coiled in tanks, and some fine specimens of the silver carp - Reina del Lago.  It was off one of the eels that we made our lunch; and taken, as he was, alive from his cool lodging, he furnished a series of dishes fit for a king.

Climbing the hill of Cortona seemed a quite interminable business.  It poured a deluge.  Our horses were tired, and one lean donkey, who, after much trouble, was produced from a farmhouse and yoked in front of them, rendered but little assistance.

Next day we duly saw the Muse and Lamp in the Museo, the Fra Angelicos, and all the Signorellis.  One cannot help thinking that too much fuss is made nowadays about works of art - running after them for their own sakes, exaggerating their importance, and detaching them as objects of study, instead of taking them with sympathy and carelessness as pleasant or instructive adjuncts to our actual life.  Artists, historians of art, and critics are forced to isolate pictures; and it is of profit to their souls to do so.  But simple folk, who have no aesthetic vocation, whether creative or critical, suffer more than is good for them by compliance with mere fashion.  Sooner or later we shall return to the spirit of the ages which produced these pictures, and which regarded them with less of an industrious bewilderment than they evoke at present.

I am far indeed from wishing to decry art, the study of art, or the benefits to be derived from its intelligent enjoyment.  I only mean to suggest that we go the wrong way to work at present in this matter.  Picture and sculpture galleries accustom us to the separation of art from life.  Our methods of studying art, making a beginning of art-study while traveling, tend to perpetuate this separation.  It is only on reflection, after long experience, that we come to perceive that the most fruitful moments in our art education have been casual and unsought, in quaint nooks and unexpected places, where nature, art, and life are happily blent.

The Palace of the Commune at Cortona is interesting because of the shields of Florentine governors, sculptured on blocks of grey stone, and inserted in its outer walls - Peruzzi, Albizzi, Strozzi, Salviati, among the more ancient - de’ Medici at a later epoch.  The revolutions in the Republic of Florence may be read by a herald from these coats-of-arms and the dates beneath them.

The landscape of this Tuscan highland satisfies me more and more with sense of breadth and beauty.  From S. Margherita above the town the prospect is immense and wonderful and wild - up into those brown, forbidding mountains; down to the vast plain; and over to the cities of Chiusi, Montepulciano, and Foiano.  The jewel of the view is Trasimeno, a silvery shield encased with serried hills, and set upon one corner of the scene, like a precious thing apart and meant for separate contemplation.  There is something in the singularity and circumscribed completeness of the mountain-girded lake, diminished by distance, which would have attracted Lionardo da Vinci’s pencil, had he seen it.

Cortona seems desperately poor, and the beggars are intolerable.  One little blind boy, led by his brother, both frightfully ugly and ragged urchins, pursued us all over the city, incessantly whining ’Signore Padrone!’ It was only on the threshold of the inn that I ventured to give them a few coppers, for I knew well that any public beneficence would raise the whole swarm of the begging population round us.  Sitting later in the day upon the piazza of S. Domenico, I saw the same blind boy taken by his brother to play.  The game consists, in the little creature throwing his arms about the trunk of a big tree, and running round and round it, clasping it.  This seemed to make him quite inexpressibly happy.  His face lit up and beamed with that inner beatitude blind people show - a kind of rapture shining over it, as though nothing could be more altogether delightful.  This little boy had the smallpox at eight months, and has never been able to see since.  He looks sturdy, and may live to be of any age - doomed always, is that possible, to beg?

CHIUSI

What more enjoyable dinner can be imagined than a flask of excellent Montepulciano, a well-cooked steak, and a little goat’s cheese in the inn of the Leone d’Oro at Chiusi?  The windows are open, and the sun is setting.  Monte Cetona bounds the view to the right, and the wooded hills of Città della Pieve to the left.  The deep green dimpled valley goes stretching away toward Orvieto; and at its end a purple mountain mass, distinct and solitary, which may peradventure be Soracte!  The near country is broken into undulating hills, forested with fine olives and oaks; and the composition of the landscape, with its crowning villages, is worthy of a background to an Umbrian picture.  The breadth and depth and quiet which those painters loved, the space of lucid sky, the suggestion of winding waters in verdant fields, all are here.  The evening is beautiful - golden light streaming softly from behind us on this prospect, and gradually mellowing to violet and blue with stars above.

At Chiusi we visited several Etruscan tombs, and saw their red and black scrawled pictures.  One of the sepulchres was a well-jointed vault of stone with no wall-paintings.  The rest had been scooped out of the living tufa.  This was the excuse for some pleasant hours spent in walking and driving through the country.  Chiusi means for me the mingling of grey olives and green oaks in limpid sunlight; deep leafy lanes; warm sandstone banks; copses with nightingales and cyclamens and cuckoos; glimpses of a silvery lake; blue shadowy distances; the bristling ridge of Monte Cetona; the conical towers, Becca di Questo and Becca di Quello, over against each other on the borders; ways winding among hedgerows like some bit of England in June, but not so full of flowers.  It means all this, I fear, for me far more than theories about Lars Porsenna and Etruscan ethnology.

GUBBIO

Gubbio ranks among the most ancient of Italian hill-towns.  With its back set firm against the spine of central Apennines, and piled, house over house, upon the rising slope, it commands a rich tract of upland champaign, bounded southward toward Perugia and Foligno by peaked and rolling ridges.  This amphitheatre, which forms its source of wealth and independence, is admirably protected by a chain of natural defences; and Gubbio wears a singularly old-world aspect of antiquity and isolation.  Houses climb right to the crests of gaunt bare peaks; and the brown mediaeval walls with square towers which protected them upon the mountain side, following the inequalities of the ground, are still a marked feature in the landscape.  It is a town of steep streets and staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn across the lowland.  One of these views might be selected for especial notice.  In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as they straggle by the roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds.  All this enclosed by the heavy archway of the Porta Romana, where sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tones of a dim fresco, indistinct with age, but beautiful.

Gubbio has not greatly altered since the middle ages.  But poor people are now living in the palaces of noblemen and merchants.  These new inhabitants have walled up the fair arched windows and slender portals of the ancient dwellers, spoiling the beauty of the streets without materially changing the architectural masses.  In that witching hour when the Italian sunset has faded, and a solemn grey replaces the glowing tones of daffodil and rose, it is not difficult, here dreaming by oneself alone, to picture the old noble life - the ladies moving along those open loggias, the young men in plumed caps and curling hair with one foot on those doorsteps, the knights in armour and the sumpter mules and red-robed Cardinals defiling through those gates into the courts within.  The modern bricks and mortar with which that picturesque scene has been overlaid, the ugly oblong windows and bright green shutters which now interrupt the flowing lines of arch and gallery; these disappear beneath the fine remembered touch of a sonnet sung by Folgore, when still the Parties had their day, and this deserted city was the centre of great aims and throbbing aspirations.

The names of the chief buildings in Gubbio are strongly suggestive of the middle ages.  They abut upon a Piazza de’ Signori.  One of them, the Palazzo del Municipio, is a shapeless unfinished block of masonry.  It is here that the Eugubine tables, plates of brass with Umbrian and Roman incised characters, are shown.  The Palazzo de’ Consoli has higher architectural qualities, and is indeed unique among Italian palaces for the combination of massiveness with lightness in a situation of unprecedented boldness.  Rising from enormous substructures mortised into the solid hillside, it rears its vast rectangular bulk to a giddy height above the town; airy loggias imposed on great forbidding masses of brown stone, shooting aloft into a light aerial tower.  The empty halls inside are of fair proportions and a noble size, and the views from the open colonnades in all directions fascinate.  But the final impression made by the building is one of square, tranquil, massive strength - perpetuity embodied in masonry - force suggesting facility by daring and successful addition of elegance to hugeness.  Vast as it is, this pile is not forbidding, as a similarly weighty structure in the North would be.  The fine quality of the stone and the delicate though simple mouldings of the windows give it an Italian grace.

These public palaces belong to the age of the Communes, when Gubbio was a free town, with a policy of its own, and an important part to play in the internecine struggles of Pope and Empire, Guelf and Ghibelline.  The ruined, deserted, degraded Palazzo Ducale reminds us of the advent of the despots.  It has been stripped of all its tarsia-work and sculpture.  Only here and there a Fe.D., with the cupping-glass of Federigo di Montefeltro, remains to show that Gubbio once became the fairest fief of the Urbino duchy.  S. Ubaldo, who gave his name to this duke’s son, was the patron of Gubbio, and to him the cathedral is dedicated - one low enormous vault, like a cellar or feudal banqueting hall, roofed with a succession of solid Gothic arches.  This strange old church, and the House of Canons, buttressed on the hill beside it, have suffered less from modernisation than most buildings in Gubbio.  The latter, in particular, helps one to understand what this city of grave palazzi must have been, and how the mere opening of old doors and windows would restore it to its primitive appearance.  The House of the Canons has, in fact, not yet been given over to the use of middle-class and proletariate.

At the end of a day in Gubbio, it is pleasant to take our ease in the primitive hostelry, at the back of which foams a mountain-torrent, rushing downward from the Apennines.  The Gubbio wine is very fragrant, and of a rich ruby colour.  Those to whom the tints of wine and jewels give a pleasure not entirely childish, will take delight in its specific blending of tawny hues with rose.  They serve the table still, at Gubbio, after the antique Italian fashion, covering it with a cream-coloured linen cloth bordered with coarse lace - the creases of the press, the scent of old herbs from the wardrobe, are still upon it - and the board is set with shallow dishes of warm, white earthenware, basket-worked in open lattice at the edge, which contain little separate messes of meat, vegetables, cheese, and comfits.  The wine stands in strange, slender phials of smooth glass, with stoppers; and the amber-coloured bread lies in fair round loaves upon the cloth.  Dining thus is like sitting down to the supper at Emmaus, in some picture of Gian Bellini or of Masolino.  The very bareness of the room - its open rafters, plastered walls, primitive settees, and red-brick floor, on which a dog sits waiting for a bone - enhances the impression of artistic delicacy in the table.

FROM GUBBIO TO FANO

The road from Gubbio, immediately after leaving the city, enters a narrow Alpine ravine, where a thin stream dashes over dark, red rocks, and pendent saxifrages wave to the winds.  The carriage in which we travelled at the end of May, one morning, had two horses, which our driver soon supplemented with a couple of white oxen.  Slowly and toilsomely we ascended between the flanks of barren hills - gaunt masses of crimson and grey crag, clothed at their summits with short turf and scanty pasture.  The pass leads first to the little town of Scheggia, and is called the Monte Calvo, or bald mountain.  At Scheggia, it joins the great Flaminian Way, or North road of the Roman armies.  At the top there is a fine view over the conical hills that dominate Gubbio, and, far away, to noble mountains above the Furlo and the Foligno line of railway to Ancona.  Range rises over range, crossing at unexpected angles, breaking into sudden precipices, and stretching out long, exquisitely modelled outlines, as only Apennines can do, in silvery sobriety of colours toned by clearest air.  Every square piece of this austere, wild landscape forms a varied picture, whereof the composition is due to subtle arrangements of lines always delicate; and these lines seem somehow to have been determined in their beauty by the vast antiquity of the mountain system, as though they all had taken time to choose their place and wear down into harmony.  The effect of tempered sadness was heightened for us by stormy lights and dun clouds, high in air, rolling vapours and flying shadows, over all the prospect, tinted in ethereal grisaille.

After Scheggia, one enters a land of meadow and oak-trees.  This is the sacred central tract of Jupiter Apenninus, whose fane -

        Delubra Jovis saxoque minantes
  Apenninigenis cultae pastoribus arae

Some miles beyond Cagli, the real pass of the Furlo begins.  It owes its name to a narrow tunnel bored by Vespasian in the solid rock, where limestone crags descend on the Barano.  The Romans called this gallery Petra Pertusa, or Intercisa, or more familiarly Forulus, whence comes the modern name.  Indeed, the stations on the old Flaminian Way are still well marked by Latin designations; for Cagli is the ancient Calles, and Fossombrone is Forum Sempronii, and Fano the Fanum Fortunae.  Vespasian commemorated this early achievement in engineering by an inscription carved on the living stone, which still remains; and Claudian, when he sang the journey of his Emperor Honorius from Rimini to Rome, speaks thus of what was even then an object of astonishment to travellers: -

  Laetior hinc fano recipit fortuna vetusto,
  Despiciturque vagus praerupta valle Metaurus,
  Qua mons arte patens vivo se perforat arcu
  Admittitque viam sectae per viscera rupis.

The Forulus itself may now be matched, on any Alpine pass, by several tunnels of far mightier dimensions; for it is narrow, and does not extend more than 126 feet in length.  But it occupies a fine position at the end of a really imposing ravine.  The whole Furlo Pass might, without too much exaggeration, be described as a kind of Cheddar on the scale of the Via Mala.  The limestone rocks, which rise on either hand above the gorge to an enormous height, are noble in form and solemn, like a succession of gigantic portals, with stupendous flanking obelisks and pyramids.  Some of these crag-masses rival the fantastic cliffs of Capri, and all consist of that southern mountain limestone which changes from pale yellow to blue grey and dusky orange.  A river roars precipitately through the pass, and the roadsides wave with many sorts of campánulas - a profusion of azure and purple bells upon the hard white stone.  Of Roman remains there is still enough (in the way of Roman bridges and bits of broken masonry) to please an antiquary’s eye.  But the lover of nature will dwell chiefly on the picturesque qualities of this historic gorge, so alien to the general character of Italian scenery, and yet so remote from anything to which Swiss travelling accustoms one.

The Furlo breaks out into a richer land of mighty oaks and waving cornfields, a fat pastoral country, not unlike Devonshire in detail, with green uplands, and wild-rose tangled hedgerows, and much running water, and abundance of summer flowers.  At a point above Fossombrone, the Barano joins the Metauro, and here one has a glimpse of faraway Urbino, high upon its mountain eyrie.  It is so rare, in spite of immemorial belief, to find in Italy a wilderness of wild flowers, that I feel inclined to make a list of those I saw from our carriage windows as we rolled down lazily along the road to Fossombrone.  Broom, and cytisus, and hawthorn mingled with roses, gladiolus, and sainfoin.  There were orchises, and clematis, and privet, and wild-vine, vetches of all hues, red poppies, sky-blue cornflowers, and lilac pimpernel.  In the rougher hedges, dogwood, honeysuckle, pyracanth, and acacia made a network of white bloom and blushes.  Milk-worts of all bright and tender tints combined with borage, iris, hawkweeds, harebells, crimson clover, thyme, red snap-dragon, golden asters, and dreamy love-in-a-mist, to weave a marvellous carpet such as the looms of Shiraz or of Cashmere never spread.  Rarely have I gazed on Flora in such riot, such luxuriance, such self-abandonment to joy.  The air was filled with fragrances.  Songs of cuckoos and nightingales echoed from the copses on the hillsides.  The sun was out, and dancing over all the landscape.

After all this, Fano was very restful in the quiet sunset.  It has a sandy stretch of shore, on which the long, green-yellow rollers of the Adriatic broke into creamy foam, beneath the waning saffron light over Pesaro and the rosy rising of a full moon.  This Adriatic sea carries an English mind home to many a little watering-place upon our coast.  In colour and the shape of waves it resembles our Channel.

The sea-shore is Fano’s great attraction; but the town has many churches, and some creditable pictures, as well as Roman antiquities.  Giovanni Santi may here be seen almost as well as at Cagli; and of Perugino there is one truly magnificent altar-piece - lunette, great centre panel, and predella - dusty in its present condition, but splendidly painted, and happily not yet restored or cleaned.  It is worth journeying to Fano to see this.  Still better would the journey be worth the traveller’s while if he could be sure to witness such a game of Pallone as we chanced upon in the Via dell’ Arco di Augusto - lads and grown-men, tightly girt, in shirt sleeves, driving the great ball aloft into the air with cunning bias and calculation of projecting house-eaves.  I do not understand the game; but it was clearly played something after the manner of our football, that is to say; with sides, and front and back players so arranged as to cover the greatest number of angles of incidence on either wall.

Fano still remembers that it is the Fane of Fortune.  On the fountain in the market-place stands a bronze Fortuna, slim and airy, offering her veil to catch the wind.  May she long shower health and prosperity upon the modern watering-place of which she is the patron saint!