Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Charles V. gave Siena as a fief to his son, Philip II., who ceded it to Cosimo I., and he built there the fort which the Spaniards had attempted. It remained under the good Lorrainese dukes till Napoleon made it capital of his Department of the Ombrone, and it returned to them at his fall. In 1860 it was the first Tuscan city to«f vote for the union of Italy under Victor Emmanuel — the only honest king known to history, says my “New - Guide.”

  III

  IT is a “New Guide” full of the new wine of our epoch, and it brags not only of the warriors, the saints, the popes, the artists, the authors, who have illustrated the Sienese name, but of the two great thinkers in religion and politics who have given her truer glory. The bold pontiff Alexander III., who put his foot on the neck of the Emperor at Venice, was a Sienese; the meek, courageous St Catherine, daughter of a dyer, and the envoy of popes and princes, was a Sienese; Sallustio Bandini the inventor of the principle of Free Trade in commerce, was a Sienese; and Socinus, the inventor of Free Thought in religion, was a Sienese. There is a statue to Bandini in one of the chief places of Siena, but when my “New Guide” was written there was as yet no memorial of Socinus. “The fame of this glorious apostle,” he cries bitterly, “who has been called the father of modem rationalism, is cherished in England, in France, in Italy, in Switzerland, in Holland, in Poland, in America. Only Siena, who should remember with noble pride her most illustrious son, has no street named for him, no bust, no stone. Rightly do the strangers who visit our city marvel at neglect which denies him even a commemorative tablet in the house where he was born — the Casa Sozzini, now Palazzo Malavolta, 21 Via Ricasoli.” The justness of this censure is not impugned by the fact that the tablet has since been placed there; perhaps it was the scorn of my “New Guide” which lashed the Sienese to the act of tardy recognition. This has now found stately utterance in the monumental Italian which is the admirar tion and despair of other languages: —

  “In the first Half of the 16th Century

  Were born in this House

  Lelio and Fausto Sozzini,

  Scholars, Philosophers, Philanthropists.

  Strenuous Champions of the Liberty of Thought,

  Defenders of Human Reason against the Supernatural,

  They founded the celebrated Socinian School,

  Forecasting by three Centuries

  The doctrine of Modern Rationalism.

  The Sienese Liberals, Admiring, Reverent,

  Placed this Memorial.

  1877.”

  I wandered into the court of the old palace, now involuntarily pea-green with mould and damp, and looked out from the bow-shaped terrace bulging over the garden behind, and across the olive orchards — But I forgot that I was not yet in Siena.

  IV

  BEFORE our arrival I had time to read all the “New Guide” had to say about the present condition of this city. What it was socially, morally, and personally, I knew already, and what it was industrially and commercially I learned with regret. The prosperity of Siena had reached its height in the thirteenth century, just before the great pest appeared. Her people then numbered a hundred thousand, from which they were reduced by the plague to twenty thousand. Whole districts were depopulated within the walls; the houses fell down, the streets vanished, and the plough passed over the ruins; wide gardens, olive orchards, and vineyards still flourish where traffic was busy and life was abundant. The “New Guide” does not say so, but it is true that Siena never fully recovered from this terrible stroke. At the time of the great siege, two hundred years after the time of the great pest, she counted only forty thousand souls within her gates, and her silk and woollen industries, which still exist, were vastly shrunken from their old proportions. The most evident industry in Siena now is that of the tanners, which hangs its banners of leather from all the roofs in the famous region of Fontebranda, and envelops the birthplace of St Catherine in an odour of tan bark. There is also a prosperous fabric of iron furniture, principally bedsteads, which is noted throughout Italy; this, with some cotton-factories and carpet-looms on a small scale, and some agricultural implement works, is nearly all that the “New Guide” can boast, till he comes to speak of the ancient marchpane of Siena, now called Panforte, whose honoured name I have ventured to bestow upon these haphazard sketches of its native city, rather because of their chance and random associations of material and decorative character than because of any rivalry in quality to which they can pretend. I often saw the panforte in shop-windows at Florence, and had the best intention in the world to test its excellence, but to this day I know only of its merits from my “New Guide.”

  “This specialty, wholly Sienese, enjoys, in the article of sweetmeats, the primacy in Italy and beyond, and forms one of the principal branches of our industry. The panforte of Siena fears no competition or comparison, either for the exquisiteness of its flavour or for the beauty of its artistic confection: its brown paste, gemmed with broken almonds, is covered in the panfortes de luxe with a frosting of sugar, adorned with broideries, with laces, with flowers, with leaves, with elegant figures in lively colours, and with artistic designs, representing usually some monument of the city.”

  V

  IT was about dark when we reached Siena, looking down over her wall upon the station in the valley; but there was still light enough to give us proof, in the splendid quarrel of two railway porters over our baggage, of that quickness to anger and readiness to forgive which demonstrates the excellence of heart in the Sienese. These admirable types of the local character jumped furiously up and down in front of each other, and then, without striking a blow, instantly exchanged forgiveness and joined in a fraternal conspiracy to get too much money out of me for handling my trunks. I willingly became a party to their plot myself in gratitude for the impassioned spectacle they had afforded me; and I drove up through the steeply winding streets of the town with a sense of nearness to the Middle Ages not excelled even in my first visit to Quebec. Of Quebec I still think when I think of Siena; and there are many superficial points of likeness in the two cities. Each, as Dante said of one, “torregia e siede” (“sits and towers” is no bad phrase) on a mighty front of rock, round whose precipitous slopes she belts her girdling wall. The streets within wander hither and thither at will; in both they are narrow and hemmed in with the gray façades of the stone houses; without spreads a mighty valley — watered at Quebec with the confluent St Lawrence and St Charles, and walled at the horizon with primevally wooded hills; dry at Siena with almost volcanic drought, and shut in at the same far range by arid and sterile tops bare as the skies above them, yet having still the same grandeur and nobility of form. After that there is all the difference you will — the difference of the North and South, the difference of the Old World and the New.

  I have always been a friend of the picturesqueness of the Cathedral Place at Quebec, and faithful to it in much scribbling hitherto, but nothing — not even the love of pushing a parallel — shall make me pretend that it is in any manner or degree comparable to the old and deeply memoried Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele at Siena. This was anciently Piazza del Campo, but now they call it Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, because, since the Unification, they want some piazza of that dear name in every Italian city, as I have already noted; and I walked to it through the Via Cavour which they must also have, and how it was I failed to traverse a Via Garibaldi I do not understand. It was in the clearness that follows the twilight when, after the sudden descent of a vaulted passage, I stood in the piazza and saw the Tower of the Mangia leap like a rocket into the starlit air. After all, that does not say it: you must suppose a perfect silence, through which this exquisite shaft for ever soars. When once you have seen the Mangia, all other towers, obelisks, and columns are tame and vulgar and earth-rooted; that seems to quit the ground, to be not a monument but a flight. The crescent of the young moon, at half its height, looked sparely over the battlements of the Palazzo Communale, from which the tower sprang, upon the fronts of the beautiful old palaces who
se semi-circle encloses the grand space before it, and touched with its silver the waters of the loveliest fountain in the world, whose statues and bas-reliefs darkled above and around a silent pool. There were shops in the basements of some of the palaces, and there were lamps around the piazza, but there seemed no one in it but ourselves, and no figure broke the gentle slope in which the ground shelves from three sides towards the Palazzo Communale, where I left the old republic in full possession when I went home through the thronged and cheerful streets to bed.

  I observed in the morning that the present Italian Government had taken occasion overnight to displace the ancient Sienese signory, and had posted a sentry at the palace door. There had also sprung up a picturesque cluster of wooden-roofed market-booths where peasant women sat before heaps of fruit and vegetables, and there was a not very impressive show of butter, eggs, and poultry. Now I saw that the brick-paved slope of the piazza was moss-grown in disuse, and that the noble Gothic and Renaissance palaces seemed half of them uninhabited. But there was nothing dilapidated, nothing ruinous in the place; it had simply a forsaken look, which the feeble stir of buying and selling at the market-booths scarcely affected. The old Palace of the Commonwealth stood serene in the morning light, and its Gothic windows gazed tranquilly upon the shallow cup before it, as empty now of the furious passions, the mediaeval hates and rivalries and ambitions, as of the other volcanic fires which are said once to have burned there. These, indeed, still smoulder beneath Siena, and every August a tremor of earthquake runs through her aged frame; but the heart of her fierce, free youth is at peace for evermore.

  VI

  WE waited at the hotel forty-eight hours for the proverbially cordial reception of strangers which the “New Guide” had boasted in his Sienese. Then, as no deputation of citizens came to offer us the hospitality of the city, we set about finding a lodging for ourselves. At this distance of time I am a little at a loss to know how our search, before it ended, had involved the complicity of a valet de place; a short, fat, amiable man of no definite occupation; a barber; a dealer in bric-a-brac; a hunchbackling; a mysterious facchino; and a were-wolf. I only know that all these were actually the agents of our domiciliation, and that without their intervention I do not see how we could ever have been settled in Siena. The valet had come to show us the city, and no caricature of him could give a sufficient impression of his forlorn and anxious little face, his livid silk hat, his threadbare coat, his meagre body, and his evanescent legs. He was a terribly pathetic figure, and I count it no merit to have employed him at once. The first day I gave him three francs to keep away, and went myself in search of a carriage to drive us about in search of rooms. There were no carriages at the stand, but an old man who kept a bookstore let the lady of the party have his chair and his scaldino while I went to the stable for one. There my purpose somehow became known, and when the driver mounted the box, and I stepped inside, the were-wolf mounted with him, and all that morning he directed our movements with lupine persistence and ferocity, but with a wolfishly characteristic lack of intelligence. He had an awful face, poor fellow, but I suspect that his ravenous eyes, his gaunt cheeks, his shaggy hair, and his lurking, illusive looks, were the worst of him; and heaven knows what dire need of devouring strangers he may have had. He did us no harm beyond wasting our time upon unfurnished lodgings in spite of our repeated groans and cries for furnished ones. From time to time I stopped the carriage and drove him down from the box; then he ran beside us on the pavement, and when we came to a walk on some uphill street he mounted again beside the driver, whom he at last persuaded to take us to a low tavern darkling in a sunless alley. There we finally threw off his malign spell, and driving back to our hotel, I found the little valet de place on the outlook. He hopefully laid hold of me, and walked me off to one impossible apartment after another — brick-floored, scantily rugged, stoveless, husk-matressed, mountain-bedsteaded, where we should have to find our own service, and subsist mainly upon the view from the windows. This was always fine; the valet had a cultivated eye for a prospect, and there was one of these lodgings which I should have liked to take for the sake of the boys playing mora in the old palace court, and the old lady with a single tooth rising like an obelisk from her lower jaw, who wished to let it.

  A boarding-house, or pension, whose windows commanded an enchanting panorama of the Sienese hills, was provided with rather too much of the landscape in-doors; and at another, which was cleanly and attractive, two obdurate young Englishmen were occupying the sunny rooms we wanted, and would not vacate them for several days. The landlord conveyed a vivid impression of the violent character of these young men by whispering to me behind his hand, while he gently tried the door to see whether they were in or not, before he ventured to show me their apartment We could not wait, and then he tried to get rooms for us on the floor above, in an apartment belonging to a priest, so that we might at least eat at his table; but he failed in this, and we resumed our search for shelter. It must have been about this time that the short fat man appeared on the scene, and lured us off to see an apartment so exquisitely unsuitable that he saw the despair and reproach in our eyes, and, without giving us time to speak, promised us a perfect apartment for the morrow, and vanished round the first corner when we got into the street In the very next barber’s window, however, was a notice of rooms to let, and the barber left a lathered customer in his chair while he ran across the way to get the keys from a shoemaker. The shoemaker was at dinner, and his shop was shut; and the barber having, with however great regret, to go back to the customer left steeping in his lather, we fell into the hands of the most sympathetic of all bric-a-brac dealers, who sent us to the apartment of a French lady — an apartment with a northern exposure as sunless as fireless, from which we retreated with the vague praises and promises of people swearing in their hearts never to be caught in that place again. The day went on in this vain quest, but as I returned to the hotel at dusk I was stopped on the stairs by a mysterious facchino in a blouse; he had been waiting there for me, and he whispered that the priest, whose rooms the keeper of the pension had tried to get, now had an apartment for me. It proved that he had not quite this, when I went to visit him after dinner, but he had certain rooms, and a lady occupying an apartment on the same floor had certain others; and with these and one more room which we got in the pension below, we really sheltered ourselves at last. It was not quite a realization of the hereditary Sienese hospitality, but we paid almost nothing for very comfortable quarters; and I do not see how a party of five could be better housed and fed for twenty-five francs a day in the world.

  We must have been almost the first lodgers whom our good ecclesiastic and his niece had ever had, their enterprise being so new; the rooms were pretty and fresh, and there was a comfortable stove in our little parlour — a franklinetto which, three days out of four, did not smoke — and a large kerosene lamp for our table included in the price of two francs a day which we paid for our two rooms. We grieved a good deal that we could not get all our rooms of Don A., and he sorrowed with us, showing us a jewel (giojello) of a room which he would have been so glad to give us if it were not already occupied by a young man of fashion and his dog. As we stood looking at it, with its stove in the corner, its carpet, its chest of drawers, and its other splendours, the good Don A. holding his three-beaked classic lamp up for us to see better, and his niece behind him lost in a passion of sympathy, which continually escaped in tender Ohs and Ahs, we sighed again, “Yes, if we could only have this, too!”

  Don A. nodded his head and compressed his lips. “It would be a big thing!” (“Sarebbe un’ affarone!”) And then we all cast our eyes to heaven, and were about to break into a common sigh, when we heard the key of the young man of fashion in the outer door; upon which, like a party of guilty conspirators, we shrank breathlessly together for a moment, and then fled precipitately into our own rooms. We parted for that night with many whispered vows of esteem, and we returned in the morning to take possession. I
t was in character with the whole affair that on the way we should be met by the hunchbackling (whom I find described also in my notes as a wry-necked lamb, probably from some forcible contrast which he presented to the were-wolf) with a perfectly superb apartment, full of sun, in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, looking squarely upon the Palazzo Communale and the Tower of the Mangia. I was forced to confess that I had engaged my rooms.

  “A pity for you cried the hunchbackling, passionately.

  “I have promised,” I faltered. “One must keep one’s promises, no?”

  “Oh, you are right, you are right,” said the hunchbackling, and vanished, and I never saw him more. Had he really the apartment to which he pretended?

  VII

  No more, probably, than I had the virtue which I affected about keeping my promises. But I have never been sorry that I remained true to the word I had given Don A., and I do not see what harm there can be in saying that he was an ex-monk of the suppressed convent of Monte Olivetto, who was eking out the small stipend he received for his priestly offices in the next parish church by letting these lodgings. All the monks of Monte Olivetto had to be of noble family, and in one of our rooms the blessed candle and crucifix which hung on one side of the bed were balanced by the blazon of our host’s arms in a frame on the other. Yet he was not above doing any sort of homely office for our comfort and convenience; I saw him with his priest’s gown off, in his shirt-sleeves and knee-breeches, putting up a bedstead; sometimes I met him on the stairs with a load of fire-wood in his arms, which I suspect he must have been sawing in the cellar. He bowed to me over it with unabashed courtesy, and he and Maddalena were so simply proud and happy at having filled all their rooms for a month, that one could not help sharing their cheerfulness. Don A. was of a mechanical turn, and I heard that he also earned something by repairing the watches of peasants who could not or would not pay for finer surgery. Greater gentleness, sweeter kindliness never surrounded the inmates of hired lodgings than enveloped us in the manners of this good priest and his niece. They did together all the work of the apartment, serving us without shame and without reluctance, yet keeping a soft dignity withal that was extremely pretty. May no word of mine offend them, for every word of theirs was meant to make us feel at home with them; and I believe that they will not mind this public recognition of the grace with which they adorned their gentle poverty. They never intruded, but they were always there, saluting our outgoing and incoming, and watchful of our slightest wish. Often before we could get our key into the outer door Maddalena had run to open it, holding her lucerna above her head to light us, and hailing us with a “Buona sera Loro!” (Good evening to them — our lordships, namely) to which only music could do justice.