MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIOREAustere and terrible, barren as the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is the desert of Accona, where Bernardo Tolomei founded the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore.At Asciano we left behind us the fruitful gardens of Tuscany, rippling with vines, and rich with maize and olives, and embarked upon a sea of pallid hills. It was as though a blight had fallen. The naked earth was parched and rent with gaping fissures; the tamarisks and spurges and the drab grass which fringed the roadside were old and dry. The smiling valleys fled to the north and the south as from a land accursed, 'and lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness.'Our way lay along a bleached white road which seared the grey hillside and writhed among volcanic mounds and precipices. Here and there the drab monotony was broken by the clustered spires of cypresses round scattered farms; but their black foliage, like funeral plumes, only added a deeper note of melancholy. It was hot too. The August sun beat down upon us from a brazen sky, and the glare of theroad made our eyes ache for cool green shadows. But when we reached the plateau a vision of surpassing beauty burst upon us. It was as though, after sojourning for many hours in the wilderness, we looked from Pisgah on the promised land. To our right, across miles of pale clay gorges and volcanic mounds, Siena lay rosy and smiling in her vineyards; on the other hand a wide valley full of precipices rolled away to the purple hills of Umbria, which hung like a mirage between earth and sky, with Monte Amiata lifting her proud head above them all. And presently, after we had passed through Chiusure, a shrunken little town in the heart of a green oasis, we caught our first glimpse of Monte Oliveto.Below the road the hill fell away in a deep ravine, whose tortured sides were torn and scarred by torrents, as though the pallid earth had bared an ancient wound. And in the midst of the grey desolation, with towering cliffs above, and wild precipices leaping down into the valley below, stood the Abbey of the Blessed Bernardo. Grim and forbidding as a fortress were its bare red walls, devoid of ornament, only redeemed from positive ugliness by their austerity and rugged strength. And yet, as we approached the monastery through the fragrant shade of cypress avenues, the scent of pine needles and the song of cicalas rose together like the voice of the wilderness and the solitary place which has been made glad.CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE.For, indeed, S. Bernardo and his companions laboured to make this wilderness blossom like a rose. Early in the fourteenth century he put aside the vanities of life. At the height of his glory, when all Sienawas ringing with his brilliance and prodigality, he left the city, fleeing, like Shelley, from the awful spectre of his veiled self, asking 'Are you satisfied?' And coming into the desert of Accona he dwelt here in poverty and simplicity, building a little chapel to Santa Scolastica, the sister of St. Benedict, and leading a life of prayer and meditation. We read that a great number of followers, many of them noble, came to him, and lived upon the hillside, striving by the sweat of their brows to transform the Tuscan desert into a garden. But in that day of Guelph and Ghibelline disorders the rulers of Siena feared that he was sowing the seeds of a rebellion; and, if we believe his legend, tried to poison him. It is certain that he was accused of heresy, and forced to make the long journey to the Papal Court of Avignon with Ambrogio Piccolomini, one of his earliest companions, and a scion of the noble house of Piccolomini. Nothing more is said of the charge of heresy. The Pope, JohnXXII., received them with favour and gave them letters to Guido Tarlati, the splendid old warrior-bishop of Arezzo, in which he asked that most unconventional of prelates to furnish them with a monastic rule. Here again the legend adds a picturesque touch, for it tells us that Tarlati had a miraculous vision, in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and commanded him to give the rule of Benedict to 'the pious solitaries' of Accona, to clothe them in spotless white, the symbol of herpurity, and to give their hermitage the name of St. Mary of Mount Olivet.So with their own hands Bernardo and his companions, no longer clad in the garb of penitents, began to build their church and convent on the spot where he had his vision of a celestial ladder stretching up to heaven, with angels leading his companions to the throne of Christ. But their work was stopped by news of the great plague which was spreading desolation throughout the country. Going himself to Siena, Bernardo sent out the brothers two by two to tend the people, bidding them depart with good courage, saying that they should all meet together in Siena for the Festival of the Assumption. He never saw his cloistered home again; he died in the stricken city with nearly all his companions, and other hands took up the building of his monastery; and, later, beautified it with frescoes by Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma, and rare intarsia by Fra Giovanni of Verona.But I was not thinking of the Blessed Bernardo or of his white-robed Olivetans as we drew near the monastery. Some touch of faery lingered in that cypress grove. We had come out to see a convent. And lo! a battlemented gateway rose before us, with drawbridge and portcullis, as warlike as a castle of the Sforzas. It was as though we had ridden like princes of eld across the grey inferno of Childe Roland, wherethe grass 'grew scant as hair in leprosy,' only to wind our horns before the gate of an enchanted city.And the fancy grew. We passed without challenge under the portcullis, with a smiling Godspeed from its Della Robbia Madonna, into one of those enchanted woods of Italy, where stone-pines make a frieze against the sky, and cicalas sing their little hearts away in rapture. Two paths led through the flickering shadows. We hesitated which to take, and glanced behind us, half expecting some warden to issue from that ancient gate to ask our pleasure and direct our steps. No one was there. But, just as St. Mary welcomed us without, so from his niche above the arch St. Benedict, clad in the spotless robes of Oliveto, gave us his blessing. We went forward then, past a huge brick jebbia full of green water and down to the stables where we dismounted by a well, as Aeneas Sylvius and his brilliant suite of knights and choristers dismounted when they rode here from Siena and marvelled to find so fair a garden in that barren land.Still no one came, and still the enchanted silence of the woods prevailed. We wandered round the old red walls, seeking to find an entrance, and since there was no one to say us nay, we went into the cool white monastery. How still and desolate it was! Our footsteps ringing on the flags dismayed us, and when we pealed the bell it echoed like derisive laughter down the empty corridor. Truly the spirit of the place hastaken flight, now that the white-robed brethren no longer dwell in their inheritance. Not more than three monks live here to-day; and these, they told us rather sadly, ascustodesonly, for their order is suppressed nearly everywhere, and the state has made a national monument of their treasures. So the ancient law that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath, is fulfilled. And I will confess at once that from the sentimental point of view my sympathies are all with the monks, for they are one of our most picturesque links with the past, and it was with their own hands that they sowed this harvest which another reaps.[12]So there are only ghosts to people the deserted cells and chapels and refectories of Mount Olivet to-day. Time and the hand of man have robbed this sanctuary. Everywhere the eye sees frescoes fading from the walls; and Napoleon, who never saw any harm in robbing Peter to pay Paul, stole some of the exquisite intarsia stalls of the convent church to enrich the cathedral of Siena. Only in the great cloister, where Signorelli and Sodoma painted the life and miracles of St. Benedict, is the imagination fired. What does it matter that the story has been often told? That wehave conned it in a hundred other frescoes? It is like the magic stories of our youth, which gained an added joy by repetition, because no two people ever told them quite the same. Here we could find inhabitants for all those empty cells; here we could fill the pleasant groves with white-cowled monks who knelt in prayer below the cypresses, or paced the shady avenues in meditation; here we could picture Bernardo himself, building his abbey, and see him sitting in the old refectory with Patrizi, and Ambrogio Piccolomini, and the other nobles who followed him into the wilderness. 'The series forms, in fact, a paintednovellaof monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles.'[13]And then, because it was long after mezzogiorno, and we were to sleep at Chiusi that night, we went back to the magic cypress-woods to eat our lunch and rest before we drove to Asciano. Our coachmen had prepared a place for us, which they explained wasmolto ariosofor so warm a day, on a terraced slope in the wide avenue of cypresses leading from the monastery church to the little chapel which contains the cell of Bernardo. The bank was carpeted with pine-needles, and the air was fragrant with the scent of crushed thyme. We lunched excellently well off wine and bread, figs and peaches; and our smiling drivers brought us a greatfiascoof sparkling ice-coldwater—an acceptable addition to the meal, for we were thirsty, and good spring water is not found everywhere in Italy. And then we pillowed our heads on the soft bank, and lay in silence, entangled in a flickering web of sun and shadow.Surely it was an enchanted wood of cypresses that summer afternoon! As I drowsed I dreamt that I saw a boy come idly through the trees singing to his lute. His eyes were heavy-lidded, and long black love-locks lay on his shoulders. He was dressed fantastically in scarlet stockings, a silken cap, and a gay cloak, which evidently pleased him well, for at times he plucked at it and pulled it closely round him to admire its folds. A monkey with a gilded chain was on his shoulder, and a badger walked solemnly at his heels. Who could he be? I wondered. He was too gay and worldly to have thoughts of entering the Brotherhood, and as he drew nearer I could hear that his song was in the praise of love. Some poet of the Renaissance, perhaps, whose lord was resting in the monastery.He drew nearer still, till I thought he must have seen me; and then, as though he was a little weary of his song, he dropped his lute and pillowed his gracious young head upon the flowery bank and drifted into sleep, lulled by the fragrance of the warm pine-woods. It seemed to me as if he dreamed, for he stirred, and turned his face away.Was it I who dreamt the rest?I saw a lady moving towards him across the flowers as lightly as a butterfly upon the wing. Fair of face and form was she, fashioned very lightly, full of airy grace; with child-like laughter on her lips and a half-defiant, wholly-alluring challenge in her tender eyes. Her dress was blue and of so light a texture that it rippled from her rosy limbs like water, and scarce bruised the flowers. As she ventured near she laughed, and wantoned with some golden fruit. The sunshine and the breeze, greatly daring, played in her filmy yellow hair and fashioned the tender blue of her robe into little wings. Half a child was she, and half a woman, full of the joy of living and the joy of beautiful things; the very spirit of an azure butterfly who flutters through a summer day, dancing from sheer delight.Who could have dreamt that I should find her here, on this bleak hillside, in this austere old house? These baked clay cliffs and desolations should have driven her away to gay Siena long ago, even if she outstayed the bitter winds which thrash the stone-pines round the forsaken monastery in winter.She was standing by the poet now, and smiling down at him, pouting a little because he did not wake. Who could resist her, this happy butterfly fashioned so beautifully for love on a golden summer day?A pine-cone fell into my lap and startled me. I moved. And in a flash the spell was broken. Theyhad vanished, the beauteous lady and the sleeping boy whose dreams had conjured her. The yellow sunlight was slanting in between the cypresses, and from the stables came the sound of horses being harnessed. It was already time to go.And yet they say that Benedict sent her away with harsh words and admonitions.And the youth who dreamed was not a poet but a painter; his name was Sodoma. You may see her picture in the cloister, and his own as well, in the gay clothes of which he was so proud, for they were part-payment for his work, and had belonged to a gentleman of Lombardy who took the monastic habit.But it is still a miracle to me that I should have met her on this bare hillside.
Austere and terrible, barren as the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is the desert of Accona, where Bernardo Tolomei founded the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore.
At Asciano we left behind us the fruitful gardens of Tuscany, rippling with vines, and rich with maize and olives, and embarked upon a sea of pallid hills. It was as though a blight had fallen. The naked earth was parched and rent with gaping fissures; the tamarisks and spurges and the drab grass which fringed the roadside were old and dry. The smiling valleys fled to the north and the south as from a land accursed, 'and lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness.'
Our way lay along a bleached white road which seared the grey hillside and writhed among volcanic mounds and precipices. Here and there the drab monotony was broken by the clustered spires of cypresses round scattered farms; but their black foliage, like funeral plumes, only added a deeper note of melancholy. It was hot too. The August sun beat down upon us from a brazen sky, and the glare of theroad made our eyes ache for cool green shadows. But when we reached the plateau a vision of surpassing beauty burst upon us. It was as though, after sojourning for many hours in the wilderness, we looked from Pisgah on the promised land. To our right, across miles of pale clay gorges and volcanic mounds, Siena lay rosy and smiling in her vineyards; on the other hand a wide valley full of precipices rolled away to the purple hills of Umbria, which hung like a mirage between earth and sky, with Monte Amiata lifting her proud head above them all. And presently, after we had passed through Chiusure, a shrunken little town in the heart of a green oasis, we caught our first glimpse of Monte Oliveto.
Below the road the hill fell away in a deep ravine, whose tortured sides were torn and scarred by torrents, as though the pallid earth had bared an ancient wound. And in the midst of the grey desolation, with towering cliffs above, and wild precipices leaping down into the valley below, stood the Abbey of the Blessed Bernardo. Grim and forbidding as a fortress were its bare red walls, devoid of ornament, only redeemed from positive ugliness by their austerity and rugged strength. And yet, as we approached the monastery through the fragrant shade of cypress avenues, the scent of pine needles and the song of cicalas rose together like the voice of the wilderness and the solitary place which has been made glad.
CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE.
CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE.
CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE.
For, indeed, S. Bernardo and his companions laboured to make this wilderness blossom like a rose. Early in the fourteenth century he put aside the vanities of life. At the height of his glory, when all Sienawas ringing with his brilliance and prodigality, he left the city, fleeing, like Shelley, from the awful spectre of his veiled self, asking 'Are you satisfied?' And coming into the desert of Accona he dwelt here in poverty and simplicity, building a little chapel to Santa Scolastica, the sister of St. Benedict, and leading a life of prayer and meditation. We read that a great number of followers, many of them noble, came to him, and lived upon the hillside, striving by the sweat of their brows to transform the Tuscan desert into a garden. But in that day of Guelph and Ghibelline disorders the rulers of Siena feared that he was sowing the seeds of a rebellion; and, if we believe his legend, tried to poison him. It is certain that he was accused of heresy, and forced to make the long journey to the Papal Court of Avignon with Ambrogio Piccolomini, one of his earliest companions, and a scion of the noble house of Piccolomini. Nothing more is said of the charge of heresy. The Pope, JohnXXII., received them with favour and gave them letters to Guido Tarlati, the splendid old warrior-bishop of Arezzo, in which he asked that most unconventional of prelates to furnish them with a monastic rule. Here again the legend adds a picturesque touch, for it tells us that Tarlati had a miraculous vision, in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and commanded him to give the rule of Benedict to 'the pious solitaries' of Accona, to clothe them in spotless white, the symbol of herpurity, and to give their hermitage the name of St. Mary of Mount Olivet.
So with their own hands Bernardo and his companions, no longer clad in the garb of penitents, began to build their church and convent on the spot where he had his vision of a celestial ladder stretching up to heaven, with angels leading his companions to the throne of Christ. But their work was stopped by news of the great plague which was spreading desolation throughout the country. Going himself to Siena, Bernardo sent out the brothers two by two to tend the people, bidding them depart with good courage, saying that they should all meet together in Siena for the Festival of the Assumption. He never saw his cloistered home again; he died in the stricken city with nearly all his companions, and other hands took up the building of his monastery; and, later, beautified it with frescoes by Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma, and rare intarsia by Fra Giovanni of Verona.
But I was not thinking of the Blessed Bernardo or of his white-robed Olivetans as we drew near the monastery. Some touch of faery lingered in that cypress grove. We had come out to see a convent. And lo! a battlemented gateway rose before us, with drawbridge and portcullis, as warlike as a castle of the Sforzas. It was as though we had ridden like princes of eld across the grey inferno of Childe Roland, wherethe grass 'grew scant as hair in leprosy,' only to wind our horns before the gate of an enchanted city.
And the fancy grew. We passed without challenge under the portcullis, with a smiling Godspeed from its Della Robbia Madonna, into one of those enchanted woods of Italy, where stone-pines make a frieze against the sky, and cicalas sing their little hearts away in rapture. Two paths led through the flickering shadows. We hesitated which to take, and glanced behind us, half expecting some warden to issue from that ancient gate to ask our pleasure and direct our steps. No one was there. But, just as St. Mary welcomed us without, so from his niche above the arch St. Benedict, clad in the spotless robes of Oliveto, gave us his blessing. We went forward then, past a huge brick jebbia full of green water and down to the stables where we dismounted by a well, as Aeneas Sylvius and his brilliant suite of knights and choristers dismounted when they rode here from Siena and marvelled to find so fair a garden in that barren land.
Still no one came, and still the enchanted silence of the woods prevailed. We wandered round the old red walls, seeking to find an entrance, and since there was no one to say us nay, we went into the cool white monastery. How still and desolate it was! Our footsteps ringing on the flags dismayed us, and when we pealed the bell it echoed like derisive laughter down the empty corridor. Truly the spirit of the place hastaken flight, now that the white-robed brethren no longer dwell in their inheritance. Not more than three monks live here to-day; and these, they told us rather sadly, ascustodesonly, for their order is suppressed nearly everywhere, and the state has made a national monument of their treasures. So the ancient law that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath, is fulfilled. And I will confess at once that from the sentimental point of view my sympathies are all with the monks, for they are one of our most picturesque links with the past, and it was with their own hands that they sowed this harvest which another reaps.[12]
So there are only ghosts to people the deserted cells and chapels and refectories of Mount Olivet to-day. Time and the hand of man have robbed this sanctuary. Everywhere the eye sees frescoes fading from the walls; and Napoleon, who never saw any harm in robbing Peter to pay Paul, stole some of the exquisite intarsia stalls of the convent church to enrich the cathedral of Siena. Only in the great cloister, where Signorelli and Sodoma painted the life and miracles of St. Benedict, is the imagination fired. What does it matter that the story has been often told? That wehave conned it in a hundred other frescoes? It is like the magic stories of our youth, which gained an added joy by repetition, because no two people ever told them quite the same. Here we could find inhabitants for all those empty cells; here we could fill the pleasant groves with white-cowled monks who knelt in prayer below the cypresses, or paced the shady avenues in meditation; here we could picture Bernardo himself, building his abbey, and see him sitting in the old refectory with Patrizi, and Ambrogio Piccolomini, and the other nobles who followed him into the wilderness. 'The series forms, in fact, a paintednovellaof monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles.'[13]
And then, because it was long after mezzogiorno, and we were to sleep at Chiusi that night, we went back to the magic cypress-woods to eat our lunch and rest before we drove to Asciano. Our coachmen had prepared a place for us, which they explained wasmolto ariosofor so warm a day, on a terraced slope in the wide avenue of cypresses leading from the monastery church to the little chapel which contains the cell of Bernardo. The bank was carpeted with pine-needles, and the air was fragrant with the scent of crushed thyme. We lunched excellently well off wine and bread, figs and peaches; and our smiling drivers brought us a greatfiascoof sparkling ice-coldwater—an acceptable addition to the meal, for we were thirsty, and good spring water is not found everywhere in Italy. And then we pillowed our heads on the soft bank, and lay in silence, entangled in a flickering web of sun and shadow.
Surely it was an enchanted wood of cypresses that summer afternoon! As I drowsed I dreamt that I saw a boy come idly through the trees singing to his lute. His eyes were heavy-lidded, and long black love-locks lay on his shoulders. He was dressed fantastically in scarlet stockings, a silken cap, and a gay cloak, which evidently pleased him well, for at times he plucked at it and pulled it closely round him to admire its folds. A monkey with a gilded chain was on his shoulder, and a badger walked solemnly at his heels. Who could he be? I wondered. He was too gay and worldly to have thoughts of entering the Brotherhood, and as he drew nearer I could hear that his song was in the praise of love. Some poet of the Renaissance, perhaps, whose lord was resting in the monastery.
He drew nearer still, till I thought he must have seen me; and then, as though he was a little weary of his song, he dropped his lute and pillowed his gracious young head upon the flowery bank and drifted into sleep, lulled by the fragrance of the warm pine-woods. It seemed to me as if he dreamed, for he stirred, and turned his face away.
Was it I who dreamt the rest?
I saw a lady moving towards him across the flowers as lightly as a butterfly upon the wing. Fair of face and form was she, fashioned very lightly, full of airy grace; with child-like laughter on her lips and a half-defiant, wholly-alluring challenge in her tender eyes. Her dress was blue and of so light a texture that it rippled from her rosy limbs like water, and scarce bruised the flowers. As she ventured near she laughed, and wantoned with some golden fruit. The sunshine and the breeze, greatly daring, played in her filmy yellow hair and fashioned the tender blue of her robe into little wings. Half a child was she, and half a woman, full of the joy of living and the joy of beautiful things; the very spirit of an azure butterfly who flutters through a summer day, dancing from sheer delight.
Who could have dreamt that I should find her here, on this bleak hillside, in this austere old house? These baked clay cliffs and desolations should have driven her away to gay Siena long ago, even if she outstayed the bitter winds which thrash the stone-pines round the forsaken monastery in winter.
She was standing by the poet now, and smiling down at him, pouting a little because he did not wake. Who could resist her, this happy butterfly fashioned so beautifully for love on a golden summer day?
A pine-cone fell into my lap and startled me. I moved. And in a flash the spell was broken. Theyhad vanished, the beauteous lady and the sleeping boy whose dreams had conjured her. The yellow sunlight was slanting in between the cypresses, and from the stables came the sound of horses being harnessed. It was already time to go.
And yet they say that Benedict sent her away with harsh words and admonitions.
And the youth who dreamed was not a poet but a painter; his name was Sodoma. You may see her picture in the cloister, and his own as well, in the gay clothes of which he was so proud, for they were part-payment for his work, and had belonged to a gentleman of Lombardy who took the monastic habit.
But it is still a miracle to me that I should have met her on this bare hillside.
CHIUSINight had fallen when we reached Chiusi Junction. A full-blown harvest moon hung over the station-yard like a yellow lamp. It was late, and the lights of Chiusi were a twinkling bunch of fire-flies on a distant hill. We dined at the excellent station buffet, resolved not to spoil the propitious hour by arriving in an unknown city tired and hungry; and afterwards we climbed up to our mysterious destination at leisure, in the glory of a late moon, with the night insects singing by the dusky roadside.They are among the little joys of Italy these late arrivals, on breathless summer nights, at hill-towns whose features you have only glimpsed heretofore from the windows of a flying train. A fig for the discomforts that you risk! They add a touch of salt to the adventure. The inn you stumble on may be the worst of all bad inns; the dinner will of course be long-delayed; and if you have inadvertently walked in upon a festa it may be difficult to find a place whereon to lay your head. But reckon against these things the charm of mystery—the complete sense of satisfaction with which you watch the ruby tail-lights of your trainslipping away into the night, and hear the lessening roar of its engine till your last link with the familiar world is severed, and you are face to face with the unknown. And lastly, remember the joy with which you discover a new world in the morning.We started in a vettura which was never meant to carry passengers as well as luggage, but before long we slipped out one by one, for we were only going at a snail's pace up the long hill which leads from Chiusi station to Chiusi town, and we could see nothing of the magic of the night, half-buried in boxes, and with the stars shut out by tarpaulin. The driver did not notice, but the horses quickened their pace with the lightened burden, and soon we were left to find our own way up the hillside. It was not difficult. The bright moonlight, which flooded the plain below, turned the road into a band of silver, whose whiteness was barred by the shadows of giant cypresses towering black against the night. The chanting of the frogs and the song of the night cricket almost drowned the jangling bells of our vettura, and high above us we could see Chiusi, no longer a bunch of fire-flies, but a ghostly grey hill-city already wrapt in slumber, with a frowning rocca, and grim old walls. Its silence was a little desolate as we drew near, and it was a relief to see the hospitable yellow lights of the Leon d'Oro outside the Porta Romana, giving us a homely welcome into the mysterious moonlit town.CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI.I woke early in the morning. It needed but a glance to tell me that I was back in Umbria. Nowhere else are the dimpled valleys so full of beauty, or the blue hills so softly moulded; and nowhere else is that pellucid sky, or that strange clarity of atmosphere which inspired the landscapes of the Umbrian Quattrocento artists. It was as though I looked straight into the heart of one of Perugino's sacred pictures. There was the soft green valley melting in the distance into the azure folds of mountains; there were the slender trees cleaving the luminous air; there were the towered cities crowning the hills; there was the clear pale sky, the spaciousness, the holiness which Perugino and his school immortalised. But, after all, this rich plain, from which the waters of an inland sea have long ago receded, is peculiarly the land of Perugino. Is notthat rose-red city on the crest of the wooded hill which bounds the southern horizon of Chiusi, Città della Pieve, the town which gave him birth? I half expected to see a band of saints walking in the vineyards, or to find Madonna sitting by the roadside with the Infant Christ. But another artist had usurped the landscape. Below my window was a peasant ploughing in his olive-garden. He sang as he bent forward to throw his weight on the wooden shaft, and his clothes were as blue as the heavens at mid-day. Two milk-white oxen moved slowly before him under the tender grey of the olives, and as they passed they left behind them shining furrows of freshly-turned earth. It was a poem of labour, as delicate in colour as a tone-etching, an inspiration for Millet with the poetry of life in his veins, or for the subtle Corot.Chiusi, the Clusium of Lars Porsena, the great Etruscan Prince who championed the Tarquinii after they were expelled from Rome, is a little self-contained city with an affectation of placing cypresses at becoming angles. She is rather a coquette this old town. She is not unconscious of the picturesqueness of her position as she rises above the shimmering olives which veil her hillsides; she knows the value of cypress spires when they soar above the bastions of ancient walls; she deliberately sets herself out to charm the stranger by filling the gardens of hertrattoriewith flowering gourds and purple morning-glories. Her picturesqueold cathedral has been so cleverly redecorated throughout with painted mosaics, that when we first stepped down into the cool dark nave we were deceived, and gasped to see such jewels outside Ravenna; and she has built herself a delightful museum, in the form of a classic temple, to house her Etruscan treasures.I think she has never ceased to congratulate herself upon giving the lie to Dante's ill-omened prophecy, when he quoted her as an example of a city falling into decay—'Mark Luni, Urbisaglia mark,How they are gone, and after them how goChiusi and Sinigaglia; and 't will seemNo longer new or strange to thee to hear,That families fail when cities have their end.'[14]She may well have seemed a city doomed to him as he rode in haste through the pestilent marshes of the Val di Chiana, and saw her desolate towers above him stark against the evening sky, as he hurried from Rome to Siena to meet his fellow exiles and learn the story of his fall.For eight centuries or more Chiusi was a plague spot, and the vapours of the maremma were more powerful to guard her from invaders than the strongest walls. So she has fewer mediaeval palaces, and fewer towers than other hill-cities, and these were long ago given to neighbouring churches to hang their bells in,and the ancient Rocca is a garden with a farm-house in its keep.I have a tender spot in my heart for Chiusi. She is a happy town. In herself she is not very picturesque: her houses are the plain, white-washed, green-shuttered homes of modern Italy; there are few traces of her ancient greatness to be seen except the scanty Etruscan foundations of her mediaeval fortifications, a quantity ofcippiand reliefs built into walls, and the labyrinth of ancient sewers which honey-combs the hill.[15]And in comparison with the other cities of Umbria she contains nothing of the Middle Ages, certainly nothing Gothic, if we except the exquisite illuminated missals and psalters by Bindo Fiorentino and Girolamo da Cremona, which are kept in the sacristy of the cathedral, and which came originally from the monastery of Monte Oliveto. To the antiquary she is of the highest interest, for she marks the site of Clusium, one of the five Etruscan towns which combined against the first of the Tarquins, and of the earlier Camars, which may have been a city of the more ancient Umbrians. Her history shows her to have been one of the oldest and most powerful cities of the Etruscan League; and the country for miles round her walls hasyielded, and still yields, a rich harvest of antiquities from scattered tombs. There is a slope to the east of the city which is called 'The Field of the Jewellers,' because so manyscarabaeihave been discovered there by the chance furrow of a plough.ETRUSCAN CINERARY URNS.But I am no antiquary. It is not for me to discuss the possible site of that improbable mausoleum of Lars Porsena with its labyrinth and pyramids and windbells, which Varro described as glibly as Herodotus did the marvels of the labyrinth of Crocodilopolis. I have not seen the great necropolis of Poggio Gajella on the hill to the north of Chiusi, which Dennis tells us is a hive of tombs. To me the charm of Chiusi does not lie in her antiquity, though like every one else who visits her I have spent happy hours in her sunny museum, poring over inscriptions and sarcophagi, and cinerary urns and household implements, and all the strange paraphernalia of a vanished race which havebeen garnered from the fields of Clusium. Nor are the painted tombs of Etruria as much to me as the wonderful beauty of the olive-gardens through which we walked to find them, in the golden sunset or the clear cool dawn.There are many tombs scattered round the hill of Chiusi. Some of them empty caves hollowed out of the rock, half full of water, abandoned to moths and bats; and others which have been opened and closed up again because the damp and thieves have robbed them of all interest. A few of the best are kept under lock and key to preserve them from wanton destruction, but even these are slipping reluctantly back to oblivion.Such an one is the Tombe del Colle Casuccini, which is to be found in an olive-grove to the south-east of the town. It is hollowed in the rock, and is approached by a levelled path cut in the slope of the hill. The earth around is full of iris plumes and slender field flowers; there is a weather-beaten cippus over the lintel, and a solitary stone-pine which stretches out its branches as though Nature sought to render homage to the dead by yielding them a royal canopy. We had lingered so long in the silver olive-gardens that it was almost the hour of sunset when we reached the tomb. A melancholy evening wind moaned in the branches of the pine-tree, and rustled in the flowering yews which guarded the entrance of the passage.Up and down the hillside we could see the peasants returning from their work in the fields, and the whole world was caught in the sudden glory of the setting sun. A woman came towards us with the key of the tomb; she had a baby in her arms, and on her head a great mottled pitcher, green and gold, full of spring water. The sunlight wove a halo round her till she seemed as radiant as one of Pinturicchio's Madonnas.The great doors of travertine groaned as they swung slowly open on their stone pivots, and a scorpion fled from the light. Dennis says, 'There can be no doubt of the antiquity of these doors; it is manifest in their very arrangement; for the lintel is a huge mass of rock buried beneath a weight of superincumbent earth, and must have been laidafterthe slabs were in their place.'This sepulchre, like most Etruscan tombs of importance, is divided into several chambers. Its roof is curiously coffered, and was at one time painted red and black. But it is the wall paintings which are of supreme interest here. Unlike the other tombs of Chiusi the sandstone walls have been whitened, and even so the figures are hardly distinguishable. But look close. It is worth the trouble, for as your candlelight drives the shadows back, the story of an ancient world unfolds itself. Here, to the right, three charioteers urge their archaic steeds to the winning-post; here are the wrestlers; here the musicians with their doublepipesand lutes, and here a dancing girl. On the other wall you can trace the progress of a banquet, and see the languid youths of Etruria reclining on couches, toying with wreaths and flowers, and holding out theirpateraefor the hurrying slaves to fill with wine.But they are very faded. They are a world of shadows; they vanish with the months. Another generation will look for them in vain; then the athletes will no longer run their silent races to eternity, the music will be hushed, and the feet of the dancers stilled. And then, I suppose, the wonderful old doors will be taken away, and the angry scorpions will be left in possession. If you would see these ghosts, come soon. For if you come ten years after, perchance you will find nothing on the cold stone walls; their pictures will have gone the way of all the other antique graces which have been lost in Time's devouring maw!In Italy, especially in the small cities, you have to bow to local convention. In Chiusi it takes the form of Etruscan tombs. Every one from tiny children to the oldest inhabitant volunteers to be your guide. A stranger would say that the Tomb of the Monkey or the Deposito del Gran Duca were topics of burning interest in the town, for the people will not rest until they are assured that he has visited them. It was for this reason that the sunrise next morning found us on our way to the Tomba della Scimmia, which lies a mile or so to the north-east of Chiusi. At first we followedthe highroad where the gay painted ox-carts of Clusium, with their picturesque high-curved shafts, were already rolling up the hill. But our way soon turned off into a rough path which dipped down into the chilly sweetness of the olive-gardens. The sun had not yet risen high enough to penetrate these dewy hollows, but as we re-emerged from them and breasted the little oak-clad hills beyond, it slanted between the branches and made a halo round some young peasant girls, barefoot and with uncovered heads, who were carrying great pitchers of water to their cottages from an Artesian well. We dipped into more valleys and circled other hills, plucking the ripe blackberries as we passed, and gathering the flowers which made a tangle round our feet. The only people that we met were peasants at work below their olives, and every one of them gave us a smilingbuon giorno a loroas we passed. Presently we came out upon a wooded cliff and saw Chiusi, with her fair white houses and her grey ivied rocca, across the valley to our right, and on our left the little lakes of Montepulciano and Chiusi, like opals in the dawn. Umbria again! The flowers at our feet, the glint of water in the wide green valley, the purple hills, the soft blue sky, the breadth and depth, the holiness and peace of mystic Umbria.173Chiusi: the Palace of the Bishop.The Tomb of the Monkey owes its name to the painted monkey chained to a tree in the midst of the athletes who wrestle and ride and box and perform their Pyrrhic dances round the walls. It is approached by a deep cut in the tufa, in the style of the mummy shafts of Egypt, but the steps which lead down to the door, and the door itself, are modern. By the help of our guttering candles we were able to decipher the solitary spectator who sits, like Nefertari in her rock-hewn tomb of Thebes, with foot on stool and umbrella over head, gazing into eternity. But we did not stay there long. It was too cold. The damp had eaten almost everything away. Down in the chill dark of the tomb we knew that the wrestlers, their naked red bodies fading into the tufa, wrestled continuously, and the chariots drove silently into the shadows before the solemn audience of one.But up above we could hear the bells of Chiusi on the warm, scented air. And there were the wind, the limpid sunlight, the song of birds, the wooded hills and valleys, the yellow earth with its flowers and its trails of bramble covered with shining fruits—everything of warmth and sweetness and pleasure to the eye and ear. In the plain below we could see the little blue lake of Chiusi, called lovingly of the people, the 'chiaro di Chiusi,' which in the olden days was yearly espoused with a ring by the chief magistrate of the town, in the same manner as the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic. And beside it the towers of Béccati Questo and Béccati Quest'altro, which were put up in the fifteenth century by the rival provinces of Siena andPerugia, still shout defiance to each other across the valley.After all, it was for her old-world charm that we loved Chiusi—the simple pastoral beauty of hercontado, her forges glowing at night in deep caverns below her walls, her Bishop's palace with its ancientcippi, and its flowering agaves and cypresses. And most of all we loved the lichen-covered boy in the fountain of the Piazza del Duomo. For he was like the spirit of eternal youth, keeping the soul of things alive in this city of tombs. There were gold fish in the green shallows round his feet, the water spouted from his forehead, his arms were outstretched and his face upturned, as though he sang in rapture to the sun.For it was in such little things as these that we found the hidden secret of Italy's charm. These little towns like Chiusi, perched each one on its hill, are sometimes commonplace enough in themselves, even though their foundations are inscribed by the years that have passed; but they look across valleys of unimaginable beauty to the mountains; they have genii singing in their springs; and the lives of their people have the classic simplicity of an older, unspoilt world.
Night had fallen when we reached Chiusi Junction. A full-blown harvest moon hung over the station-yard like a yellow lamp. It was late, and the lights of Chiusi were a twinkling bunch of fire-flies on a distant hill. We dined at the excellent station buffet, resolved not to spoil the propitious hour by arriving in an unknown city tired and hungry; and afterwards we climbed up to our mysterious destination at leisure, in the glory of a late moon, with the night insects singing by the dusky roadside.
They are among the little joys of Italy these late arrivals, on breathless summer nights, at hill-towns whose features you have only glimpsed heretofore from the windows of a flying train. A fig for the discomforts that you risk! They add a touch of salt to the adventure. The inn you stumble on may be the worst of all bad inns; the dinner will of course be long-delayed; and if you have inadvertently walked in upon a festa it may be difficult to find a place whereon to lay your head. But reckon against these things the charm of mystery—the complete sense of satisfaction with which you watch the ruby tail-lights of your trainslipping away into the night, and hear the lessening roar of its engine till your last link with the familiar world is severed, and you are face to face with the unknown. And lastly, remember the joy with which you discover a new world in the morning.
We started in a vettura which was never meant to carry passengers as well as luggage, but before long we slipped out one by one, for we were only going at a snail's pace up the long hill which leads from Chiusi station to Chiusi town, and we could see nothing of the magic of the night, half-buried in boxes, and with the stars shut out by tarpaulin. The driver did not notice, but the horses quickened their pace with the lightened burden, and soon we were left to find our own way up the hillside. It was not difficult. The bright moonlight, which flooded the plain below, turned the road into a band of silver, whose whiteness was barred by the shadows of giant cypresses towering black against the night. The chanting of the frogs and the song of the night cricket almost drowned the jangling bells of our vettura, and high above us we could see Chiusi, no longer a bunch of fire-flies, but a ghostly grey hill-city already wrapt in slumber, with a frowning rocca, and grim old walls. Its silence was a little desolate as we drew near, and it was a relief to see the hospitable yellow lights of the Leon d'Oro outside the Porta Romana, giving us a homely welcome into the mysterious moonlit town.
CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI.
CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI.
CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI.
I woke early in the morning. It needed but a glance to tell me that I was back in Umbria. Nowhere else are the dimpled valleys so full of beauty, or the blue hills so softly moulded; and nowhere else is that pellucid sky, or that strange clarity of atmosphere which inspired the landscapes of the Umbrian Quattrocento artists. It was as though I looked straight into the heart of one of Perugino's sacred pictures. There was the soft green valley melting in the distance into the azure folds of mountains; there were the slender trees cleaving the luminous air; there were the towered cities crowning the hills; there was the clear pale sky, the spaciousness, the holiness which Perugino and his school immortalised. But, after all, this rich plain, from which the waters of an inland sea have long ago receded, is peculiarly the land of Perugino. Is notthat rose-red city on the crest of the wooded hill which bounds the southern horizon of Chiusi, Città della Pieve, the town which gave him birth? I half expected to see a band of saints walking in the vineyards, or to find Madonna sitting by the roadside with the Infant Christ. But another artist had usurped the landscape. Below my window was a peasant ploughing in his olive-garden. He sang as he bent forward to throw his weight on the wooden shaft, and his clothes were as blue as the heavens at mid-day. Two milk-white oxen moved slowly before him under the tender grey of the olives, and as they passed they left behind them shining furrows of freshly-turned earth. It was a poem of labour, as delicate in colour as a tone-etching, an inspiration for Millet with the poetry of life in his veins, or for the subtle Corot.
Chiusi, the Clusium of Lars Porsena, the great Etruscan Prince who championed the Tarquinii after they were expelled from Rome, is a little self-contained city with an affectation of placing cypresses at becoming angles. She is rather a coquette this old town. She is not unconscious of the picturesqueness of her position as she rises above the shimmering olives which veil her hillsides; she knows the value of cypress spires when they soar above the bastions of ancient walls; she deliberately sets herself out to charm the stranger by filling the gardens of hertrattoriewith flowering gourds and purple morning-glories. Her picturesqueold cathedral has been so cleverly redecorated throughout with painted mosaics, that when we first stepped down into the cool dark nave we were deceived, and gasped to see such jewels outside Ravenna; and she has built herself a delightful museum, in the form of a classic temple, to house her Etruscan treasures.
I think she has never ceased to congratulate herself upon giving the lie to Dante's ill-omened prophecy, when he quoted her as an example of a city falling into decay—
'Mark Luni, Urbisaglia mark,
How they are gone, and after them how goChiusi and Sinigaglia; and 't will seemNo longer new or strange to thee to hear,That families fail when cities have their end.'[14]
She may well have seemed a city doomed to him as he rode in haste through the pestilent marshes of the Val di Chiana, and saw her desolate towers above him stark against the evening sky, as he hurried from Rome to Siena to meet his fellow exiles and learn the story of his fall.
For eight centuries or more Chiusi was a plague spot, and the vapours of the maremma were more powerful to guard her from invaders than the strongest walls. So she has fewer mediaeval palaces, and fewer towers than other hill-cities, and these were long ago given to neighbouring churches to hang their bells in,and the ancient Rocca is a garden with a farm-house in its keep.
I have a tender spot in my heart for Chiusi. She is a happy town. In herself she is not very picturesque: her houses are the plain, white-washed, green-shuttered homes of modern Italy; there are few traces of her ancient greatness to be seen except the scanty Etruscan foundations of her mediaeval fortifications, a quantity ofcippiand reliefs built into walls, and the labyrinth of ancient sewers which honey-combs the hill.[15]And in comparison with the other cities of Umbria she contains nothing of the Middle Ages, certainly nothing Gothic, if we except the exquisite illuminated missals and psalters by Bindo Fiorentino and Girolamo da Cremona, which are kept in the sacristy of the cathedral, and which came originally from the monastery of Monte Oliveto. To the antiquary she is of the highest interest, for she marks the site of Clusium, one of the five Etruscan towns which combined against the first of the Tarquins, and of the earlier Camars, which may have been a city of the more ancient Umbrians. Her history shows her to have been one of the oldest and most powerful cities of the Etruscan League; and the country for miles round her walls hasyielded, and still yields, a rich harvest of antiquities from scattered tombs. There is a slope to the east of the city which is called 'The Field of the Jewellers,' because so manyscarabaeihave been discovered there by the chance furrow of a plough.
ETRUSCAN CINERARY URNS.
ETRUSCAN CINERARY URNS.
ETRUSCAN CINERARY URNS.
But I am no antiquary. It is not for me to discuss the possible site of that improbable mausoleum of Lars Porsena with its labyrinth and pyramids and windbells, which Varro described as glibly as Herodotus did the marvels of the labyrinth of Crocodilopolis. I have not seen the great necropolis of Poggio Gajella on the hill to the north of Chiusi, which Dennis tells us is a hive of tombs. To me the charm of Chiusi does not lie in her antiquity, though like every one else who visits her I have spent happy hours in her sunny museum, poring over inscriptions and sarcophagi, and cinerary urns and household implements, and all the strange paraphernalia of a vanished race which havebeen garnered from the fields of Clusium. Nor are the painted tombs of Etruria as much to me as the wonderful beauty of the olive-gardens through which we walked to find them, in the golden sunset or the clear cool dawn.
There are many tombs scattered round the hill of Chiusi. Some of them empty caves hollowed out of the rock, half full of water, abandoned to moths and bats; and others which have been opened and closed up again because the damp and thieves have robbed them of all interest. A few of the best are kept under lock and key to preserve them from wanton destruction, but even these are slipping reluctantly back to oblivion.
Such an one is the Tombe del Colle Casuccini, which is to be found in an olive-grove to the south-east of the town. It is hollowed in the rock, and is approached by a levelled path cut in the slope of the hill. The earth around is full of iris plumes and slender field flowers; there is a weather-beaten cippus over the lintel, and a solitary stone-pine which stretches out its branches as though Nature sought to render homage to the dead by yielding them a royal canopy. We had lingered so long in the silver olive-gardens that it was almost the hour of sunset when we reached the tomb. A melancholy evening wind moaned in the branches of the pine-tree, and rustled in the flowering yews which guarded the entrance of the passage.
Up and down the hillside we could see the peasants returning from their work in the fields, and the whole world was caught in the sudden glory of the setting sun. A woman came towards us with the key of the tomb; she had a baby in her arms, and on her head a great mottled pitcher, green and gold, full of spring water. The sunlight wove a halo round her till she seemed as radiant as one of Pinturicchio's Madonnas.
The great doors of travertine groaned as they swung slowly open on their stone pivots, and a scorpion fled from the light. Dennis says, 'There can be no doubt of the antiquity of these doors; it is manifest in their very arrangement; for the lintel is a huge mass of rock buried beneath a weight of superincumbent earth, and must have been laidafterthe slabs were in their place.'
This sepulchre, like most Etruscan tombs of importance, is divided into several chambers. Its roof is curiously coffered, and was at one time painted red and black. But it is the wall paintings which are of supreme interest here. Unlike the other tombs of Chiusi the sandstone walls have been whitened, and even so the figures are hardly distinguishable. But look close. It is worth the trouble, for as your candlelight drives the shadows back, the story of an ancient world unfolds itself. Here, to the right, three charioteers urge their archaic steeds to the winning-post; here are the wrestlers; here the musicians with their doublepipesand lutes, and here a dancing girl. On the other wall you can trace the progress of a banquet, and see the languid youths of Etruria reclining on couches, toying with wreaths and flowers, and holding out theirpateraefor the hurrying slaves to fill with wine.
But they are very faded. They are a world of shadows; they vanish with the months. Another generation will look for them in vain; then the athletes will no longer run their silent races to eternity, the music will be hushed, and the feet of the dancers stilled. And then, I suppose, the wonderful old doors will be taken away, and the angry scorpions will be left in possession. If you would see these ghosts, come soon. For if you come ten years after, perchance you will find nothing on the cold stone walls; their pictures will have gone the way of all the other antique graces which have been lost in Time's devouring maw!
In Italy, especially in the small cities, you have to bow to local convention. In Chiusi it takes the form of Etruscan tombs. Every one from tiny children to the oldest inhabitant volunteers to be your guide. A stranger would say that the Tomb of the Monkey or the Deposito del Gran Duca were topics of burning interest in the town, for the people will not rest until they are assured that he has visited them. It was for this reason that the sunrise next morning found us on our way to the Tomba della Scimmia, which lies a mile or so to the north-east of Chiusi. At first we followedthe highroad where the gay painted ox-carts of Clusium, with their picturesque high-curved shafts, were already rolling up the hill. But our way soon turned off into a rough path which dipped down into the chilly sweetness of the olive-gardens. The sun had not yet risen high enough to penetrate these dewy hollows, but as we re-emerged from them and breasted the little oak-clad hills beyond, it slanted between the branches and made a halo round some young peasant girls, barefoot and with uncovered heads, who were carrying great pitchers of water to their cottages from an Artesian well. We dipped into more valleys and circled other hills, plucking the ripe blackberries as we passed, and gathering the flowers which made a tangle round our feet. The only people that we met were peasants at work below their olives, and every one of them gave us a smilingbuon giorno a loroas we passed. Presently we came out upon a wooded cliff and saw Chiusi, with her fair white houses and her grey ivied rocca, across the valley to our right, and on our left the little lakes of Montepulciano and Chiusi, like opals in the dawn. Umbria again! The flowers at our feet, the glint of water in the wide green valley, the purple hills, the soft blue sky, the breadth and depth, the holiness and peace of mystic Umbria.
173
Chiusi: the Palace of the Bishop.
Chiusi: the Palace of the Bishop.
Chiusi: the Palace of the Bishop.
The Tomb of the Monkey owes its name to the painted monkey chained to a tree in the midst of the athletes who wrestle and ride and box and perform their Pyrrhic dances round the walls. It is approached by a deep cut in the tufa, in the style of the mummy shafts of Egypt, but the steps which lead down to the door, and the door itself, are modern. By the help of our guttering candles we were able to decipher the solitary spectator who sits, like Nefertari in her rock-hewn tomb of Thebes, with foot on stool and umbrella over head, gazing into eternity. But we did not stay there long. It was too cold. The damp had eaten almost everything away. Down in the chill dark of the tomb we knew that the wrestlers, their naked red bodies fading into the tufa, wrestled continuously, and the chariots drove silently into the shadows before the solemn audience of one.
But up above we could hear the bells of Chiusi on the warm, scented air. And there were the wind, the limpid sunlight, the song of birds, the wooded hills and valleys, the yellow earth with its flowers and its trails of bramble covered with shining fruits—everything of warmth and sweetness and pleasure to the eye and ear. In the plain below we could see the little blue lake of Chiusi, called lovingly of the people, the 'chiaro di Chiusi,' which in the olden days was yearly espoused with a ring by the chief magistrate of the town, in the same manner as the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic. And beside it the towers of Béccati Questo and Béccati Quest'altro, which were put up in the fifteenth century by the rival provinces of Siena andPerugia, still shout defiance to each other across the valley.
After all, it was for her old-world charm that we loved Chiusi—the simple pastoral beauty of hercontado, her forges glowing at night in deep caverns below her walls, her Bishop's palace with its ancientcippi, and its flowering agaves and cypresses. And most of all we loved the lichen-covered boy in the fountain of the Piazza del Duomo. For he was like the spirit of eternal youth, keeping the soul of things alive in this city of tombs. There were gold fish in the green shallows round his feet, the water spouted from his forehead, his arms were outstretched and his face upturned, as though he sang in rapture to the sun.
For it was in such little things as these that we found the hidden secret of Italy's charm. These little towns like Chiusi, perched each one on its hill, are sometimes commonplace enough in themselves, even though their foundations are inscribed by the years that have passed; but they look across valleys of unimaginable beauty to the mountains; they have genii singing in their springs; and the lives of their people have the classic simplicity of an older, unspoilt world.
HANNIBAL'S THRASYMENE'Yea! sometimes on the instant all seems plain,The simple sun could tell us, or the rain,The world caught dreaming with a look of heavenSeems on a sudden tip-toe to explain.''The Rubaiyat,' Le Gallienne's translation.We came to Passignano from Chiusi, because we could not resist the beauty of Thrasymene. Most travellers in Italy only view it with passing admiration as they fly by in the express which takes them from Florence to Rome and Naples. It is to them merely another lovely incident in their journey through a landscape of surpassing beauty. Perchance they refer to their Baedekers, and find that it was the scene of Hannibal's great victory over Flaminius, and in a few minutes more their train is in Chiusi Junction, and the lake is lost behind the Umbrian hills. Others, who visit Perugia and Assisi, see more of its beauties, for when they leave the main line at Chiusi they have to make a semi-circular tour of the lake; and even from Terontola, the junction for Florence and Perugia, the line runs for miles along the lake-side, and crosses the actual site of Hannibal's battle-field.Twice already, in the last month, we had traversed it, on the journey from Cortona to Perugia, and again on our way to Siena. Coming back we could no more resist it. Our intention had been to go straight from Chiusi to Assisi, but at Terontola the little philosopher put in a special plea for Thrasymene. He has a passion for lakes and rivers; no landscape is complete for him without them.'Let us go down to Thrasymene,' he said. 'Not for the sake of Hannibal, but for the pleasure of its beauty. For I am sick of the petty wars of hill-towns, and am wearied for the moment of Etruscan tombs and Gothic palaces and churches. Let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear and the pomegranates bud forth!'So we came to Thrasymene and Passignano, which is a mere handful of brown houses pushed into the water at the foot of a rocky hill. Passignano has a flavour of its own. To begin with, its inn is different from any other albergo in Italy. It has an old-fashioned kitchen with a cowl chimney and rows of shining brass saucepans, and it opens on to the village street, where the people sit to gossip while the evening meal is cooking. Its low cottage windows look over the wide expanse of water to towered Castiglione, and the wooded islands of Thrasymene; but it is built so closeinto the hillside at the back that you can stretch your hand from an upper room and pluck the creepers which pour in a green cascade over the rocks. It is extremely primitive: the menu consists of soup, macaroni, eggs, fresh fish from the lake, and very lean chickens, supplemented by rough country bread, plenty of honey and fresh fruit, and cheese if the proprietor has lately been to market in Perugia. Meat there is none, at any rate in August, nor tea. But the rooms are spotlessly clean, with snowy beds, dainty white valances, curtains edged with hand-made lace, and the finest of linen towels; the daughter of the buxom landlady is as charming as she is elegant, and the serving girl is a beautiful Murillo.Passignano is full of beautiful women; they form two-thirds of the population of this little lake-side town. There are hardly any men in it except the old fishermen, and a few young lads, apprentices to bootmakers and saddlers. All the rest have drifted away to the towns, or have farms out in thepaese. And the women, from the pretty French wife of Signor Arturo of the Albergo Balducci, with her freshly laundered cotton dresses, to the little bareheaded girls whose mothers call to them at night, bidding them bathe their dusty feet in the lake before they come to bed, are all lovely. They are noted for it.The only other visitor in Passignano that August was a young Apollo—so beautifully dressed in pale greyriding-clothes that he looked as if he must have slipped out of a George Edwards musical comedy. He was, according to the landlady, a student from the University of Perugia, spending his vacation in Passignano because the girls were so beautiful! Oh, young Italy! How natural and unaffected you are! I loved to see him strolling down the village street with a lordly air of indifference, running the gauntlet of eyes as the pretty girls, linked in groups like bouquets of flowers, passed him demurely; while their mothers, sitting on the doorsteps of their cottages, scanned the handsome boy with kindly humour.Everybody lives out of doors in Passignano. The women are always sitting outside their houses; and their children, half-naked in the summer heat, with halos of sunburned curls, pillow their heads on the rough cobbles of the hilly streets, and sleep after their play, as baby angels might sleep in paradise, tired out with singing. The stables and bakeries and workshops are open to the road, and above them the shabby brown houses clamber up the hillside to the Fortezza, which rears its shaggy head above the highest of their pagoda-like chimneys.'If we stay here we shall prolong our lives for always,' cried the philosopher. 'Already I have forgotten the world!'And he fell to imitating the song of the cicalas.Indeed for us the world was standing still. We were caught in a mesh of beauty as in a summer daydream.The waves of Time seemed to retreat, leaving us like swimmers resting on a golden shore after struggle and turmoil. It might have been Lethe whose waters sang to the stones at our feet: for we forgot the world: its voice became a dream; we found ourselves content to watch the changing lights as the hours drifted away.CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO.We ate our meals in the unfinished dining-room which Signor Balducci is building out over the lake—a mere shell of white plaster with empty doors andwindows through which the little breezes strayed. There were flowers on the cloth beside our plates, and a great bowl of oleanders, geraniums and white asters on the table. We breakfasted off golden bread and honey, and the pretty waiting girl brought tuberoses with our coffee. Outside, the lake was a tender morning blue; its surface rippled to the cool breath of the mountains, and sparkled in the sunlight. The bent and twisted sticks of the fishermen cast fantastic reflections in the water, and were beautified, as all humble and work-a-day things are beautified in Italy, by the magic of the sun. Further out two men in a rickety sampan were hauling in their nets.It was a scene of infinite romance. The towers of Castiglione shone like ivory out of the violet mists, and many of the hills which rose above them bore turreted towns upon their crests. Behind them we knew lay Siena, Montepulciano and Chiusi, and to the right Cortona and Arezzo, and there Perugia, and Assisi there. History swept down upon us too. Thrasymene and its vine-clad slopes are full of memories of Hannibal, the stormy petrel who beat his wings round Rome in vain. Nor does it lack for gentler associations, for Saint Francis of Assisi, who had been preaching in one of the lake-side towns, was inspired, according to the author of theFioretti, to spend Lent on an island in its midst. Which he did, in solitary prayer and meditation, eating only the half of one small loaf of bread, 'fromreverence for the fast of Christ the blessed one, Who fasted forty days and forty nights without partaking any earthly food; but in this manner, with that half a loaf, chased far the venom of vain glory from him.'Towards the hour of sunset, when the shadowed hills grew blue and misty, and the lake was a mirror of pale gold, we walked along the reedy shore of Thrasymene. The wind rustled in the silken leaves of the maize, and made a music like far-off singing in the emerald reeds. We went down to the edge of the water where the gardens sloped to the lake, and we found flowers there and herbs—mint and thyme and rosemary that scented the air, and purple vetches and clover, and the beautiful cow-parsley whose blossoms float like butterflies over every hedge and waste ground. And there we waited while the sky glowed from gold to rose, and Thrasymene seemed aflame with Hannibal's desire for Rome.We dined in our alfresco dining-room, and afterwards we walked again by the still waters, where the frogs were shrilling a chorus to the night-crickets, whose song in the grass is like the sound of a curb-chain being rubbed in the hand. Except for these the world was still. There were no lights along that mysterious country road except the stars, and rarely have I seen them brighter, even in Africa.'In a town we never see such stars as these,' said the philosopher. We never do. The Milky Waystretched like a girdle across the heavens, and was reflected in the lake like a pale moon. We stayed to watch it, and to listen to the voices of the night.A train glared out of the tunnel which pierces the hill below Passignano, and tore along in the darkness beside the road, lightening our starlit gloom for a moment before its meteoric tail of windows was swallowed up by the night. Then we saw a glow-worm in a hole below the wall, and because in Italy you are pleased with little things, we stopped to look at it, and watch it turn round like a light-house lamp, now glowing clear as a star, now an indistinguishable mass of phosphorescence. And all the time the sky was growing lighter, and the mountains darker in the east.It was the moon.Slowly it rose. The Milky Way grew pale in the lake, and one great star which had twinkled like a will-o'-the-wisp among the reeds went out. The light grew and gathered behind the hills, and at last the miracle of moonrise came to us as we waited in the scented darkness of Thrasymene's shore, as it came to the young world on the eve of its creation. First the rim, and then the pulsing globe leaping from the shadows. For a moment it hung upon the hillside while two fantastic stone-pines, a fraction of an inch in height, swayed within its circle like neophytes bowing before Diana; then it rose into the heavens,—a stately ship steering among the stars.186Lake Thrasymene.A miracle no less because our darkness has been lightened thus since the beginning of the world. There are so many miracles every day, if we but knew them,—the scent of flowers, the webs of spiders, the subtle fragrance of the earth, a wayside weed, and, most beautiful of all, the sunrise and the moon. For sunsets, though they may fill a grey world with rose and gold, and though they are always so magnificent that words are pallid pictures and artists' colours impotent, never have the beauty of the dawn. A sunset may turn our joy to melancholy, so tender is it, so pregnant with regret for the vanished day, so full of splendours. But we are always happy in the dawn. What of the night? It is over and gone. A new world lies at our feet; a new beauty fills our eyes; the breath of the morning in our nostrils is as a flower after rain. For in the dawn we step from the valley of the Shadow of Death on to the rosy mountains of Hope.And because you are in Italy you have time to notice these miracles of every day, time to be happy, time to watch things grow. The hours do not matter, for to-morrow is as yesterday, and to-day is but a little minute in a garden. If it should rain the butterflies will only seek their shelter, the cicalas will be still, and the pores of the thirsty earth will open. To-morrow the sun will shine again. Or the day after that.Nor is Passignano devoid of interest for the sightseer whose pleasure is not to be found in green pasturesor beside still waters. Magione, with its three mediaeval castles and its memory of the Baglioni, is within a drive. Picturesque Castiglione del Lago is well worth a visit. There is the island of St. Francis, with its ruined convent, now the villeggiatura of an Italian nobleman, and its exquisite views of Montepulciano. And lastly, there is the battle-field where Hannibal, the 'furious youth' of Publius Cornelius Scipio, defeated Flaminius, the maker of roads.We did not go to Magione, but we let two old men of Passignano row us to St. Francis' Island in their weather-beaten fishing-boats. In an acacia grove down by the water's edge they showed us the block of stone whose surface was worn into two hollows by the knees of St. Francis. So they would have us believe. 'Ma, è vero!' they exclaimed, as though they feared that we should doubt them; and we could but smile as they told us an old legend of the saint sailing miraculously across Thrasymene on his mantle, bearing a lighted candle in his hand, because the boatmen dared not put out in the tramontana which was lashing the waters to fury.We almost missed seeing the battle-field of Hannibal, because we had left it to our last afternoon, and discovered too late that the only carriage in Passignano had been already commandeered.It was Fortunato Rosso who came to our rescue, dear old man, with his dilapidated vehicle, whichwas no larger than a riksha, and so broken down that we expected the back to fall away every minute. The step did break when we tried to use it, and the axle bar was tied up with string. Fortunato Rosso is one of the characters of Passignano. He is a veteran of the Venti Settembre. As he has lost his teeth his conversation is difficult to follow, though he is an intelligent guide, having a soldier's eye for the possibilities of the land: his clothes are almost as dilapidated as his carriage, but he has a string of medal ribbons sewn across his scrupulously clean white waistcoat. The medals themselves are kept in a dirty scrap of paper in his pocket. He persisted in showing them to us before we started, and the villagers stood round and laughed indulgently. While he was eagerly pulling them out a cheap crucifix fell to the ground. A small boy picked it up, and pressed it to his lips as he handed it back, and Rosso himself gave it a resounding kiss before he put it into his pocket.The spot where Hannibal entrapped the Roman army is as distinct as stage scenery. There is a semi-circle of mountains coming down to the lake at each end. Passignano clambers into the water at the southern extremity; and on the northern spur, close to the lake, there is an ancient road climbing between bluffs in an olive-garden. It is below the modern strada; and Fortunato Rosso, who takes a delight in propounding the stratagems of Hannibal, insists thatFlaminius must have entered the plain through this pass. Half-way between the semi-circle and the lake is the hill of Tuoro, on which Hannibal's centre was conspicuously drawn up.For the Punic general with his genius for guerilla warfare no better place for an ambuscade could be imagined. The Consul Flaminius lay at Arretium some miles to the north; and Hannibal, knowing his impetuous temper, determined to draw him out by laying waste the countryside from Cortona to Thrasymene under the very eyes of the Roman legions. As he anticipated, Flaminius, exasperated beyond endurance, left Arezzo and marched down to Thrasymene, paying no heed to the ill-omens which attended his setting forth. As a consequence his army had no enthusiasm. The name of Hannibal had turned even the heart of Rome to water, so that she spent her days in making sacrifices to the gods and consulting the oracles, but the fiery Flaminius would not allow his legions to make propitiation. 'Nay, rather,' said he with bitter sarcasm, 'let us lie before the walls of Arretium, for here is our country, here our household gods. Let Hannibal, slipping through our fingers, waste Italy through and through; and, ravaging and burning everything, let him arrive at the walls of Rome; nor let us move hence till the fathers shall have summoned Flaminius from Arretium, as they did Camillus of old from Veii.'[16]Everything befell as Hannibal desired. Flaminius entered the pass. Seeing the Carthaginian army on the hill of Tuoro he advanced to give battle, not noticing the Baliares and light troops posted round the mountains, and unconscious of the fact that the Numidian cavalry had blocked his retreat by holding the pass when the last detachment of his army had come through. To add to his discomfiture a mist rose up from the lake and enveloped the lowlands, while the hills were in the sunlight above, and the enemy could watch for the preconcerted signal of attack.It was given, and they poured down upon the Romans from all sides, taking them by surprise, and terrifying them by the unexpectedness of the assault. Even so the day might not have been lost if Flaminius had not fallen early in the engagement. After that it was a slaughter. There was no order. Each man fought for his own life, and when the legions attempted to escape by water, the only way left open to them, they were either drowned, or cut to pieces by the Carthaginian cavalry which followed them into the shallows. A band of some six thousand did indeed force their way to the hills, where they waited for the mist to rise, not being able to see how the day was going. And when at last the sun pierced through to the plain, and they could view the slaughter, they fled, taking their standards with them, only to fall prisoners on 'the following day when, Maharbal, who hadfollowed them during the night with the whole body of cavalry, pledging his honour that he would let them depart with single garments if they would deliver up their arms, they surrendered themselves: which promise was kept by Hannibal with Punic fidelity, and he threw them all into chains' (Livy, xxii. 6).So much for the battle, but the old tragedy that was enacted on these vine-clad plains has been forgotten. Many of the peasants have not even heard of the name of Hannibal, nor dream that where they gather their purple vintage to-day the earth was reddened once by Roman blood. The broad smooth road led us between ancient olives. White oxen yoked to clumsy wooden tumbrils rolled on and on towards us in a mist of sunlit dust; peasants in gay kerchiefs and skirts were working in the bearded corn which rose higher than their heads, so that we looked at them through a veil of stalks; a herd of black swine were nosing the yellow earth under the olives, with a little girl-child to keep them. And when we reached the summit of the pass above the turquoise lake we could see the road to Arezzo in a gap of the mountains, across a sea of vines. There was nothing to disturb the air of peace; the mediaeval towers and castles which crowned the hills were farms; and the Sanguinetto, whose sinister name is the one memento of that day of slaughter, was a river of stones agape for the September rains.'Far other scene is Thrasymene now;Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plainRent by no ravage save the gentle plough;Her aged trees rise thick as once the slainLay where their roots are; but a brook hath ta'en—A little rill of scanty stream and bed—A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain;And Sanguinetto tells you where the deadMade the earth wet, and turn'd the unwilling waters red.'Childe Harold.
'Yea! sometimes on the instant all seems plain,The simple sun could tell us, or the rain,
The world caught dreaming with a look of heaven
Seems on a sudden tip-toe to explain.'
'The Rubaiyat,' Le Gallienne's translation.
We came to Passignano from Chiusi, because we could not resist the beauty of Thrasymene. Most travellers in Italy only view it with passing admiration as they fly by in the express which takes them from Florence to Rome and Naples. It is to them merely another lovely incident in their journey through a landscape of surpassing beauty. Perchance they refer to their Baedekers, and find that it was the scene of Hannibal's great victory over Flaminius, and in a few minutes more their train is in Chiusi Junction, and the lake is lost behind the Umbrian hills. Others, who visit Perugia and Assisi, see more of its beauties, for when they leave the main line at Chiusi they have to make a semi-circular tour of the lake; and even from Terontola, the junction for Florence and Perugia, the line runs for miles along the lake-side, and crosses the actual site of Hannibal's battle-field.
Twice already, in the last month, we had traversed it, on the journey from Cortona to Perugia, and again on our way to Siena. Coming back we could no more resist it. Our intention had been to go straight from Chiusi to Assisi, but at Terontola the little philosopher put in a special plea for Thrasymene. He has a passion for lakes and rivers; no landscape is complete for him without them.
'Let us go down to Thrasymene,' he said. 'Not for the sake of Hannibal, but for the pleasure of its beauty. For I am sick of the petty wars of hill-towns, and am wearied for the moment of Etruscan tombs and Gothic palaces and churches. Let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear and the pomegranates bud forth!'
So we came to Thrasymene and Passignano, which is a mere handful of brown houses pushed into the water at the foot of a rocky hill. Passignano has a flavour of its own. To begin with, its inn is different from any other albergo in Italy. It has an old-fashioned kitchen with a cowl chimney and rows of shining brass saucepans, and it opens on to the village street, where the people sit to gossip while the evening meal is cooking. Its low cottage windows look over the wide expanse of water to towered Castiglione, and the wooded islands of Thrasymene; but it is built so closeinto the hillside at the back that you can stretch your hand from an upper room and pluck the creepers which pour in a green cascade over the rocks. It is extremely primitive: the menu consists of soup, macaroni, eggs, fresh fish from the lake, and very lean chickens, supplemented by rough country bread, plenty of honey and fresh fruit, and cheese if the proprietor has lately been to market in Perugia. Meat there is none, at any rate in August, nor tea. But the rooms are spotlessly clean, with snowy beds, dainty white valances, curtains edged with hand-made lace, and the finest of linen towels; the daughter of the buxom landlady is as charming as she is elegant, and the serving girl is a beautiful Murillo.
Passignano is full of beautiful women; they form two-thirds of the population of this little lake-side town. There are hardly any men in it except the old fishermen, and a few young lads, apprentices to bootmakers and saddlers. All the rest have drifted away to the towns, or have farms out in thepaese. And the women, from the pretty French wife of Signor Arturo of the Albergo Balducci, with her freshly laundered cotton dresses, to the little bareheaded girls whose mothers call to them at night, bidding them bathe their dusty feet in the lake before they come to bed, are all lovely. They are noted for it.
The only other visitor in Passignano that August was a young Apollo—so beautifully dressed in pale greyriding-clothes that he looked as if he must have slipped out of a George Edwards musical comedy. He was, according to the landlady, a student from the University of Perugia, spending his vacation in Passignano because the girls were so beautiful! Oh, young Italy! How natural and unaffected you are! I loved to see him strolling down the village street with a lordly air of indifference, running the gauntlet of eyes as the pretty girls, linked in groups like bouquets of flowers, passed him demurely; while their mothers, sitting on the doorsteps of their cottages, scanned the handsome boy with kindly humour.
Everybody lives out of doors in Passignano. The women are always sitting outside their houses; and their children, half-naked in the summer heat, with halos of sunburned curls, pillow their heads on the rough cobbles of the hilly streets, and sleep after their play, as baby angels might sleep in paradise, tired out with singing. The stables and bakeries and workshops are open to the road, and above them the shabby brown houses clamber up the hillside to the Fortezza, which rears its shaggy head above the highest of their pagoda-like chimneys.
'If we stay here we shall prolong our lives for always,' cried the philosopher. 'Already I have forgotten the world!'
And he fell to imitating the song of the cicalas.
Indeed for us the world was standing still. We were caught in a mesh of beauty as in a summer daydream.The waves of Time seemed to retreat, leaving us like swimmers resting on a golden shore after struggle and turmoil. It might have been Lethe whose waters sang to the stones at our feet: for we forgot the world: its voice became a dream; we found ourselves content to watch the changing lights as the hours drifted away.
CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO.
CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO.
CHIMNEYS AT PASSIGNANO.
We ate our meals in the unfinished dining-room which Signor Balducci is building out over the lake—a mere shell of white plaster with empty doors andwindows through which the little breezes strayed. There were flowers on the cloth beside our plates, and a great bowl of oleanders, geraniums and white asters on the table. We breakfasted off golden bread and honey, and the pretty waiting girl brought tuberoses with our coffee. Outside, the lake was a tender morning blue; its surface rippled to the cool breath of the mountains, and sparkled in the sunlight. The bent and twisted sticks of the fishermen cast fantastic reflections in the water, and were beautified, as all humble and work-a-day things are beautified in Italy, by the magic of the sun. Further out two men in a rickety sampan were hauling in their nets.
It was a scene of infinite romance. The towers of Castiglione shone like ivory out of the violet mists, and many of the hills which rose above them bore turreted towns upon their crests. Behind them we knew lay Siena, Montepulciano and Chiusi, and to the right Cortona and Arezzo, and there Perugia, and Assisi there. History swept down upon us too. Thrasymene and its vine-clad slopes are full of memories of Hannibal, the stormy petrel who beat his wings round Rome in vain. Nor does it lack for gentler associations, for Saint Francis of Assisi, who had been preaching in one of the lake-side towns, was inspired, according to the author of theFioretti, to spend Lent on an island in its midst. Which he did, in solitary prayer and meditation, eating only the half of one small loaf of bread, 'fromreverence for the fast of Christ the blessed one, Who fasted forty days and forty nights without partaking any earthly food; but in this manner, with that half a loaf, chased far the venom of vain glory from him.'
Towards the hour of sunset, when the shadowed hills grew blue and misty, and the lake was a mirror of pale gold, we walked along the reedy shore of Thrasymene. The wind rustled in the silken leaves of the maize, and made a music like far-off singing in the emerald reeds. We went down to the edge of the water where the gardens sloped to the lake, and we found flowers there and herbs—mint and thyme and rosemary that scented the air, and purple vetches and clover, and the beautiful cow-parsley whose blossoms float like butterflies over every hedge and waste ground. And there we waited while the sky glowed from gold to rose, and Thrasymene seemed aflame with Hannibal's desire for Rome.
We dined in our alfresco dining-room, and afterwards we walked again by the still waters, where the frogs were shrilling a chorus to the night-crickets, whose song in the grass is like the sound of a curb-chain being rubbed in the hand. Except for these the world was still. There were no lights along that mysterious country road except the stars, and rarely have I seen them brighter, even in Africa.
'In a town we never see such stars as these,' said the philosopher. We never do. The Milky Waystretched like a girdle across the heavens, and was reflected in the lake like a pale moon. We stayed to watch it, and to listen to the voices of the night.
A train glared out of the tunnel which pierces the hill below Passignano, and tore along in the darkness beside the road, lightening our starlit gloom for a moment before its meteoric tail of windows was swallowed up by the night. Then we saw a glow-worm in a hole below the wall, and because in Italy you are pleased with little things, we stopped to look at it, and watch it turn round like a light-house lamp, now glowing clear as a star, now an indistinguishable mass of phosphorescence. And all the time the sky was growing lighter, and the mountains darker in the east.
It was the moon.
Slowly it rose. The Milky Way grew pale in the lake, and one great star which had twinkled like a will-o'-the-wisp among the reeds went out. The light grew and gathered behind the hills, and at last the miracle of moonrise came to us as we waited in the scented darkness of Thrasymene's shore, as it came to the young world on the eve of its creation. First the rim, and then the pulsing globe leaping from the shadows. For a moment it hung upon the hillside while two fantastic stone-pines, a fraction of an inch in height, swayed within its circle like neophytes bowing before Diana; then it rose into the heavens,—a stately ship steering among the stars.
186
Lake Thrasymene.
Lake Thrasymene.
Lake Thrasymene.
A miracle no less because our darkness has been lightened thus since the beginning of the world. There are so many miracles every day, if we but knew them,—the scent of flowers, the webs of spiders, the subtle fragrance of the earth, a wayside weed, and, most beautiful of all, the sunrise and the moon. For sunsets, though they may fill a grey world with rose and gold, and though they are always so magnificent that words are pallid pictures and artists' colours impotent, never have the beauty of the dawn. A sunset may turn our joy to melancholy, so tender is it, so pregnant with regret for the vanished day, so full of splendours. But we are always happy in the dawn. What of the night? It is over and gone. A new world lies at our feet; a new beauty fills our eyes; the breath of the morning in our nostrils is as a flower after rain. For in the dawn we step from the valley of the Shadow of Death on to the rosy mountains of Hope.
And because you are in Italy you have time to notice these miracles of every day, time to be happy, time to watch things grow. The hours do not matter, for to-morrow is as yesterday, and to-day is but a little minute in a garden. If it should rain the butterflies will only seek their shelter, the cicalas will be still, and the pores of the thirsty earth will open. To-morrow the sun will shine again. Or the day after that.
Nor is Passignano devoid of interest for the sightseer whose pleasure is not to be found in green pasturesor beside still waters. Magione, with its three mediaeval castles and its memory of the Baglioni, is within a drive. Picturesque Castiglione del Lago is well worth a visit. There is the island of St. Francis, with its ruined convent, now the villeggiatura of an Italian nobleman, and its exquisite views of Montepulciano. And lastly, there is the battle-field where Hannibal, the 'furious youth' of Publius Cornelius Scipio, defeated Flaminius, the maker of roads.
We did not go to Magione, but we let two old men of Passignano row us to St. Francis' Island in their weather-beaten fishing-boats. In an acacia grove down by the water's edge they showed us the block of stone whose surface was worn into two hollows by the knees of St. Francis. So they would have us believe. 'Ma, è vero!' they exclaimed, as though they feared that we should doubt them; and we could but smile as they told us an old legend of the saint sailing miraculously across Thrasymene on his mantle, bearing a lighted candle in his hand, because the boatmen dared not put out in the tramontana which was lashing the waters to fury.
We almost missed seeing the battle-field of Hannibal, because we had left it to our last afternoon, and discovered too late that the only carriage in Passignano had been already commandeered.
It was Fortunato Rosso who came to our rescue, dear old man, with his dilapidated vehicle, whichwas no larger than a riksha, and so broken down that we expected the back to fall away every minute. The step did break when we tried to use it, and the axle bar was tied up with string. Fortunato Rosso is one of the characters of Passignano. He is a veteran of the Venti Settembre. As he has lost his teeth his conversation is difficult to follow, though he is an intelligent guide, having a soldier's eye for the possibilities of the land: his clothes are almost as dilapidated as his carriage, but he has a string of medal ribbons sewn across his scrupulously clean white waistcoat. The medals themselves are kept in a dirty scrap of paper in his pocket. He persisted in showing them to us before we started, and the villagers stood round and laughed indulgently. While he was eagerly pulling them out a cheap crucifix fell to the ground. A small boy picked it up, and pressed it to his lips as he handed it back, and Rosso himself gave it a resounding kiss before he put it into his pocket.
The spot where Hannibal entrapped the Roman army is as distinct as stage scenery. There is a semi-circle of mountains coming down to the lake at each end. Passignano clambers into the water at the southern extremity; and on the northern spur, close to the lake, there is an ancient road climbing between bluffs in an olive-garden. It is below the modern strada; and Fortunato Rosso, who takes a delight in propounding the stratagems of Hannibal, insists thatFlaminius must have entered the plain through this pass. Half-way between the semi-circle and the lake is the hill of Tuoro, on which Hannibal's centre was conspicuously drawn up.
For the Punic general with his genius for guerilla warfare no better place for an ambuscade could be imagined. The Consul Flaminius lay at Arretium some miles to the north; and Hannibal, knowing his impetuous temper, determined to draw him out by laying waste the countryside from Cortona to Thrasymene under the very eyes of the Roman legions. As he anticipated, Flaminius, exasperated beyond endurance, left Arezzo and marched down to Thrasymene, paying no heed to the ill-omens which attended his setting forth. As a consequence his army had no enthusiasm. The name of Hannibal had turned even the heart of Rome to water, so that she spent her days in making sacrifices to the gods and consulting the oracles, but the fiery Flaminius would not allow his legions to make propitiation. 'Nay, rather,' said he with bitter sarcasm, 'let us lie before the walls of Arretium, for here is our country, here our household gods. Let Hannibal, slipping through our fingers, waste Italy through and through; and, ravaging and burning everything, let him arrive at the walls of Rome; nor let us move hence till the fathers shall have summoned Flaminius from Arretium, as they did Camillus of old from Veii.'[16]
Everything befell as Hannibal desired. Flaminius entered the pass. Seeing the Carthaginian army on the hill of Tuoro he advanced to give battle, not noticing the Baliares and light troops posted round the mountains, and unconscious of the fact that the Numidian cavalry had blocked his retreat by holding the pass when the last detachment of his army had come through. To add to his discomfiture a mist rose up from the lake and enveloped the lowlands, while the hills were in the sunlight above, and the enemy could watch for the preconcerted signal of attack.
It was given, and they poured down upon the Romans from all sides, taking them by surprise, and terrifying them by the unexpectedness of the assault. Even so the day might not have been lost if Flaminius had not fallen early in the engagement. After that it was a slaughter. There was no order. Each man fought for his own life, and when the legions attempted to escape by water, the only way left open to them, they were either drowned, or cut to pieces by the Carthaginian cavalry which followed them into the shallows. A band of some six thousand did indeed force their way to the hills, where they waited for the mist to rise, not being able to see how the day was going. And when at last the sun pierced through to the plain, and they could view the slaughter, they fled, taking their standards with them, only to fall prisoners on 'the following day when, Maharbal, who hadfollowed them during the night with the whole body of cavalry, pledging his honour that he would let them depart with single garments if they would deliver up their arms, they surrendered themselves: which promise was kept by Hannibal with Punic fidelity, and he threw them all into chains' (Livy, xxii. 6).
So much for the battle, but the old tragedy that was enacted on these vine-clad plains has been forgotten. Many of the peasants have not even heard of the name of Hannibal, nor dream that where they gather their purple vintage to-day the earth was reddened once by Roman blood. The broad smooth road led us between ancient olives. White oxen yoked to clumsy wooden tumbrils rolled on and on towards us in a mist of sunlit dust; peasants in gay kerchiefs and skirts were working in the bearded corn which rose higher than their heads, so that we looked at them through a veil of stalks; a herd of black swine were nosing the yellow earth under the olives, with a little girl-child to keep them. And when we reached the summit of the pass above the turquoise lake we could see the road to Arezzo in a gap of the mountains, across a sea of vines. There was nothing to disturb the air of peace; the mediaeval towers and castles which crowned the hills were farms; and the Sanguinetto, whose sinister name is the one memento of that day of slaughter, was a river of stones agape for the September rains.
'Far other scene is Thrasymene now;Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plainRent by no ravage save the gentle plough;Her aged trees rise thick as once the slainLay where their roots are; but a brook hath ta'en—A little rill of scanty stream and bed—A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain;And Sanguinetto tells you where the deadMade the earth wet, and turn'd the unwilling waters red.'
Childe Harold.