Having changed, we drove up to dinner at the Villa, where we spent a delightful evening. Mrs Eden mixed us cocktails of her own invention. After dinner we went round the house. The bedrooms seemed to contain more of the collection than the rooms downstairs. Mr Eden had made several additions since I had been to lunch two years before. We ended up the evening, unforgivably late, on the roof of a grotto overlooking the lights of the town.
The next morning at 9.30 Martin and Edward arrived with unfailing punctuality, to take us out to see the sights. I alone went with them, and having visited the galleries and churches with great thoroughness on a previous visit, made no particular effort at formal sightseeing. There is nothing so pleasant as revisiting a town like Florence, when the monuments of the place are no longer weighing on the conscience. We wandered into the Bargello and stood before the Donatellos, the greatest portrait sculptures of European civilization; of which, beneath the rough-hewn corrugations which he mistakes for patine, Epstein is, of contemporary artists, the most direct follower.
We then visited the Palazzo Vecchio and wallowed in the titanic curves of Vasari’s battlepieces. Here one can almost agree with Vasari’s own opinion that he was the last of the great masters. A sixteenth-century map of England, frescoed on the wall of one of the apartments, was marked with the name of our local market-town, a place that has been of complete unimportance since the reign of John. After a fleeting glance at what Baedeker terms the ‘vitreous paste of the Orsanmichele’, we returned and as David and Simon were awake, went out and had lunch on the pavement of the Via Tornabuoni. The meal was prolonged by two cavernous flasks of chianti.
About three o’clock, having borrowed a cushion for the back seat, we set out to see the Certosa, a monastery on a hill outside the town, noted as the scene of the imprisonment of Pius VII by Napoleon. The rooms occupied by him are kept empty in sacred memory of the event, and adorned with badly-painted portraits of the martyr. The monastery, as a whole, possesses a beautiful atmosphere, aloof from the world, the embodiment of Tuscan peace and permanence. The sloping arcading, at the side of the broad shallow steps that lead up from the entrance gate, stood out creamy white against the hot pewter-blue of the sky. Oddly detached panoramas presented themselves through each successive arch: white villas perched on little hummocks; black points of cypresses, like the teeth of a broken comb; terraced rows of salad-green vines; and the ethereal grey of the round olives on their stunted trunks climbing the hills in dotted patches; all stood out against the inevitable range of solid mountains. A monk led us round; a fresco, half worn away, presented the same airy unreality as the olive leaves. In the middle of a spacious, cloistered courtyard, open to nothing but the turquoise imminence of the sky, stood a wellhead designed by Michael Angelo. Mounting the steps to it, the monk posed, white-robed and brown-bearded, and asked us to photograph him. The last visitors who had done so were from Copenhagen, and when they had reached home, they had sent him some snapshots of himself. We regretted that we had no camera. He, therefore, led us to what is apparently the raison d’être of the establishment. In a small room, furnished from floor to ceiling with shelves, there confronted us row upon row of bottles of every shape, substance and capacity, containing an unending variety of intoxicating liqueurs. Simon and Edward were unable to resist the guile of the reverend brother behind the counter. David purchased a large majolica flask to store away behind Diana’s cushions in case of emergency. Martin, eyeing Edward disapprovingly, gulped down a miniature bottle holding rather less than a thimble; and I, who dislike liqueurs, asked for a glass of soda-water: at which, it is no exaggeration to say, the monk was genuinely shocked. Such was the lining of our Tuscan cloud.
After a further ten miles’ driving, we came to Monte Gufoni, the home of the Sitwells, a fortified castle on a hummock. This low rambling collection of dilapidated courtyards and periods, surmounted by a medieval tower, is tenanted not only by that distinguished family, but a number of others, which they are unable to evict. The porter refused to let us enter the living-rooms with their Severini frescoes, despite all Martin’s protestations of intimacy with the owners; but we were able to admire the shell and gold mosaic grotto and the terraced garden covered with flowers. The castle commands a magnificent view on all sides, but is so entirely surrounded by roads that any sense of privacy is lacking.
On our return, in the attempt to find the key to a palace that was shut, we drove round the town twice at high speed, each time inadvertently disregarding the upraised arms of the police. We arrived at the hotel and were leisurely dismounting, when a whole fleet of them, mounted on bicycles, arrived panting with rage and excitement and fined David a pound on the spot.
We then went to dinner at the Villa. Mrs Eden’s cocktails, on top of the holy monk’s liqueur, produced an explosive effect, and no sooner was the meal finished, than the whole party launched into a loud and acrimonious political discussion, in which Simon tried wildly to explain why the Birmingham group of the Labour Party, led by Oswald Mosley, must needs adopt the name of the most impregnable Conservative stronghold in the country. As people always regard Simon’s advanced theories as either childish or unbalanced, he becomes not unnaturally annoyed. Mrs Eden and I laughed together in a corner.
The next day was Saturday. After finding that our bill was, for once, less than we expected, we drove off to Siena.
CHAPTER XI
ITALY IN AUGUST is not the quaint hippety-hop country of middle-aged water colourists that she appears in the Spring. The landscape of the Tuscan and Umbrian Apennines assumes a grim, forbidding aspect. The afternoon, as we set out for Florence, was thick and sultry, with thunder in the air. The sun had ceased to shine; it glowed through a molten haze; a sort of dull, yellow fog of heat overspread the whole land. Light and shade seemed to disappear.
We turned off the main road at Poggibonsi, having first entered the town and upset a hand-cart in our efforts to find a way out of it. A few miles up a side road brought us to San Gimignano, with her thirteen perfectly plain and haphazardly oblique fortified towers silhouetted against the skyline like a series of bowled wickets. At Easter time, two years ago, wallflowers were sprouting from the crevices of the towers, and the fruit trees were in bloom in the gardens. Now the place seemed deserted. We looked at the frescoes at Benozzo Gozzoli and drank some soda water, then drove out by the opposite gate along an ill-defined track, in the hope of coming to Volterra.
Gradually the country began to lose its vegetation. The hills developed longer and more sweeping curves; at the same time, as though convulsed by some uncontrollable agony, their sides were thrown into fissures and tumours of the most fantastic description. At the foot of each straggled a little grass, burnt a dirty brown, which, as though seared to dust beneath the furnace of the heavens, soon gave place to hot, grey powdery earth. Occasionally a couple of white oxen might be seen ploughing some precipitous slope, one of them standing two feet higher than the other, yet both harnessed to the same plough.
Volterra is situated on a rock, black and gloomy, looking out over long-drawn wastes of parched desolation. The site is of great age, Volterra having been the capital of the old kingdom of Etruria, and the last city to hold out against the Romans. She is now famed for her mines of alabaster, which is carved locally into battleships and motor-bicycles. As we zig-zagged up the face of the cliff, huge walls, remnants of the extinct Etruscan civilization, frowned their massive, uncemented blocks upon us.
We passed through the Porta dell’Arco, also Etruscan, a double gate thirty feet deep. At this point a small boy hopped on to the car, and we drove about the town under his direction, to the envy of his fellows.
We eventually came to a stop between the baptistery and the cathedral. This latter supports a dome designed, like that of the duomo at Florence, by Brunelleschi. As if to add to the sinister atmosphere of the place, the ancient fortress has been converted into a convict prison. Also, owing to a slow subsidence of their foundations, the majority of the chur
ches are beginning to fall over the cliff. Our urchin informed us that he was one of the few certified guides in Volterra. When, after a long absence in the cathedral, I thought it advisable to make sure that no one was molesting the car, he remarked in a tone of offended indignation: ‘There are thieves in Florence, in Rome, in Milan; in Volterra, only gentlemen.’
It was dark by the time we reached Siena.
Siena reigns supreme among the hill towns. The architecturally fastidious may affect to dislike her black and white cathedral, with its Neapolitan wedding cake façade, that dominates the town like a great, humped zebra sitting on a rock. These same purists will, however, be lost in admiration of the primitives with which the Palazzo Publico is frescoed, many of which, especially the panoramic battlepieces, are unlike any to be found elsewhere. They are done in much the same style as those decorative memorials of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir and the triumphs of Sir Garnet Wolseley in the Soudan, which still adorn the walls of old-fashioned public houses. Most attractive of all is the equestrian portrait, executed in 1328 by Simone Martini, of Guidoriccio da Folignano di Reggio attending the siege of Montemassi, a painting mentioned above as the nearest analogy – in two dimensions – to the statue of Can Grande at Verona. High up on the end wall of a large room there rides a solitary man upon a horse, in the midst of an oblong, dark blue landscape, relieved by fortresses, palisades, tents and attendant armies drawn and shaded in opaque, yellowish grey. The man himself is puffed with satisfaction, and the horse, prancing along beneath him, is draped from top to bottom in a yellow robe adorned with diagonal black lozenges.
In a neighbouring room is a series of life-size representations of the triumph and eventual funeral of Victor Emmanuel II, first king of Italy, one of whose many coats reposes in a glass case beneath. The sleek realism with which these illustrations of Italy’s unification have been depicted by the artist is enhanced by the fact that he has so contrived his compositions, that the brilliant patches of red upon the uniforms, the green grass, and the great airy spaces of white sky, convey without a moment’s hesitation an impression of the Italian national flag. The art to which the exploits of Garibaldi, Cavour, Mazzini, and the House of Savoy gave birth in the seventies and eighties still awaits recognition as one of the most widespread, if not meritorious, intellectual phenomena of the nineteenth century. There is not a town or a villa throughout the length and breadth of Italy where it is not represented. Here indeed is a novel and fruitful subject to which the ever-increasing body of artistic commentators may turn their attention. The style culminates in the frescoes in the Vatican, perpetuating the proclamation of the Infallibility of the Pope, in which the Holy Father is represented standing firmly on the red baize steps of his throne, while a ray from Heaven strikes his uplifted visage in the presence of an applauding crowd.
The great beauty of Siena is the main piazza, fashioned like one of those fan-shaped shells that are found on the sands, with the ribs marked out in stone. At its foot, adjoining the Palazzo Publico, rises the Mangia, a very tall, slender, brick tower, stone-machicolated, and supporting on its topmost platform a bell, beneath the gaping metal mouth of which it is possible to stand and survey the view. As though from an aeroplane, the whole of Tuscany stretches away on every side. In the foreground on its altar of rock, stands the cathedral, with its black ringed campanile, and its dome, a delicate white shell, now visible. Diverging from it lies the town, hemmed in by the encasing walls, with the streets lined in black shadow against the sunbaked brilliance of the rough tiled roofs.
It was at Siena, in the Spring of 1923, that we arrived to find the whole town en fête, the windows hung with arras – whatever arras is – and the entire population lining the narrow streets and converging on to the open space beneath the façade of the cathedral. As we watched, amid intense, yet restrained excitement, there materialised, ensconsed in a pre-war taxi, the embalmed hand of St Francis Xavier. The whole multitude fell on its knees to the ground as the vehicle approached. Seated bolt upright on the worn, black leather seat, a bishop in mitre and cope, inclined the shrivelled relic and its emerald ring from side to side, blessing the crowd. The arrival was followed by an impressive ceremony in the cathedral, so largely attended that little boys were to be seen seated among the large altar candlesticks. As a result the floor was boarded up to prevent it from damage. This year, however, it was uncovered and we could admire the superb drawing of the incised battle-pictures, with which it is emblazoned.
The ten frescoes, ordered by Pope Pius III to commemorate the papacy of his uncle, Pius II, with which the Piccolomini library leading from the cathedral is adorned, are too well known as the consummate achievement of Pinturicchio, to justify superfluous comment; the magnificence and freshness of their colour has lost nothing during four hundred years. Equally familiar is the pulpit of Niccolo Pisano, with its groups of supporting pillars resting on the backs of lions marchant. A curious and less noticed feature of the building is the frieze of the heads of all the Popes, running on either side of the main aisle above the Gothic arches, among which, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning has remarked:
… … … Joan
And Borgia ’mid their fellows, you may greet,
A harlot and a devil.
Much has been written of this building and the works of art beneath its roof. More no doubt is to come. But there is one sentence which expresses to perfection that particular genius, a mixture of extreme splendour and mysterious solemnity, that characterizes the cathedral; a sentence which describes it as the supreme example of what ‘the unassisted genius of the Italians’ could produce ‘when influenced by medieval ideas’. In this rare combination lies the whole secret of the spiritual magnificence of early Italian art.
The day after our arrival was a Sunday and the streets of the town were paraded by bands representative of the various contradi in their medieval dresses of tights, doublets, and feathered ‘Caps of Maintenance’, who attracted attention by banners and drums. This curious survival of the parochial rivalries of the Middle Ages reaches its climax in the Palia, a racing fixture held twice yearly in the piazza, in which each contrada is represented by one or two riders, while the majority stand in the middle and beat one another with staves. In the afternoon we went to present a letter of introduction to Donna Issa Chigi at the Palazzo Chigi, a large building, the ground floor of which was converted into shops. She was away in the country, about two miles outside the town. We did not feel capable of following her.
The next day we set out in the afternoon for a motor drive. The heat was suffocating, and the sun was still invisible behind the lowering haze, which seemed to have become intensified. The land was the colour of burning pewter, patched with deadened ochres. Now and then the green streaks of a vineyard or the effervescent grey of an olive grove would take shape on the side of an approaching hill. Our objective was Pienza. It was here that the famous scholar and agnostic, Aeneas Sylvius, Pius II, built himself a palace, and, in fact, created the whole town, which remains exactly as when it came into being by his command five hundred years ago. The palace is built round three sides of a court, the fourth of which is left open to a wonderful view and is still inhabited by the Piccolomini, of which family Pius II was a member. A contemporary fresco-portrait still looks from over the door of his bedroom at the golden-pillared bed in which he slept. The rooms are small, and surmounted by fifteenth-century ceilings that have preserved their original decorations, consisting of a large number of painted beams crossing and re-crossing. The wallpapers, more modern, are reminiscent of William Morris. One room was occupied by a delightful miniature theatre in the Greek style, painted white and gold, with a tiny gallery at the back.
Later, we continued to Montepulciano, a hill town in a state of dilapidation. The once imposing tomb of Bartelomeo Aragazzi, by Donatello, has been split up all over the cathedral. One of the friezes, now part of the altar, consists of cupids and wreaths in soft relief. Its fellow is in the National Gallery. The town hall has a to
wer which I insisted on ascending in order to view Lake Trasimene, which could not be seen for the increasing haze. The others sat below.
On the way home I began to develop a headache. We had not gone far before the silencer fell off, and David and I were obliged to lie full length on our backs, in three inches of stifling dust and filth, and tie it on again with our handkerchiefs. As it was red-hot, this was not easy.
Late that night, the storm which had been threatening for so long broke on the hills with a terrific vehemence. After emptying the heavens of water, it began to blow with such force that the tiles rained off the roofs like dead leaves. The noise resembled a cinema orchestra accompanying a battle film. The orange trees in the courtyard fell against each other like a pile of drunken women; and Simon’s little octagonal boudoir (Gothic 1820) was deluged with flying earth, which landed in clouds on his bed and befouled the clean linen in his open trunk.
Next morning the air was cool and fresh. We lunched at Arezzo, where we were held up twenty minutes at a level crossing. In the afternoon we passed along the shores of Lake Trasimene, but any desire to bathe was dispelled by a soaking downpour of rain that had wetted us to the skin before we had time to put up the hood. During the delay we were able to pluck large bunches of black grapes, which we ate as we drove along. We arrived at Perugia for dinner.
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