* * *
WE SIT DOWN on the church steps overlooking the lively piazza full of older residents. “The cocktail party,” Ed calls our intensely social mornings in the piazza in Cortona. Of course, instead of cocktails, people are sipping cappuccino. Parties going on all over Italy every morning of the world. Growing old in Italy seems a kinder thing than in America. The old aren’t isolated and don’t get the not-so-subtle message that they should be. Four women, two with canes, hold court at a table under the arcade. They’re having fun on this chilly October morning.
“Here’s the brief,” I say to Ed, as I check the Blue Guide. “Under dominion of Pisa. Then a free city in 1225, the period when all these buildings were accomplished. 1335, conquered by Siena. Downward spiral, plus malaria and bubonic plague. 1555, town goes under the control of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and old mining (active in Etruscan times) of silver, lead, iron, copper recommenced and prosperity returned. Nutshell. ‘Massa’ is from Latin, meaning a group of properties. And ‘Marittima’ doesn’t mean it was once near the sea; it refers to the area, Maremma.”
“Okay. And ‘Maremma’ means sea-swamp, doesn’t it? Mar, sea, and –emma, marshland.”
How nice to sit in the mild autumn sun, the Duomo looming magnificently. Blind arches run along one side and on either side of the entrance. The campanile is a joy; the zigzag of steps so unusual, a rose window with stained glass (not very Tuscan), the octagonal cupola instead of a dome, and the bas-relief over the big door, portraying the life of San Cerbonius, whose works seem kind of goofy. They involved a gaggle of geese he met en route to see the pope, bears who were supposed to devour him but licked his feet instead, deer who allowed themselves to be milked to slake the thirst of guards accompanying Cerbonius to Rome. And he heard angels sing. How childlike, these narratives for the populace, and strange how tonally different these stories are from the tree-of-fecundity phalluses.
* * *
EVEN IF YOU’VE seen a hundred archeological museums, you haven’t seen the belt buckle, storage jars, safety pins, and weapons from this particular area. And I always appreciate the shock of obvious aesthetic pleasure taken in fashioning a pitcher or necklace. After photographing the dignified façade covered with coats of arms, we go inside to see the small collection, which ranges from the Etruscans (sites still being excavated in this area) to the Romans. And, yes, there is a cunningly wrought belt buckle. And to contemplate: a prehistoric sandstone figure, about sixty centimeters high, in the shape of a triangle. Mysterious: Barely etched in are crossed arms and slits for eyes that looked at we know not what.
* * *
WE WALK ALONG via Moncini, the main street spiking off the piazza. Knife shop, bookstore, wine bar, house concept shop, and toward the end, La Padellaccia del Viggia, a small café where we sit outside for a quick lunch of mushroom bruschette and salad. Up from here, Piazza Matteotti and Sant’Agostino, also from the boom-time thirteenth century. There’s a 1228 clock tower to climb for a view over the countryside, but we don’t. Instead, we take a few side streets, quiet and mostly residential, where Ed stops to pick up bread and I buy some pretty paper. What for? Lining drawers, wrapping gifts? I just have a weakness for paper.
* * *
LAST STOP, THE interior of the Duomo. What a beauty. Seen from inside, that odd octagonal cupola on top stuns me with eight wedges of alternating black and white bricks. A deep, receding illusion. I wonder if it was meant to have been stuccoed and frescoed. But the effect could not be more dramatic. Dazzling, too, the magnificent Madonna delle Grazie almost certainly by the great Sienese painter Duccio. Raffaello Vanni’s Annunciation shows Mary, with a what-am-I-to-do expression on her face. Uncharacteristically, she’s wearing a bright red dress. Behind the altar, generations of crass visitors have scratched their names and initials on the marble. A relic preserved here—a finger of San Cerbonius.
NOTE:
Thirty-two kilometers away: the evocative ruins of Abbazia di San Galgano. Not to be missed.
On the way to Sansepolcro, we stop at Busatti, maker of traditional Tuscan fabrics. Anghiari, the striking hill town, is Busatti headquarters, where you might be taken downstairs to the industrial-age-looking looms, or see Giuseppe Busatti himself, stirring a large pot of onion skins on the back porch—for dyeing wools and cottons.
While I’m looking at tablecloths, Ed strikes up a conversation. He often finds someone to talk to while he waits for me to finish shopping. He claims he’s practicing his conversation skills. But really, he just likes talking to Italians. After some exchange about Anghiari restaurants, he says to the woman, “How did Sansepolcro get its name?” She isn’t entirely sure but another local chimes in—some pilgrims brought relics from the Holy Land, pieces of the sepulcher where Jesus was buried and arose; built themselves a monastery; and called it Holy Sepulcher—Sansepolcro.
Not by coincidence, then, that Piero della Francesca’s most famous painting, The Resurrection, was created in the city of his birth, Sansepolcro. I select a muted orange cloth woven with a renaissance design.
* * *
WE’VE TAKEN THE famous Piero della Francesca trail many times—the Basilica di San Francesco in Arezzo, with frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross; the Duomo for his small portrait of Mary Magdalene with her hair wet after drying the feet of Jesus; nearby Monterchi, birthplace of Piero’s mother, for his stately Madonna del Parto, the pregnant Virgin Mary, and, of course, the Museo Civico in Sansepolcro, featuring The Resurrection. Aldous Huxley proclaimed this to be “the greatest painting in the world.” Christ rises from the tomb; four guards sleep beneath. The one in brown on the left is said to be a self-portrait of Piero.
I like the story, and I hope it’s true, of an American pilot in World War Two who had orders to bomb Sansepolcro. As he flew, he had a memory of an art professor lecturing about the great painting hanging in a museum in Sansepolcro. He dropped his bombs elsewhere. Be thankful for a good liberal arts education.
Also at the civic museum, we find Piero’s San Ludovico (Saint Louis) and San Giuliano (Saint Julian), the blond youth with an other-worldly look in his eyes. I love the riveting Polyptych of the Misericordia. A larger-than-life Virgin Mary shelters eight people under her cloak. The panels of saints are equally brilliant and moving. Although Piero magnetizes us always, there is more to see. I’m especially fond of the work by local artist Santi di Tito, most of all the lovely Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Raffaellino del Colle paintings, and the Mannerist Pontormo’s San Quintino.
* * *
I CAN IMAGINE living here. Though the setting lacks the drama of hill towns, the flat streets and spacious Piazza Torre di Berta invite lingering, bicycling, window-shopping. Droves of well-dressed young people throng streets lined with fashionable shops and bars. Cortona friends come here to find distinctive clothes at Ballerini. Busatti has a branch. La Nuova Libreria is an excellent bookstore. Look up! Several medieval towers spike the façades of handsome palazzi. One sidewalk menu offers pasta with goose sauce, roast duck, osso bucco, rabbit. Just your ordinary old fare.
We’ve brought guests here many times, as the town is a bit out of the way and many do not know of it. We always take them to Ristorante Locanda da Ventura. We have to have completed our sight-seeing prior because you stand up from the table in a food coma. We order from the antipasti cart, as was the custom for many decades in Tuscany. Grilled eggplant and breaded peppers, slices of frittata and salumi. For primo, the ribollita or the ravioli with truffles, then the roasted pork with crackly skin, or the savory brasata, braised beef.
Today we visit the gorgeous and appealing displays of medicinal plants and herbs in Museo Aboca, a few meters down from the Museo Civico. Antique ceramic pitchers and jugs, blown glass distillers, bottles and storage jars painted with names of what they held: opium, roses, arsenic. All the tools for making cures. Old monasteries had their garden of simples; and much of the lore, of course,
is now known to have scientific basis.
While I’m looking at books in the gift shop, Ed talks to the women at the desk. He is told that Osteria Il Giardino di Piero, the restaurant across the street, is associated with the museum—which he finds out is associated with the farm Aboca, 2,000 acres of vegetables and organic medicinal herbs. We have to try it. This means no lunch at Da Ventura. Will this be a rival for our affections?
The garden room of the osteria faces the Piero park, which Aboca has planted with healing plants in beds all around the statue of Piero della Francesca. Since we’re at the end of October, we sit inside. As we walk in, we see glass flasks (fiaschi) filled to the top with beans in the fireplace coals. We have to taste that ancient Tuscan specialty. First, we split the bringoli pasta (similar to the pici of our area) with a pesto of kale, saffron, walnuts, and almonds. Then the smoky white beans with a plate of fried artichokes. A slender slice of almond and ricotta tart with a hint of lemon. We love this—everything top quality, organic, curated, and served on Richard Ginori china painted with a scene of the park across the street. We’ll have to come back to Sansepolcro twice as often now.
Walking out, we find the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Evangelista open—not always the case in the afternoon. The first church was revised to Romanesque in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Because it faces via Matteotti, a side street, not the piazza, it’s easy to miss and that would be a pity, because inside is a resurrection painting, earlier than Piero’s and almost certainly an influence on his. Niccolò di Segna’s composition is similar, with Jesus resting one foot on the edge of the sepulcher with toes curled over, same powdery-pink garment. I feel a little shiver, thinking of Piero standing in front of this painting while contemplating starting his own.
I always visit the Ascensione di Gesù by Perugino, with Christ ascending in an oval of cherub heads surrounded by musicians, angels, and dangling ribbons. Mary and the crowd below look up in wonder. The colors and shading are harmonious, and always with Perugino there will be a glimpse of sublime landscape in the background. Quite magnificent but after spending time with Piero, Perugino looks static.
In an inconspicuous spot, I see a Piero look-alike. Baptism of Christ by Christiana Jane Herringham (1852–1929). How curious. This copy, painted in 1909, of one of Piero’s famous works is excellent. Herringham would have seen the original in London’s National Gallery. When I look up the copyist, she is one of those formidable, fascinating Edwardian women who carved their way in a society that expected little of them. Lady Herringham translated a fifteenth-century book on tempera and fresco, reviving interest in those methods. She started funding organizations, still active today, to protect British works of art. She traveled to India to copy Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves, leaving an important record of their condition at that time. Her last years were, sadly, spent in mental institutions. I wonder how her painting found a home on a side wall of the cathedral in Sansepolcro.
“Piero’s town,” Ed says. We’re walking along the substantial town walls toward the car.
“Why do we always call him by his first name?”
“We want to feel on intimate terms with the local boy.”
NOTE:
There is a biography of Christiana Jane Herringham: Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene by Mary Lago.
Isn’t this the way an Umbrian hill town should look? Yes. A circular piazza, just the right size, with seven radiating streets, some leading down cobbled lanes into charming neighborhoods of stone cottages with arbors covered with grapevines, tumbling potted plants, and a multihued cat asleep in the street.
The piazza is anchored by a handsome thirteenth-century Palazzo Comunale, town hall, with a bell tower to climb for wide views. Directly across, Teatro San Filippo Neri formerly was a church. What a good fate for unused religious buildings, staging pageants of a different kind. At an arched doorway surrounded by datura plants, I step into the intimate oratory, Santa Maria di Piazza. The apse fresco of the Madonna and Child was painted in 1517 by local boy Francesco Melanzio, whose name you see around town, but the oratory dates back to the beginning of the thirteenth century. Melanzio’s blues are vivid, his Madonna pensive, and off to the left Pope Gregory I holds up a huge communion wafer. I almost didn’t notice the aedicule (small shrine) to the right of the fresco. This niche is a remnant of the older oratory. Along the sides, the tourist office has mounted copies of many important paintings in Montefalco. If churches are closed, you can still see what you’re missing.
Via Goffredo Mameli drops down to the frescoed Porta Sant’Agostino, the main entrance into Montefalco. Along the way, enotece for the tasting of the local sagrantino wine, textile shops selling pastel linens in traditional patterns, and trattorie, including our favorite, Olevm. On this street, it’s easy to pass right by Chiesa di Sant’Agostino. I love the haphazard arches and windows inside and the faded and fragmentary frescoes, almost all “attributed to” someone or by unknown Umbrian painters of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Via Ringhiera Umbra, off the piazza, takes you to the museum and church of San Francesco. Others lead you to panoramic views. No wonder this town is known as “the balcony of Umbria.” We identify the compelling towns of Trevi, Spello, Spoleto, and Assisi, scaling distant forested hills, shining white against green like fine two-color drawings of themselves. When I look at them, I always feel a surge of hope. Maybe this comes from the biblical “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
* * *
MONTEFALCO IS ONE of my favorite towns. We discovered it early in our years in Italy, arriving with two friends at dark in winter. Ed wanted to taste sagrantino—the grape is indigenous to Montefalco—then mostly unknown outside its sphere. The town was not the lively place it now is. One light across the deserted piazza, an open door with barrels of wine inside. No one home. We sat down at a rustic table and waited. Finally, a scruffy man in old wool ambled in and gave us a glass of the “little sacred wine.” He’d been playing cards in the bar. I thought the tannins had tied my tongue in a knot. The man laughed and gave us another taste, an aged sagrantino, mellow and deep, with just enough tannin to make me sit up straight.
“Smart wine,” Ed remarked. “The complexity makes you think. Makes you want to analyze, talk about it.”
We bought a bottle. Arnaldo Caprai, it said. We have been drinking those wines ever since. We’ve had lunches at the vineyard, tasting their passito, dessert wine made from first drying the mature grapes in the sun, and their vintages. A first sip always brings back the image of the lighted doorway across the piazza, a bare bulb casting shadows on our faces, the dark crimson wine pouring into our glasses.
* * *
WE CAN NOW buy sagrantino in Cortona, even in North Carolina. Still we come to Montefalco for its beauty and major art holdings, especially for the captivating frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. When our French friend, Veronique, worked on the restoration years ago, we were able to climb the scaffolding and see faces and details up close. How cold she was in winter, all bundled up, painting on fingernails and earlobes, and cleaning faces with vile-smelling potions. Now the frescoes are in their glory again. The museum attached to the church displays rooms of paintings by unknown artists. Powerful paintings, crucified Christ in wood and tempera, another devastating Crucifixion painted on a board mounted with a carved sculpture of bleeding Christ on the cross. Disturbing and weighty. Who gets remembered, whose works? Many of these pieces rival or surpass others by artists whose names are well known, hung in city galleries. Being from a remote place, not producing a body of work, not known by those who could promote you, that was the fate of Painter from Spoleto, 1280; Umbrian Painter, fourteenth century; Circle of Niccolò di Liberatore; and others.
Before the museum rooms lead into the church, we visit the lapidary rooms down in the crypt. Local archeological finds include several Roman funerary stele from the first century. (Some were discovered
just outside town at San Fortunato, where we are going later.) The prize in this room: a white marble Hercules, 117 centimeters tall from the first century B.C. or early first century A.D. Although found here, its provenance is unknown. He is holding the skin of the Nemean lion, his first challenge in obtaining forgiveness for murdering his own children in a fit of pique. Since the skin couldn’t be pierced, he strangled the raging lion and created a coat and a helmet from the head. He holds a club in one hand and an apple in the other, a symbol of one of his other labors. A mysterious hello from ancient history.
* * *
ONLY THREE OTHER people are in the church. What luck. Soon they leave and we have Signor Gozzoli to ourselves. On the back wall, we find Perugino’s sweet nativity against a bucolic landscape background. It’s painted in a coved space perhaps six meters high. Above the nativity, God looks down benevolently and at the top, the start of everything—an Annunciation, with the angel in soft corals and blues.
There is much to see along the walls. Gozzoli’s chapel of San Girolamo with many weird clouds that look like splats of whipped cream. Other chapels depict the Annunciation, Assumption, and lives of Saints Bernardine and Antonio. In the choir chapel, we arrive at the frescoes of the life of San Francesco. The space is crowded with scenes on three levels and on the vaulted ceiling. From left to right, follow the narrative of Francesco’s life from birth in a manger setting like that of Jesus, to youth when he renounced his family’s wealth, meetings with saints, a dream, expulsion of devils from Arezzo, and then the familiar stories of preaching to the birds—thirteen different kinds mill around his feet in attentive postures. In the same panel, Francesco blesses Montefalco. The scenes reinforce the parallels between Jesus and Francesco. The fait accompli occurs when Francesco receives the stigmata, the only saint to be so honored. Then, death.
See You in the Piazza Page 21
