CITIES OF ITALY
Whatever may be the opinion of Europe as to the political advantages accruing to it from the independence of Italy, it must be mournfully confessed that the losses to art and to history through it are greater than any which could have been caused by centuries of neglect or long years of hostile occupation and devastating war. It is scarcely to be measured, indeed, what those losses are; so immense are they in their extent, so incessant in their exercise, so terrible in their irreparable infamy. No doubt it could never be foreseen, never be imagined, by those who brought about and permitted the consolidation of Italy into one kingdom, that the people, nominally free, would become the abject slaves of a municipal despotism and of a barbarous civic greed. None of the enthusiasts for Italian independence possessed that power of foresight which would have told them that its issue would be the daily destruction, by hordes of foreign workmen, of its treasures of art and its landmarks of history. Yet there is no exaggerationin saying that this, and nothing less than this, is its chief issue.
Hermann Grimm published a powerful appeal to the scholars and artists of Europe against the Italian destruction of Rome. Having for thirty years written on Italian cities and their art and history, with scholarship and devotion, he had gained the right to raise his voice in indignant protest and scorn against the mercenary and vulgar shamelessness with which the Roman municipality is so dealing with the splendid heritage which it has received, that soon scarcely one stone will be left upon another of the sacred city. He said, and with truth, that the portion of the Italian nation which has the eyes to perceive and the soul to abhor all that is being done is so small a minority, and one so spiritless, hopeless and discouraged, that it is for all practical purposes non-existent. He appealed to what he termed that larger Rome which exists in the hearts of all who have ever known Rome with a scholar’s knowledge, or an artist’s love. The appeal may be powerless but at least it may be heard; and though it will scarcely be able to pierce through the thick hide of smug vanity and rapacity in which Italian municipalities are enveloped, it will put on record the courage and the scorn of one man for what is the greatest artistic iniquity of our time. It is idle and untrue for Italians to say that the rest of Europe has no right to interfere with what they do with the legacy they enjoy. In the first place, without the aid and acquiescence of Europe, the Italian kingdom as a unity could never have existed at all; without the permission of Europe the entry into Rome could never have been made atall. Europe has the title to observe and to condemn the manner in which the superb gift, which she permitted to be given to those very various peoples who are called Italians, is being squandered away and destroyed. The United Kingdom of Italy may, as a political fact, disappear to-morrow in any European war or any great Socialistic uprising; but historic Italy, classic Italy, artistic Italy, is a treasure which belongs to the whole world of culture, in which, indeed, the foreigner, if he be reverent of her soil, is far more truly her son than those born of her blood who violate her and desecrate her altars. Italy cannot be narrowed to the petty bounds of a kingdom created yesterday; she has been the mistress of all art, the muse and the priestess of all peoples.
What are the Italians doing with her? It is sickening to note and to record. Nothing can ever give back to the world what, day by day, municipal councillors having houses to sell, syndicates and companies merely looking for spoliation and speculation, contractors who seize on the land as a trooper seizes on a girl in a sacked town, are all taking from the fairest and the most ancient cities and towns on earth. The sound of the hatchet in the woods and gardens of Italy is incessantly echoed by the sound of the pickaxe and hammer in the cities and towns. The crash of falling trees is answered by the crash of falling marbles. All over the land, destruction, of the vilest and most vulgar kind, is at work; destruction before which the more excusable and more virile destruction of war looks almost noble. For the present destruction has no other motive, object, or mainspring than the lowest greed. It is absolutelyincomprehensible how, after having been the leaders and the light of the far centuries, the Italians have, by common consent and with pitiable self-congratulation, sunk to the position of the most benighted barbarism in art. In everything which is now constructed the worst and most offensive taste is manifest, whilst that which has existed for centuries is attacked and pulled down without remorse. I wholly fail to account, on any philosophic or psychological grounds, for the utter deadness of soul which has come on the Italians as a nation. Born with loveliness of all kinds, natural and architectural, around them, the æsthetic sense should be as instinctive in them as their movements of limbs or lungs. Instead of this, it is entirely gone out of them. They have no feeling for colour, no sense of symmetry, and little or no sense of reverence for the greatness and the gloriousness of the past.
The only people in whom any of the native feeling for natural and artistic beauty still exists are those country people who dwell far removed from the contagion of the towns, and the marine populations of the Veneto. But even in these it is slighter than any student of the past would expect. The sense of colour isnilin most Italians; they might as well be colour-blind for any heed they take of harmony of tones. They delight inchinoiseries, in photographs, incrétonnes, in all the rubbish bought in modern Exhibitions. In the superb and immense halls of a palace of the Renaissance one will see priceless tapestries on the walls, antique marbles on the consoles, frescoes of Veronese, of Giulio Romano, or of Sodoma on the ceilings; and at the same time see arm-chairs and couches, some yellow, some blue, somegreen, some scarlet; a table-cover of crimson; and the mosaic floor covered with a worthlessmoquettecarpet of all hues, and of a set and staring pattern. I call to mind a similar palace on the Tiber, whose very name is as a trumpet-call to all the glories of the past; there the antique statues have been coloured, ‘because white marble is so cold and sad;’ an admirable copy in bronze of the Mercury of Gian’ di Bologna has had his wings, his petasus, and his caduceus gilded; and the marble floors have been taken up to have French parquet flooring laid down in their stead, and varnished so highly that the woods glisten like looking-glasses; yet the owner of and dweller in this place is a great noble, who, after his own fashion, cherishes art. I have seen a Greek Venus, found in the soil at Baiæ, wreathed round with innumerable yards of rose-coloured gauze by its owner, an Italian princess. The excuse given is, ‘Senza un’po di tinta sta cosi fredda!’
It is the same feeling which makes the Italian peasant say of the field-flowers which you have arranged in your rooms, ‘How well you have made those vulgar weeds look! Any one would take them now forfiori secchi!’ (artificial flowers). Whence comes it, this absolute blindness of the eyes, this deadening absence of all consciousness of beauty? It is the same thing in their villages and their fairs. Go to a fair on a feast-day in any part of France; go to a kermesse in Belgium or Luxembourg; go to a merry-making in Germany or Austria, and you will see a picturesque and graceful sight; you will see a great deal of what the eyes of Teniers, of Ostade, of Callot, of Mieris saw in their day. There will beharmonised colours, unconscious grace of grouping, arrangements of common goods and simple things so made that beauty is got out of them. But in a village festival in Italy there is nothing, except in the water pageants of Venice, which is not ugly; it is all dusty, uninteresting, untempting; what colours there are, are arranged with the same disregard of fitness as is shown in the yellow, red and green arm-chairs of the palace chambers; and the whole effect is one of squalor and of vulgarity. The carnivals, which used to be fine and brilliant spectacles, are now, almost all, save that of Milan, mere tawdry, trivial, unlovely follies. Who can account for this?
Are we to infer that all the transmitted influences of race count for nothing? Would those who, rightly or wrongly, are tempted to explain all the problems of life by the doctrines of heredity tell me why the living representatives of the most artistic races on earth are almost absolutely deprived of all artistic instincts? Some have suggested that it is the outcome of the artificial habits and false taste of the eighteenth century; but this can scarcely be correct, because this artificiality existed all over Europe, not in Italy alone, and besides, never touched the country people in any way or in any of their habits.
The excuse made for the utter disregard and destruction of beauty in Italy is that the utility of all things is now preferred to beauty. But this is no adequate explanation. It may explain why a dirty steamboat is allowed to grind against the water-steps of the Ca’d’Oro, or why the fair shores of Poselippo and the blue bays of Spezzia and Taranto are made hideous by steam and bricks. But it will not explainwhy the peasant thinks a wax or cambric flower more lovely than a field anemone or daffodil, or why the nobleman paints his Athene and gilds the wings of his Hermes. This can only be traced to the utter decay of all feeling for beauty, natural or artistic, in the Italian mind, and, though we see, we cannot adequately explain, we can only deplore, it. There is no doubt a tendency all the world over to loss of the true sense of beauty; despite the æsthetic pretences of nations, the real feeling for natural and artistic perfection is very weak in most of them. If it were strong and pure, the utilitarian (i.e., the money-getting spirit) would not prevail as it does in architecture, and forest solitudes would not be destroyed as they are; and men would see what hypocrites they be who make millions out of some hideous desecration of nature by factories, iron foundries, or petroleum wells, and think they can purchase condonation, and a reputation for fine taste, by buying pictures for their galleries or inlaying their halls with rare woods or stones. The whole world which calls itself civilised is guilty more or less of the most absolute barbarism; but modern Italy is guiltiest of all, even as he who has inherited a fair home and cultured intelligence is guiltier than he who has never known anything but a vitiated atmosphere and a squalid house. It is the immensity of her heritage which makes her abuse of all her opportunities so glaring and so utterly beyond pardon.
Nothing can ever give back to mankind what every day the Italian municipalities and people are destroying, as indifferently as though they were pulling down dead leaves or kicking aside anthills in the sand.There is not even the pretext for these acts that they are done to better the state of the people; to execute them the cheapest foreign labour is called in, ousting the men of the soil off it: house-rent is trebled and quadrupled, house-room narrowed, and in many instances denied, to the native population: and contracts are given away right and left to any foreign companies or syndicates who choose to bid for them. The frightful blocks of new houses, the hideous new streets, the filthy tramways, the naked new squares, are all made by foreign speculators who purchase the right of spoliation from the municipalities as the private owners of the soil. A few men are made temporarily richer: the country is permanently beggared.
‘Rome’ wrote Hermann Grimm, ‘represents for humanity a spiritual value which cannot be easily estimated, but which is none the less precious because ideal.’ Yet the vulgar and petty administration of an ephemeral moment is allowed to treat the capital of the world as though it were some settlement of shanties in the backwoods of America, fit only to disappear beneath the mallet and scaffolding of carpenters and masons. He said with justice that to call it vandalism is an injustice to the Vandals, for they, at least, were too ignorant to know the worth of what they destroyed, and acted in mere fierce instinct of conquest, with no ulterior greed; but they who are now destroying arch on arch, tower on tower, temple and church and palace, piling the sacred stones one on another like rubble, and effacing landmarks which had been respected through a thousand years, have the excuse neither of ignorance nor of war. Theyknow not what to do, and we may add that they care not what they do, so long as their gain is made, their pockets filled.
Of all the grotesque barbarisms committed in Rome, the destruction of the cloister of Ara Cœli and of the tower of San Paolo upon the Capitol, to make room for an equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel, has been one of the most offensive and ill-judged. All the world knows the beauty of the Capitol, the immemorial memories connected with it, and the great statue which for so many centuries has felt the Roman sunshine strike on its golden bronze. The placing of a modern statue in juxtaposition with the mighty Aurelian is an act so irredeemably vulgar, so pitiably incongruous, that it is a matter of infinite regret, even for the repute of the House of Savoy, that the present king did not peremptorily forbid such use of his father’s manes. In the Superga, or on the mountain-side of the Piedmontese Alps he loved so well, a statue of Victor Emmanuel would be in keeping with his traditions, but it is a cruelty to him to dwarf him by such surroundings and such memories as are there on the Capitol of Rome. His fame is not of the kind which can bear, uninjured, such comparisons; and were it even ten times greater than it is, there could be no excuse for using the Capitol for such a purpose when there is the whole width of the Campagna for it, and when, in perfect accord with the abilities of modern sculptors, there are all the staring and naked modern piazzas waiting for their works. Will it be credited that it was actually proposed to place a statue of him between the columns of St Mark? In these matters the king could and should,with perfect propriety, intervene, and forbid a pretended homage for his father’s memory being made a pretext and cover for the coarse and common vandalism of the epoch. In Florence, the beautiful wooded entrance of the Cascine was destroyed to make the bald, uninteresting square called the Piazza degli Zuavi, and a large, stony, open place, shadeless and unlovely, was reserved for a monument to Victor Emmanuel; for this the oval brick basement of the pedestal was raised many years ago, and there stands, unfinished and hideous, an eyesore to the city, an insult to the royal House.
There is scarcely a little town, there is no provincial capital on the whole peninsula, which has not some new, staring, stucco street named Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, or some historic and ancient square made absurd and pitiable by being re-baptised Piazza dell’ Independenza. The effect is at once ludicrous and deplorable.
If it were necessary thus to deify the events of the last thirty years, and magnify them out of their true proportions, it would have been easy to build some wholly new city in some vacant spot, which might have borne any name or names deemed fitting, and thus have left in peace the great cities of the past, and not have made the present recall the fable of the frog and the bull.
Around Rome, as well as within it, the most luxuriant vegetation, a few years ago, alternated with the most sacred ruins: tombs and temples and triumphal arches were framed in the most abundant foliage; the banksia rose, the orange, the myrtle, the jessamine climbed and blossomed amidst the ruins ofthe palace of the Cæsars. In all these grand gardens, in these flowering fields, in these grass meadows, stretching between their marble colonnades, there was, as the German scholar says, an infinite calm, a loveliness and stillness in which the poet and the scholar could draw near to the mighty dead who had once been there as living men. There was nothing like it left on earth. Now it is destroyed for ever. Now,—in the stead of that tender silence of the tombs, that exquisite freshness of the spring, awakening in a thousand moss-grown dells and myrtle thickets which had seen Ovid and St Paul, Augustine and Raffael--now, in the stead of this there are the stench of engines, the dust of shattered bricks, the scream of steam whistles, the mounds of rubbish, the poles of scaffolding, long lines of houses raised in frantic haste on malarious soil, enormous barracks, representative of the martial law required to hold in check a liberated people: all is dirt, noise, confusion, hideousness, crowding, clamour, avarice.
The leaders of an invading and victorious army would have been ashamed to cause the havoc and the blasphemy which the Roman municipality have carried out with shameless callousness; the indignant voice of Europe would have bidden a Suwarrow, a Napoleon, a Constable de Bourbon stay his hand, had he dared to level with the dust the august monuments of which neither the majesty nor the memories have power to daunt the impious hand of the nineteenth century Edilizia. Common faith, even, has not been kept with the Roman people in the ruin of their city; the completed plan, put before the public in 1880, of the works which wereintended, did not prepare the public for one-tenth of the devastation which has been wrought. In the words of Grimm, those who put forth the plan of ’80 proposed tranquil, moderate and decent measures, and never contemplated the insensate haste, the brutal fury, the unsparing greed shown by those who, professing to accept its propositions, have utterly disregarded and far outstripped them. In the plan of ’80 it was, for instance, expressly stated and provided that certain gardens, amongst them the Ludovisi, should be purchased by the city, but kept intact in their verdure and extent. This promise has been broken.
What traveller has not known the Ludovisi Gardens? What scholar, dreamer, painter, has not found his heaven there? Those immemorial pines, making twilight beneath them in the sunniest noon, those lofty walls of bays and of arbutus, those dim, green, shadowy aisles leading to velvet swards and violet-studded banks, the family of peacocks spreading their purples, their emeralds, their gold, out in the glory of the radiant light, the nightingales singing night and day in the fragrant solitudes, Sappho’s angel in Corrinna’s gardens—who has not known these? who has not loved these? And they are gone, gone forever; gone through the greed of men, and in their stead will stand the vile rows of cheap and staring houses: in their place will reign the devil of centralisation.
Centralisation is the heart-disease of nations. The blood, driven by it from the body and the limbs, becomes turgid and congested, overfills the vessels of the heart, and chokes them up; there is no more health, and later there is death. It has been thecurse of France. It will be the curse of Italy. The violated nymphs and the slaughtered nightingales of the ruined gardens will be avenged. But what solace is that to us? We have lost them forever. No power on earth can give them back to us.
There is a violation of that sentiment which the Latins called Piety, so glaring, and so monstrous, in the destruction of Rome by the Italians, that it dwarfs all similar ruin being wrought elsewhere. All over Italy things are daily being done which might wring tears from the statues’ eyes of stone.[A]
After the outrage to Rome, the injury done to Venice is the most irreparable, the most inexcusable.
The wanton destruction of the island of Saint Elena is, after the destruction of the Ludovisi and other historic gardens in Rome, the most disgraceful act of the sacrilege of modern Italy. It is barbarism without one shadow of excuse or plea of obligation. This loveliest isle had been spared by all hostile fleets and armies. It lies at the very mouth of the lagoon opening out from the Grand Canal. It arrests the eyes of all who go to and fro the Lido. It was, a little while ago, a little paradise of solitude, fragrance and beauty. Its thickets of wild rose, of jessamine, and of myrtle, were filled with song-birds. Its old church, the oldest in the Veneto, stood, grey and venerable, amidst the shade of green acacias and flowering oleanders. The little world of blossom and of melody, hung between the sea and sky, had a holiness, a pathos, a perfection of woodland loveliness not to be told in words; there no sound was heardexcept the bells of the matins and vespers, the lapping of the waves, the whir of the white gulls’ wings, and the echo of some gondolier’s boating song. To sit in its quiet cloisters, with the fragrance of its wild gardens all around, and see the sun set beyond Venice, and the deep rose of evening spread over the arch of the skies and the silver plain of the waters, was to live a little while in the same world that Giorgione and Veronese knew. It seems like a vision of a nightmare to find these cloisters levelled and these gardens and trees destroyed; the whole island made a grimy, smoking mound of clay and ruins. Yet thus it is. The government has chosen to make it a site for a factory and foundry; and, not content with this defilement, is throwing up, upon it and beside it, acres of the stinking sand and clay dredged up from the canals, intending in due time to cover this new soil with other factories and foundries, full in the face of the Ducal Palace, a few furlongs from the Piazza of St Mark. Viler devastation was never more iniquitously or more unpardonably wrought.
Meantime the very commonest care is refused to such interesting and priceless houses as the House of the Camel, which is let out to a number of poor and dirty tenants, with its eponymus alto-relievo made the target for the stones of the children; while in the same quarter of the Madonna dell’ Orta, close at hand, a manufacturer is allowed to send the mouths of his steam-tubes hissing through the iron arabesques and between the carved foliage of a most noble Gothic doorway belonging to a deserted church.
I am aware that it is useless to protest against these things. The soul in the country is withered up bysmall greeds. All these irreparable injuries are done that municipal councillors may pocket some gain, and any stranger who has the money necessary can purchase from the Conscript Fathers of the hour the right to defile, to annex, to violate, to destroy the fairest and most sacred places in Italy. The goddess is given over to the ravishing of any boor who brings a money-bag.
The scholar, the poet, the archæologist are all abhorred in modern Italy; their protests are impatiently derided, their reverence is contemptuously ridiculed, their love of art, of nature, or of history, is regarded as a folly, ill-timed and inconvenient, lunatic and hysterical. But the new-comer who proposes a machine, a chimney, a monster hotel, a bubble company, or a tramway station, is welcomed with open arms; it is considered that he means ‘progress,’i.e., that he means a subsidy for some one, a general scramble for gold pieces.
Emile de Lavaleye has demonstrated, in his recentLettres d’ Italie, that these works in Venice, so fatal to the city, cannot ever result in any financial profit; that, with coal forty francs a ton, it is impossible they should ever bring any; that all industry of the kind is artificial and pernicious in Italy, and ends in impoverishing the many to enrich a few.
It is a wanton love of destruction which can alone lead a people who possess neither iron nor coal to make foundries and factories in Venice, the most lovely and luminous city of the sea. These works cannot be ever profitable at Venice, by reason of the immense cost of the transport there of the metals and combustibles necessary for their development. Yet inevery direction their foul smoke is rising, and dimming that translucent air so dear to every painter from Carpaccio to Aïvarnovski. From the Zattere alone no less than fourteen factory chimneys are visible.
The Fondamenté Nuové was in the days of the Doges theriva, consecrated to the villas and pleasure-gardens of the Venetian nobles; their palaces were only for winter habitation or ceremonious use, but the beautiful garden-houses facing Murano were their retreat for mirth, ease and recreation of all kinds, with nothing between them and the silvery lagoon except the clouds of foliage and of blossom which then covered these little isles. Nothing would have been easier than to make this shore now what it was then, and it would even have been undoubtedly profitable to have done so. Will it be credited that, instead, it has been selected as the especial site of gas-works and iron-works and all abominations of stench and smoke, whilst, instead of the laughing loveliness of flowering lawns leaning to touch the sea, there is a long and dreary brick embankment, on which you can walk if you choose, and recall, if you can, the ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’?
‘La lumière de Venise‘ has been the theme of all poets and the enchantment of all travellers for centuries; that opal-hued, translucent, ethereal light has been the wonder of every wanderer who has found himself in the enchantment of its silvery radiance. ’On nage dans la lumière,’ is the just expression of Taine, to describe the exquisite effulgence of the light in Venice. Yet this wonder, this delight, this gift of Nature from sea and sky, themodern masters of the fate of Venice deliberately sacrifice, that a few greedy commercial adventurers may set up their chimneys on the shores consecrated to St Mark.
The Venetian populace have still in themselves a sense of colour and a passion for verdure; in every littlecalleand at everytraghettoan acacia grows and a vine climbs; on the sails of the fishing and fruit boats there are painted figures, and in the garb of those who steer them there is still picturesque choice of form and hue. But in the Venetian municipality, as in every other Italian municipality, all taste is dead, all shame is dead with it; and the only existence, the only passion, left in their stead, are those of gain and of destruction. On the Giudecca hideous factories, which belch out the blackest of smoke close to the dome of the Church of the Redentore, have been allowed to pollute the atmosphere and disgrace the view; and in every shed or outhouse where anyone has a fancy to stick up the iron tube of an engine, similar smoke passes forth, making day frightful and clouding the lagoon for miles.
Reverence, and that sense of fitness which always goes with reverence, are wholly lacking in the modern Italian mind. There is a kind of babyish self-admiration in its stead, which is the most sterile of all moral ground, and with which it is impossible to argue, because it is deaf and blind, inwrapped in its own vanity. In a few years’ time, if the Italian kingdom last, it will insist on its history being re-written, and the debts that it owed to the French Emperor in ’59 and to the German Emperor in ’70 being struck out of its balance-sheet altogether. Nothing was moreuntrue, more bombastical, or more misleading than the favourite phrase,Italia fara da se; but it is one of those untruths which have been caressed and repeated until they are accepted as facts; and the injury done by this conceit to the present generation is very great.
Nature has done all for Italy; it is a soil which is indeed blessed of the gods; from its pure and radiant air to its wildflowers, which spring as though Aphrodite were still here ‘to sow them with her odorous foot,’ it is by Nature perfectly dowered and thrice blessed. In its roseate dawns, its crystal, clear moonlight, its golden afternoons, it has still the lovely light of an unworn world. Art joined hands with Nature, and gave her best and her richest treasures to Italy. It is, to any scholar, artist, poet, or reverent pilgrim to her shrines, a thing of intolerable odium, of unutterable sorrow, that the very people born of her soil should be thus ignorant of her exquisite beauty, thus mercenary, venal and unshamed in their prostitution of it.
Even amongst those who follow art as their calling, there is no sense of colour or of fitness. When the old houses of the Via degli Archibusieri were pulled down in Florence, to lay bare the colonnade beneath them, a committee of artists deliberated for three months as to the best method of dealing with this colonnade. The result of their deliberations was to cover the old stone with stucco and paint the stones brown, with white borders! The effect is enhanced by upright lamp-posts, coloured brown, stuck in the middle of the way. The excusegiven for the demolition of the houses was that the removal of them would widen a thoroughfare: as the lamp-posts are much more obstructive to drivers than the houses were, the correctness of the reasons given can be easily gauged. This is an example of all the rest. ‘Are we to go in rags for sake of being picturesque?’ said a syndic now ruling one of the chief cities of Italy, to a person who complained to him of the destruction of art and beauty now common throughout the peninsula. The reply is characteristic of that illogical stupidity and that absolute colour-blindness which are common to the modern Italian, or, let us say, the municipal Italian mind. They are insensible themselves to the horror of their work, just as they are unconscious why yellow, blue and green chairs on a red carpet offend a delicate taste. To whitewash frescoed walls; to make old monasteries look brand new; to scrub and peel and skin sculptured marbles; to daub over beautiful arches and columns and cloisters with tempera paintings, mechanically reproduced in one set pattern over and over again, over miles of stucco; to outrage the past and vulgarise the present; to respect nothing; to set the glaring seal of a despotic and bourgeois administration over all which ages have made lovely and reverent—all this they think an admirable and hygienic work, while they let human excrement be strewn broadcast over the fields and emptied in the street at midday under broiling heat, and set the guards of their rivers to drive out with blows of the scabbard the poor children who would fain splash and bathe in them under canicular suns. The excuse of hygiene is only the parrot crywhich covers the passion for iconoclasm and destruction. To make their owninteressiwhile the moment lasts is the only desire at the heart of all these civic councillors and engineers, architects and contractors, house-owners and speculators. To petty personal purposes and selfish personal profits everything is sacrificed by the innumerable prefects, syndics, and town councillors, by whom Italy is regarded as the Turkish pashas regarded the Egyptian fellah.
Florence, again, might, with great ease, have been made one of the most beautiful cities of Europe: if there had been only moderate care and decent taste displayed in its administration, its natural and architectural charms were so great that it would have been a facile task to keep them unharmed. If its suburbs, indeed, of ugliness and squalor, could show good roads and shady avenues; if its river banks, instead of brick walls, showed grass and trees; if its filthy cab-stands were kept out of sight, and its city trees allowed to grow at the will of Nature, Florence would be lovely and twice as healthy as it is. But there is no attempt to preserve what is beautiful, or to make what is of necessity modern accord in any manner with the old; whilst on trees there is waged a war which can only oblige one to conclude that those who are entrusted with the care of them have no eye except to the filling of their own wood-cellars. It is a very common thing to see an avenue of plane or lime trees with their heads cut off, whilst all the trees, whether in the public gardens or on the boulevards, are chopped and hacked out of all likeness to themselves, and of course dry up and perish long before their time.
Nothing can be more criminal that what is actuallynow being proposed in the Florence town council, i.e., to raise a loan of eight millions, at four per cent., to destroy the entire old centre of the city.[B]I repeat, nothing more criminal, more wasteful, or more senseless could be done. Florence is very poor; a few years ago she was on the brink of bankruptcy; taxation is enormous throughout Tuscany; the poorest are taxed for the very bed they lie on; the amount which she has to pay to the government from thedazio consume(that is, the octroi duty at the gates, on all food and produce of every kind entering the town) is extravagant and intolerable. So cruelly are the simplest productions of the soil mulcted by taxation that every class suffers, whether producer or consumer. The annual interest payable on the new loan will add immensely to the burdens which the city bears; and for what purpose is such a loan to be contracted? For the purpose of pulling down the oldest and most historic parts of Florence, to create a naked wilderness which will be changed into one of those squares, dusty and hideous, with metal lamp-posts round it and stunted shrubs in the centre of it, which represent to the municipal Italian thene plus ultraof loveliness and civilisation. The excuse given of hygienic reasons is a lie. All the uncleanly classes which dwelt in the Ghetto have been bundled off wholesale to the S. Frediano quarters, where they will continue to dwell with unchanged habits, a few score of yards removed from where they were before. The dirt of Italian cities is not due to the age or shape of the streets, it is due to the filthy personal habits of the people,which are the same in a wide and roomy farm-house in the pine woods as in a garret of a town. They love dirt; water never touches their bodies all the year round, and never touches even their faces or hands in winter; they like their vegetables raw, their wine sour; their pipes are eternally in their mouths, and their clothes reek with every stench under heaven. It is the habits of the people, not the formation of the streets, which constitute the standing peril of pestilence in Italy. They would make a new house as filthy as an old one in a week. For what, then, is this enormous, useless, and unpardonable addition to the civil debt of Florence incurred? Only to put money in the pockets of a few speculators, and a few owners of the soil, at the cost of destroying all that is most interesting, valuable, and historical in the city.
Will it be credited by any readers of these words that it is actually in contemplation to turn the old piazza behind the Palazzo Strozzi into a range of glass-galleries like those of Milan or of Brussels? It is incredible that a whole civil population can tranquilly permit such outrage, and such grotesque outrage, to be committed in its name.
It is indeed very much as though the owner of Raffaeles and Titians tore them up into tatters and bought chromo-lithographs and olegraphs to hang in their places.
Oftentimes the populace itself is pained and mortified to see its old heirlooms torn down and its old associations destroyed, but the populace has no power; the whole civic power is vested in the bureaucracy, and civic electoral rights are wholly misunderstood and practically unused by the masses of the people.It is for the most part the smug and self-complacentbourgeoisiewhich rules, and which finds a curious delight in the contemplation of everything which can destroy the cities of the Renaissance, and the records of classic Latium, to replace them with some gimcrack and brand-new imitation of a third-rate modern French or Belgian town, glaring with plate-glass, gilding, dust, smoke, acres of stucco, and oceans of asphalt.
The modern Italian has not the faintest conception of the kind of religious reverence with which the English, the German, the American scholar visits the cities of Italy. Such an emotion seems to the son of the soil wholly inexplicable and grotesquely sentimental. If the Englishman praise a monster hotel or a torpedo-boat, or the German the march of a regiment, or the American the shafts of a factory, then, and then only, will the Italian regard the travellers with complacency. And what is done in the cities is repeated in the small towns, of which the municipalities think it grand and ‘advanced’ to imitate the innovations of larger ones, and where the house-owners and owners of the soil are just as greedy as their town councillors, and just as eager to sacrifice any classic beauty or mediæval memory for gain.
Could Dante come to life, no curse that he ever breathed upon his countrymen would be one-half so fierce and deep as that with which he would devote the Italian of the close of the nineteenth century to the vengeance of the offended gods. But Dante’s self would say his curses to deaf ears, wadded close with the wool of vanity and greed.
Meanwhile the taxation of all these towns is so highthat tradespeople are ruined in them, as the country proprietors are ruined in hundreds and thousands by the imposts on land and all that land produces. Against blind cupidity the gods themselves are impotent.