ASSISI

ASSISIAlmost the first thing we noticed in Assisi was the Biblical simplicity of life. This little city, rose and white, upon the lower slopes of Subasio would be like a picture out of the Bible if it were not so Gothic. Its steep and rough-paved streets have grasses growing in between their stones; its grim and silent houses, built of Subasian rock, are as unresponsive as the East; at their barred gates stand mules and asses tethered, with clumsy wooden saddles on their backs, or sacks of grain thrown pannier-wise. It is not only Francis and his companions that you might see walking in this poor and humble town, but Jesus of Nazareth.For Assisi still wears the thread-bare garment of her poverty, notwithstanding the great basilica on the hillside, which is rich out of all comparison with the poor little city of St. Francis. Long, long ago in the thirteenth century she dedicated her life to him, giving up her worldly vanities and espousing Lady Poverty, 'that Dame to whom none openeth pleasure's gate.' So that the story of the splendid young men of Assisi, whose magnificent equipages drew the eyes ofRome in the seventeenth century, comes as an echo of another place. I think she loved him from the first, when he was still gay Cecco of the midnight revels, Lord of Love, the boon companion of her merry youths. She listened to his songs—the soft Provençal songs which he had learnt from the lips of Madonna Pica, his mother—and smiled at his caprices, pleading his youth when others shook their heads. Later, when the world made a jest of the penitent, and his friends scorned him, and the hand of the people was against him, she wept for him, and gazed with wistful eyes down to the valleys where he ministered to her outcasts, and garnered in his soul that Peace of the Lord which passeth all understanding. She is like the bride of whom the poet of the Israelites sang, looking and listening for the voice of her beloved.'The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.My beloved is like the roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice.My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.'But if there had been no Saint Francis to raiseher to the foremost rank of shrines, and sanctify her with a special crown of holiness, Assisi would still be one of the most lovely cities in the garden of Umbria. She has grown like a fair white flower upon the brown slope of Monte Subasio, whose shoulder is a bulwark between the ragged Appennines and the soft valleys of Umbria.It is a sudden revelation, as though the landscape foreshadowed the history of Assisi, to stand on the windy height of her Rocca, and first to look down on the rolling Umbrian hills, clothed with the tender green of vines and olives, which have gentle streams meandering at their feet, and then to turn to the eastern slope of Subasio and see the brown and barren mountains ravening away to the horizon, like an angry sea, now towering into broken peaks, now falling back with steep, scarred sides, red as wounds where the ruddy limestone has been torn from them. On the one hand there is that Peace of God which St. Francis scattered through the turbulent thirteenth century, and which has lingered in the grass-grown streets of his native city; and, on the other, the bloody wars and revolutions which racked Assisi from the day that Rome first put its yoke upon her, to the sixteenth century, when she surrendered a second time to the Imperial city, and yielded up her keys to PaulIII.For her history is one long tale of disasters. She fell a victim to so many conquerors—Totila, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and thecondottieri of her enemy Perugia—Biordo Michelotti, Braccio Fortebraccio, and Niccolò Piccinino. And from the sack of the terrible little man, Niccolò, Assisi never recovered: to this day there is a spacious olive-garden between the Rocca and the town itself, on which the disheartened Assisans had not the spirit to rebuild their ravished homes.Assisi is full of forgotten charms. No other city in Umbria, except proud Spoleto, can boast as many traces of her Roman greatness. Though her amphitheatre has vanished underground, its lines are clearly preserved by the houses which are built above it; there is a wonderful Roman cistern below the cathedral; there are fragments of a theatre, and a drain of excellent masonry in the Canon's garden; and in the Piazza Vittore Emanuele is the exquisite portico of the Temple of Minerva, which, legend says, was built by Dardanus of Troy. Be that as it may, this temple of the Goddess of Wisdom, which was long ago dedicated to the Mother of Christ, and on whose steps St. Francis often stood to preach, is one of the most perfect Roman temple-façades extant, notwithstanding the mass of mediaeval buildings which crowd in upon it, or the foreshortening of its pronaos, half sunk below the pavement of the piazza.It would be difficult to find a more completely Gothic place than Assisi. Except for the great hotels near San Francesco, the sixteenth-century church ofSanta Maria degli Angeli, and the palaces of the Via Superba, in which the spendthrift nobles of the seventeenth century entertained Queen Christina of Sweden, there is hardly anything in Assisi that is not of the Gothic age. If all the bricked-up loggias and windows of Assisi were opened out, she would look like a city frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli.And she has many treasures which the hurried traveller does not dream of. Who, for instance, ever remembers the ancient cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Bishop's Palace, where Saint Francis renounced his earthly heritage; or climbs the hill to see the cathedral of San Rufino, with its wonderful Romanesque façade, mystic with strange carvings, and its font in which not only Francis, but the great Emperor FrederickII., was baptized? How many people have lingered to look at the little loggia of the Comacine masters at the foot of one of the stair-streets of Assisi, which seem to have been created by the imagination of Albrecht Dürer? Or the sunken loggia of the Monte Frumentario, one of the most ancient municipal buildings in Assisi, which still carries on its original business and makes loans of money and seed to the peasantry, so that they shall not be ruined in the lean years of agriculture? How many have seen the little Chapel of the Pilgrims, founded by the Confraternity of St. Anthony in honour of their saint as a hospice for poor pilgrims, though it is frescoed by Matteo de Gualdo and Mesastris of Foligno?199A Street in Assisi.There are few even who have visited the minor relics of St. Francis,—the Carcere; the cell in the garden of San Rufino in which the Miracle of the Fiery Chariot took place; the little parish church of San Giorgio; and the chapels scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed.It is San Francesco which most people come to see; San Francesco, one of the most inspired Gothic buildings in Italy, made sacrosanct with the body of Francis, illuminated with all that Tuscany could yield of art in the far-back thirteenth century. So all those dreams of poverty and humility which were the moving spirit of the Early Companions have come to naught. It avails nothing that when the hand of death lay heavy upon Francis, he yielded up even the coarse rough robe, his last possession, and but for his hair-shirt lay naked upon the ground, until a brother covered him with another garment, given 'as to one who has made himself poor for the love of God.' Nor does his humility count for anything, for though his petition to be buried on the Collis Inferni among the criminals and malefactors was granted, he was not given the humble grave he sought; and it is probable that Pope Gregory, who changed the name of the hill from that day to Collis Paradisi, only yielded to the saint's request because there was no other spot near the city walls suitable for the huge monument which he and Brother Elias were preparing to build.There is a story that the irresponsible Leo, the constant friend and companion of Francis, whom he so lovingly called 'the little sheep of God,' broke the porphyry vase for alms and collections which Brother Elias placed outside the church that all might contribute to its building. But it needed more than the simple Leo's protest to stem the flood of innovations which the ambitious Vicar-General was introducing into the Order. Even in his life-time St. Francis could not hold it back. Who, knowing the pathetic story of his home-coming from the East, and his disappointment at seeing the sumptuous Convent of the Brothers Minor in Bologna, can think that this splendid basilica does not weigh heavily upon the bones of the little poor man of Assisi? But it was inevitable. He had more to combat than the ambitions of individuals; there was the papacy to reckon with, the luxurious and effete Court of Rome, which saw well enough the moral of the Rule of Francis, but had no mind to make a bride of Poverty.'Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes nor yet staves. And, as ye go, preach, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Thus, literally, did Francis, the splendid Idealist of the Middle Ages, whose faith in human nature was second only to his faith in God, follow the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Only once in a hundred ages does sucha star arise in the East to illumine the darkness of the world and oppose the primeval laws of disaster. We know how much he achieved, what a vista of purity and love he opened to the thirteenth century, and how signally even this fervent age failed to respond to the voice of the Herald of God who preached repentance, and sang the praises of his Maker through the sunlit fields and gardens of Italy. So that there is much pathos in this mighty temple on the western rock of Assisi, which is the mausoleum of all the beautiful impracticable dreams of Francis as well as the shrine on which devotion, art and wealth have lavished every resource to make it a worthy resting-place for the Messiah of the Middle Ages.It was the hour of sunset when we first climbed up the slope of Monte Subasio, and Assisi and her great church were rose-red, as though they glowed with inward fires. We left our vettura at the city gates, telling the driver to take our luggage to the inn, and we ourselves turned up the hill to San Francesco. As we approached it through the long arcades of the lower piazza the great golden church with its towers and gables, its buttressed sides, its jewelled windows and gracious portico, and the noble steps which lead up to the Chiesa Superiore, had something of the eternal beauty of St. Mark's at Venice.We passed through a group of the clamorous beggars who besiege the pilgrim at the door of San Francesco,like a canker at the heart of a perfect fruit, and plunged into the gloom of the Lower Church. After the gold splendour of the sunset our eyes could distinguish little except the royal tombs which line the vestibule, and the great barrel arches which span the vault. But as we groped our way through the vast dim nave the world of Giotto, Cimabue and the Lorenzetti loomed on us through the shadows like a memory. The walls of chapel and transept were held in the bondage of shadow, but here and there some sweet familiar face looked down upon us with its golden halo fired by the last light of day. It was very dark. Vespers were over. One little lamp hanging in the Cappella San Martino only emphasised the gloom, but our footsteps were lighted by a faint glare radiating from the lowest tier of the altar. We could not imagine whence it came, shining so low in our path, until we drew near and beheld through the grille a lamp, suspended below the floor above the tomb of Francis. It was as though the luminous presence of the saint himself was guiding our feet through the shadows.205Assisi: the Lower Church of San Francesco.I have been many times to see San Francesco since the first night I climbed Assisi's hill, but I have never passed from the sunlight, which the little Poor Brother loved so well, into that shadowy vault without feeling something pulling at my heart-strings, for there is an atmosphere of sadness in San Francesco. Below all this splendour Francis is crushed out of thought just as his body is crushed out of sight by his massive tomb. It is Brother Elias, not Francis, whom we meet in these dim rich chapels; and the fabric of the great church and convent is a monument to human frailty rather than to individual holiness. But it is so completely lovely, so full of memories, with its unbroken chain of faith and prayer to link it to the thirteenth century, that I would not have one jot or tittle of it altered. It is one of the chief gems in Italy's crown of beauty, an inexhaustible treasure-house.Every day, although we were living at the other end of Assisi, our feet wandered down the hillside to San Francesco. Now it was to hear Mass in the dim Lower Church when clouds of incense veiled Giotto's canopy of allegories above the High Altar, and the peasants knelt humbly round the shrine of the little Poor One, who having nothing gained the whole world. Now to gaze upon the pitiful relics of the saint housed in the magnificent carved presses of the sacristy—the fragments of his death-clothes; the original register of Honoriusiii.; the Blessing of St. Leo in Francis' handwriting; and, most touching of all, the rough sandals which Saint Clare made with her own hands for the beloved Father, when his poor weary feet, with their sacred wounds, could no longer tread the stony Umbrian roads. Now we would wander through the chapels spelling out the frescoes of Martiniand the lesser Tuscans, pausing awhile before the tomb of that forgotten Queen of Cyprus, who is only remembered for her priceless gift of ultramarine, presented in the porphyry vase which is still to be seen in the east transept; or by the shadowy tomb of Madonna Giacobba di Settisoli, the Roman lady who loved Francis, and ministered to him at the last, bringing him his shroud and the candles for his burying, and, pitiful and human touch, the little comfits which had pleased him when he lay sick in Rome.Nor did we ever weary of the small cloister of San Francesco with its faded grey of bricks and mortar, its cypresses and lichens, and thestemmeof the nobles who lie below its pavement. It is a veritable home of peace. The walls are veiled in hanging creepers; there is a little box-hedge and a shower of sun-flecked acacias and lilacs from which the grey trunks of giant cypresses soar like the columns of a mighty temple. Dragon-flies flash through the warm, pine-scented air, and in the heart of it there is a crucifix to turn the thoughts of the brothers to holiness, lest they should be distracted by the sight of so much beauty, as they walk in the garden before their Mass.209The Little Cloister in S. Francesco d'Assisi.And many a golden afternoon did we while away in the beautiful Gothic Chiesa Superiore, whose walls Giotto has illumined with the story of St. Francis. It would be hard to find two buildings in such strong contrast as the Upper and Lower churches of San Francesco. The Chiesa Inferiore, with its great barrel arches, its shadows and its dim frescoes, moves the world most, for it is full of the suggestion of beautiful unseen things; but the Upper Church has blossomed like the flowers of the field above the tomb of Francis. It is a miracle of light and spaciousness and colour, with rich stained windows and soaring arches; and the white cities of Giotto's frescoes, and the exquisite blues of his many heavens encircle the walls like a gay ribbon below the faded reds and yellows of Cimabue.Here at least we cannot but feel grateful to Brother Elias, for from the beginning the Franciscans were patrons of the art of painting, and they were among the first to encourage the independent school of art as distinct from the work of Byzantium. Giunto da Pisa clothed the walls of the transept, and Cimabue and his pupils were called in to complete the decorations of the Upper Church. Thus it befell that, while Cimabue was painting some of his masterpieces on the walls above, Giotto, serving his apprenticeship and working with the other pupils of his Master's atelier, stretched out his hand to snatch the greater laurel.'Cimabue thoughtTo lord it over painting's field; and nowThe cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'[17]Many years later, when his fame was assured, Giottocame back to paint his allegories in the place of honour over the High Altar of the Lower Church. What did he think of it all, I wonder, this Florentine, this lover of beautiful things, this shepherd who left his sheep and his poverty and lighted the difficult path of art by the torch of his genius? Did he too love the memory of Francis? Or was it beyond his understanding that a man should dream of giving up all the world to follow a vision of eternal life? Perhaps he shrugged his shoulders over the whole thing, and painted on, with little thought for the saint, but all his heart in his ambitions, and in the beautiful church which he was helping to adorn.Truly it is a temple of Art this Franciscan Holy of Holies, but pilgrims who are questing for the gentle spirit of St. Francis should come away, nor hope to find it in the other great shrine of Assisi, Santa Chiara, the resting-place of Clare. Santa Chiara is inside the eastern gate of Assisi, close to the ancient palace of the Scifi in which the saint was born. It is a bare and empty church whose frescoes, according to the sacristan, were white-washed by a seventeenth-century bishop, because so many strangers came to disturb the nuns! But this Goth, who is said to have been of German extraction, left untouched some exquisite gold pictures of virgin saints over the High Altar, nor did he deem it worth while to destroy the frescoes which cover the walls of the ancient parish church of San Giorgio. Forwhich we should be grateful, because half-hidden behind the gaudy trappings of its altar are two expressive and beautiful pictures of the Madonna and Saint Clare.In this humble chapel where they keep the miraculous crucifix of San Damiano, we seem to draw a little nearer to Francis, who must have come here often to the old priest who gave him lessons in his childhood. Later, when the Assisans had begun to listen to him, he preached here until the press became so great that he was given permission to deliver his sermons in the then unfinished cathedral of San Rufino. Here, too, he lay in state while the people of Assisi wept and gloried over him, just as many years after they wept and gloried over St. Clare. It would have been a gentle thought if these two who had prayed and laboured together in life could have been sheltered by the same roof in death. Madonna Giacobba, who had the privilege of coming to St. Francis in his last illness, lies in San Francesco; but Clare, the Poor Lady of San Damiano, who had so humbly begged that she might once break bread with Francis, lies on the hillside far away from him.We went down to see her tomb, the rock-hewn vault in which until fifty years ago she lay, just as the world had left her seven centuries before, with sprigs of wild thyme scattered by her mourning sisters still clinging to her robe. To-day she lies in a gilt and crystal chest, decked with flowers and jewels and elaboratevelvet cushions. Her strong and rather austere face with its delicate aquiline nose is outlined against her snowy wimple, and in the midst of the incongruous splendour of her resting-place she is clad in the coarse brown robe and black veil of penitence for which she cast aside the luxurious garments of her youth. Candles burn at her head and at her feet, and a phantom-like nun with a lighted taper in her hand glides from behind a veil to draw the curtains. It was so quiet that suddenly I could hear the ticking of my watch out of the stillness, as though time tried to mark the moments in that silent chamber where it had been as nothing for so long.But how grotesque the wreath of flowers, the thin halo, the gilded bed! Why not have left that sunken figure resting on such hard stones as it chose for comfort in life?It is only by going out into the highways and hedges as he did that we can find the real Francis;—in the little convent of San Damiano, in the Hermitage of the Carcere, that retreat on Monte Subasio beloved of the early Franciscans, and in the holy places scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed.ASSISI: S. MARIA MADDALENA AT RIVO TORTO.A faint odour of romance clings round the ancient stones of San Damiano, for there St. Francis laboured with his own hands to build a habitation of apostolical simplicity which was to be the spiritual home of Clare.This humble place, a mere chapel in the olive-gardens below Assisi, is pregnant with memories of the simple Francis and the saintly Clare. For it was here, as he knelt before a crucifix in the little ruined church, that Francis, the gay merchant-prince of Assisi, heard the voice of Jesus saying, 'Francis, seest thou not that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me.' It was just what he needed, this troubled boy. Here was an obvious work for his hands, and in the doing of it he might find relief from the fears and doubtings that had assailed him since he rose from his weary sick-bed and looked upon an altered world. With no premonitionof his life-work, truly the rock on which the Catholic Church built up its power when it was in danger of being swept away in tidal waves of lust and avarice during the stormy Middle Ages, the ever-literal Francis bethought him of the letter of his miraculous command.It is such an old story that it is not worth retelling, how he sold the bales of cloth from his father's warehouse in the market of Foligno and brought the money to the priest of San Damiano; how the good man refused it, being fearful of Pietro Bernardone's wrath; how Francis flung it into the corner of a little window and would not touch it either; how his angry father renounced him; and how St. Francis, having yielded up his earthly goods, begged through the streets of Assisi for the stones with which to accomplish his work. There was no more fitting spot in all Umbria to be the home of the Second Order than San Damiano. But I think that Clare in her long life within its walls must have often wept, seeing the rough stones which Francis, with his tender unaccustomed hands, had fashioned into a house of God and a shelter for the Poor Ladies who had renounced the world to serve his Master.I remember well coming upon it one evening, breathless with sirocco, when all the world was gray and silver. In the little cloister-garden the flowers were yielding up their fragrance to the night in perfumedsighs, and in the tiny vaulted chapel two brothers and a priest were singing vespers with a few peasants who had wandered in from the fields. A flight of steps led down into the dark chapel, so little altered from the church which Francis built. And here I rested. Every moment the shadows below the olives crept nearer, shutting out the distance. At my feet in San Damiano the altar lights grew brighter in the dusk, and the swinging censer glowed like a live coal in the dark choir. So I waited, thinking of another Clare, in England, who was lying sick unto death, but with peace in my heart, for it was very sweet to hear Vespers in this holy place while the curious shadows of night crept up under the olives. Presently the chanting ceased. The priest went away, and the peasants passed out into the soft dusk.I went down then into the silent chapel and saw the relics of Saint Clare; the little sacristy with ancient wooden seats, such hard uncomfortable planks, where she and the sisters heard Mass; the room she died in; the hollow in the wall through which she received her spiritual food; her yard of garden overlooking the wide Umbrian plain and Rivo Torto. How often as she stood here upon the convent roof must she have thought of the Seraphic Father toiling down in the valley, for I doubt not she loved him, even as Madonna Pica, his mother, and Giacobba di Settisoli loved him, and hungered over him, and grieved for hispoor weary feet, and exulted in the purity of his soul.What memories of Francis and Clare, the true type of the brother and sister in Christ, are here! Francis indeed came seldom to the convent after the Poor Ladies were installed, for as he was not ordained, he had not the right to hear their confessions or administer the Holy Sacrament. But we know that he often sent to ask advice of the saintly abbess; and he stayed here before his journey to Rieti, when he was worn-out and sick, and almost blind, and took much comfort in her sympathy. Here, too, his body was brought, so that the sisters might look their last upon it before it was borne in triumph to Assisi. But Clare, whose cry of grief still has the power to stir our hearts to pain, lived on through bitter years to see the ideals of the little lover of Poverty shattered by Brother Elias and the Papacy before she followed him up the hill to rest.The way up to the Carcere is steep and long. The path is a mere track of broken stones which radiates heat, and there is no shade to mitigate the pitiless August glare. And yet I would not have forgone that toil up the side of Subasio, if only for the pleasures of the way. Assisi lay behind us like a city of the Middle Ages, with Gothic towers and palaces grouped in échelon below her fantastic castle. On our right the hillside, veiled in the tender grey of olives, slopedaway to the Valley of Spoleto, which was a vision of pure beauty, with mists clinging about the banks of its streams, and its many little cities, Spello,Foligno, Bevagna, tall Trevi and Spoleto, rising from the green folds of encircling hills. Above Subasio was barren except for some scanty oaks, but the bushes by the roadside were heavy with fruit, blackberries, and shiny red and yellow hips and crimson haws. Out of the parched stony earth grew clumps of broom, long-stemmed and slender, with a crest of golden blossoms like a flight of butterflies; and scabious, white and purple, rosettes for a fairy's shoe; and little Morning Glories smiling at the sky; and sugamele, and that wonderful blue thistle, which looks as though it had been soaked, leaves and all, in the rare dye of mountain mists at dawn.ASSISI: THE CARCERE.We did not see the Carcere until we were actually upon it. It is completely hidden in a ravine of ilexes, in a fold, as it were, of the brown skirts of Subasio. Small wonder that the Poverello loved this place; it is so humble, so silent, so restful. Often and often while he toiled down in the valley, ministering to the lepers of Rivo Torto, or preaching to the hard of heart, himself beset with doubts and fears, he must have lifted his eyes unto the hills, and longed for the Peace of God, which he knew dwelt in this solitude. Far away on the spur of the mountain is Assisi, where he laboured to bring love; and further away still, beyond the peaceful vales of Umbria, are great cities in which men worked, and hated, and struggled, ay, and loved unceasingly. But here in this leafy ilexgrove, in these tiny cells and chapels, there is a little world of dreams and tender memories.It is so small that a few minutes suffice to see everything—the courtyard with its miraculous well; the narrow cell and chapel of St. Francis, which is polished by the feet and shoulders of a multitude of pilgrims; the hole through which the exasperated devil vanished when he found that his temptations were of no avail; the lonely caves of the Early Companions in the hillside. It is a mere cluster of cells overhanging a mountain torrent; but it has a peculiar beauty as of a place set apart, dedicate to holiness.And there is peace in the shadowy ilex wood in which St. Francis loved to walk, holding converse with his little sisters, the birds. Myrtle and cyclamens grow among the grey rocks, and the sunlight flickers across the mossy path. In the silence we could hear the song of Brother Wind down in the glen, the humming of an insect near at hand, and, far away, a bird calling to his mate. And all the time the brother, who walked beside us, prated of the miracles of the saint. I hardly listened, for like an echo down the years I seemed to hear Francis, the troubadour of God, singing his canticle of the sun as he toiled up the barren hillside from Assisi.'Laudato sia Dio mio SignoreCum tutte le tue creature,Specialmente messer lo frate sole,Il quale giorna et illumina nui per lui,Et ello è bello et radiante cum grande splendore,De te Signore porta significatione.'On a day of never-to-be-forgotten beauty we went down into the fields below Assisi, and wandered in the footsteps of Francis and his brother saints. Our way led out of the town by the old Roman road below the ancient Porta Moiana, and there among the olives we came upon Gothic farms, tended by beautiful Umbrian peasants, and many a humble half-forgotten shrine, made holy in the thirteenth century, and fallen now into disuse. There are many such places round Assisi, within whose walls Mass is only said once a year, leaving them for the rest of the days to be store-houses or granaries or sheds in which to keep the wooden plough of the country-side.Everywhere were snow-white butterflies dancing in pairs before us as we passed, or swinging on the slender flowers that starred the hedges. White doves bowed and sidled in the golden wheat, and wayside shrines rose from a tangle of flowers where the cross roads met. And here, as though it was a custom oft repeated, the milk-white oxen, which once were deemed a fitting sacrifice for Roman gods, paused in their rolling gait while their masters laid down their whips, and doffed their hats and knelt a moment in the dust before the symbol of the suffering Christ.It was a world of great simplicity and faith in which we walked. For here in Umbria, down in these fields where Francis' 'Camp of the Lord' set up their wattle huts, faith is a real and potent thing. They do not doubt, these people, these rugged-faced men, these Madonna-like women—they never will doubt. To them the mysteries of the Incarnation and Ascension are accepted facts. In simplicity and faith they rise up in the morning and lie down again at night, never fearing that their prayers at dawn and evening, their hastily uttered petitions at a roadside cross, have not winged their way straight to heaven. I too would fain believe it when I am walking in their olive-groves and vineyards, for it is a lovely thing, as dreams are lovely, and young ambitions and young hope. And it is here perhaps that the secret of the intangible beauty of Assisi may be found—because it is a shrine; no matter of St. Francis, or of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the older gods. Out of the wreck of time the flame of worship and faith has been kept burning; the stones upon this altar have never darkened and grown cold.It was the season of the husking of the maize, and a happy harvest air hung over everything. Each farm had its pile of fragrant white husks outside its door ready to replenish the mattresses of the household, and the corn was spread out on the threshing-floors like a golden carpet. Sometimes we saw the family gatheredthere to shell the cobs, and sometimes we came upon them sitting below their olive-trees, separating the yellow corn from its white sheaths, and heaping them up on either side the gold and silver largesse of the Great Mother.It was in the midst of all this pastoral loveliness that we came to Rivo Torto, which is so bare and ugly and un-Franciscan in feeling. Poor and humble, but far richer in the spirit of St. Francis than the great church of Rivo Torto, are the two chapels of Santa Maria Maddalena and San Rufino d'Arce, which may mark the approximate site of the hut in which the saint dwelt while he was ministering to the lepers. We found Santa Maria Maddalena in a field of hemp, whose tall slender stalks and green tassels veiled the ancient apse and narrow lancet windows. Golden pumpkins were piled shoulder-high outside its wall, drying in the sun; and the interior, when at last it was unlocked, proved to be a potato store. Even more dilapidated is San Rufino d'Arce, which stands further from the road near the threshing-floor of a neighbouring farm. Nor could the lovely peasant woman, who brought its key and walked like a queen barefoot among her golden corn-cobs, tell us anything of its miraculous well in which, tradition says, a young boy saint was drowned.225Assisi: the Porziuncula.But now, as we drew near it, along the dusty white road which links Perugia to Rome, the dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli towered above the plain. This is the holiest place in Umbria, the Little Portion, beloved of St. Francis and his brethren, in which they lived and worked, and from which they issued forth to preach the gospel of love and repentance to the world. It is sanctified by miracles and the frequent presence of the saint, and is pregnant with the romance of the Franciscan order, which the writer of theFiorettihas set forth so admirably. But overmuch devotion has robbed it of simplicity and nullified many of its gentler associations. It is a pathetic sight to see the little church, consecrated by centuries of prayer, in the centre of the sixteenth-century Leviathan. It looks like an imprisoned thing, a dim unspoken reproach. I wish they could have left it in its fields, where the wild sweet wind would have sung praises through door and window, and the ardent sun have shamed the candles on the altar. But just as the papacy swept away Francis himself, so this great church has swallowed up the Little Portion which was all-sufficing for so many saints. A gentle, white-haired friar took us round the church. 'Here by this pier,' he said, 'Francis dined with Clare. And this is where he died. You know he wished to die here. He loved the Porziuncula better than any other place in the world.'And then we saw the thornless roses of St. Francis, and his cell, and the garden where he bade the brothers put cabbages into the earth upside down to test theirobedience, and the fig-tree which the brothers lately planted at the request of two Englishwomen, to take the place of the tree wherein the cicala praised God continuously with Francis until the saint begged him to rest because he had edified him enough.He was a simple, dear old man, our guide, who told his stories smilingly and yet with reverence and faith, very different from the unkempt and cynical monk at Rivo Torto. And when he had finished he took us into the sacristy and gave us a little book he had written about Saint Mary of the Angels, and a rose sprig from the bush which lost its thorns when St. Francis threw himself into it. And so we parted, he to his prayers, we to climb up through the fields to Assisi.

Almost the first thing we noticed in Assisi was the Biblical simplicity of life. This little city, rose and white, upon the lower slopes of Subasio would be like a picture out of the Bible if it were not so Gothic. Its steep and rough-paved streets have grasses growing in between their stones; its grim and silent houses, built of Subasian rock, are as unresponsive as the East; at their barred gates stand mules and asses tethered, with clumsy wooden saddles on their backs, or sacks of grain thrown pannier-wise. It is not only Francis and his companions that you might see walking in this poor and humble town, but Jesus of Nazareth.

For Assisi still wears the thread-bare garment of her poverty, notwithstanding the great basilica on the hillside, which is rich out of all comparison with the poor little city of St. Francis. Long, long ago in the thirteenth century she dedicated her life to him, giving up her worldly vanities and espousing Lady Poverty, 'that Dame to whom none openeth pleasure's gate.' So that the story of the splendid young men of Assisi, whose magnificent equipages drew the eyes ofRome in the seventeenth century, comes as an echo of another place. I think she loved him from the first, when he was still gay Cecco of the midnight revels, Lord of Love, the boon companion of her merry youths. She listened to his songs—the soft Provençal songs which he had learnt from the lips of Madonna Pica, his mother—and smiled at his caprices, pleading his youth when others shook their heads. Later, when the world made a jest of the penitent, and his friends scorned him, and the hand of the people was against him, she wept for him, and gazed with wistful eyes down to the valleys where he ministered to her outcasts, and garnered in his soul that Peace of the Lord which passeth all understanding. She is like the bride of whom the poet of the Israelites sang, looking and listening for the voice of her beloved.

'The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

My beloved is like the roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice.

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.'

But if there had been no Saint Francis to raiseher to the foremost rank of shrines, and sanctify her with a special crown of holiness, Assisi would still be one of the most lovely cities in the garden of Umbria. She has grown like a fair white flower upon the brown slope of Monte Subasio, whose shoulder is a bulwark between the ragged Appennines and the soft valleys of Umbria.

It is a sudden revelation, as though the landscape foreshadowed the history of Assisi, to stand on the windy height of her Rocca, and first to look down on the rolling Umbrian hills, clothed with the tender green of vines and olives, which have gentle streams meandering at their feet, and then to turn to the eastern slope of Subasio and see the brown and barren mountains ravening away to the horizon, like an angry sea, now towering into broken peaks, now falling back with steep, scarred sides, red as wounds where the ruddy limestone has been torn from them. On the one hand there is that Peace of God which St. Francis scattered through the turbulent thirteenth century, and which has lingered in the grass-grown streets of his native city; and, on the other, the bloody wars and revolutions which racked Assisi from the day that Rome first put its yoke upon her, to the sixteenth century, when she surrendered a second time to the Imperial city, and yielded up her keys to PaulIII.For her history is one long tale of disasters. She fell a victim to so many conquerors—Totila, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, and thecondottieri of her enemy Perugia—Biordo Michelotti, Braccio Fortebraccio, and Niccolò Piccinino. And from the sack of the terrible little man, Niccolò, Assisi never recovered: to this day there is a spacious olive-garden between the Rocca and the town itself, on which the disheartened Assisans had not the spirit to rebuild their ravished homes.

Assisi is full of forgotten charms. No other city in Umbria, except proud Spoleto, can boast as many traces of her Roman greatness. Though her amphitheatre has vanished underground, its lines are clearly preserved by the houses which are built above it; there is a wonderful Roman cistern below the cathedral; there are fragments of a theatre, and a drain of excellent masonry in the Canon's garden; and in the Piazza Vittore Emanuele is the exquisite portico of the Temple of Minerva, which, legend says, was built by Dardanus of Troy. Be that as it may, this temple of the Goddess of Wisdom, which was long ago dedicated to the Mother of Christ, and on whose steps St. Francis often stood to preach, is one of the most perfect Roman temple-façades extant, notwithstanding the mass of mediaeval buildings which crowd in upon it, or the foreshortening of its pronaos, half sunk below the pavement of the piazza.

It would be difficult to find a more completely Gothic place than Assisi. Except for the great hotels near San Francesco, the sixteenth-century church ofSanta Maria degli Angeli, and the palaces of the Via Superba, in which the spendthrift nobles of the seventeenth century entertained Queen Christina of Sweden, there is hardly anything in Assisi that is not of the Gothic age. If all the bricked-up loggias and windows of Assisi were opened out, she would look like a city frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli.

And she has many treasures which the hurried traveller does not dream of. Who, for instance, ever remembers the ancient cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Bishop's Palace, where Saint Francis renounced his earthly heritage; or climbs the hill to see the cathedral of San Rufino, with its wonderful Romanesque façade, mystic with strange carvings, and its font in which not only Francis, but the great Emperor FrederickII., was baptized? How many people have lingered to look at the little loggia of the Comacine masters at the foot of one of the stair-streets of Assisi, which seem to have been created by the imagination of Albrecht Dürer? Or the sunken loggia of the Monte Frumentario, one of the most ancient municipal buildings in Assisi, which still carries on its original business and makes loans of money and seed to the peasantry, so that they shall not be ruined in the lean years of agriculture? How many have seen the little Chapel of the Pilgrims, founded by the Confraternity of St. Anthony in honour of their saint as a hospice for poor pilgrims, though it is frescoed by Matteo de Gualdo and Mesastris of Foligno?

199

A Street in Assisi.

There are few even who have visited the minor relics of St. Francis,—the Carcere; the cell in the garden of San Rufino in which the Miracle of the Fiery Chariot took place; the little parish church of San Giorgio; and the chapels scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed.

It is San Francesco which most people come to see; San Francesco, one of the most inspired Gothic buildings in Italy, made sacrosanct with the body of Francis, illuminated with all that Tuscany could yield of art in the far-back thirteenth century. So all those dreams of poverty and humility which were the moving spirit of the Early Companions have come to naught. It avails nothing that when the hand of death lay heavy upon Francis, he yielded up even the coarse rough robe, his last possession, and but for his hair-shirt lay naked upon the ground, until a brother covered him with another garment, given 'as to one who has made himself poor for the love of God.' Nor does his humility count for anything, for though his petition to be buried on the Collis Inferni among the criminals and malefactors was granted, he was not given the humble grave he sought; and it is probable that Pope Gregory, who changed the name of the hill from that day to Collis Paradisi, only yielded to the saint's request because there was no other spot near the city walls suitable for the huge monument which he and Brother Elias were preparing to build.

There is a story that the irresponsible Leo, the constant friend and companion of Francis, whom he so lovingly called 'the little sheep of God,' broke the porphyry vase for alms and collections which Brother Elias placed outside the church that all might contribute to its building. But it needed more than the simple Leo's protest to stem the flood of innovations which the ambitious Vicar-General was introducing into the Order. Even in his life-time St. Francis could not hold it back. Who, knowing the pathetic story of his home-coming from the East, and his disappointment at seeing the sumptuous Convent of the Brothers Minor in Bologna, can think that this splendid basilica does not weigh heavily upon the bones of the little poor man of Assisi? But it was inevitable. He had more to combat than the ambitions of individuals; there was the papacy to reckon with, the luxurious and effete Court of Rome, which saw well enough the moral of the Rule of Francis, but had no mind to make a bride of Poverty.

'Provide neither gold nor silver nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes nor yet staves. And, as ye go, preach, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Thus, literally, did Francis, the splendid Idealist of the Middle Ages, whose faith in human nature was second only to his faith in God, follow the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Only once in a hundred ages does sucha star arise in the East to illumine the darkness of the world and oppose the primeval laws of disaster. We know how much he achieved, what a vista of purity and love he opened to the thirteenth century, and how signally even this fervent age failed to respond to the voice of the Herald of God who preached repentance, and sang the praises of his Maker through the sunlit fields and gardens of Italy. So that there is much pathos in this mighty temple on the western rock of Assisi, which is the mausoleum of all the beautiful impracticable dreams of Francis as well as the shrine on which devotion, art and wealth have lavished every resource to make it a worthy resting-place for the Messiah of the Middle Ages.

It was the hour of sunset when we first climbed up the slope of Monte Subasio, and Assisi and her great church were rose-red, as though they glowed with inward fires. We left our vettura at the city gates, telling the driver to take our luggage to the inn, and we ourselves turned up the hill to San Francesco. As we approached it through the long arcades of the lower piazza the great golden church with its towers and gables, its buttressed sides, its jewelled windows and gracious portico, and the noble steps which lead up to the Chiesa Superiore, had something of the eternal beauty of St. Mark's at Venice.

We passed through a group of the clamorous beggars who besiege the pilgrim at the door of San Francesco,like a canker at the heart of a perfect fruit, and plunged into the gloom of the Lower Church. After the gold splendour of the sunset our eyes could distinguish little except the royal tombs which line the vestibule, and the great barrel arches which span the vault. But as we groped our way through the vast dim nave the world of Giotto, Cimabue and the Lorenzetti loomed on us through the shadows like a memory. The walls of chapel and transept were held in the bondage of shadow, but here and there some sweet familiar face looked down upon us with its golden halo fired by the last light of day. It was very dark. Vespers were over. One little lamp hanging in the Cappella San Martino only emphasised the gloom, but our footsteps were lighted by a faint glare radiating from the lowest tier of the altar. We could not imagine whence it came, shining so low in our path, until we drew near and beheld through the grille a lamp, suspended below the floor above the tomb of Francis. It was as though the luminous presence of the saint himself was guiding our feet through the shadows.

205

Assisi: the Lower Church of San Francesco.

I have been many times to see San Francesco since the first night I climbed Assisi's hill, but I have never passed from the sunlight, which the little Poor Brother loved so well, into that shadowy vault without feeling something pulling at my heart-strings, for there is an atmosphere of sadness in San Francesco. Below all this splendour Francis is crushed out of thought just as his body is crushed out of sight by his massive tomb. It is Brother Elias, not Francis, whom we meet in these dim rich chapels; and the fabric of the great church and convent is a monument to human frailty rather than to individual holiness. But it is so completely lovely, so full of memories, with its unbroken chain of faith and prayer to link it to the thirteenth century, that I would not have one jot or tittle of it altered. It is one of the chief gems in Italy's crown of beauty, an inexhaustible treasure-house.

Every day, although we were living at the other end of Assisi, our feet wandered down the hillside to San Francesco. Now it was to hear Mass in the dim Lower Church when clouds of incense veiled Giotto's canopy of allegories above the High Altar, and the peasants knelt humbly round the shrine of the little Poor One, who having nothing gained the whole world. Now to gaze upon the pitiful relics of the saint housed in the magnificent carved presses of the sacristy—the fragments of his death-clothes; the original register of Honoriusiii.; the Blessing of St. Leo in Francis' handwriting; and, most touching of all, the rough sandals which Saint Clare made with her own hands for the beloved Father, when his poor weary feet, with their sacred wounds, could no longer tread the stony Umbrian roads. Now we would wander through the chapels spelling out the frescoes of Martiniand the lesser Tuscans, pausing awhile before the tomb of that forgotten Queen of Cyprus, who is only remembered for her priceless gift of ultramarine, presented in the porphyry vase which is still to be seen in the east transept; or by the shadowy tomb of Madonna Giacobba di Settisoli, the Roman lady who loved Francis, and ministered to him at the last, bringing him his shroud and the candles for his burying, and, pitiful and human touch, the little comfits which had pleased him when he lay sick in Rome.

Nor did we ever weary of the small cloister of San Francesco with its faded grey of bricks and mortar, its cypresses and lichens, and thestemmeof the nobles who lie below its pavement. It is a veritable home of peace. The walls are veiled in hanging creepers; there is a little box-hedge and a shower of sun-flecked acacias and lilacs from which the grey trunks of giant cypresses soar like the columns of a mighty temple. Dragon-flies flash through the warm, pine-scented air, and in the heart of it there is a crucifix to turn the thoughts of the brothers to holiness, lest they should be distracted by the sight of so much beauty, as they walk in the garden before their Mass.

209

The Little Cloister in S. Francesco d'Assisi.

And many a golden afternoon did we while away in the beautiful Gothic Chiesa Superiore, whose walls Giotto has illumined with the story of St. Francis. It would be hard to find two buildings in such strong contrast as the Upper and Lower churches of San Francesco. The Chiesa Inferiore, with its great barrel arches, its shadows and its dim frescoes, moves the world most, for it is full of the suggestion of beautiful unseen things; but the Upper Church has blossomed like the flowers of the field above the tomb of Francis. It is a miracle of light and spaciousness and colour, with rich stained windows and soaring arches; and the white cities of Giotto's frescoes, and the exquisite blues of his many heavens encircle the walls like a gay ribbon below the faded reds and yellows of Cimabue.

Here at least we cannot but feel grateful to Brother Elias, for from the beginning the Franciscans were patrons of the art of painting, and they were among the first to encourage the independent school of art as distinct from the work of Byzantium. Giunto da Pisa clothed the walls of the transept, and Cimabue and his pupils were called in to complete the decorations of the Upper Church. Thus it befell that, while Cimabue was painting some of his masterpieces on the walls above, Giotto, serving his apprenticeship and working with the other pupils of his Master's atelier, stretched out his hand to snatch the greater laurel.

'Cimabue thought

To lord it over painting's field; and nowThe cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.'[17]

Many years later, when his fame was assured, Giottocame back to paint his allegories in the place of honour over the High Altar of the Lower Church. What did he think of it all, I wonder, this Florentine, this lover of beautiful things, this shepherd who left his sheep and his poverty and lighted the difficult path of art by the torch of his genius? Did he too love the memory of Francis? Or was it beyond his understanding that a man should dream of giving up all the world to follow a vision of eternal life? Perhaps he shrugged his shoulders over the whole thing, and painted on, with little thought for the saint, but all his heart in his ambitions, and in the beautiful church which he was helping to adorn.

Truly it is a temple of Art this Franciscan Holy of Holies, but pilgrims who are questing for the gentle spirit of St. Francis should come away, nor hope to find it in the other great shrine of Assisi, Santa Chiara, the resting-place of Clare. Santa Chiara is inside the eastern gate of Assisi, close to the ancient palace of the Scifi in which the saint was born. It is a bare and empty church whose frescoes, according to the sacristan, were white-washed by a seventeenth-century bishop, because so many strangers came to disturb the nuns! But this Goth, who is said to have been of German extraction, left untouched some exquisite gold pictures of virgin saints over the High Altar, nor did he deem it worth while to destroy the frescoes which cover the walls of the ancient parish church of San Giorgio. Forwhich we should be grateful, because half-hidden behind the gaudy trappings of its altar are two expressive and beautiful pictures of the Madonna and Saint Clare.

In this humble chapel where they keep the miraculous crucifix of San Damiano, we seem to draw a little nearer to Francis, who must have come here often to the old priest who gave him lessons in his childhood. Later, when the Assisans had begun to listen to him, he preached here until the press became so great that he was given permission to deliver his sermons in the then unfinished cathedral of San Rufino. Here, too, he lay in state while the people of Assisi wept and gloried over him, just as many years after they wept and gloried over St. Clare. It would have been a gentle thought if these two who had prayed and laboured together in life could have been sheltered by the same roof in death. Madonna Giacobba, who had the privilege of coming to St. Francis in his last illness, lies in San Francesco; but Clare, the Poor Lady of San Damiano, who had so humbly begged that she might once break bread with Francis, lies on the hillside far away from him.

We went down to see her tomb, the rock-hewn vault in which until fifty years ago she lay, just as the world had left her seven centuries before, with sprigs of wild thyme scattered by her mourning sisters still clinging to her robe. To-day she lies in a gilt and crystal chest, decked with flowers and jewels and elaboratevelvet cushions. Her strong and rather austere face with its delicate aquiline nose is outlined against her snowy wimple, and in the midst of the incongruous splendour of her resting-place she is clad in the coarse brown robe and black veil of penitence for which she cast aside the luxurious garments of her youth. Candles burn at her head and at her feet, and a phantom-like nun with a lighted taper in her hand glides from behind a veil to draw the curtains. It was so quiet that suddenly I could hear the ticking of my watch out of the stillness, as though time tried to mark the moments in that silent chamber where it had been as nothing for so long.

But how grotesque the wreath of flowers, the thin halo, the gilded bed! Why not have left that sunken figure resting on such hard stones as it chose for comfort in life?

It is only by going out into the highways and hedges as he did that we can find the real Francis;—in the little convent of San Damiano, in the Hermitage of the Carcere, that retreat on Monte Subasio beloved of the early Franciscans, and in the holy places scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed.

ASSISI: S. MARIA MADDALENA AT RIVO TORTO.

A faint odour of romance clings round the ancient stones of San Damiano, for there St. Francis laboured with his own hands to build a habitation of apostolical simplicity which was to be the spiritual home of Clare.This humble place, a mere chapel in the olive-gardens below Assisi, is pregnant with memories of the simple Francis and the saintly Clare. For it was here, as he knelt before a crucifix in the little ruined church, that Francis, the gay merchant-prince of Assisi, heard the voice of Jesus saying, 'Francis, seest thou not that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me.' It was just what he needed, this troubled boy. Here was an obvious work for his hands, and in the doing of it he might find relief from the fears and doubtings that had assailed him since he rose from his weary sick-bed and looked upon an altered world. With no premonitionof his life-work, truly the rock on which the Catholic Church built up its power when it was in danger of being swept away in tidal waves of lust and avarice during the stormy Middle Ages, the ever-literal Francis bethought him of the letter of his miraculous command.

It is such an old story that it is not worth retelling, how he sold the bales of cloth from his father's warehouse in the market of Foligno and brought the money to the priest of San Damiano; how the good man refused it, being fearful of Pietro Bernardone's wrath; how Francis flung it into the corner of a little window and would not touch it either; how his angry father renounced him; and how St. Francis, having yielded up his earthly goods, begged through the streets of Assisi for the stones with which to accomplish his work. There was no more fitting spot in all Umbria to be the home of the Second Order than San Damiano. But I think that Clare in her long life within its walls must have often wept, seeing the rough stones which Francis, with his tender unaccustomed hands, had fashioned into a house of God and a shelter for the Poor Ladies who had renounced the world to serve his Master.

I remember well coming upon it one evening, breathless with sirocco, when all the world was gray and silver. In the little cloister-garden the flowers were yielding up their fragrance to the night in perfumedsighs, and in the tiny vaulted chapel two brothers and a priest were singing vespers with a few peasants who had wandered in from the fields. A flight of steps led down into the dark chapel, so little altered from the church which Francis built. And here I rested. Every moment the shadows below the olives crept nearer, shutting out the distance. At my feet in San Damiano the altar lights grew brighter in the dusk, and the swinging censer glowed like a live coal in the dark choir. So I waited, thinking of another Clare, in England, who was lying sick unto death, but with peace in my heart, for it was very sweet to hear Vespers in this holy place while the curious shadows of night crept up under the olives. Presently the chanting ceased. The priest went away, and the peasants passed out into the soft dusk.

I went down then into the silent chapel and saw the relics of Saint Clare; the little sacristy with ancient wooden seats, such hard uncomfortable planks, where she and the sisters heard Mass; the room she died in; the hollow in the wall through which she received her spiritual food; her yard of garden overlooking the wide Umbrian plain and Rivo Torto. How often as she stood here upon the convent roof must she have thought of the Seraphic Father toiling down in the valley, for I doubt not she loved him, even as Madonna Pica, his mother, and Giacobba di Settisoli loved him, and hungered over him, and grieved for hispoor weary feet, and exulted in the purity of his soul.

What memories of Francis and Clare, the true type of the brother and sister in Christ, are here! Francis indeed came seldom to the convent after the Poor Ladies were installed, for as he was not ordained, he had not the right to hear their confessions or administer the Holy Sacrament. But we know that he often sent to ask advice of the saintly abbess; and he stayed here before his journey to Rieti, when he was worn-out and sick, and almost blind, and took much comfort in her sympathy. Here, too, his body was brought, so that the sisters might look their last upon it before it was borne in triumph to Assisi. But Clare, whose cry of grief still has the power to stir our hearts to pain, lived on through bitter years to see the ideals of the little lover of Poverty shattered by Brother Elias and the Papacy before she followed him up the hill to rest.

The way up to the Carcere is steep and long. The path is a mere track of broken stones which radiates heat, and there is no shade to mitigate the pitiless August glare. And yet I would not have forgone that toil up the side of Subasio, if only for the pleasures of the way. Assisi lay behind us like a city of the Middle Ages, with Gothic towers and palaces grouped in échelon below her fantastic castle. On our right the hillside, veiled in the tender grey of olives, slopedaway to the Valley of Spoleto, which was a vision of pure beauty, with mists clinging about the banks of its streams, and its many little cities, Spello,Foligno, Bevagna, tall Trevi and Spoleto, rising from the green folds of encircling hills. Above Subasio was barren except for some scanty oaks, but the bushes by the roadside were heavy with fruit, blackberries, and shiny red and yellow hips and crimson haws. Out of the parched stony earth grew clumps of broom, long-stemmed and slender, with a crest of golden blossoms like a flight of butterflies; and scabious, white and purple, rosettes for a fairy's shoe; and little Morning Glories smiling at the sky; and sugamele, and that wonderful blue thistle, which looks as though it had been soaked, leaves and all, in the rare dye of mountain mists at dawn.

ASSISI: THE CARCERE.

We did not see the Carcere until we were actually upon it. It is completely hidden in a ravine of ilexes, in a fold, as it were, of the brown skirts of Subasio. Small wonder that the Poverello loved this place; it is so humble, so silent, so restful. Often and often while he toiled down in the valley, ministering to the lepers of Rivo Torto, or preaching to the hard of heart, himself beset with doubts and fears, he must have lifted his eyes unto the hills, and longed for the Peace of God, which he knew dwelt in this solitude. Far away on the spur of the mountain is Assisi, where he laboured to bring love; and further away still, beyond the peaceful vales of Umbria, are great cities in which men worked, and hated, and struggled, ay, and loved unceasingly. But here in this leafy ilexgrove, in these tiny cells and chapels, there is a little world of dreams and tender memories.

It is so small that a few minutes suffice to see everything—the courtyard with its miraculous well; the narrow cell and chapel of St. Francis, which is polished by the feet and shoulders of a multitude of pilgrims; the hole through which the exasperated devil vanished when he found that his temptations were of no avail; the lonely caves of the Early Companions in the hillside. It is a mere cluster of cells overhanging a mountain torrent; but it has a peculiar beauty as of a place set apart, dedicate to holiness.

And there is peace in the shadowy ilex wood in which St. Francis loved to walk, holding converse with his little sisters, the birds. Myrtle and cyclamens grow among the grey rocks, and the sunlight flickers across the mossy path. In the silence we could hear the song of Brother Wind down in the glen, the humming of an insect near at hand, and, far away, a bird calling to his mate. And all the time the brother, who walked beside us, prated of the miracles of the saint. I hardly listened, for like an echo down the years I seemed to hear Francis, the troubadour of God, singing his canticle of the sun as he toiled up the barren hillside from Assisi.

'Laudato sia Dio mio SignoreCum tutte le tue creature,Specialmente messer lo frate sole,Il quale giorna et illumina nui per lui,Et ello è bello et radiante cum grande splendore,De te Signore porta significatione.'

On a day of never-to-be-forgotten beauty we went down into the fields below Assisi, and wandered in the footsteps of Francis and his brother saints. Our way led out of the town by the old Roman road below the ancient Porta Moiana, and there among the olives we came upon Gothic farms, tended by beautiful Umbrian peasants, and many a humble half-forgotten shrine, made holy in the thirteenth century, and fallen now into disuse. There are many such places round Assisi, within whose walls Mass is only said once a year, leaving them for the rest of the days to be store-houses or granaries or sheds in which to keep the wooden plough of the country-side.

Everywhere were snow-white butterflies dancing in pairs before us as we passed, or swinging on the slender flowers that starred the hedges. White doves bowed and sidled in the golden wheat, and wayside shrines rose from a tangle of flowers where the cross roads met. And here, as though it was a custom oft repeated, the milk-white oxen, which once were deemed a fitting sacrifice for Roman gods, paused in their rolling gait while their masters laid down their whips, and doffed their hats and knelt a moment in the dust before the symbol of the suffering Christ.

It was a world of great simplicity and faith in which we walked. For here in Umbria, down in these fields where Francis' 'Camp of the Lord' set up their wattle huts, faith is a real and potent thing. They do not doubt, these people, these rugged-faced men, these Madonna-like women—they never will doubt. To them the mysteries of the Incarnation and Ascension are accepted facts. In simplicity and faith they rise up in the morning and lie down again at night, never fearing that their prayers at dawn and evening, their hastily uttered petitions at a roadside cross, have not winged their way straight to heaven. I too would fain believe it when I am walking in their olive-groves and vineyards, for it is a lovely thing, as dreams are lovely, and young ambitions and young hope. And it is here perhaps that the secret of the intangible beauty of Assisi may be found—because it is a shrine; no matter of St. Francis, or of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the older gods. Out of the wreck of time the flame of worship and faith has been kept burning; the stones upon this altar have never darkened and grown cold.

It was the season of the husking of the maize, and a happy harvest air hung over everything. Each farm had its pile of fragrant white husks outside its door ready to replenish the mattresses of the household, and the corn was spread out on the threshing-floors like a golden carpet. Sometimes we saw the family gatheredthere to shell the cobs, and sometimes we came upon them sitting below their olive-trees, separating the yellow corn from its white sheaths, and heaping them up on either side the gold and silver largesse of the Great Mother.

It was in the midst of all this pastoral loveliness that we came to Rivo Torto, which is so bare and ugly and un-Franciscan in feeling. Poor and humble, but far richer in the spirit of St. Francis than the great church of Rivo Torto, are the two chapels of Santa Maria Maddalena and San Rufino d'Arce, which may mark the approximate site of the hut in which the saint dwelt while he was ministering to the lepers. We found Santa Maria Maddalena in a field of hemp, whose tall slender stalks and green tassels veiled the ancient apse and narrow lancet windows. Golden pumpkins were piled shoulder-high outside its wall, drying in the sun; and the interior, when at last it was unlocked, proved to be a potato store. Even more dilapidated is San Rufino d'Arce, which stands further from the road near the threshing-floor of a neighbouring farm. Nor could the lovely peasant woman, who brought its key and walked like a queen barefoot among her golden corn-cobs, tell us anything of its miraculous well in which, tradition says, a young boy saint was drowned.

225

Assisi: the Porziuncula.

But now, as we drew near it, along the dusty white road which links Perugia to Rome, the dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli towered above the plain. This is the holiest place in Umbria, the Little Portion, beloved of St. Francis and his brethren, in which they lived and worked, and from which they issued forth to preach the gospel of love and repentance to the world. It is sanctified by miracles and the frequent presence of the saint, and is pregnant with the romance of the Franciscan order, which the writer of theFiorettihas set forth so admirably. But overmuch devotion has robbed it of simplicity and nullified many of its gentler associations. It is a pathetic sight to see the little church, consecrated by centuries of prayer, in the centre of the sixteenth-century Leviathan. It looks like an imprisoned thing, a dim unspoken reproach. I wish they could have left it in its fields, where the wild sweet wind would have sung praises through door and window, and the ardent sun have shamed the candles on the altar. But just as the papacy swept away Francis himself, so this great church has swallowed up the Little Portion which was all-sufficing for so many saints. A gentle, white-haired friar took us round the church. 'Here by this pier,' he said, 'Francis dined with Clare. And this is where he died. You know he wished to die here. He loved the Porziuncula better than any other place in the world.'

And then we saw the thornless roses of St. Francis, and his cell, and the garden where he bade the brothers put cabbages into the earth upside down to test theirobedience, and the fig-tree which the brothers lately planted at the request of two Englishwomen, to take the place of the tree wherein the cicala praised God continuously with Francis until the saint begged him to rest because he had edified him enough.

He was a simple, dear old man, our guide, who told his stories smilingly and yet with reverence and faith, very different from the unkempt and cynical monk at Rivo Torto. And when he had finished he took us into the sacristy and gave us a little book he had written about Saint Mary of the Angels, and a rose sprig from the bush which lost its thorns when St. Francis threw himself into it. And so we parted, he to his prayers, we to climb up through the fields to Assisi.

GUBBIOI shall always think of Gubbio as I saw her first, in the magic sunset of a cold grey day, on which summer had been hidden by the jealous clouds, and the wind blew bleakly from the Appennines. September had come in the night before with storm and wind. When we left Assisi the sky was clear and rain-swept, blue as the heavens of Giotto's frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco, and there was a glint of sunshine lighting her Gothic towers between the racing cumuli. But all day the mountains of Nocera and Gualdo 'mourned for their heavy yoke,' hiding their crests in wind-blown veils of cloud; and the rocky stream-beds at their feet, which had lain mute and parched since the last rains of spring, gave voice in swirling torrents.So we came to the heart of the Appennines, to the broad Valley of the Chiaggio, which is so rich with maize and vineyards. Here in the north three mountains lift their great heads to the sky, and in the hollow where their three slopes meet lies Gubbio, a fairy citadel such as poets dream of. Indeed, Gubbio might well be the home of dreams, for I can think of no placewhere their gossamer threads could be so lightly spun as in the long, fantastic arcade of the Mercato Vecchio, in the shadow of her Gothic palaces.As we drew near, the sun slipped from below her mantle of cloud, and in a seeming passion of desire bathed the whole world in flame. Seen by the ruddy torch of this wild sunset Gubbio was all rose, a city of fair dreams, unforgettably lovely. Her towers, palaces and loggias were illuminated, and the bare slopes of Monte Calvo were flooded with roseate light save where the folds of the hill made cobalt shadows. Even the peasants walking in the Piazza del Mercato were caught in the same radiance, which made a glory round the humblest implements of toil. It was so fair a sight that I stood as one enchanted and feared to take my eyes away from it, lest it should vanish like the fairy cities of our childhood, and I should find myself once more upon the bleak hillside of life.O little town, with the name whose quaintness has made it familiar, do you still sleep at the foot of your mountains under the shadow of your holy houses? Can it be that I have dreamt of you, seeing some picture of a mediaeval city in a psalter? Or does your lamp-lighter still light your ancient swing-lamps in the dusk, with old-world grace and disregard of time, setting out on his slow rounds long before the sunset glow has faded from your brow? I must come back to see if it is true; if your barren hills have reallyblossomed into shrines and monasteries; if you have still the wistful charm that I remember; if you will greet me after the long journey with that same rosy blush at eve!GUBBIO: THE LAMPLIGHTER.And yet, I do not know why I should question, for I have many gentle memories of Gubbio—of steep, quiet streets whose ends are closed by solemn mountains; of Gothic palaces and loggias; of ancient churches full of faded pictures; of saints and Madonnas broodingover city gates; of peasants streaming into Mass of a morning; of women in black mantillas or the graceful fringed shawls of Venice and the March. Nor have I forgotten the hospitality that she extended to us. Gubbio was always famous for her hospitality. There is a story that in the olden days the nobles of Gubbio fought so fiercely for the right of entertaining visitors to their town that to avoid the really serious conflicts which resulted from this rivalry a pillar was erected in the Mercato with rings attached to it, 'each belonging to some separate aristocratic house, and to whosesoever ring a traveller chanced to fasten his horse, to him belonged the right of entertainment.'[18]Though our inn was humble, even rough, we were lodged in the ancient convent of San Marco, and we took our meals in a vine arbour full of hanging grapes, where the sunlight piercing the leafy roof flecked the snowy table-cloth with silver, and made the floor an arabesque of dappled light and shade. A few yards away among the vines the Carmignano foamed along its rocky bed. And here we were content with simple fare, but of the best—macaroni spread with pomidoro,misto fritto, golden eggs, fruit and honey, washed down with amber-colouredvino del paese.Whatever may be the facts about the grandson of Noah, to whom local tradition loves to assign the foundation of Gubbio, there can be no doubt thatshe is of Umbrian antiquity. Unlike most of the so-called Umbrian cities Gubbio has ample proof of her importance as a city of the older race, which was displaced by the Etruscans; for besides the number of prehistoric utensils discovered in the caves of her mountains, and a short course of Cyclopean wall on Monte Calvo, which point to a remote civilisation, there are certain pieces of money in existence bearing the Umbrian name Ikuvini; and, most conclusive evidence of all, there are the world-famous Eugubian Tables.These tables of bronze, which have been of such inestimable value to the student of ancient languages, are Gubbio's greatest treasure. They are housed in her Palazzo Pubblico, in her little shrunken museum, which has so few precious things left to-day, except a solitary tazza by the immortal Maestro Giorgio. It would be useless for me to write of them at length, for it is impossible to treat of them scientifically in a short chapter, and only those who come to see them can gauge the romance and mystery which hang about them. There are seven tables in all, four written in Etruscan characters, two in Latin, and one partly in Etruscan and partly in Latin characters. Yet the language that they have immortalised is neither Latin nor Etruscan, but the tongue of that mysterious people, the Umbrians, who have left us so few traces of their civilisation, whose origin is lost in the misty ages.Since the discovery of these tables in 1444 studentsand scholars have sought to read their riddle, and it is by the fruit of their labours that we know what an interesting clue they afford to the character of Gubbio. For these fine letters traced by the scribes of long ago are sacerdotal inscriptions, dealing with the religious rites of the Attidian brethren, who paid homage to a strange pantheon of gods—Umbrian, Roman and Greek—and whose headquarters, according to many students, were in the temple of Jupiter Appenninus, eight miles away, at Scheggia, on the old Flaminian way. M. Bréal, however, does not hold this theory, claiming that Jupiter Appenninus is not mentioned in the text; and urging the plea that as the tablets were discovered in a subterranean vault, near the ancient theatre of Iguvium, the college of the confraternity was likely to be found within the city itself.It would be difficult to say, for necessarily the reading of the tablets is but vague; the only point we can be certain of is that this ghostly echo of a vanished city is one of prayer and invocation, occupied with sacrifices and propitiations rather than with laws or ceremonies, as the inscriptions of Rome and Etruria have been. And this is typical of the city, for the real characteristic of Gubbio to-day is her gentle air of sanctity, just as the most vivid memories of her Middle Ages are concerned with saints and bishops. For the bishops of Gubbio, the saintly Ubaldo, whose name thepeople of Gubbio venerate in the yearly festival of the Ceri on the 15th of May, the blessed Teobaldo who succeeded him, and Villano, that man 'of pure and saintly life who was, besides, the friend of St. Francisof Assisi,' are only a few of the many holy men who steered her helm through the stormy waves of Time.GUBBIO: SAN FRANCESCO.And here, as you remember, St. Francis came with song and thanksgiving, although he had been but a short time before stripped naked to the world, to see his friend Giacomello Spada, who clothed him and sheltered him, and whose garden covered the ground where the picturesque Gothic church of San Francesco stands to-day. Nor is there any more familiar story told by their nurses to the breathless children of the Latin countries than the legend of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which is commemorated to this day in the little chapel of S. Francesco della Pace; built, so it is said, on the site of the cave wherein the wolf dwelt after he had been tamed by the brotherly love of Francis. It was to Gubbio Francis came in the first glow of his renunciation, for we read that he was confident of finding shelter and the bare necessaries of clothing with his friends there, but I think there was another reason. Perhaps as he lay on the bleak side of Subasio he thought with longing of the gentle city of Ubaldo, cradled at the foot of its bare mountain, which soared towards the heavens, offering, as it were, upon an altar, the body of its saintly bishop.Gubbio is a city of vanished splendours, a ghost of her old glory. So that we were amazed on entering Santa Maria Nuova to see anything so brilliant and full of vivid beauty as the Madonna della Belvedere,which Ottaviano Nelli painted there. Like Sant'Agostino and San Pietro, Santa Maria has her share of faded fresco; but this Madonna in her splendid robes, in the midst of her gracious court of angels and saints and kneeling donors, is a vision of the glories of that Gubbio which once raised a proud head among the principalities of the Quattrocento. Yet not even Nelli has succeeded in colouring the past of Gubbio. For nearly all her treasures have been stolen from her, and her tired old walls toppling to their decay enclose more gardens and smiling vineyards than streets and squares. If she had not been so poor and so ready to sell herself for a fewsoldito the passing stranger she might have been a museum of lovely things. As it is she has been stripped of everything which could be carried away, from the exquisite majolica of Maestro Giorgio (whose ruby glaze made him as much the glory of sixteenth-century Gubbio as Oderigi was of the city visited by Dante) to the intarsia cabinets in the Palace of Federigo of Urbino.How typical of Gubbio, the shrunken city, is the ruined palace full of lovely crumbling stones, where Federigo and his beloved wife Battista lived. It is fallen into decay; it has become a mere barrack; a more desolate spot could not well be imagined. And yet it is a fitting symbol of the house of Montefeltro; for Guidobaldo, the weakling son of the great condottiere, was born here, in the house which Federigo built soproudly in his birthplace among the loyal people of Gubbio. And it was the scene of a great tragedy. For here Battista died.After her death Federigo came here less often, for we read that he loved Battista very dearly. She had inherited the wit and ready sympathy of her great grandmother, Battista da Montefeltro; she was a scholar, and a woman of resource and courage, capable of defending the duchy while Federigo was absent on his long campaigns. And withal she loved him. It was for this reason, knowing his disappointment because she had given him no heir to succeed to his hard-won estate, that this great woman, the grandmother of Vittoria Colonna, listened for her lord's sake to an old wife's tale, and making a pilgrimage to Gubbio vowed to Saint Ubaldo that if a son was vouchsafed to her she would be willing to die for his sake. A curious story. But she did bear a son, here at Gubbio, whither she had come to be under the special protection of the saint. Federigo was away in Tuscany, gaining more laurels by his great victory over the Volterrans. He came back to her as soon as he could, riding swiftly through the Appennines with his honours fresh upon him. And here is the strangest part of the story. For when he was but a few hours away Battista, who had been progressing so well, fell ill, and died soon after his arrival, thus expiating her vow. Federigo's heartbroken letters to the Senate of Siena and the Pope testify his grief. Nor did her love and sacrifice avail him anything, for Guidobaldo was the last of his race to sit upon the throne of Urbino.239Gubbio: Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.But neither Time, nor the wanton hand of strangers, can rob Gubbio of her beauty. She is a dream-city within whose walls we grew forgetful of the world. It is not the imperishable grandeur of her mountains or her monuments which constitute her special charm so much as her Gothic grace and her gentle blending of art and nature. See what a fraction of old Iguvium is left—a theatre, with its memories of vanished pomps and vanities, and some broken tombs standing in the corn-fields, with twisted vines veiling their ragged cores, and brambles tossing wide arms over their crests. And yet I carry with me the memory of a golden hour in that ancient Umbro-Roman theatre of Iguvium, not so much for its importance as a monument as for its beauty; although the vandalism of the last century, which allowed the people of Gubbio to strip it of its marble columns, has left it many interesting fragments, such as a perfect doorway with its jambs complete, and the unspoilt sloping pavement of the wings by which the actors entered the stage. For we approached it through a vineyard below the city walls: its auditorium was a deep semi-circle of grassy steps, broidered with little flowers, and in its proscenium the apples dropped from neighbouring orchards.We stepped through the vineyard gate on to the raised platform of the stage, denuded of everything except some stumps of masonry and some few feet of pavement. Three blocks of marble served as rough steps from the proscenium to the orchestra, and here a lizard sunned himself, and a happy golden butterfly fluttered, as though these old worn stones were their familiar playground. As we climbed up the seats where once the Romans sat, and perhaps the Umbri, for the theatre was repaired in the lifetime of Augustus, the scent of crushed thyme filled the air. It was very quiet. There were not even cicalas, only the distant bells of Gubbio calling her people to prayer. We sat on the highest circle of the mossy steps, and looked across the vineyards to the little city, asleep in the golden noon below her arid hills.The poet was deep inopus reticulatumand cornices and friezes, but I could only love the silence and the scented air, the little flowers which starred the ground, the grasses pencilled lightly against the sky on the chain of arches, the lizards sunning themselves on broken marbles, the butterflies dancing above them. And when I raised my eyes Gubbio lay before me with olive-gardens enclosed in her broken walls, and her old grey houses piled one above the other round her lovely Gothic Palazzo dei Consoli, which soars above the lesser roofs, arcaded andbattlemented, a crown of beauty on the hillside. Behind rose her three mountains, Monte Calvo, Monte Ingino, and Monte S. Girolamo, barren of everything but lonely cypresses pointing the way to monasteries on high.GUBBIO: THE MEDIAEVAL AQUEDUCT.Gubbio has the indefinably wistful charm of a citybuilt in the shadow of great mountains, for though she has conquered the three giants which hem her in, and left her monasteries as out-posts on their slopes, and solemn crucifixes as her ensign on their brows, she has not tamed their wildness. It needs only a few steps through the picturesque old Porta Metauro to prove this, for out in that rugged pass which leads to Scheggia, and the Old Flaminian Road, and Cagli, and Urbino we were hemmed in between the hungry mountains, whose sides are scarred by torrents, curiously seamed, and richly coloured.Along this road the Dukes of Urbino rode in splendid state. How little it is altered from their day! Here you are face to face with Nature, who changes slowly. The strata on the frowning cliffs are a little worn; the road is a little better, though it is a poorstradaeven now for motors; perhaps there was no wall then between the road and the deep gully where the green Carmignano stirs up its sandy bed. But the peasants rode up the hilly pass then as now with their women riding astride and a-pillion on mules or donkeys, and the traveller in that day would hear as we did the forlorn music of their bells still floating back, long after they were out of sight. On the hillside above was one of Gubbio's wonders—the mediaeval aqueduct which creeps perilously round the shoulder of Monte Calvo, and dips down the hillside to the Bottaccione, which I can best describe by saying that it is a thick wall which joins Monte Calvo to Monte Ingino, and dams the Carmignano, making a reservoir from which water can flow at will into the town for use in mills and fountains. If the Eugubian Tablets testify to the importance of ancient Iguvium, these vast engineering feats testify to her mediaeval greatness. For though they are not as imposing as Roman Monuments, and are built of small poor stones, they are a splendid testimony of the energy of this little hill-girt city in the twelfth and fourteenth[19]centuries, when most principalities were too occupied in petty wars to think of such stupendous work.245Gubbio: Via Carmignano.It would be unfair to Gubbio to take leave of her without saying one word about the Via Carmignano, which is not only one of the most picturesque streets to be seen anywhere in Italy, but which represents a sphere of life in which Gubbio was extremely active from the twelfth century to comparatively recent years—her woollen industry. It is rather astonishing that Gubbio, who had so many trades and arts, should be so poor to-day. Her school of painting which was mainly of the miniature type—for Ottaviano Nelli was as much a miniature-painter as the mysterious Oderisi, whose name, like Francesca da Rimini's, has been handeddown to posterity by Dante—was famous throughout Italy.I have already spoken of her renown as the home of Master George, the great majolica-maker; she sheltered a school of mosaic-workers from early times; and her wood-carvers, who have left splendid work in her old Church of San Pietro, were reckoned so important that a certain Niccolò was commissioned to carve the great doors of San Francesco at Assisi. But it was by her wool industry that Gubbio built up her wealth; and it was to turn their wool mills that the Eugubians built the Bottaccione out in the pass between Scheggia and Gubbio, and diverted the course of the Carmignano, which till the twelfth century had been a moat round the city walls.To-day this little mountain torrent still runs through the heart of Gubbio, but the mills are silent. For the woollen trade, which was so prosperous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the nobles passed a law forbidding any of their class to enter its ranks under penalty of forfeiting his title, has been slowly killed by the suppression of the monasteries, which has robbed it of its staple support, the making of habits for religious houses.The Via Carmignano is a little Venice which loses itself in a mountain torrent as it approaches the Porta Metauro. Behind the arcaded loggia del Mercato, where it runs at the foot of the cypress garden of SanGiovanni Battista, a picturesque and ancient church on the site of the early cathedral, the ravine is spanned by as many bridges as a Venetian waterway, mediaeval erections of the maddest shapes, full of fantastic angles, which sometimes only lead to the barred doors of some Merchant of Gubbio's private house. Here are Gothic palaces with gardens pouring over their walls, and coats of arms by their doors like the house near the Via dei Consoli, which has the Lamb of the Templars over its portal. But as the road creeps up towards the Porta Metauro they are replaced by thirteenth-century houses, mere cottages of rough grey stone such as you might find in any mountain village—only these were built in the time of St. Francis. Between the street and the deep river gully is a breast-high parapet with wide-eaved shrines whose hanging lamps are always lit at night; and beyond and above are the everlasting hills, towering overhead, blocking every vista with their rocks and gullies and stony water-courses, lifting their tawny heads up to the soft sky and crowned with giant crucifixes, as though they shouted in triumph to an unheeding world the old war-cry of the Lord, 'In hoc signo vinces!'

I shall always think of Gubbio as I saw her first, in the magic sunset of a cold grey day, on which summer had been hidden by the jealous clouds, and the wind blew bleakly from the Appennines. September had come in the night before with storm and wind. When we left Assisi the sky was clear and rain-swept, blue as the heavens of Giotto's frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco, and there was a glint of sunshine lighting her Gothic towers between the racing cumuli. But all day the mountains of Nocera and Gualdo 'mourned for their heavy yoke,' hiding their crests in wind-blown veils of cloud; and the rocky stream-beds at their feet, which had lain mute and parched since the last rains of spring, gave voice in swirling torrents.

So we came to the heart of the Appennines, to the broad Valley of the Chiaggio, which is so rich with maize and vineyards. Here in the north three mountains lift their great heads to the sky, and in the hollow where their three slopes meet lies Gubbio, a fairy citadel such as poets dream of. Indeed, Gubbio might well be the home of dreams, for I can think of no placewhere their gossamer threads could be so lightly spun as in the long, fantastic arcade of the Mercato Vecchio, in the shadow of her Gothic palaces.

As we drew near, the sun slipped from below her mantle of cloud, and in a seeming passion of desire bathed the whole world in flame. Seen by the ruddy torch of this wild sunset Gubbio was all rose, a city of fair dreams, unforgettably lovely. Her towers, palaces and loggias were illuminated, and the bare slopes of Monte Calvo were flooded with roseate light save where the folds of the hill made cobalt shadows. Even the peasants walking in the Piazza del Mercato were caught in the same radiance, which made a glory round the humblest implements of toil. It was so fair a sight that I stood as one enchanted and feared to take my eyes away from it, lest it should vanish like the fairy cities of our childhood, and I should find myself once more upon the bleak hillside of life.

O little town, with the name whose quaintness has made it familiar, do you still sleep at the foot of your mountains under the shadow of your holy houses? Can it be that I have dreamt of you, seeing some picture of a mediaeval city in a psalter? Or does your lamp-lighter still light your ancient swing-lamps in the dusk, with old-world grace and disregard of time, setting out on his slow rounds long before the sunset glow has faded from your brow? I must come back to see if it is true; if your barren hills have reallyblossomed into shrines and monasteries; if you have still the wistful charm that I remember; if you will greet me after the long journey with that same rosy blush at eve!

GUBBIO: THE LAMPLIGHTER.

And yet, I do not know why I should question, for I have many gentle memories of Gubbio—of steep, quiet streets whose ends are closed by solemn mountains; of Gothic palaces and loggias; of ancient churches full of faded pictures; of saints and Madonnas broodingover city gates; of peasants streaming into Mass of a morning; of women in black mantillas or the graceful fringed shawls of Venice and the March. Nor have I forgotten the hospitality that she extended to us. Gubbio was always famous for her hospitality. There is a story that in the olden days the nobles of Gubbio fought so fiercely for the right of entertaining visitors to their town that to avoid the really serious conflicts which resulted from this rivalry a pillar was erected in the Mercato with rings attached to it, 'each belonging to some separate aristocratic house, and to whosesoever ring a traveller chanced to fasten his horse, to him belonged the right of entertainment.'[18]

Though our inn was humble, even rough, we were lodged in the ancient convent of San Marco, and we took our meals in a vine arbour full of hanging grapes, where the sunlight piercing the leafy roof flecked the snowy table-cloth with silver, and made the floor an arabesque of dappled light and shade. A few yards away among the vines the Carmignano foamed along its rocky bed. And here we were content with simple fare, but of the best—macaroni spread with pomidoro,misto fritto, golden eggs, fruit and honey, washed down with amber-colouredvino del paese.

Whatever may be the facts about the grandson of Noah, to whom local tradition loves to assign the foundation of Gubbio, there can be no doubt thatshe is of Umbrian antiquity. Unlike most of the so-called Umbrian cities Gubbio has ample proof of her importance as a city of the older race, which was displaced by the Etruscans; for besides the number of prehistoric utensils discovered in the caves of her mountains, and a short course of Cyclopean wall on Monte Calvo, which point to a remote civilisation, there are certain pieces of money in existence bearing the Umbrian name Ikuvini; and, most conclusive evidence of all, there are the world-famous Eugubian Tables.

These tables of bronze, which have been of such inestimable value to the student of ancient languages, are Gubbio's greatest treasure. They are housed in her Palazzo Pubblico, in her little shrunken museum, which has so few precious things left to-day, except a solitary tazza by the immortal Maestro Giorgio. It would be useless for me to write of them at length, for it is impossible to treat of them scientifically in a short chapter, and only those who come to see them can gauge the romance and mystery which hang about them. There are seven tables in all, four written in Etruscan characters, two in Latin, and one partly in Etruscan and partly in Latin characters. Yet the language that they have immortalised is neither Latin nor Etruscan, but the tongue of that mysterious people, the Umbrians, who have left us so few traces of their civilisation, whose origin is lost in the misty ages.

Since the discovery of these tables in 1444 studentsand scholars have sought to read their riddle, and it is by the fruit of their labours that we know what an interesting clue they afford to the character of Gubbio. For these fine letters traced by the scribes of long ago are sacerdotal inscriptions, dealing with the religious rites of the Attidian brethren, who paid homage to a strange pantheon of gods—Umbrian, Roman and Greek—and whose headquarters, according to many students, were in the temple of Jupiter Appenninus, eight miles away, at Scheggia, on the old Flaminian way. M. Bréal, however, does not hold this theory, claiming that Jupiter Appenninus is not mentioned in the text; and urging the plea that as the tablets were discovered in a subterranean vault, near the ancient theatre of Iguvium, the college of the confraternity was likely to be found within the city itself.

It would be difficult to say, for necessarily the reading of the tablets is but vague; the only point we can be certain of is that this ghostly echo of a vanished city is one of prayer and invocation, occupied with sacrifices and propitiations rather than with laws or ceremonies, as the inscriptions of Rome and Etruria have been. And this is typical of the city, for the real characteristic of Gubbio to-day is her gentle air of sanctity, just as the most vivid memories of her Middle Ages are concerned with saints and bishops. For the bishops of Gubbio, the saintly Ubaldo, whose name thepeople of Gubbio venerate in the yearly festival of the Ceri on the 15th of May, the blessed Teobaldo who succeeded him, and Villano, that man 'of pure and saintly life who was, besides, the friend of St. Francisof Assisi,' are only a few of the many holy men who steered her helm through the stormy waves of Time.

GUBBIO: SAN FRANCESCO.

And here, as you remember, St. Francis came with song and thanksgiving, although he had been but a short time before stripped naked to the world, to see his friend Giacomello Spada, who clothed him and sheltered him, and whose garden covered the ground where the picturesque Gothic church of San Francesco stands to-day. Nor is there any more familiar story told by their nurses to the breathless children of the Latin countries than the legend of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which is commemorated to this day in the little chapel of S. Francesco della Pace; built, so it is said, on the site of the cave wherein the wolf dwelt after he had been tamed by the brotherly love of Francis. It was to Gubbio Francis came in the first glow of his renunciation, for we read that he was confident of finding shelter and the bare necessaries of clothing with his friends there, but I think there was another reason. Perhaps as he lay on the bleak side of Subasio he thought with longing of the gentle city of Ubaldo, cradled at the foot of its bare mountain, which soared towards the heavens, offering, as it were, upon an altar, the body of its saintly bishop.

Gubbio is a city of vanished splendours, a ghost of her old glory. So that we were amazed on entering Santa Maria Nuova to see anything so brilliant and full of vivid beauty as the Madonna della Belvedere,which Ottaviano Nelli painted there. Like Sant'Agostino and San Pietro, Santa Maria has her share of faded fresco; but this Madonna in her splendid robes, in the midst of her gracious court of angels and saints and kneeling donors, is a vision of the glories of that Gubbio which once raised a proud head among the principalities of the Quattrocento. Yet not even Nelli has succeeded in colouring the past of Gubbio. For nearly all her treasures have been stolen from her, and her tired old walls toppling to their decay enclose more gardens and smiling vineyards than streets and squares. If she had not been so poor and so ready to sell herself for a fewsoldito the passing stranger she might have been a museum of lovely things. As it is she has been stripped of everything which could be carried away, from the exquisite majolica of Maestro Giorgio (whose ruby glaze made him as much the glory of sixteenth-century Gubbio as Oderigi was of the city visited by Dante) to the intarsia cabinets in the Palace of Federigo of Urbino.

How typical of Gubbio, the shrunken city, is the ruined palace full of lovely crumbling stones, where Federigo and his beloved wife Battista lived. It is fallen into decay; it has become a mere barrack; a more desolate spot could not well be imagined. And yet it is a fitting symbol of the house of Montefeltro; for Guidobaldo, the weakling son of the great condottiere, was born here, in the house which Federigo built soproudly in his birthplace among the loyal people of Gubbio. And it was the scene of a great tragedy. For here Battista died.

After her death Federigo came here less often, for we read that he loved Battista very dearly. She had inherited the wit and ready sympathy of her great grandmother, Battista da Montefeltro; she was a scholar, and a woman of resource and courage, capable of defending the duchy while Federigo was absent on his long campaigns. And withal she loved him. It was for this reason, knowing his disappointment because she had given him no heir to succeed to his hard-won estate, that this great woman, the grandmother of Vittoria Colonna, listened for her lord's sake to an old wife's tale, and making a pilgrimage to Gubbio vowed to Saint Ubaldo that if a son was vouchsafed to her she would be willing to die for his sake. A curious story. But she did bear a son, here at Gubbio, whither she had come to be under the special protection of the saint. Federigo was away in Tuscany, gaining more laurels by his great victory over the Volterrans. He came back to her as soon as he could, riding swiftly through the Appennines with his honours fresh upon him. And here is the strangest part of the story. For when he was but a few hours away Battista, who had been progressing so well, fell ill, and died soon after his arrival, thus expiating her vow. Federigo's heartbroken letters to the Senate of Siena and the Pope testify his grief. Nor did her love and sacrifice avail him anything, for Guidobaldo was the last of his race to sit upon the throne of Urbino.

239

Gubbio: Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.

But neither Time, nor the wanton hand of strangers, can rob Gubbio of her beauty. She is a dream-city within whose walls we grew forgetful of the world. It is not the imperishable grandeur of her mountains or her monuments which constitute her special charm so much as her Gothic grace and her gentle blending of art and nature. See what a fraction of old Iguvium is left—a theatre, with its memories of vanished pomps and vanities, and some broken tombs standing in the corn-fields, with twisted vines veiling their ragged cores, and brambles tossing wide arms over their crests. And yet I carry with me the memory of a golden hour in that ancient Umbro-Roman theatre of Iguvium, not so much for its importance as a monument as for its beauty; although the vandalism of the last century, which allowed the people of Gubbio to strip it of its marble columns, has left it many interesting fragments, such as a perfect doorway with its jambs complete, and the unspoilt sloping pavement of the wings by which the actors entered the stage. For we approached it through a vineyard below the city walls: its auditorium was a deep semi-circle of grassy steps, broidered with little flowers, and in its proscenium the apples dropped from neighbouring orchards.

We stepped through the vineyard gate on to the raised platform of the stage, denuded of everything except some stumps of masonry and some few feet of pavement. Three blocks of marble served as rough steps from the proscenium to the orchestra, and here a lizard sunned himself, and a happy golden butterfly fluttered, as though these old worn stones were their familiar playground. As we climbed up the seats where once the Romans sat, and perhaps the Umbri, for the theatre was repaired in the lifetime of Augustus, the scent of crushed thyme filled the air. It was very quiet. There were not even cicalas, only the distant bells of Gubbio calling her people to prayer. We sat on the highest circle of the mossy steps, and looked across the vineyards to the little city, asleep in the golden noon below her arid hills.

The poet was deep inopus reticulatumand cornices and friezes, but I could only love the silence and the scented air, the little flowers which starred the ground, the grasses pencilled lightly against the sky on the chain of arches, the lizards sunning themselves on broken marbles, the butterflies dancing above them. And when I raised my eyes Gubbio lay before me with olive-gardens enclosed in her broken walls, and her old grey houses piled one above the other round her lovely Gothic Palazzo dei Consoli, which soars above the lesser roofs, arcaded andbattlemented, a crown of beauty on the hillside. Behind rose her three mountains, Monte Calvo, Monte Ingino, and Monte S. Girolamo, barren of everything but lonely cypresses pointing the way to monasteries on high.

GUBBIO: THE MEDIAEVAL AQUEDUCT.

Gubbio has the indefinably wistful charm of a citybuilt in the shadow of great mountains, for though she has conquered the three giants which hem her in, and left her monasteries as out-posts on their slopes, and solemn crucifixes as her ensign on their brows, she has not tamed their wildness. It needs only a few steps through the picturesque old Porta Metauro to prove this, for out in that rugged pass which leads to Scheggia, and the Old Flaminian Road, and Cagli, and Urbino we were hemmed in between the hungry mountains, whose sides are scarred by torrents, curiously seamed, and richly coloured.

Along this road the Dukes of Urbino rode in splendid state. How little it is altered from their day! Here you are face to face with Nature, who changes slowly. The strata on the frowning cliffs are a little worn; the road is a little better, though it is a poorstradaeven now for motors; perhaps there was no wall then between the road and the deep gully where the green Carmignano stirs up its sandy bed. But the peasants rode up the hilly pass then as now with their women riding astride and a-pillion on mules or donkeys, and the traveller in that day would hear as we did the forlorn music of their bells still floating back, long after they were out of sight. On the hillside above was one of Gubbio's wonders—the mediaeval aqueduct which creeps perilously round the shoulder of Monte Calvo, and dips down the hillside to the Bottaccione, which I can best describe by saying that it is a thick wall which joins Monte Calvo to Monte Ingino, and dams the Carmignano, making a reservoir from which water can flow at will into the town for use in mills and fountains. If the Eugubian Tablets testify to the importance of ancient Iguvium, these vast engineering feats testify to her mediaeval greatness. For though they are not as imposing as Roman Monuments, and are built of small poor stones, they are a splendid testimony of the energy of this little hill-girt city in the twelfth and fourteenth[19]centuries, when most principalities were too occupied in petty wars to think of such stupendous work.

245

Gubbio: Via Carmignano.

It would be unfair to Gubbio to take leave of her without saying one word about the Via Carmignano, which is not only one of the most picturesque streets to be seen anywhere in Italy, but which represents a sphere of life in which Gubbio was extremely active from the twelfth century to comparatively recent years—her woollen industry. It is rather astonishing that Gubbio, who had so many trades and arts, should be so poor to-day. Her school of painting which was mainly of the miniature type—for Ottaviano Nelli was as much a miniature-painter as the mysterious Oderisi, whose name, like Francesca da Rimini's, has been handeddown to posterity by Dante—was famous throughout Italy.

I have already spoken of her renown as the home of Master George, the great majolica-maker; she sheltered a school of mosaic-workers from early times; and her wood-carvers, who have left splendid work in her old Church of San Pietro, were reckoned so important that a certain Niccolò was commissioned to carve the great doors of San Francesco at Assisi. But it was by her wool industry that Gubbio built up her wealth; and it was to turn their wool mills that the Eugubians built the Bottaccione out in the pass between Scheggia and Gubbio, and diverted the course of the Carmignano, which till the twelfth century had been a moat round the city walls.

To-day this little mountain torrent still runs through the heart of Gubbio, but the mills are silent. For the woollen trade, which was so prosperous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the nobles passed a law forbidding any of their class to enter its ranks under penalty of forfeiting his title, has been slowly killed by the suppression of the monasteries, which has robbed it of its staple support, the making of habits for religious houses.

The Via Carmignano is a little Venice which loses itself in a mountain torrent as it approaches the Porta Metauro. Behind the arcaded loggia del Mercato, where it runs at the foot of the cypress garden of SanGiovanni Battista, a picturesque and ancient church on the site of the early cathedral, the ravine is spanned by as many bridges as a Venetian waterway, mediaeval erections of the maddest shapes, full of fantastic angles, which sometimes only lead to the barred doors of some Merchant of Gubbio's private house. Here are Gothic palaces with gardens pouring over their walls, and coats of arms by their doors like the house near the Via dei Consoli, which has the Lamb of the Templars over its portal. But as the road creeps up towards the Porta Metauro they are replaced by thirteenth-century houses, mere cottages of rough grey stone such as you might find in any mountain village—only these were built in the time of St. Francis. Between the street and the deep river gully is a breast-high parapet with wide-eaved shrines whose hanging lamps are always lit at night; and beyond and above are the everlasting hills, towering overhead, blocking every vista with their rocks and gullies and stony water-courses, lifting their tawny heads up to the soft sky and crowned with giant crucifixes, as though they shouted in triumph to an unheeding world the old war-cry of the Lord, 'In hoc signo vinces!'

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