•Y^S«¥M¥EIESinrY- DEPOSITED BY THE LINONIAN AND BROTHERS LIBRARY THE ROAD IN TUSCANY ?&&&• THE ROAD IN TUSCANY A COMMENTARY BY MAURICE HEWLETT I' mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel modo Che detta dentro, vo significando. 24 Purg. 52. IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. II 'Ntia gorfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1904 All rights reserved Copyright, 1904, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1904. Nortorjou ^ress J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE Lucca to Pisa ..... i CHAPTER II Into the Southern Hills : Pisa to Certaldo . 26 CHAPTER III The Ghosts of San Gimignano . . . 52 CHAPTER IV Volterra ...... 82 CHAPTER V Greve and Pesa : San Casciano, Poggibonsi, COLLE ...... 105 v vi THE ROAD IN TUSCANY CHAPTER VI CHAPTER IX Siena . Val d' Arbia: Buonconvento — Monte Oliveto — San Quirico — Pienza PAGE Volterra to the South: Massa Marittima . 125 Appendix — Histories of Massa Marittima 139 CHAPTER VII Grosseto and the Coast Road : Orbetello . 142 CHAPTER VIII Across Country — Grosseto to Siena . . 155 Appendix — The Death and Burial of Cas truccio Castracane . . . .167 170 Appendix — Sienese History . . . 199 CHAPTER X The Portrait of Livia .... 204 CHAPTER XI 243 CHAPTER XII Montepulciano . . . . .261; CONTENTS vii CHAPTER XIII PAGE Val Di Chiana: Siena to Cortona — Trasimeno 280 CHAPTER XIV Arezzo : Quick and Dead .... 297 Appendix — Historical Notes on Arezzo . 323 CHAPTER XV Arezzo to Florence : the Casentino, the Consuma ..... 327 CHAPTER XVI Conclusion : the Heart of the Country . 342 INDEX 369 ILLUSTRATIONS PHOTOGRAVURES Duomo Pisa, N. Transept To face page 16 The Candelabra, Pisa " 22 " 32 San Gimignano . 69 The Certosa, Florence . " I09 Towards the Porta Romana, Florence " 117 Cathedral Steps, Siena . " 174 Siena from Sant' Agata . " 182 Piazza San Giovanni, Siena '• 186 " I92 " 2l6 San Domenico, Siena " 224 " 232 " 240 Porta Romana, Siena • " 244 The Church, Monte Oliveto " 250 Corso, Arezzo 300 Santa Maria della Pieve, Arezzo 308 The Bishop's Tomb, Arezzo 3I8 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY IN THE TEXT PAGE Pisa 2 Pisa . 3 Campo Santo, Pisa 4 The Arsenal, Pisa 5 Lungarno, Pisa ......... 6 Door of Cathedral, Pisa 7 Pisa . . 8 Pisa . 9 Piazza del Duomo, Pisa . . . . . . . . n Pisa from the Lucca Road 12 Campo Santo, Pisa ........ 13 The Borgo, Pisa 15 Via S. Maria, Pisa 17 Pisa 18 Pisa 19 Pisa 23 Castello Vincigliata . ..... 25 Torre della Fame, Pisa ........ 27 The Arno at Pisa ........ 31 San Miniato dei Tedeschi ....... 33 Empoli .......... 37 Empoli ......... 39 The Piazza, Empoli ........ 41 Pontedera .......... 45 Certaldo, Boccaccio's House ....... 49 San Gimignano . . . . . . . . - SS S. Gimignano ......... 57 S. Gimignano ........ -59 S. Gimignano ...... ... 61 S. Gimignano ........ 63 S. Gimignano ......... 64 ILLUSTRATIONS xi Washing-Place, S. Gimignano Gate, San Gimignano S. Gimignano Palazzo Publico, S. Gimignano S. Gimignano The Walls, S. Gimignano S. Gimignano Collegiate Church, S. Gimignano The Villa Boecklin, Florence . The Road to Volterra . VolterraVolterra .... On the Walls, Volterra . VolterraMarket Place, Volterra Via Romana, Florence . The Certosa, Florence . Val di Pesa . The Certosa, Florence . The Porta Romana, Florence Poggibonsi The Castle of Poggibonsi Porta Romana from outside Poggio Imperiale, Florence Colle .... Massa Marittima . The PiazJza, Massa Marittima A Shrine, Ponte Vecchio Near Orbetello The Ferry Road to Orbetello . The Frontier Fort in the Maremma OrbetelloOrbetello Xll THE ROAD IN TUSCANY Roccastrada . Roccastrada . Walls of Siena MontalcinoOn the Mugnone, Florence SienaPiazza San Domenico, Siena The Market, Siena Casa del Consuma, Siena SienaFonte Ovile, Siena . Palazzo Tolomei, Siena . The Servi, Siena The Cathedral, Siena The Red Palace, Siena . Siena The Ossersanza, Siena On the Way to Siena Piazza, Siena . Market, Siena House of St. Catherine . SienaFonte Nuovo, Siena San Domenico, Siena Via Salicotto, Siena Vicolo al Vento, Siena . Siena — a Covered Way S. Quirico, Monte Amiata Montaperto, Siena . In the Church, Monte Oliveto The Country at Monte Oliveto S. Quirico . . . . Church, S. Quirico ILLUSTRATIONS xiii PAGE Montepulciano . 261 Palazzo Publico, Pienza 263 At the Villa Bacchlin 264 Montepulciano . 267 Montepulciano . 271 Montepulciano 275 Evening — The Arno, Florence 279 Cortona ......... 281 Cortona 283 Cortona — Pallone 285 Cortona . ....... 287 A Gateway, Cortona 289 Street, Cortona 291 Farm near Montepulciano 293 Castiglione dell' Lago 295 Arezzo 299 The Market-place, Arezzo 301 The Cathedral, Arezzo • - 3°5 The Cathedral, Arezzo ¦ • 3°9 Arezzo . . . • • ¦ • • ¦ • • 311 The Prison, Arezzo 3J3 Piazza, Arezzo . • • • • • ¦ • 3'5 Doorway in the Tornabuoni, Florence ..... 326 On the Consuma . • 329 Piazza, Bibbiena 333 Upper Val d' Arno 336 La Verna from Bibbiena . • • • • -337 The Valley of the Upper Arno 34° On the Arno, Florence 341 Poppi . 347 Villa Crawford 367 CHAPTER I LUCCA TO PISA From his high grass bastion at Lucca, San Donato pointed me the way across the marsh, his pastoral staff benevolently extended . J Outlook of over waving fields of buttercups. San Donato: ™, . . ,, . r Eipafratta. I here was no wind that morning for the kites of the long-skirted Seminarists; and afar off over the golden meads you could only just see Monte San Giuliano. That mountain which once hid mortal enemies from each other — Which Lucca hides from Pisan eyes, was veiled in the midst of great heat. Not until I was nearly below his breast could I see how closely wooded he is, how velvety with fir and ilex — and to get there was a two hours' business ; for you have to follow the Serchio's reach towards the sea, and accost the hills first at a narrow throttle, whereof Nozzano is the barbican and Ripafratta holds the keys. If I were minded 2 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. once more to discourse of wars, Ripafratta or Nozzano would furnish me a text — Nozzano clumped together on a rock, with church, castle, village, carved, as it seems, out of one piece, blended in one, rearing one ragged head to the weather, but dipped to the midriff in bright green ; Ripafratta, too, hardy little mercenary of war, in red and brown clouts — or, if you like, a camp wench, anybody's price. But I am aweary of Tuscan campaigning, which was like nothing so much as the bickering of street dogs in an Eastern town — a snarling encounter, a sudden rush, uproar, indiscriminate ripping and rolling, and then peace, when the battles are swept into a side-alley or fire another quarter of the city. i LUCCA TO PISA 3 What does it matter if Lucca had Ripafratta for a year, and Pisa for two years more, when Florence got all in the end ? We drove through the dishevelled place, spying for the first sight of Pisa, and getting it soon. For when you have left the hillsides where are the villas of old Pisan princes — of Spanish dignity and seclusion — and the woods and shady places loved by Lucca, at Ri- goli you are in the Pisan Maremma. From the very edge of this treeless flat, over pale earth caked and cracked, scummy ditches and scant grass, you may look to a line where sea and sky are one, and (with Dante's traveller) in that bar of fire and blended mist " hail the tremulous sea-shore." Anon, in that same golden distance, you will see THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. three solemn bulks, mammoths savouring the solace of the water ; one heaped like a mountain of flame-colour, one with a placid back shining wet, one reeling apart ; huge creatures at their mysteries, all alike shadowy in heat. You are Ml kStf - 1 \ U ¦-'¦'.' ;.'- -¦ ¦' rv . 'A - J\ •* i aft J ^»B^ v- Mil:' -IMKLtfJLUBF'*. o>CU Q(* CAMPO SANTO, PISA. now in touch with what makes Pisa famous, and stays the pilgrims all agog for Rome — the trinity of marble, first and last testimony of Pisa in pride. Pisa herself lies long and low to the south — belfries, cupolas, and thrust-up loggias. Very far away, beyond all this temporal power, a cloud- country stands half revealed, the blue folds of the hills which keep Siena inviolate. LUCCA TO PISA True delta country is this, dry, shadowless, full of smart to the eyes; one is but ten miles or ' so, yet worlds away, from the , r T _ The miracle. green bowers of Lucca. Expect no delicate mysteries here, no beauties hidden, no '^r&^l :r 7^"^v~**f#^Ri ^•gw&te, w^ VKS. ,.^^^JL•^s/v S-l^r ^L THE ARSENAL, PISA. coy, reluctant streets, no arching shade or grassy walks ; but be prepared for a miracle. You drive directly to a brick wall, the road turns a sharp angle at the gate, your horses scrape and slide on the flags as you pull up for the dazio : in a green field, suddenly, the three giants glare at you, as if you had disturbed their peace, flaunt ing crimson in your face, white light, angry 6 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. purple, lace of stone, streams of orange rust — monstrous, overwhelming, blinding and intoler able. They subdue you by their size, by their breaking of every known, comfortable rule. The Tower of Babel (which dared to bully God) must j? &.^dpi!!f|lk: If « nt;t 'i| LUNGARNO, PISA. have been like this, and like this thrust aside for its pains ; this great domed heap might stifle more than the Christian graces ; this shining church could never ape Christian humility. Imagine the sight: a broad green field, and three colossi vaunting their splendours alone in it! It may well be doubted if the travelled i LUCCA TO PISA 7 world has a greater sight to show than this stupendous group on the edge of a little dead town. Accident helps design ; it had needed the concurrence to be so shocked by Pisa. At Siena you may have a better view of a great church, DOOR OF CATHEDRAL, PISA. and a wonderful tiger-moth it looks, swooning there on the rock. But the belfry adds no wonder; the baptistry is out of sight. In colour, at least, the Florentine group is far more lovely — if you could only see it. Arezzo has a noble church — Orvieto, Assisi — one can name two score. But these things ! They dazzle, they are alone to dazzle. They brave it like brides, THE ROAD IN TUSCANY CHAP. and each is more insolent than the last. Pick them to pieces if you choose : it is easy ; but get your breath first. There is something here which makes judgment drunk. The cupola is more than Byzantine — it is Russian. But the purple bloom of it ! But the lacery out of which this strange flower grows! Is the baptistry overweening? Does it make out the gate of the Pisan heaven to be greater than the goal? Is not the belfry an undercut spiral, a core of stone with a gallery twisted about it? Is it lawful to treat stone as if it were pith of rushes ? All this may be true, and yet make no matter. See them at dawn i LUCCA TO PISA 9 before the shadows fall, see them raying heat and light like suns at noon, see them under the stare of the moon — and cavil no more. You will come to think them essays of the Demiurge, and will as soon dare to approve the everlasting hills. V-'ii ml mam -Ttessissgg^L. ] - «i 1 .*»•« - . .:.,-— '||, -M^i! - _ <~ r^jr^ r The Pisans, having built for themselves this church, baptistry, and belfry, which were and are still mirabilia mundi, and having of the Ksans added to them an acre for their dead, ^ their fate. than which you will find no better, contented themselves with so great feats of art, and built no more; but taking to politics and warfare, con sidering the advantage over Genoa, conversion io THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. of Saracens, lordship of islands, conquest of Tuscany, and such like, became the shuttlecocks of various tyrants, mortgaged themselves to get out of debt, were then bought by Florence from a Milanese rip, and made slaves for five centuries. The most arrogant nation between Po and Tiber, with the cleanest pretensions to Roman descent — and Etruscan if they had but known it — they paid the dearest for this nobility of theirs, and found the Florentines (like upstarts buying an cestry) as well able to purchase honour as any other market stuff. Here you have the history of Pisa in a nutshell ; and her streets and squares and melancholy Spanish air will speak it for you better than I can. Of Pisa in pride those great buildings are all that is left — standing apart from the rest, as well they may. Pisa in subjection — the Medici imprint, the taint of the Grand Dukes — begins the moment you turn your back on the Leaning Tower. You need go no farther than a bowshot to smell the fard and hair-powder, and see in your mind's eye the sedan chairs go swaying down the bare street, the starched and wigged effigy speechless behind the glass. Gian Gastone, a dribbling old fop, smirks on the Piazza of the Knights — last of the Medici line. Stucco-faced as the place is, trimmed and shuttered as it is, you would never LUCCA TO PISA 1 1 suppose it to hide up the hulk of that dreadful tower where Ugolino and his four boys gnawed their fingers until — Piu che il dolor pote il digiuno. " Hunger did that which grief could never." PIAZZA DEL DUOMO, PISA. But there it is, for all that, the skeleton of Pisa's whitewashed cupboard, and Gian Gastone thrusts his lip at it. The rest of his race are with him in line upon the palace front, thick-lipped, narrow- browed, fish-eyed, and dull. Before them all Cosimo the First, a bully, but a man, bestrides a trampling horse. Let him be Cassar with his foot on Pisa's neck. Pisa was his, for he made it. 12 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. He founded the Order of the Knights of Saint Stephen, laid out the Piazza to do it honour, built works of a church for its chapter, and had his cosimo Primo. statue to front it. For what it is, the stately pretence of a tyrant, you could hardly have PISA FROM THE LUCCA ROAD. a finer piazza — spacious and dignified, set about with tall buildings ; chivalric, too, as the times understood chivalry. The rest of the town agrees with it so well, one supposes it is owing to the same powerful hand. The main streets are broad, and squalor decently veiled. The Lungarno is superb ; no rags and tatters dipping into the stream as those of the Borgo at Florence, nothing LUCCA TO PISA 13 to obtrude upon the march of the river; and a nobly curving river it is, full and broad, held in |j -IT i". ';:'V| "5&s — _ '— '¦¦¦ ¦,,-¦ I « p M spy gp3?Mg? OTWt w i'.y l^ .t-^:' CAMPO SANTO, PISA. by a fine wall and wide carriage-way, and on either side a row of palaces which, if not splendid i4 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. (as in truth they are not), have a substantial air, and announce their fitness to hold gentlemen. Two such, of English blood, two of them did contain, as the polite will remember. Byron's, facing south, is a square brown building dressed with white stone, broad-eaved and shuttered as it should be, the picture of solid comfort. That is a grace which the noble owner for the time being had neither desired nor deserved.1 Shelley's house, near the Bridge of the Fortress, close to the bend of the river, is larger, and is very white ; that, also, perfectly the " family mansion " of the auctioneer. If he had the whole of it, which I can hardly suppose, he had " ample verge and room enough " to escape from Leigh Hunt, and a garret in which to lock up Godwin. I don't know where Byron kept his pea-fowl. They lived somewhere in the environs, en pension. The Arno here at Pisa has a turbid wave and banks of clay, yet nourishes certain Reflections J J upon fisher- large fish, of which I have eaten, and men. . (to judge by symptoms of the tide way), certain small, never seen by me in net or 1 It was the Lanfranchi palace, and had need to be large. Medwin says that Byron came to Pisa with "seven servants, five carriages, nine horses, a monkey, a bull-dog and a mastiff, two cats, three pea-fowl, and some hens." The proprietor of all this gear occupied the first floor, guarded by the bull-dog — which knew Shelley, but refused to be comforted by Medwin. LUCCA TO PISA i5 dish. But up river and down, on either bank, do squat Pisans, working seines or rods, to THE BORGO, PISA. every man his umbrella as a screen from sun or rain. I suppose they were at it while Ugolino was agonising in the Tower ; and that when 16 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. Neri Capponi was battering the walls with his mangonels, there were peaceful Pisans aligned below the Fortezza watching a bunch of worms on a string. Tuscany is full of such contrasting thoughts, for the sights that provoked them are still here. Below this bridge, over the square houses and the river wall, there looms to this day the bulk of a great fortress and a tower beside it which looks like a blind giant. Shelley believed it to be the Tower of Famine, but he was wrong. There is another above bridge, hidden deep in trees. Those two old warriors have seen some wickedness in their days and have helped to do it. The Pisans crouch underneath them now at their peaceful, fruitless task, and their daughters or sweethearts come and minister to their needs out of handkerchiefs and case-bottles. So, in many an old fresco, while the Saviour of the world is hanging on His cross, and His friends pity or gaze up in ecstasy from the foot of it, there will be a pink town on a hill in the distance, towered and walled, and belted with a silver river. Mules will lead flour-sacks through the gate, there will be a boat in mid-stream, a man fishing from the bank. On a terrace over the battlements will sit a lady bleaching her hair — a lover and a poet will be near her, one expressing (from a scroll) the sentiments of the other. Someone will say, f ¦-¦¦/) ¦lh>f:f>. r_ / r.W«^7//' LUCCA TO PISA i7 an instance, here, of the ideality of Italian art! But not a bit of it. The man has given you what he saw every day. His city was at war, VIA S. MARIA, PISA. the enemy at the gate. There would be burn ings, pillagings, ravishings, and such like ; some body would be getting hanged on a gibbet. All day the bells would be swinging, all night the beacons would flare. God would go to His grave i8 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. in order that men might one day stir out of theirs. But still the mules would creep up the hill, women hear tales of love, and men go a-fishing. Nor would you ever guess, to see the Pisans go about their business, that they are A good inn. J the descendants of a race enslaved, though Shelley guessed it, or thought he did, Amid the desolation ofa city Which was the cradle and is now the grave Of an extinguished people. . . . LUCCA TO PISA 19 There is no desolation nowadays : the place has a very Spanish air to me with its tall, inscrutable houses and empty streets. There is a good inn up a dark lane — La Cervia its name — kept by a 20 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. stately widow, and kept in good order. To hear her rate the maids, to see the waiters fly, is to be assisting at a comedy of Goldoni's. " Padrona, si," " Padrona, no," is all they dare say to her. I came upon her one morning cheapening a fish. It was a vast fish, and a good (as I can testify, who ate of it afterwards) ; the proud taker of it knew its merits and was voluble upon them. The Padrona listened without changing a muscle; she heard every word, but never moved a hair. At the end, still looking at the fish, she asked, " Quanto domandi ? " The man smiled wistfully, shrugged, and murmured some supposed price. She heard him, though I did not ; her bosom laboured with a tumult and was delivered of a sigh. She lifted the gill of the fish with a contemptuous finger, and — " Pah ! " says she, and lets it down again with a splash. After that she condescended to name her own price, which was immediately accepted. She asked me at dinner, did I not think it an admirable fish ? And as fresh as fresh ! Muddy or not, and fishy as it is fished, the Arno here is a noble stream, running full-flooded to the sea. The Pisans made more A noble game. . of it than the Florentines ever could ; for not only did they trade upon it, sending out their argosies east and west, but they took their i LUCCA TO PISA 21 pleasure there, nobly as befits. Noble is the word for the river, and it should be recorded for the field of a very noble game played yearly upon it to within time of living memory. They called it the Giuoco del Ponte, the Bridge Game. I found a room in the museum devoted to its relics — flags, targes, suits of padded leather, challenges on satin, acceptances full of flourish, sonnets of victory, sonnets of defiance, hortatory sonnets, Chi P antiche pompe, e'l fiero Giuoco Or mi rammenta. . . . elegies, old prints dedicated to the patron of the year, with that patron's boat in the foreground and himself in tie-wig, his chapeau de bras ex tended in the air, standing to cheer the com batants. Once it was " I nobilissimi Signori, Maria Contessa di Lanesborough e Giacomo King": the English of the eighteenth century were fond of Pisa. Lastly, there is a model of the Ponte di Mezzo, with the parties of either side striving in what used to be called (and was) "mimic warfare" — the phrase seems part of the game. This is how it was played. Mezzogiorno (that is, Pisa south of the Arno) challenged Tramontana, Pisa over the water ; or it might be the other way round, according to previous victory. The day and hour appointed, the 22 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. battles assembled, each on his own side of the river. Amidbridge were two marshals of the fight with the banners of Pisa. Each contrada sent a dozen men, and there were six contrade on either side ; twelve dozen men, as I make it, were to contend for the bridge, armed in helmet and breastplate, and a targe — that is, a narrow, pointed shield of wood, fixed on the fore-arm, the sharp end at the elbow, and projecting. It may be conceived from this much that the game was simple : it was as simple as a battle. At gun-fire the opposing sides rushed on to the bridge where the marshals stood. They tried, not to push each other back, but to cross ; after an hour the gun sounded again, and every man stood where he was. One of the marshals threw a cord to the other, who drew it taut. That side won which had the more men in the enemy's half bridge. This was the game at its simplest ; no doubt it was complicated by local hatreds, by hot blood, vainglory, and the presence of sweet hearts upon the ¦ housetops. If the contrada feel ing was anything approaching that of Siena-;- and there is no reason to suppose the Pisans less Tuscan than most — the havoc must have been tremendous, and many a man mortally hurt by a thrust of the targa. In the old prints they show you boats herded under the bridge to save the v'*'4BH : . ' ... . 1 ¦-*$ m/ IHIfflSS 111 SI -• § 1 - "...**''. . csl: *Jl 1 ^ Sra^^^9| *u-*"- - : ¦ J''"''"! 'C* w • '' ill * '§tmrWrc BKhii a I "*« 1 M I nH' Haft* firi' ii if -* ;;p;f. ¦« ^^.y^yy-jJBMg . :.i5^Kr.L' %at K*i' ll'fci.'V .' „;M^.V ":''V '' - .**,' ' tail i*^S.ji«*'=-;iill{a ..... ,;i j.i^| :-¦ lli£jia .*- ¦21 ' /^ ^^rfideccuruz/. Zumu LUCCA TO PISA 23 giuocatori, who are tumbling into the river like frogs from a rushy bank. It seems that if the enemy saved you from the water you were a prisoner; for at either bridge end there are pounds, ticketted Prigionieri. The tall houses on each side of Arno are filled with spectators ; ladies and their cavaliers are at the windows, chambermaids and theirs on the roof, footboys cling to the chimney-pots. The nobility are in barges on the flood, with their banners trailing behind, dipt in the water. I observed my Lady Lanesborough's lozenge thus employed : her lady ship and the Honourable Mr. King in the stern 24 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap.! of the vessel were applauding. Mr. King waved his hat with the air of the Marquis of Granby at Minden. There is not the least suggestion of the proud, passionate old Pisa of great days. The wigs and plaster of the eighteenth century are everywhere ; the Lorrainers have accomplished what the Medici began ; Pisa is transmogrified. CASTELLO VINCIGLIATA. CHAPTER II INTO THE SOUTHERN HILLS : PISA TO CERTALDO Era, Elsa, Ema, Evola, and Pesa are the five sister rivers which flow from the mountains of The choice Volterra into Arno, between Prato- of roads. magno and the sea. Their names are symphonies, and so are they: green water, grey banks, and yellow sands form the whole chord of the upland colour. Any one of their valleys will afford you harmonious escape from a plain whose opulence is cloying. You do not come to Tuscany to soak in sap-green. Choose, then, which valley to ascend : from Pontedera you may follow the Era through bald downs to Volterra, or by Evola take a rougher road by Montopoli to the great shoulder of Monte Maggio, which hides San Gimignano from her windy neighbour. My own choice was for .neither of these — though by either I should have escaped the sooner — but for Elsa. I would endure the high road even unto Empoli, see the Arno's long 26 chap, n PISA TO CERTALDO 27 reach there ; then, having climbed the height of San Miniato, whose tall tower can be observed twenty miles away, follow that gentlest sister of the five — slow- winding Elsa — to Boccaccio's town on the hill ; thence by long circuits I should win San Gimignano. So I kept the hither side of Chianti, and missed San Casciano in the Val %M feaj^*^#^i ' 'in |^^ . s . TORRE DELLA FAME, PISA. di Pesa, and Lorenzo's mountain torrent, the Ombrone, which (after his manner) he turned into a nymph, and doted on — in ottava rima, perfectly melodious and as empty as a bladder. One must miss something in a country where every turn of the road brings you to a jut of rock, and every rock has bred a nation. Let me count the gains rather than the losses 28 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. of that fine spring morning. After the drab outskirts of Pisa, the Maremma and Pontedera, the dyked road, I gained Cascina, a walled arcaded town at the limit of the Vico Pisano, grey within a red husk of walls, inexhaustibly picturesque; then came Pontedera, walled again — and with each a thrill. That is a thing you may count upon — that flutter of expectancy and its full reward — whenever you approach a walled town by road. By road, observe, but not otherwise. Seen thus, the wall must be negotiated ; you must pass through the gates with other wayfarers. A walled city is like a veiled bride. What is one about to embrace ? There are no gradations, no straggling line of suburbs to water down the type before you reach the heart. The truth is flashed upon you plump and plain. You leave the fields, you clear the gates — here is Cascina, here Pontedera for good or ill. To them, through them and beyond, an inexorable white road runs as straight as a ruled line towards Florence, and (sure sign of Florentine dominion) the cypresses begin to lift their heads, in groves by the wayside, sable as night, or sparsely in the fields, one sooty flame striking up in a hedgerow : — Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi — the Mantuan's image for a very Mantuan land- n PISA TO CERTALDO 29 scape. It was a Sunday in late April when I saw all these lazy riches ; the sun and the larks in the sky seemed the only active things. The men were in the wineshops and the women in church — or most of them. But some frowsy, dark- browed girls craned from upper windows in Pon tedera to see us clatter through; some heavy young men were asleep on benches by the tavern door; some dogs were catching at flies as they drowsed. All's one to Pontedera whether Pisa or Florence be lord ! Yet this is a road of memories ; armies have trampled it. There's not a crumbling wall between the two cities that has not been wetted with blood. Immediately after Pontedera a low spur of hill starts up from the level, runs the north parallel of your road for a league or so, and bears a crown. You cannot RMarla4n-ta fail to notice Santa Maria-in- Monte, Monte; aPious observance. pink and white upon a boss of sage- green, with her white belfry gleaming in the sun. It lies across the water; just before you, east by south, you have Rotta-upon-Arno, a ruddy- brown village with a square tower, where they make bricks out of Arno mud. The river makes a deep bend to kiss Rotta's dusky cheek ; and a pretty country thing she is, though she looks across the flood to a prettier, her pale sister on a 30 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. green throne — which we should call Saint Mary- at-Hill. How many towns go partners in the mercies of Arno ! Lastra and Signa, Montelupo and Capraja — and now these two. And so it is that the fairer is ever the more remote. Here Rotta plays the saucy romp of the highway, the fancy of any fattore in a two-wheeled cart. Modesty abides, I gather, behind the green lattices of St. Mary's. Yet admire at Rotta the lonely stretches of the river above it and below ; placid breadths of water scarcely streaked by a dabchick — a triangle sail, maybe, beating up — rows of service poplars, silver grey — golden water meadows behind them — a peaceful, smil ing, Sunday country. By a bridge over the Cie- cina brook you will see Montopoli above the valley of Evola, a long hill town very boldly fired by the sun, with a red tower predominant — tattered ensign of her ancient state. There is a more comfortable sight near at hand — a trick they have, when pence fail, of making bowers for the Madonna of clipped yews. The hedgerows here are of yew more often than not. Within any length of it you may see her darkling, like a bird on a nest of eggs, and always a bunch of wild flowers before her, fresh from the wayside. Once, indeed, and just hereabouts, I found her caged in an old egg-box, and that perched in the PISA TO CERTALDO 3i hedge. An egg-box, I do assure you, with a wreath of buttercups and daisies all about it. I don't mind confessing that I was moved — as who would not be? How our country prospers, nourishes the virtues, tells the truth, spends its happy ease, without the Madonna to smile approval, to admonish or to counsel, I do not in ft .¦'?% M#'" ->«' -^V'Sp-iEV V.- '. THE ARNO AT PISA. the least understand. Still less how, having once had her for its friend, it could ever have decided to do without her. It is not a racial matter ; she is by no means a Latin goddess ; you will see her in Germany, Belgium, Russia, Ireland, Greece. The people of all these countries adore her openly, but we are too shamefaced, it seems. A tale of love will always send some tongue into 32 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. some cheek. We do not choose to own that we love our mothers; and if one of us love God he had better not say so. Therefore we deny ourselves this pretty bosom-friendship, choke up this ever-running fount of emotion, and ask our boys and girls to love Virtue. Lord help us! It is very well to extenuate an egg-box shrine, and to exhibit it as the sorry remnant of that burning faith which built Florence a dawn- coloured church, and made Lucca della Robbia's descendants marquesses. The only answer is, that, to be sure, it is no greater thing than the two mites in the treasury, but yet one may be as glad of one as of the other. For one person who can serve God in spirit and in truth there should be a thousand who can do it only in egg-boxes and buttercups. And so sure as a woman sets a pious picture in an egg-box and puts a nose gay in front of it, she is a lover, I'll trouble you, and therefore she is blessed. As the land closes in upon the river the coun try grows fantastically fair. An amphitheatre of abrupt monticules reveals itself, San Miniato de' on each a towered town, a castle, Xsdssclii a heap of monastery building, or a gleaming white villa, cypress-haunted ; but the highest is always that which carries San Miniato- of-the-Germans, a city impossible to be hid. I ¦ ¦¦ * ¦ ¦¦ " ... ¦^4,,-;; ¦ ¦ fyzA-^Lt&iw <^U>CC€Z/. PISA TO CERTALDO 33 turned aside from the Empoli road to see it for the sake of Pier delle Vigne, a pleasant poet and much-injured statesman. Nor did I repent, though I suppose my horses did, for it stands upon a rock, the highest of a series of three, round each of which we had to creep afoot. Cypresses led us the way, and heavy-booted peasants, trudg- SAN MINIATO. ing home from the fields in companies, the women singing like wood-birds at dusk, the men apart. The town has a castellated keep and gatehouse, a little octagonal church, a little round church, an ugly collegiate church, and on the summit of its final rock, higher than the highest belfry, the great shaft, cleft in the midst, which is the terrific menace of all the valleys about. That was where VOL. II 34 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. the Suabian Emperors had their high seat and bed of justice. There judged, there sonnetteered, and there pined Pier delle Vigne, from whom Dante, brushing by him in the hell-wood of sui cides, tore a gnarly limb. According to his own account, he was a faithful servant of Caesar's, but he used a privilege for which a man must pay dear: I am that one who held both keys Of Frederick's heart, which I dispensed, Opening and shutting with such ease, There was no man but found it fenced. Envy, he says: Envy the whore, who from the gates Of Caesar never takes her eyes — envy, the disease in the bones of princes, undid him. The story says that in this tower they blinded him by means of the red-hot basin,1 and that from this very rock, as he was being led to his death at Pisa, he dashed himself headlong: My spirit, driven by scornful gust To ease in death the sting of scorn, To my just self made me unjust. Milton never wrung stronger juices from common words. But if we fail to understand why Cato was to be at large in Purgatory while Pier grew writhen in Hell — seeing each had preferred death iThis torment has a verb of its own: bacinare, to wit. The atrocity must have been as common as boycotting. n PISA TO CERTALDO 35 to his dishonour — it may be because great Rome seems to us greater without such accommodations. Let Cato stand with his own, say we. But Dante thought not. Pier is a ghost for whom the great tower stands spokesman ; other there were who now have no witness in this little old town. Pleasant tnings Whitewash covers all the blood- * san Miniato. stains made by Mangiadori rending Malpigli, or Malpigli stabbing Mangiadori in the dark. They have put up a monument to Garibaldi where you would have looked to see one to the Stupor Mundi. The church, which must have heard those rascals sing O Salutaris Hostia, is bare of any sign that so it did. It stands in a little empty piazza, which it graces with a tondo of the Della Robbia, no more out of place and no less fragrant than a flower in a wall — being, indeed, the same sort of artless accident of the sun's to all ap pearance, and as different from its brethren as one flower differs from another. A stooping Madonna, deeply curtseying with crossed arms, an angel frizzed like a signorino, God the Father with His meinie of cherubim approving from the sky. Good title deeds for a marchese the like of these ! Beyond that, the church reveals frescoes and mild Tuscan altar-pieces — thin, happy things — and a wise old priest teaching the Catechism to 36 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. a score of children, doing the best he could for the reputation of San Giuseppe. There is a scouring drive to be done — circle after circle of road at an angle of forty-five — before you recover the plain of Empoli. A fat Samminiatese passed me on this declivity, swaying in his tax-cart as his horse galloped down with a loose rein. Good, easy man, he had his spectacles on his nose and read the Corriere della Sera. Neither the terrors of the steep nor the purple and grey stretches of the great valley, half revealed in the gathering dusk, had any interest for him. Empoli seemed a hiving, unaired place after that empty mountain town. Its one long street Empoli in the was thronged with Sunday passen- piam. gers, and every window had its elbow- cushion, and pair, or two pair, of shoulders thrust out. There you have a pastime of which the Tuscan woman never tires. When she has passed the age of being looked at, she will look — from a window. Men go to the cafe : the woman's cafe is the street, and the window-sill her little table. As for the promenade, it is a solemn ritual in which the following points are observed. The girls walk together in mid street, the young men on either side of them. The girls go one way, the young men meet them going the other; meet and pass ; but there are no recognitions, PISA TO CERTALDO 37 greetings, salutations, sidelong looks. Conversa tion is in undertones, no one laughs, and no one stops walking. You never saw such a mummery, so devoutly done. A few steps aside there is a piazza set with trees, a public garden well kept — and empty. Beyond that, again, you find a bridge over a long reach of river, an embanked way, a parapet upon which not to sit is an absurdity. No one sits there. Yet there are fishermen to be seen setting their lines aslant the flood, singing plaintive songs as they work ; there are the skew- sails of barges urging slowly home in the twilight 38 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap.h — all the romantic riverine business is here. But no! The drift of fashion has left this spacious theatre bare ; the Empolitani shuffle in procession up and down that very street where they are slaves every day of the week; and Nunziata, who will trundle a mop here to-morrow, must be unknown to Olinto, to whom to-morrow she may laugh her " buon di." Such are the Sunday diversions of a town which once held the fate of Florence within its walls. For it was in this very Empoli that they held a council — After the havoc and the rout Which tinctured gules the Arbia's wave ; and here Farinata degli Uberti, exiled Florentine though he was, " with his face gravely perturbed," says Villani, up and spoke his piece in her defence : Alone I was, there in that place Where every will saw Florence razed, I on her side with open face. This is the account he makes of it to Dante ; and it seems to have been true. He shook his fist at Provenzano Salvani, the great Sienese captain, whose mind was that Florence should be laid level with the ground, and whose eloquence had nearly moved the council to a^ree with him. " If that beast," says Farinata — and one can read the scorn rv. ¦ 40 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. of one city for the other trembling in his deep tones — " If that beast tread not out the fire he has kindled, I will build him a cage whence he will never get loose; and such a bonfire will I heap round about it that he will never live to quench it." No doubt he meant what he said, and no doubt was able to have performed it. The upshot was that they made a peace at Castelfiorentino in Val d' Elsa, which lasted just as long as such pacts usually did : to be exact, not six years. Benevento followed at just that interval of time, Tagliacozzo two years later. Farinata, who had enabled Florence to win those two battles and so recover what she had lost, was (as a consequence) further from her than he had ever been. Tantcene animis ! So great a race and such little wars! I think one must be strongly enamoured of the drums and trumpets of history to care for such toy symphonies. To those who love Wordsworth's "pastoral melancholy," and in low grey hills and willows The Val about a sluggish grey brook can caLmoren- reaP their quiet harvest, the long tiuo- road by Elsa, from Empoli to Boccaccio's town, will need no enhancing. To bolder spirits it will be redeemed by the sense of adventure which never fails the traveller when, by how slow degrees soever, he leaves the plain — ¦ PISA TO CERTALDO 4i and by two sights justificatory. Castelnuovo huddled on a cliff exactly big enough to hold it, is one, and the other is Capanaiolo with a tall Pucci villa. Hereabouts, also, let me tell the humorous, they lead pigs by a string and collar round the neck — and do no better. 1 *¦> 1 r-SHSfc^WSfSSfSifc ' '" Mi ' ''¦^'¦*~ :jff THE PIAZZA, EMPOLI. Of Castelfiorentino, a precipitous town full of children, dust, and flies, there is nothing so com fortable to say. It is well-looking from without, but within cavernous and starved — like Dante's wolf — Che di tutte brame Sembiava carca nella sua magrezza.1 I think the people must have been veritably 1 Whose gaunt ribs looked A cage for all the lusts. 42 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. famished, for they crowded about us like desperate cats — hollow-eyed, patient, asking faces they had. This unspeakable endurance of the Tuscan poor — is there anything like it in the world? The sight of us to their fevered eyes — smug, sleek, broad-clothed foreigners that we were — would have egged Lancashire on to murder and Paris to ghoul's work. These people looked their hunger, said nothing, and bore no grudges. Theirs is one of those cases where a lower town has gathered about the highway and the rails, and left the old stronghold to itself. The Castello, the Podesta, the Cathedral, the wonder-working Madonna, the old apparatus of township, are derelict on the hill, where once upon a day they were all to all. There must be a dozen churches — all as dead as King Pandion — in that dead town. Shops with nothing to sell, and old women who lack the means of buying, are to be seen there, and faded children languidly playing in the gutter. They are querulous, too, like little convalescents after fever. But there are palaces in the streets, and the fortress-houses of an older generation, and frescoes dropping flake by flake, and grease on dumb altars a hundred years cold. It is ill-work dying on a hill-top ; but to live there if you can must be good. You come to a tougher stock than Castel- fiorentino, with much hardy green wood in it still, ii PISA TO CERTALDO 43 if you are patient of a few more miles of dull road. A turn in this, round the shoulder of a brae, reveals a bluff of sandstone rock, a headland thrust far out into the valley; upon it stands a ruddy town, with heavy old red towers, three or four. You will find a hale growth up there — or certainly I did. That is Certaldo, where Master John Boccas, as our betters called him, "a right worthy clerk," was alive and dead on December 21,1 375. Look to the right of it — but far to the right. Among folded hills, blurred by the heat, stand up the shafts of San Gimignano ; and so one old town watches another, while you may wonder at two. You may wonder at three, if you please, though the third is a spirit. High above Certaldo, on the watershed between Elsa and Lost Pesa, lay — and still lies buried, so Semifonte- they say — the wondrous city of Semifonte : absolutely once there, and now absolutely vanished. The mind storing little of it, the fancy can build at large. Castles in Spain — castles in Semifonte ! It may have been Etruscan, Roman, Longobard, Gothic, Frankish — chi lo sa? The first strife that ever fell out between Florence and Siena was before its walls. That was an eleventh-century affair, and even then it was said to have been a splendid town. In another two 44 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. hundred years it was destroyed, and so effectually that not a stone was left behind. This is a fate too extraordinary for any cities save those of the plain ; I give it as it is told, but I cannot believe it. Deep under the grass sod Semifonte must be lying, as I picture it, body-perfect, awaiting the resurrection of us all. At that tremendous hour when Charlemagne shall walk forth from the Untersberg, shaking his long sleep from eyes and hair, and Arthur be brought back in his barge of queens from Avilion, the hillside of Petrognano will open her mouth, and we shall see the spires and domes of Semifonte — the gonfalon floating from the towers of the signiory — the cathedral doors open for Mass — all shall be as it was before. What a city to visit! The Rocca, quadrangular citadel " beautiful and inconceivably strong," the Porta Grande of cut stone: the tower of it — Torre del Leone — two hundred and thirty feet high, having a gallery wreathed about it, all of arches upon marble columns, and on the top a grey stone lion of colossal size, who held in his paws the banner of Semifonte. Here had been sights. There were fountains of abundant water cut and arcaded into the rock, and others which coursed down the streets in marble conduits; there were forty churches, monasteries, palaces of the greater clergy, strongholds of the chiefs ; one can PISA TO CERTALDO 45 conceive the rest. That were a city to visit — which had never known the Medici, nor the PONTEDERA. neo-classicists, nor sixteenth-century surfeit — Benvenuto Cellini, John of Bologna, Paolo Giovio and all his crew ; nor seventeenth-century 46 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. simulacra — fair white tombs full of putrid bones ; nor eighteenth-century pomatum — Metastasio and his fellow-jigsters. Semifonte would arise a perfect whole and clean, from the days of Pisa's great building, and Lucca's — a revenant from strong old times, like Ogier the Dane, when men were men before they could hope to be poets, and painters did not take themselves to be prophets, and God and the devil were as near at hand as Emperor and Pope. Cities came and went, and quicklier in Tuscany than elsewhere. " Se tu riguardi Luni ed Urbisaglia, Come son ite" says old Cacciaguida to Dante. The sea left some to wither on dunes, the land swallowed up others inch by inch, but Semifonte went out like the dream of a night. So splendid, and so to vanish ! I am content to believe any marvel you may have to tell me of Semifonte. To return to Certaldo. There is a lower town there, as at Castelfiorentino, and much busi ness done about the railway station ; Certaldo, . _ J Boccaccio's inns also there are, highly favoured by town- u r ¦ ¦/ bagmen. Commerce is a snug jade o' these days. For you and me, whose traffic is with more impalpable bales, who have " intelletto d' amore " and such like, we can leave our carriage there, and walk up a stepped path — paved like a mill-race and worn as smooth — to the old town ii PISA TO CERTALDO 47 and the citadel. Boccaccio's birth and death place, which I saw not without a pulse for his jolly sake, is all red and brown-purple, has a castellated Palace of the People, ragged battlements, bar bicans, loggias, belfries — all good old wind-wasted things. His own house, la di lui casa as they say (rather, as they write), has a tower, one of the two fine ones left, from the top of which you can see San Gimignano showing off five of her thirteen giants, and the snaky road by which you must presently travel to reach them. Catamount's nest that it is, Certaldo's streets go round about the rock like sentinel's walks, and can never know a cart-wheel. Plodding mules, with tender feet and ears drooping like tassels to the ground, carry up firing and corn-meal and yarn for the looms. Other provand than this the true Certaldesi leave to the bourgeois below, and grow sleek upon their hard-fetched fare. Their women are hand some, as they ought to be, with green eyes, dusky skins, fair, tangled hair. They carry themselves bolt upright, like all mountaineers, but with better reason than most, for their figures are remarkable. The men sing gay songs, are happy and free-mannered ; and if Boccaccio is not at the bottom of that, the deuce is. If you set these deductions down to my fancy you will be wrong. I saw here what I have never 48 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. seen elsewhere in all long Italy, a man stop and kiss a girl in open street. No offence either. He was a baker, who came — a floury amorino — saw, and considered the bend of her industrious head, and stooped and kissed her as she sat sew ing at her door. Her lovers -and acquaintances about her saw nothing amiss, nor was she at all put out. After so flagrant an achievement the madcap went a whole progress of gallantry down the street, none resenting his freedoms. He danced with one good wife, chucked another's chin, and lifted a third bodily into the air, singing all the while. You see these feats in old prints now and then — in Callot, for instance, though very rarely in Italian prints (never, I believe, in Zocchi) — they are almost inconceivable in real life, yet here seemed fitting enough. It was allowed that the baker was un pd allegro, but clearly in this town they hold to the opinion of their great man that "bocca baciata non perde ventura." There is nothing to be seen in Boccaccio's house but what is outside it, so to say; the great open view of the downs, the incidents of the cheerful street. It is quite otherwise with the Palazzo del Com mune, a Gothic structure in red brick and stone facings, of the Sienese type. The Custode's wife is very proud of her charge. She exhibits in the court a whole nosegay of painted shields. Here PISA TO CERTALDO 49 are Ridolfi, Capponi, Pucci of Florence — bygone Podestas ; here are Guinigi of Lucca, Visconti of did. initio . I flUU.'-Ul LlUOh'J CERTALDO, BOCCACCIO'S HOUSE. Milan, Tolomei, Piccolomini, Salimbeni of Siena. " All this fine blazonry," says she, " points to a 50 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. time when Certaldo was a great city, like Siena " ; and here is one of many cases where a place, always dependent upon Florence, has been inviol ably attached to the southern city by the heart strings. The remains of fresco, too, in church and chapel and hall, point to the same thing. Grave, full-throated Sienese Madonnas, blue cloaks over their brocades, preside at assem blies of doctors, seraphic and militant. Saint Catherine with her pinched and faithful face is much here, San Michele in Roman greaves and breastplate, the languorous works of Sodoma and his tribe — all crumbling, and all the better, I think ; but all tending to Siena. One has left the Florentine dominion ; one has come into the south. Florence governed all the south, but Siena reigned. From across a weir in Elsa you can see how boldly Certaldo heaps itself up, and how its house- A -weir in walls, continuing the planes of the Elsa. rock, make curtains of defence against escalade. As I watched it, eating my bread and white cheese in the flecked shade of poplars, there seemed a glow upon the place which proceeded from within. It was warm red, warm grey, warm yellow. Lichen covers the brickwork closely, and, like the gold-leaf which the old gilders used to lay upon red, is all the richer for the under- n PISA TO CERTALDO 51 tinge. This is where a road turns off to San Gimignano from the trunk which runs on to Colle and Siena — a delectable junction of shade and tumbling water made for the sweet uses of luncheon. By this very bend Boccaccio may have sat, and watched (as I did) the brown boys dip their legs in water and scream to each other as the trout leaped the weir. If he came when I did he would have exulted no less in the spring finery and chorus of nightingales, and have had more excuse than he seems to have sought for the opinion — which has been combated since his time — that this world is a garden. To what other end than man's solace and delight does this green water flow ? Why, otherwise, is there a nightingale in every bright bush ? Easy, hopeful, secure philosopher ! Here, at any rate, it is good to be, eating bread and cheese, drinking red wine, taking breath for a larger air. We may pour libation here, and cry unto the amorous gods of Siena ; for we are in their country by this, and have left the plodders of the Arno behind us. Henceforward our commerce must be in windier streets, and all the water we find will spring from the heart of rocks. We are in the way of Fonte- branda and the Aqua Diana, with five steep miles before us to San Gimignano. CHAPTER III THE GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO The white mud which boils in the Bulicame of Viterbo, and served the loose women there for The ne of the lustral water in Dante's day, is lan<1, churned in the hills of Volterra, a few miles west of San Gimignano. A pilgrim age thither will take you into places whose desolation freezes the very office of the sun ; travelling that road you will discover how this town of towers is built upon a green tongue of land pushed out into the drab Maremma. The dark bulk of a hill, the Poggio Commune, is the tongue's point, from which you can see at once the towers of San Gimignano, and Volterra keeping watch and ward over her grey leagues. The frontier-fortress of these ancient enemies, Castel San Gimignano, is on the further side of that hill. Better wine is not trodden in Tuscan vats than the clean red liquor you may buy 52 ch. iii GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 53 there.1 But it is grown in the Chianti, and not where they crush the grapes ; all the fruitful land lies to the east. Of this you may be assured by a dawn watch. Make your orisons early, rise before the sun, open your window and lean head and breast out into the shadowless, grey calm. Like great crested waves heaving to a shore, see the landscape tend towards the barrier hills. You are looking into the heart of Tuscany, if you are looking east. Elsa is below you, with woody sides, and Poggibonsi upon a little mound just across Elsa ; the first wave-crest is the hither ridge of Chianti, then comes Radda in violet distance, then the further Chianti, a blue-black bar. Over that, but hidden, are Arno, running north for a space, Arezzo, and the Apennines. But between you and the first Chianti chain the land is hollowed out like a cup, which you may see on misty mornings filled to the brim with fleecy white. It breaks like surf against the bar ; it has drowned Elsa and her little towns, Certaldo, Poggibonsi, Barberino, and the rest of them. Wait, however, and watch. To see the sun burn the top of the ridge, come glowing up behind it, and strike the cloud-sea with a broad path 1 It was famous in the 16th century. "Di quindi," says Leandro Alberti, " si traggono buone Vernace da annoverare fra i nobili vini d' Italia." Descrittione d' Italia. Venice, 1588, p. 51. 54 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. of glory, is one of the sights of this place of faery. It fits you for your day to come, and is the apocalypse of your night of mysteries. For San Gimignano is a spell-bound place; ghosts are about it by day, and the night is full of their voices. I know of none whose outside show is more of a mask to its inside truth. Seen fairly from the The truth and l°ng ^e °f cypresses, which signifies the seemmg. y0ur near approach to the Porta San Matteo, it looks to be of imposing ugliness, with a mountainous grandeur all its own. You think of storied heaps of ruin, derelict Baalbec, or Persepolis of gaunt propylons — " courts where Jamshid gloried and drank deep." Blind towers, windowless houses, blank walls, present an in scrutable front : you think, a town cut in blocks, like something of the East, where men build against the sun. To enter the gate is to trust oneself to the uncouth companionship of giants. But not at all : the moment you are within you discover the truth. It is all gigantic still, but not monstrous, not humiliating ; solemn and wonderful, rather, and silent, a place where beautiful pale people tread softly and never lift their voices, and dream-children, frail as breath and coloured as faintly as wood-flowers, come and stand about you, full of secret knowledge which they are forbidden to impart. The contrast m GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 55 is extreme ; an abode fashioned by Titans for SAN GIMIGNANO. themselves, inhabited now by a people for whom 56 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. the loggias and belvederes of Gozzoli's frescoes, all the delicate windless days of his fancy, would be the proper setting. The whole town is so much of a piece. You can well imagine it to have been hacked out of the solid by huge contrivers, a fortress dug from the live rock ; the towers and square barbicans and double walls pared down to that semblance ; open spaces cleared by force of the pick ; and about these the streets drilled into busy tracery of tunnels, galleries, archways, stepways. From the piazza three such tunnels run steeply down into the dark ; high on a broad stair a church-front stands sharply out ; but above that you may see five, seven, eight monster towers, blank cubes of masonry, afforest ing the sky. There is no ornament, no colour, no gradation between the white and the black. All is, in fact, one weathered silver or one hollow of dark, and all of one age. It sounds grimly, so described, yet it is anything but that. A friendly and gentle race inhabits it, but with so alien an air that you are apt to think them settlers in a deserted city, who have never ceased to be cowed by their enormous lodging. They are many sizes too small, and (as I read the books) so they have ever been. You will be wrong to think them the product of isolation and hunger, and their fragility a mountain anaemia. The history iii GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 57 of San Gimignano is all pathetic, all a faltered treble in the minor. Their gallantries — for they w >--.-.„ S. GIMIGNANO. were gallant — move tears rather than heart-beats. Their heroes can only be seen through a mist 58 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. of unavailing pity, and nowadays mournful birds sing their elegy. For they are famous, not for what they did, but for what they suffered. Their hierarch is Santa Fina, a precocious little macerating baggage of thirteen, pretty to death, as they say, who found a kind of still ecstasy rotting on a plank. Sienese by instinct, pre dilection, and the lie of the land, they fell a- quarrelling with Volterra in early days, and bickered ineffectually for a hundred and fifty years. The natural result flowed beautifully true. In mid-fourteenth century Florence assumed the lordship and never let go. There is very little chivalry in all this ; nothing of a kind, for instance, which would have Painted chivalry inspired that most chivalrous poet, and the facts. Messer Folgore of this place. He chose rather for Siena, the home of Tuscan chivalry, and the Spendereccia house, with its quaint gospel of clothes and frittering. It was to the " brigata nobile e cortese," which he found there, that he dedicated his high-bred, thin rhymes ; to young men with such ruffling names as Tingoccio, Atuin di Togno, ed Ancajano, Bartolo, e Mugaio, e Fainotto. He thought them, or said that he did, like Lancelot and the sons of King Ban of Benwick ; but what is curious is that his feudal verses find ra GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 59 feudal illustration upon the walls of the Communal Palace here. There is a broad sheet of fresco, blue and gold, in this place, very much in the Sienese n.aiiner; but it was another hand which commented upon Folgore, an earlier hand, with an extraordinarily Norman touch. This shows S. GIMIGNANO. you a great chase in the doing, running dogs after a boar, huntsmen with spears and horns, a wooded mountain landscape, with white harts flying through the trees. On the adjoining wall an Ardinghelli, fat-jowled, shaven tyrant — Scolaio, of that stock, Archbishop of Tyre — stiff as William on the linen of Bayeux, receives tribute of the game. Men lead dogs in leash ; there are 60 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. hooded hawks ; near by a page holds his stallion by the bridle. Then a tournament. Knights in chain mail and surcoats of silk run a course with spears, then fight the sword-bout afoot : Prodi e cortesi piu che Lancilotto, Se bisognasse con le lance in mano, Fariano torneamenti a Cambelotto. So sings Folgore, dazzled by the bravery of his spendthrifts; but the Camelot of his fancy and election was Siena, and the lists the flags of the Campo. Nor is prowess a word for the Ar- dinghelli either; so stoutly depicted here, they live in history as victims rather than heroes. They — of Norman origin as I suppose — and the Salvucci did the fighting, which no Tuscan TheArdingheiii city ever failed of, or failed to pay for brethren. jn tne long run. Their towers are standing, a couple to each name, but their houses are gone. Cheek by jowl they reared up in the Piazza and sustained vendetta for two centuries. Then a deed was done — it was in 1352, just before the Florentine occupation — which drowned their puny hatreds in innocent blood. Benedetto Strozzi, a Florentine, was Podesta, who, upon un just suspicion, fostered (as the suspects believed), by whisperings of the Salvucci, seized by night and imprisoned two brethren of the Ardinghelli. Primeranno and Rossellino were their flowery in GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 61 names ; one may suspect them of beauty. On this account or another, but probably on this (for S. GIMIGNANO. ,A the Tuscans always suffered handsome tyrants gladly, and the standard of beauty was not high), 62 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. the two lads had lovers in the town, to one of whom one of them threw a letter from the window of his prison. Word was then sent to Florence of Strozzi's doings, petitions went, warnings, entreaties, which had their effect. The priors were unwilling to risk extremities, knowing, perhaps, their Strozzi. At any rate they sent him a letter of reprieve by a messenger on a good horse. Further communication passed between the boys in gaol and the San Gimignanesi ; Strozzi intercepted one of these, and determined to act. He visited his victims at midnight, and told them they were to die within four hours. Die they did, by decollation, before their own house in the Piazza. An hour or so late came in the reprieve, delayed by a flood in Elsa. Reprisals followed upon this hasty murder. The Ardinghelli rose one night, fired the palace of the Salvucci and drove the owners into the hills, there to couch with the fox. Some of them souo-ht out foxes of another sort, and went to Florence with their griefs. This was just what Florence had desired. She arrayed a host, marched up the Val d' Elsa and the long hill from Certaldo in great strength. Five years' seigniory and a Podesta permanently of Florentine choosing were the wages of this day's work. Within a year — mark the irony of the thing — on the motion of the iii GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 63 Ardinghelli, Florence was asked to take the S. GIMIGNANO. lordship altogether. She did. That fortress on 64 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. Monte Staff oli, the citadel which commands the whole town, is her work. Now, at night, from the ghostly towers the owls tell the watches with startled, haunting cries. Kiou! falters one in a lonely treble, and Kiou! comes from afar, like the sudden sob of a child v * ¦ ' . 4 m •¦ i - ~.. -- . J\ ¦- S. GIMIGNANO. hurt. These are the uneasy sprites of Primeranno and Rossellino Ardinghelli grieving each to other as they re-enact their last night upon earth. Other voices in the dark are to be heard, but none so forsaken as these. Watchmen stray round about the walls heartening each other every hour. " All' erta, sentinello ! " you hear close at hand. iii GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 65 Wait a little, and catch the distant assurance of WASHING-PLACE, S. GIMIGNANO. the other, " All' erta sto ! " But the owls repine 66 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. without ceasing : a patient iteration which touches the heart, not because the sorrow is so great, but because the mourners are so small. I never saw a town so poor with a folk so gentle under their misery. Every one asks, but nobody begs — that is, they wait near La Miseria. .... by, searching your face with their immense eyes, saying nothing, hoping against hope that you will read and understand their necessity. " La miseria fa vendere ogni cosa," said a poor gentlewoman to me one day. She lived in the corner of one vast room of a palace : a fresco was on the wall, which was what I had come to see. I think she was not without hopes that, in my magnificent foreign way, I should lay down a roll of banknotes, and send in workmen to chip out the painting from the wall. If these were her dreams she did not utter them, but it was not hard to see that she was prepared to sell her shelter from the wind. That palace of hers — for it was her own ! A great approach through a gateway into a courtyard, a flight of shallow, marble stairs to the pian nobile, and then that long bare hall with coffered ceiling, two fireplaces (but never a fire), frescoed walls, all the garniture of the old noble life, and this poor soul encamped in it with a deal table, a chair, and a paraffin lamp for all her service. Works of the Florentine in GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 67 masters are not to be seen on these terms : there was nothing to be done but bend the head and go. I left on tiptoe, as if I had ignorantly tres passed upon a mystery. And had I not ? Was she not a figure of the San Gimignanesi trembling in this city of towers too big for them ? GATE, SAN GIMIGNANO. One more act of this tragic pageant — for play you cannot call it where it is all in dumb show. Standing on the steps of the inn, considering the various little diversions of the piazza — gossips at the well, a policeman being shaved on the pave ment, the nearing bells of the diligence from Poggibonsi, and what not — I became aware of a 68 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. very old man bowing bareheaded before me. He was in such rags as a scarecrow could not maintain in my country, but he had silver-white hair. His hat was in his hand ; he bowed down before my splendour — God forgive me — as if I myself had been a god. I was humiliated to the dust. If by any shocking act of insult or con tumely I could have stung him into dignity I declare I would have done it. Anything to make him hold up his head, cover it, and put me in my place. But no ! A silver-haired old man, purified by eighty years' lustration in the waters of misery, he bowed himself down to me, and I could only escape by degrading him still lower. I suppose I gave him money ; he blessed my lordship as he went away. " Italy," thought I, " is abased like thee. All the glories of her name and blood ; Caesar's empery, Peter's throne, the immortal eyes of Dante, the wine of Beatrice's spirit, are set out, as on a huckster's tray, to be so many lures for our shillings. Italy is upon the town, trades her beauties, and cherishes them only that they may fetch the more. We, therefore, who ought to make our prayer of humble access on our knees before we dare lift our eyes to her immortal shape, saunter through her cities with lorgnettes, doubt if Giotto painted this, think he might have bettered that, and measure the fingers and toes of 70 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. far from the purpose — as things which are the efflorescence of the very soil and air ; * but rather that I may speak of Santa Fina, and yet again in praise of the incomparable Ghirlandajo, who has dignified her maudlin legend beyond belief, and made a beautiful and tender little drama out of the clot-brained ecstasies of the hagiologist. Let no one henceforward refuse Ghirlandajo the name of poet. This is what he has done . , T,. here. The acts of Santa Fina are Santa Fina in legend, written at large in a little octavo, — " Ragguaglio istorico della vita, miracoli e culto immemorabile della gloriosa vergine Santa Fina di Sangimignano raccolto a consolazione de' suoi divoti e dedicato alia medesima Santa da Pietro Paolo Maria de' Medici, nobil Patrizio e Acca- demico Fiorentino," — where you may find within that flood of verbiage which only an Italian can command, the thin wisp of weed which stands for the deeds of her short life. At two years old she was in the way of saintship, at four she began to fast ; at eight a little boy gave her an apple at the well-head, and she took it : " Where upon she was taken with great affliction, fear and horror at the fault, and lively prayed our 1 The point in which all centres is this, for the traveller : will he study Tuscany or the Tuscans? I do not hesitate to say that I find people more entertaining than pictures, and more germane to the matter of us all. in GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 71 Lord Jesus Christ, with fervent orations and with tears, that He, by the intercession of His holy S. GIMIGNANO. Mother and the merits of the Pontiff Saint Gregory, to whom she bore particular devotion, 72 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. would inflict such pains upon her body that never more might she have occasion to sin. And this most urgent prayer of hers was heard by the Most High" — who smote her with extreme bodily infirmity, as you shall hear. At ten years old she took to her bed of board — five feet by two, and there she lay, rotting and rotting, until at fifteen she died. For she neither moved nor would be moved for common purposes of cleanli ness: "per la qual duro decubito attaccatasi la carne alia detta tavola, e venuta finalmente a marcirsi, oltre ai vermi che scaturirono dalla putredine quivi formata, vi concorrevano persino i topi a lacerarla, quando non vi era chi li dis- cacciasse, conforme attestarono molte persone de- gne di fede, che in occasione di visitarla vedeano uscire detti animali dalle concavita, che rodendo avevano fatte in quella tormentatissima parte ; soffrendo cosi e giorno e notte con generosa pazi enza, come pub credere ognuno, un complesso ben grande d' inusitati tormenti : " I excuse myself from translating these disgustful imaginings — as to which it may be added, for the sake of the curi ous, that worse are to be found in the book — and will add simply, that her mother died by act of devil and permission of God before the saint was at the end of her glorious decomposition ; that Saint Gregory in splendour announced her own in GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 73 approaching death; and that her nurse, one ft„l(2.v..'?VA.L..Si PALAZZO PUBLICO, S. GIMIGNANO. Beldia, through touching her corrupted body got 74 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. infection in the hand. Die at last she did, at fifteen years old — having done (on the hagio- logist's own showing) nothing but rot — ; and on the day of her death the bells of San Gimignano rang of themselves ; and when they had got her off the plank to which she was loathsomely glued, she diffused unearthly, seraphic fragrance, and cured at a touch the stricken hand of Beldia. On my conscience there is no more. Now see what Ghirlandajo makes of it in his two frescoes. As I read him, his Mystery is in two acts. The first is in the cottage, where Fina lies Ghirlandajo's mortally stricken and on a plank bed, version. but exquisitely decent, with pure face, still body, and intent, feverish eyes. There is extraordinary solemnity, a hush, over the clean, whitewashed place, which is poor enough of all but the graces of the land. Outside the door are roses and the full sun ; through the unglazed window you can see a dappled sky, blue distance of wooded hill. Saint Gregory floats in at the door in cope and mitre ; cherubim are his acolytes, with inhuman, little burning faces ; he gives his message, " Prepare thyself, daughter " ; and Santa Fina never moves her bright eyes from his face. Hers is too desperate a case for astonishment; moreover, as one bedridden for many years, she has the egoism of the sick, and takes this Ill GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 75 annunciation as her due. The old woman at her head, whose hand supports her, is not astonished either, but looks shrewdly at the apparition, as if suspicious. And in that she is a true cottage woman. She, too, accepts the X»5 S. GIMIGNANO. honour as her daughter's due. The other woman — for there are two sitting with the girl, on low stools by her bench — lifts her hand. She is startled, but no one moves. It is all hushed over with the coming of the shadow. Santa Fina, says Ghirlandajo, did not die in the cottage, as the hagiologist reports, and there were no filthy ceremonies of rat-chasing or 76 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. rending blue flesh from boards. When they M- P ^ THE WALLS, S. GIMIGNANO. had brushed out her long rippling hair, and m GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 77 clothed her in a thin silk gown from neck to feet, she was carried on a bier to a little oratory, and there with prayers and the chanting of boys' rvs*'-^ S. GIMIGNANO. voices she lay and waited for the Bridegroom, herself the meek and fair bride. In due course the light of day became an offence and her eye lids a burden ; so she closed them, and began the last vision. Frightened a little, a little need ing her mother, she reached out a hand, and 78 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. found what she needed. It was her last act ; for as she did it, she sighed — and that was all. Now, while all this was doing, an angel of God flew from tower to tower and set the bells ringing — but softly, lest the San Gimignanesi should think Volterra was come upon them unawares. Ghir landajo saw him at it, a trim little figure, cleaving the blue with crisp wings, hovering a moment — like a white butterfly — as he touched a bell, then flitting to the next tower. The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde In this delightful land of Faery, Are so exceeding spacious and wyde, And sprinckled with such sweet variety. . . . If Ghirlandajo, the old shop-keeping artist, could sprinkle the unholy spawn of cloister-thoughts, it was because he was a poet without knowing it. All honour to him ! Another highly poetical piece may not be omitted: I mean Benozzo's fresco in Sant' Agostino. It is one of many by this Benozzo. . . J J delightful contriver, for he has set out in candid order the whole story of that gloomy hero, from the age when he was spanked to that at which he was received into heaven ; but charming as these are — full of cavaliers, ladies, and pretty boys in the most delightful architecture out of Mr. Buzzard's bride-cake iii GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 79 shop — there are better of the sort at Pisa, which COLLEGIATE CHURCH, S. GIMIGNANO. illuminate, moreover, wholesomer stories. But 80 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. over the Sebastian altar is a very different affair, wherein Benozzo has shown his seriousness for once, and done what I have never seen attempted before or since. There has been — there is in progress — a pestilence, whereunder the people sicken suddenly, stiffen, and die. Sebastian in blue stands upon his tomb with a host of devotees clinging, kneeling, crying, raving about him. Angels crown him and break arrows in the sight of God omnipotent, who with His chivalry about Him and the Holy Ghost in His lap, Himself holds an arrow, as acceptable tribute from His servant. But — the plague not stayed — before God kneel Christ and his mother, wooing His high clemency. Christ shows his wounded side — " Father, see where they pierced me. Stay now, therefore, Thy hand: let my torment suffice!" But Mary — the meek girl stung at last — with a gesture of extraordinary passion and pride, rips open her bodice and lays bare her bosom. " By these breasts whereon Thou didst hang — save the San Gimignanesi." The appeal cannot be gainsaid. I never saw a thing so daring done so well. It is exactly another of those little strokes of real imagination which lifts shop- keeping Benozzo, with shop-keeping Domenico his neighbour, out of the rank of tradesman to iii GHOSTS OF SAN GIMIGNANO 81 that of poet. Such a thing ill done has immor talised many worse painters than Benozzo Gozzoli. This apart, Sant' Agostino is a fine bare preacher's church, of the barn-roof order (as it should be), with a mort of dead Austin friars in low relief upon the pavement. Opposite the door of entry is a great piece — the Adoration of the Cross — with a fine landscape of the Arno and Pisa spread about it. [Note. — The traveller shall remark in the Collegiate Church of this town two wooden statues by the door — as to which, if he care to know it — I have something to say at the end of the next chapter.] %^-^iim'mMVn>l"^nh THE VILLA ECECKLIN, FLORENCE. CHAPTER IV VOLTERRA A tall shepherd, motionless upon the verge of a bare hill, frightened my vetturino badly. One Pathetic saw the creature stand up there like fallacy. a weather-tossed old tree, in severe isolation against the sky, with something long, and thin, and straight under his arm. It proved to be an umbrella, which might well have been a gun ; certainly, if landscape has anything to do with the procreation of brigands, a gun it should have been. For after leaving Castel San Gimi gnano and the deep woods which come next — woods which clothe the sides of gorges, woods of dense boscage and wet spaces, of grey shale, black ilex, cyclamens, and ever-falling water; after climbing to Spicchiaiola, and resting there in the shade in communion with the curate's niece — familiarmejite trattando with this amiable woman over a flask of the curate's wine ; after such-and-such comfortable assurances of all being 82 CHAP. IV VOLTERRA 83 well, the country side changed for the worse, grew bald and sinister, as if a blighting wind had swept over it ; and instead of smiling, grinned. The sun was not hidden, yet ceased to shine ; the sun stared. Hearts might well sink and nerves go taut. The landscape was hostile, . -....j,: ...... , " -¦ -V,i ' -JL- THE ROAD TO VOLTERRA. inspiring terrors ; the pathetic fallacy — prodigious egotism, only possible to poets and the Hebrews of old — was never so plausible. Trombino, from sitting squarely on his box, looking comfortably at his horses' wagging ears, and flicking them when he could with his whip, was now all eyes and ears of his own. Brulto paese ! but he meant more than that. He was off his balance ; 84 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. no longer a disposer, but a huddled thing to be disposed of. Every dreary heave of that pale wilderness spoke to him of menace, of adverse gods, of earth estranged and ourselves forsaken, cowering in the midst. He was all agog for alarms ; Pan had resumed his mastery, had this once jaunty fellow at his mercy, and could have palsied the heart of him and cloven his tongue to palate by any sudden shock. Say, there had been a cacciatore in those wastes who, pursuing finch or thrush to the utterance, should have let off his piece, Trombino would have tumbled to his prayers. But no sound broke the heavy suspense ; the sick land lay stupid, clammy with fear. Trombino drooped, the whip drooped, the horses crawled like lice. The awful form of the man on the hill, rigidly waiting, changed all this ; or, rather, embodied it. The landscape had found its voice ; here was something more wearing to stretched nerves than a sudden ambush. "Con rispetto parlando," said Trombino from his perch, " there on that hill-crest awaits us a brigand. Momently we are all dead men." There is only one attitude to assume with a Tuscan servant upon occasions of difficulty or stress, that of cheerful permanence, of inexorable, but benevolent, order. Avanti is the word for IV VOLTERRA 85 the road — otherwise, why is one there ? There fore — — " Sempre avanti, Trombino," said I ; and counted, not without confidence, upon his fine manners. " Come lei crede," said Trombino, and urged his beasts towards the brigand. "Avanti, hep /" — he cracked his whip till the spell-bound welkin rang. Good soul, with exactly the same words and act he would have obeyed me though the Chimaera had stood fire-belching in his road. Nay, had the earth yawned and discovered him a pit of blackness, Avanti from me had made a Quintus Curtius of him. It made no difference at all that the brigand resolved into a musing shepherd. You pass a tower on the left, shortly after leaving a wayside calvary and gipsy camp. A tower, do I say? Such as it is, it Montedeiia stands on a hill of its own, dominat- Torre- ing the desolation, the picture of maimed nudity ; for whereas it was square once and looked out with a bold face to all the airts, now but a single wall stands up to speak of a thousand years' attacks. In 925, as I read the books, King Hugh gave to Bishop Adelard the Monte Della Torre, with this tower then upon it, to be a warning to the San Gimignanesi ; who countered, 86 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. I suppose, with their castle some eight miles to the east — that Castel San Gimignano where they sell clean wine, a Vernace with a fame as old as the fortress. And all these things are in a con catenation accordingly. San Gimignano, abode of gentler misfortune, makes a wine-shop of its outpost : Volterra, snarling wolf that can never be tamed to turn a spit, stands at its sentry-go and crumbles brick by brick as the weather will have it, and snarls at every wound. But I digress, if Volterra will not. Hereafter a little, from a higher ground, you will see that the lowlands which stretch away to the south have not been blighted with the accursed fate of the city. Soft purple valleys are enfolded down there ; a floating haze over all gives you the thought that there stirs an enchanted sea, whose islands are the little hills, each crowned with a glimmering burgh. I saw Pomarance — Heavens, the Arabian name! — and nearer in, Casole d' Elsa, Monte Guidi, San Dalmasio. Next to Semifonte, which no body can ever see, because it lies buried in the bosom of a grey down, I regretted Pomarance, which perforce I left, red and misty in the south, while I climbed ever higher to harsh Volterra. Round the naked knee of a hill I had my first view of it. Trombino pointed it out: "Ecco Volterra!'''' If he added not his. Deo gratias, IV VOLTERRA 37 I mistake him. It lay in the afternoon, in the sun's eye, as they say, upon what seems to be the highest of these mountains of mud, and presented an extraordinarily squalid appearance. I quarrel with other of Macaulay 's images: he loved rhetoric too well, I doubt. Cortona could VOLTERRA. never have lifted a diadem of towers to heaven in any pre-eminent way. It lies now, where it must have lain from old-time, like a cemetery strewn upon a hillside. And so here, his " lordly Volaterrae " shows at first view a squat heap of brown building and one or two stunted towers, posts for cattle to scratch at. This is not a city which could ever have looked lordly, for it climbs 88 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. the apex of its hill and falls down, more than half, on the other side ; so that from whatever point you make your approach there is none of the culmination which a hill-town should have. The great fortress by the gate impresses itself upon you as you draw near ; monstrous bulk, monstrous strength, such dignity as consists with mass, it has. The huge walls are of a piece; work of giants, titanic, but not lordly. Etruscan heads directed all this immensity ; what goaded slave-hordes wrought it, I know not. It looks as inert and spiritless as convict labour; gloomier Etruscan stronghold Herr Baedeker can never have seen. Fiesole is savage, Chiusi mournful, Perugia a termagant ; Volterra has the dulness of the brute. You do but get a premonition of it as you climb the weary leagues into the town, and have Terrific no time to enlarge it, since you are to appan ion. ^ sj-L0Cjcecj again. When the sinister country has you fast, when your spirits have flagged to their lowest, suddenly, a huge blood- coloured cliff confronts you, clothed in scrub to the peak, the Mons Tumba of this muddy waste. Backed by a storm-cloud, abode for vampires and snakes, spell-struck into silence, it terrifies you. It is as if all your flying fears, winging to a point, should take shape : a bare grey land, a storm iv VOLTERRA 89 brewing in the north, and a blood-red cliff dead in your way. Thus fared knights-errant in the old tales when they took their lives in their hands. " And Pereduc journeyed three days and three nights over the desert. And he came to a great mountain in the midst, which was as red as blood, and hight Pavidus." " Brutto paese ! " quoth Trombino, a snug youth for choice. John Villani, most friendly of historians, always on the look-out for the letter of introduction to antiquity, says that Volterra was first Bevis of called Antonia, and that, " according HamPton- to the romances," here we have the origin of the good Beuves of Antonia. By this long bow-shot he arrogates to the Volterrani our English hero, the late-born, the chaste, the pudibond Bevis of Hampton, whom Drusiane (much to his confusion) kissed under the table. I believe he got his story from the " Dittamondo," where, Fazio says, We saw Volterra near by this On a great hill, as strong and old As any town of Tuscany's, Antonia hight, whence, I am told, Came Bevis, who, for Drusiane's sake, Oversea suffered heat and cold. I cannot agree with this poet, holding, as I must (in first-rate company), that the hero was of Southampton. The " Reali di Francia," a hostile go THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. witness, says that all England rejoiced at his birth. It is true that the faithful tutor of the child, according to the same authority, was called Sinibaldo dalla Rocca San Simone, which is not a Hampshire name; and it may well be that this rocca was the lurid bluff on the road to Volterra before which I am keeping you horrific while I muse. Now I have never learned the name of this bluff; but if Sinibaldo (whom we call Saber) was lord of it, there was a great education for young Bevis, and the wicked Duodo of Maganza might have had old besieging it. But these, perhaps, are not practical speculations. Once past this fatal place you have the grim bulk of the fortezza towering over your way. As my own cortege crawled up, I The madmen. J , . . , remember that a little company of madmen strayed about us, going slowly home wards to Volterra — fit pinfold ! — herded by one man in a Government cap. He seemed glad of my company, so I conversed with him a little. His madmen were very old, but had, he told me, all been homicides in their day. Solitary confine ment had done its work; they would lay hands suddenly on no other men. So the law allows them to roam at will, to pick wild-flowers and twist garlands for their white pows : a peaceful ending to their labours. They looked upon us, IV VOLTERRA 9i our equipage and advance, with mild unwondering eyes. Once we had been grist for their long knives, but now were less than the flowers in the hedgerow. After life's fitful fever . . . A straggling suburb succeeded, a row of drab houses, a cheerless trattoria with unglazed VOLTERRA. windows, pigs, chickens, children, stern-faced women in men's hats — here are disjected notes. A diligence came tearing down the hill, full of scared pale people escaping from Volterra ; but we crept ever upwards and trailed painfully by the walls, the watch-tower, the great boulder of the fortress, and entered the doomed city by the Florence Gate. Trombino flogged the horses 92 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. into a feeble canter, and brought us up to the door of the old inn with some sort of a rattle. Cut a thin reed from scream-beset Scamander For hazard of this music ! No one came out to receive us. It might have been a dead-house ; and so it was. Wind- tortured abode of madmen and grey murderers ! Heart of earthquakes, fallen, still falling Volterra ! It wanted but this. But I must endeavour to be calm. To our notions — whose inns are as good as our hotels are bad — there is no comfort, but much hospitality in a Tuscan inn. At Volterra. Volterra, the fact is that 1 had neither; but there were reasons. Mr. Car michael, in a recent and agreeable work, shows that he found something to his taste. His land lord, however, was not dying of typhoid as mine was. To me all Volterra was exactly accursed, from the landlord to the land. A raw sea-mist was blown upon a searching wind through all the corridors of the house. Mad old women whispered and chuckled to themselves in corners, pawing and patting, as it seemed to me, waxen figures of the stricken host. Now and then there came a scurrying of fear-fanned feet, now and then the clanking of pails, the sudden banging of doors. A daughter of the house was in tears, her iv VOLTERRA 93 sister in hysterics ; the doctor spat upon the floor, signifying his diagnostic pother. Death alone sat hale in the guest-chambers, and had bespoken the chief seat at the feast. Clearly, all these things were far from Mr. Carmichael, who was able to ruminate with unencumbered mind upon the Etruscans, the alabaster industry, and the land slip — as most pleasantly he does in his little Tuscan book. To me the gloom, the shadow, the cruel sea-wind with its tainted burden of fog, blighted the eyes, and perhaps struck a palsy upon the judgment. But I am by no means so sure that this, which has been foretold by the road, is not sealed to Volterra by history. Books are not alone in the world to have their weaving fates. Far more truly than they, towns speak the nature of men and their sort in this life. I can read the chronicles or not, as I choose, but cannot fail to read in dark and silent streets, in bare piazzas, and naked grey walls of ragged church and ragged palace, confirmation of the godless rule of wicked old prince-bishops. Hark to their names ! Hildebrand, Ranier, Payn, and suchlike, implying all that was to follow: the treachery of the led against their leaders, eager to forestall that of the leaders against themselves ; the black nightwork of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi, and that havoc which Lorenzo 94 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. wrought there when he killed man, woman, and boy, and the child at the breast — for which also, according to Savonarola's friends, he died without housel. Of such is the history of Volterra. Its bishops were princes of the empire, stark men and Ghibellines, belying the fisherman.1 To their tyranny succeeded that of a traitor-race, the Belforti, begun in treachery and ending by it. The Duke of Athens lorded it here for a year; but that was all the length of rope allowed him. He had time to build the Rocca Vecchia, and might, with a little more grace, have been its first tenant. The gods saw otherwise : he was not to die in prison. Florence, which in that fortunate year of hers (1254) had reduced Pistoja, beaten Siena in the open, and by that stroke secured Montalcino, Montennana, and Poggi bonsi, had gone on from that last place across the frightful country to Volterra and had had it by luck — Florence then got her first taste of a city she was afterwards to sack three times be fore she could retain it for ever. Villani's tale of this capture is a good one. He says that the Florentines left Poggibonsi to come hither 1 When a bishop was also a prince the world was too much with him; he was never for the Church, it seems. Arezzo had similar masters, Ghibellines to a man. IV VOLTERRA 95 because Volterra was Ghibelline and the Guelphic League just then in ascendancy. There was no thought of taking, even of attacking, one of the strongest positions in Italy; if they could lay waste the country round about they would go home well pleased. But God, says Villani, ON THE WALLS, VOLTERRA. gave them victory suddenly, for the Volterrani, seeing the host close to their gates, with great pride and arrogance came flooding out — all their chivalry without order of war, or captains, or battalia — and fell upon the Floren tines from the vantage of the hill. The Florentine knights, encouraging each other, singularly bold for such a timorous race, stormed 96 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. up and drove the offenders back upon their posts. All went streaming in, besiegers and besieged, fighting and hurtling together. The keepers of the gate, seeing (as they thought) their own people in confusion, had no care but to give them entry-room. In they came, and -the Florentines with them. They secured the gates and the fortress as well. Thinking to have harried the contado, they found themselves masters of the city. The prince-bishop and clergy, cross in hand, came from the church to plead ; handsome ladies came, their hair loose, crying for mercy and peace. It is to the credit of the Florentines, if it is true, that they did neither mischief nor spoil. They reformed the Signiory according to their Guelphish lights, banished the heads and chastened the members of the Ghibelline faction, and then went on their victorious way. This was their first hold upon Volterra. Lasting hold came in the fifteenth century, a grip thrice cemented in the citizens' blood. Within this harsh stronghold beleaguered by the wind do dwell a stern, rock-faced people m, „ who take no notice whatsoever of the The Volterrani. traveller, either to beg or to demand of him, either to rob him or to sell to him. This is so singular a thing that it deserves mention, if not repetition. It is the one place in Tuscany IV VOLTERRA 97 where I have never been asked for a soldo, nor ever been informed that anything I might happen to look at was to be had for money. In San Gimignano, you may remember, a woman would have sold me the side of her house because I asked leave to look at a fresco ; at Siena, one day, a VOLTERRA. wretch was to offer me a far dearer merchandise. Nothing of the kind here. Men and women go silently their ways, and which is which is hard to tell, for they dress their heads alike — first a felt hat, then a handkerchief over it, tied under the chin — and alike they have the square jaws and low foreheads of Romans. They are a stunted race, as the pines would be which could thrive upon the 98 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. stony ground and live out the salt gale which blows day and night. With their bullet-heads and stiff-angled drapery, I can see them on some Arch of Constantine or another, in severe relief, serried closely in battle-array, or about the altar of a household god. The piazza on market morning showed me just such an effect, when the buyers and sellers stood there in the fine rain, gleaming like old marbles, as expressionless and little wetted as they. What women ! To woo a bride from Volterra would be to adventure among the Scythians. You would have to fight with your chosen maid — it would be an affair of muscles, tussles, and hard knocks. Having grassed her, you would throw her over your shoulder, like a dead stag, or a Lapith haled home by a Centaur, and so bear her to your house. Et Venus in silvis, indeed ! One cannot, of course, be precise upon the point, yet there is every reason to suppose that, like the Amazons, these fierce virgins are maimed. They wear Roman colours, deep and lurid ; grass-green kirtles or sea-blue, orange shawls, orange and black kerchiefs. They carry little crescent sickles in their hands, tools whose use against anything but the person of the lover, or their own, it is hard to see. To buy and sell sickles, and for no other apparent purpose, they rv VOLTERRA 99 hold a market in early morning in the Piazza of the Priors, a gaunt open space surrounded by great strongholds, the east end of the Cathedral being one, half smothered in a palace wall. Whiles, as the Scots has it, they go off to church, and hear masses, or pay uncouth worship to huge blind gods, roughed out of wood, and painted in their own colours — green, orange, crimson, and black. I believe a fleshed sickle is the most acceptable oblation a youth or maiden can pay. Such are the Volterrani, and such their gloomy delights. A strange feature of the place is its general likeness to Florence. It is much what Florence might have become had some malign deity set it to shrivel and lose blood upon the top of a mud-mountain. From the ramp of a little piazza, which you will find not far from the Porta del Arco — between that and the Porta San Felice — you may look down upon a cascade of grey roofs descending to the plain, beyond which a broken headland juts into the sea. Just thereabouts, where the Cecina brook hopes to end its trouble, all is new and wild and beautiful. But if you look then behind you, upwards, you see the land marks of a withered Florence — dome, baptistry, campanile ; the Palazzo Vecchio, with its Tower of the Cow ; beyond, again, the Bargello, with the ioo THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap, iv skeleton belfry. The illusion is for the mo ment complete, until you realise that the charm is not there. Then you see that the build ings want dignity, warmth, character; that they are a discord ; that they do not represent Vol terra so much as travesty Florence. Nevertheless the Cathedral has an impressive- ness of its own. It is on a grand scale, and has aceiling of surpassing splendour. This Gods. is of wood, deeply coffered, enriched with figures in blue, green, and gold. The central square is held by the Spirito Santo en compassed in a cloud of seraphs. In octagons on all sides of him are saints, their heads tend ing towards him, their bodies from the middle downwards embedded in the wood. Here is a wonderful parallelogram of forces — bishops in golden copes and mitres, yellow-haired virgins in splendid brocades, deacons in dalmatics of white and gold — the saints in levee dress all yearning and spearing to their point of bliss : a fine con ception, finely achieved. The august fowl seems to be hovering, more hawk than dove, and those others, witnesses and messengers of His, to get their swiftness from Him. They have strong and handsome faces, broad shoulders, deep chests, immense proportions ; they must be twice the size of men, and any one of them would serve MARKET PLACE, VOLTERRA. 102 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. for figurehead to a line-of-battle ship. Imps of a race of giants, colossal divinities ! To look on men and women at their prayers under the shadow of those burnished wings is to drift back to a day when it was universal belief that God made earth for His disport, gave it a flick to set it spinning, and then forgot all about it. The heavenly throng, busy with a vaster pageantry, was in full sight of men ; yet man, except for some chance errantry from on high, had no existence there. But and if a straying son of God saw a daughter of man, that she was fair, then some beauty or another of ours, walking shyly the green ways of earth, would on a sudden be caught up in a gusty draught of enormous love, whelmed and lost in flame — and shine thereafter a lesser light in that high galaxy. Thus mankind, according to this theology, would fitfully preserve a clue to godkind. But in a chapel of the south transept you can see the graven images of Volterra even better than in the nave. Up there, on the ceiling, you may have their theology ; here, at kissing range, is their religion. It is figured by stiff and huge wooden gods dumbly enacting a scene from some blunt old tragedy. Though Herr Baedeker calls it a " Deposition from the Cross," it had far better stand for the Passion of Prometheus. iv VOLTERRA 103 This group, one of the most extraordinary to be seen in Italy, is composed of figures nearly eight feet high, coloured in coarse crimson, blue, and green. One thinks not of the calm Olympians, but of their forerunners, " Kronos, and Ge, and murdered Ouranos," of monstrous revenges, vast pangs, before such a scene. The mystical dolours, reveries, and tender regrets of Christianity appear local. I suppose the piece cannot be earlier than the twelfth century in sober truth; but of this I am sure, that the fashioners of it, and those who fulfil their worship in its contemplation, are not. of the new circum cision. No son of man hangs here, no hand maid of the Lord bewails him, nor a Joseph of Arimathy offers the hospitality of his new tomb. No ! vast, blind forces writhe and suffer ; these are cosmical throes ; the sun goes down in blood into the sea, and earth stands by, passive and mute, as fixed as her own fate. So here it is that the fierce daughters of Volterra, sickles in their hands, come and offer dreadful self-sacrifice. And here a rock-browed son of the place, leading some virgin captive, espouses her with bloody rites.1 1 Let not the traveller fail to notice, whithersoever he go in European countries, the wooden statues in churches. Art is not always a full-dress business; you are apt to get nearer to the root of the matter in the borgo than in the piazza grande. Roughly speaking, I do believe that the 104 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap.iv homelier the stuff and the nearer to hand, the more expressive of emotion the art becomes. Thus, it is undoubtedly true that the Tanagra figurini tell you more of Greece than the great smooth marbles which stare through you out of their sightless eyes. In Italy, clay proved a happier material than bronze, and wood came very near to clay. In the museum at Pisa are some beautiful wooden figures of girls — slim, Gothic, low- bosomed creatures in white and blue gowns, with whom the traveller may come to terms at once. I know not what they represented first; but I felt in their company as a child with her household of dolls about her. I was at home with them; they are made of a stuff that once lived, fibrous stuff not different from myself, with marrow in it and sap, and much dependence upon the sun, the earth, and the wind. Whereas between stone, cut from the chill shoulder of the mountain, and me there is an unbridgeable gulf. And if I feel so in beholding, what must not the worker have felt as he wrought ? To go on, at San Gimignano, by the west door of the Collegiata, there is a wooden group — Gabriel in red (red, I think) on one side, Virgin in blue on the other — of more value to private devotion, that of the bedside and the dark, than all the Parthenon, Sistine Chapel, six-feet putti in Saint Peter's, Golden Altar of Saint Mark's put together. Della Quercia did not disdain wood. The fairest of his Junoesque Madonnas is cut from the heart of a tree, and stands in a golden robe above the altar of San Martino at Siena. From wood Donatello hewed his haggard Magdalene ; and one knows what the Spaniards made of it and how close they could draw us to the Agony of Christ. Above them all, to my thinking, is the Volterran group, quite alone in Tuscan art. Nor is anything so terrible, so colossal, and so dim known to me in sculpture. Lastly, it is worth while to reflect whether, in the flat art, anything can approach in poignancy the mosaic of Ravenna and Torcello — and to remember that of the stuff of that art they also make beer-bottles. CHAPTER V GREVE AND PESA : SAN CASCIANO, POGGIBONSI, COLLE The great old highway from the north to Rome went through Arezzo ; but Florence possessed three of her own. One was from Empoli by the Val d' Elsa, which now we know ; another, nearer home, turned south at Montelupo ; the third (and best for Florentine purposes) ran out by the Porta Romana, followed the Greve to San Casciano, then took to the Pesa, and joined the Val d' Elsa road at Poggibonsi. Thence to Siena is but some fourteen miles. Upon this great outlet of Florence, and of the monstrous cube of masonry it contains, I shall only make two observations. The „. „ J . Via Romana : first is, that the Via Romana by itself tnePaiaceof J the Wig. is enough to prove that Florence was never built for wheeled traffic ; the second con cerns the Pitti Palace. If it was ever required 105 106 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap, v to be proved that you can design an enormous building so badly that it will look half its size, here is the proof to hand. One has but to compare it with the Strozzi, which is about half, and looks twice, as big, to be convinced. Luca Pitti, most fatuous, most futile of the Florentines ! He promised himself that he would build a house which would hold Filippo Strozzi's in its cortile. Firstly, he did not build it; and next, when it was done, although the vaunt was true, nobody would ever believe it. What his own masons would have made of it cannot now be known, for Brunelleschi and Michelozzo were no mean builders ; but they never touched it after his downfall, and for near a hundred years it stood a shell. Then Eleonora of Toledo, Cosimo Primo's beautiful wife, admired it ; her lord bought it for nine thousand gold florins — surely a very low price, but it is the Osservatore's figure — got Ammanati to add the wings; and lived in it, he and nine grand dukes after him. " Whoever," says the watchful Osservatore, "takes upon himself to pronounce that this edifice is a mountain of masonry, is not consider ing at all, as he should, the noble design, the strength, and the beauty of the parts, among which is a series of heads of lions upon the parapet of each ground-floor window, in age and VIA ROMANA, FLORENCE. 108 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. character so varied that they form a natural history of this wild beast, so much revered by the Florentines." This is very well ; but the Osservatore himself may here be observed in the trammels of the Florentine sin. In matters of art curious ornament was always a snare to these people. To the last they could never perceive that the facade of a church was not to be only a white wall on which to stick hippogriffs. There is no doubt that the deftness of the execution of the Seven Ages of Lions upon this lumpy front completely redeemed it in the Osservatore's eyes. I like to remember that in this monumental cage lived Giovanni Gastone's Wig, the last of the Medici. In an old engraving which I possess you may see it start for an airing in a coach and six: the carabiniers present arms, the courtiers bow until their noses appear between their legs, guns fire, the beggars limp forward with petitions. With a fine young man on either hand, one to hold a powder-box, the other a comb, the Wig goes in state to high mass in San Lorenzo, above the tombs of its ancestors. This is a great picture ; and so is this, where Chiabrera, a rococo poet, hymns the glories of the Pitti. His form is odic and interrogatory. m^mSi^s^s fl/te^liet&.K' ¦ ijtbte-nc:*. v GREVE AND PESA 109 Pitti, albergo di Regi, Per le staglon festose, Quai nelle notte ombrose, Furo i maggior tui pregi ? Quando udisti d' Orfeo note dogliose Ver la Citta di Dite, O quando il pie d' argento In te degno mostrar 1' alma Anfitrite ? O quando al bel concento Di tumburi guerrieri Fur tanti Duci altieri D' infinito ornamento ? The scholiast defeats his purpose, glossing here. North, east, and west, the tramways have done for the roads out of Florence what the railways have done for the country • i tt ir t-,- The Certosa side. Halfway to Pistoja a tram and other runs, another to Signa, another to Rovezzano. The south parts are no exception ; there is a tramway to San Casciano which, by driving the whole of the traffic into half of the road, has taught us terrible things. I have found it a dangerous quag in the wet, and in the dry one long bolster of dust. The best stretches of it — and it is a beautiful road — are ruined by this misery. Up the hill, however, and beyond the suburb which, as usual, signalises the gate and the dazio, on a plateau of rock, stands the brown Certosa, and looks like a fortress — and has been one in its day. A fine wood of cypress slopes no THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. away to the west of it ; above the high wall you see a tower, the steep gables of the church ; you can make- out the cloister, and on the north side the messuages of the monks. Personally, I care little for the inside of this or any monastery in Tuscany, excepting always St. Mark's of Florence.1 I find this Certosa tawdry, insincere, ceremonious, and rococo, containing, nevertheless, one good thing — the tomb of Lorenzo Acciaiuoli. The town just before it is Galluzzo, one mean street ; and then, below Tavern uzze, which looks very fine, high up in a cleft of the rocks — white and grey, it is, with one thin tower — your road bears to the right, and piercing the ridge 2 by another cleft, enters a finely-wooded rising country, with the Greve, which failed to drown Buondelmonte's grandsire, running be tween ferny banks. The road is indeed vile, but the setting altogether lovely: an ample curve round an amphitheatre of rocks. These rise boldly in tiers, and are clothed to the very top with pines, so delicate that they look 1 The Seicento stifled the community life in all sorts of ways. It bred much unwholesome and prurient thought, and it smothered the buildings in stucco and plaster. Notable examples abound. To take but two, consider Monte Oliveto by Buonconvento, and the famous La Verna above Bibbiena. This Certosa is just such another. In the case of San Marco, mercifully, they stopped in time. 2 This ridge is actually the Chianti, the more easterly of the two. You have to cross the western ridge also to get to Poggibonsi. GREVE AND PESA n i like tufted velvet. Nothing more dainty gay could be imagined than this glen as I saw it last. The blue-green river ran musical among the THE CERTOSA, FLORENCE. stones, eglantine and woodbine dipped as it passed ; the broom was in flower, the acacias and the may. Nightingales sang at large, the frogs and cicale made a jingling accompaniment ; the sun was in the heavens, a soft gale stirred the 112 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. pines. It was good to be there — but ah, better to be in England. Mr. Browning was not the only man to know that, but he was the first to say it ; and perhaps I am not the second. And beautiful as this Val di Greve undoubtedly is, it is not of the Tuscan but of the general picturesque. Characteristic Tuscany is in the next valley. Emerging from San Casciano, a town which only looks well from a distance, and calls for no remark ; you get to the open country, San Casciano, . .... Pesa, vaidi with the western Chianti ridge Chianti. ... . straight before you. A country is this aboundingly fertile ; olives, with flax, corn and maize in between them, mulberry trees to carry the vines. Not an inch of ground is wasted — a sight which would have gladdened the eyes of Mr. Arthur Young, and would have gladdened them more if he had not speculated what, with proper appliances, the yield might have been. I found a plough by the wayside just here and stayed to examine it. The whole was of wood, including the share. It had no wheels, but had to be haled by main force of two oxen through the marl. I suppose it drove a furrow of six inches. It is almost exactly that which Virgil describes in the Georgics — if that make matters any better. But as to the produce, for my GREVE AND PESA H3 own part, I shall not care greatly what amount they win from their splendid earth until I can be sure that the yield goes into the right mouths. At present I fear it does not. The proprietor is content, the fattore content (or he ought to be) ; the contadino peddles along, and at all events fills his belly from VAL DI PESA. the ground he tills. He looks to do, and does, no more. But the labourer? Practically, he starves ; a fine, limber, gentle-mannered animal, beautiful when he is young, but too soon old, he is always hungry, never knows the taste of meat. And yet he is a poet: Musam meditatur avena ! — to twist the tag, Edinburgh fashion. Let us now cross Pesa by a fine bridge of ii4 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. brick and accost the western Chianti. Once you are across it, you are in the Val d' Elsa ; but you must rise and dip, and rise again before you see Poggibonsi and San Gimignano's towers. You go up by a cypress wood, whose tops are like spears in an ambush, and round about a rocky spur, which in these parts they call Poggio Petroio, and so gradually top the first blade of the two-edged down. It is some of the best land in Tuscany, a tilth of corn and wine and oil indeed, and I could not traverse it without a sense that I was on holy ground. For between Strada, just beyond Pesa Bridge, and Tavarnelle on the crest lay Semifonte, the buried city.1 The smiling fields — all in their spring finery of red- brown diapered with green — the olives, which look lavender in the sun, know nothing of it. Look from ridge to ridge, look east, look west; San Casciano far behind you is the only town to be seen. Here stood Semifonte ! Well, perhaps the olives grow the better for its bones. Tavarnelle, wide-streeted and comfortable, is Eisa, and an on tbe very top of this Chianti ridge; herlittletowns. a mUe Qr mQre beyQnd ^ yQU rQund a corner and come in full view of the broad Val d' Elsa, than which I know no prospect 1 See Chapter ii., where I have spoken at large about this place. GREVE AND PESA IJ5 more attractive in a quiet way of its own. It is pastoral country, yet with a spice of classic for- ,— ¦-. ^r^f i f > THE CERTOSA, FLORENCE. mality in the way the towns are dotted in, each exactly fitting its own pedestal. It is, we may say, a Claude Lorrainish, Nicholas Poussinesque sort of country: nymphs, goats, ruins, towns on 116 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. hill-tops, bunchy trees, and a velvety texture over all. It has character; it has some mystery, for all those far-off towns look more grandiose than in fact they are. It is quietly but admir ably composed ; it chastens the fancy ; it leads the mind from the politicians to the people, from the artists to the artisans. To put the matter in a nutshell, it is exactly like Gray's Elegy — a restrained, academic landscape. Immediately before you, as you stand, is Barberino, heaped up like a cairn upon the top of a mound — a warm foxy-brown and cream-coloured village, with an open-work belfry to its church and a look-out tower as warden of the east. Here, as I have always chosen to suppose, lived La Nencia, that nymph of the orchards whose loves Lorenzo sang most excellently well.1 Indeed, I thought that I had seen her as I passed, in an olive garden, with a yellow shawl over her head. Over and beyond Barberino, over the western slope, you can just see the roofs of Certaldo ; beyond that again, looking S.-W., sheer across the vale, deep in 1 It is certain, I am bound to confess, that she lived in Barberino di Mugello, a village in the upper Val di Sieve, near Scarperia. There is internal evidence. Not only is the poem an admirable burlesque of the Rispetti daily made in those parts, but the hero of it, " povero Vallera sventurato" fetches his images from local sources. For instance — Se mi dicessi, quando Sieve e grossa, — Gettati dentro : i' mi vi getteria. This is conclusive. //i/./r/ i'r/j //ie ', '(''//a ¦.frf.-f/na-na. ¦¦-'%'>>. GREVE AND PESA 117 purple shadows, is San Gimignano, sad little city, with its thirteen towers clumped together into seven. Further round towards the south THE PORTA ROMANA, FLORENCE. is Poggibonsi, a warm heap of buildings, with a tower or two. The prospect should please you. Poggibonsi is a merry town, where I heard 118 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. more laughter in half an hour than in Florence in a week. It has two fine churches, Poggibonsi. ., externally, and a castello, so ornate and trim that I suspect it of rifacimento, and the town of having wasted its pence. The great church has a Tuscan belfry of the true sort — a turretted tower ; the invariable palladian facade is stuck against the body of the nave, with the invariable result that it is misleading seen from before and ridiculous from any other point of view. The interior is neo-classical, in the manner of Santo Spirito at Florence — a plain cross in shape, with Doric columns and entab lature, painted grey and white. The result is ugly but decent. There are some Pollajuolesque frescoes on the walls, mild, dextrous, and anaemic. San Domenico, the other church, has nothing whatever within, and without is sadly encum bered by buildings. It has an odd, but success ful belfry — a square trunk carrying pinnacles and balls at each corner ; out of that a turret with a cone, and atop of all a brass vane. Corpus Christi was at hand ; there was great prepara tion for the feast when I was there : the mer riest, haphazardest business of tintacks, tinsel, and turkey-red tassels that ever I saw. I like better the Piedmont custom, which you may see in the Alpine villages between Turin and the GREVE AND PESA 119 Mont Cenis. There they stick the streets with green boughs, and carpet the pavement with flowers, to commemorate the sacrament ; thus earth is made green and red in honour of earth made Flesh and Blood. At the Aquila, a pleasant country inn, I broke my fast. Commercianti kept me company, and POGGIBONSI. roasted the padrona over a dry fire of wit. But she knew her men. This was part of the meal — the relish, without which they could not eat bread. She ran off her list of dishes, with an apparent hopefulness of tone which her looks belied. Bistecche ? and she waited. " Leave them to repair the permanent way." Cotolette di vitello ? " Dio caro, are there no soldiers in Poggibonsi ? " There was, in fact, a regiment 120 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. bivouacked in the Piazza San Domenico. The jokes may have been old, though they were fired off with gusto ; for each she had a deprecat ing grin. Manzo bollito, then ? She was sure these signori would be pleased. I waited for the outcry ; but, by Heaven, they ate it ! The whole was a great comedy ; and so was it, that one of my friends called for a clove of garlic, and industriously wiped his plate and knife with it before he would suffer his meat to touch either. My long day ended at Colle, in a rough inn of the lower town. I have been here many times, and in all sorts of weather, — for the Colle. place lies at a crossing of four high roads, — but have never failed to be struck by the noble appearance of the upper town — a street of tall palaces, of great gates, and one proud old tower, lining with a double row the spine of rock. Many and many a city has fallen gently to decay ; and some ignobly, like Ravenna, and some beautifully, like Ferrara. But Colle has met death with heroism, and so splendid was the craftsmanship which stood her up, that nothing has fallen yet. Only the perishable stuff, the wood, plaster, and mortar, has dropped out: the stone blocks remain immovable; the huge cornices, mortised into place, may still be used against the weather. GREVE AND PESA 121 Sienese by choice, Florentine by fate, below this street of hers of great houses was fought that "*•"'*" '.'rvW,-'H, "• $ '¦ - .! JV THE CASTLE OF POGGIBONSI. fight between the rival cities where Provenzano Salvani met his shameful death. It turned on a 122 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. comma. There had been a prediction — Villani says it was a wile of the Devil's — whispered in Provenzano's ear : — " Anderai e combatterai, vincerai, no morrai alia battaglia, e la tua testa fia la piu alta del campo." To this he trusted. Thou shalt go up and fight, thou shalt prevail, not in battle shalt thou die, aizd may thy head be highest in the field. Battle was joined in the valley below; but De Mon tfort with the Florentines outnumbered the Ghibellines, outflanked them, and drove them back into their trenches. There they stayed, while the others prepared the assault. And then Cavolino Tolomei, a Sienese exile, enemy of the house of Provenzano, disguised himself and went about the trenches, seeking the captain ; whom, when he had found, he followed in and out, and leaping upon him in a lonely place, stabbed him through and through, and cut off his head, and fixed it high on a lance and bore it off in full sight of the Sienese. And thus was fulfilled that lying prophecy, which had been spoken with this intention, — " Anderai e com batterai, vincerai no, morrai alia battaglia, e la tua testa fia la piu alta del campo " ; Thou shalt go up and fight, thou shalt prevail 7iot, in battle shalt thou die, and may thy head be highest in the field. He did not prevail, in battle he died, and his head was high above all others. Then it was that the GREVE AND PESA 123 Sienese fled and were massacred as they flew; and then also Sapia, that virago of party, who PORTA ROMANA FROM OUTSIDE. had watched from her tower the havoc of her own countrymen with beastly delight, turned her burning face to God and cried out at Him — i24 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap, v " Henceforth I fear Thee no more ! " Dante gives her a flick as he passes her. Savia non fui, avvegna che Sapia Fossi chiamata, the lady confesses herself. Pier Pettignano saved her by prayer.1 1 He sold combs on the bridge at Pisa, and was a famous fakir of Siena. POGGIO IMPERIALE, FLORENCE. CHAPTER VI VOLTERRA TO THE SOUTH: MASSA MARITTIMA I must fetch backwards from this point, and pick up my line at Volterra, whence I pushed on farther into the south part of Tuscany, nor rested until I had touched its uttermost limit at Orbetello. I consider Semifonte to have been the fairest city in Tuscany, because I have never seen it. Next to that I had been accustomed . Pomarance. to place Pomarance, partly because it also I had never seen, partly because of its fragrant name. If it be a habit peculiar to poets to mistake names for things,1 then I am a poet ; for it was impossible for me to suppose that a place called Pomarance could be other than exquisite. Hereby I was betrayed into a fatuity which I shall not attempt to conceal. Instead of going on from Colle to Siena, and from Siena to the south, securing by these means not only 1 But is by no means so. The vice is common to politicians, tacti cians, and the religious. 125 126 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. a good road but also a sight of San Galgano, what must I needs do but chase this Fata Morgana of a Pomarance ? Folly of a fool ! The little place, which from a distance seems coloured like a Killarney rose, is a very good sort of town, but only in one sense out of the way. That, it undoubtedly is. For, first of all, you have those dread leagues over chasmy mud to pass — Spicchiaiola, the Monte della Torre, Bevis of Hampton's blood-coloured cliff; then the abhorred climb beneath the walls of Volterra. I saw the place, as vast and inert in the sun as it had been of old in drizzling fog. Again I saw severe maids in felt hats, sickles in girdle ; again I felt my hairs on end. Within sight of the fatal gate — at the Garibaldi monu ment — you turn and go down a sloping road into the valley. And far ahead of you rose- coloured Pomarance, in Emerson's pretty phrase, " sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible home." To be perfectly plain, as dull a little town as you may wish to avoid is the Pomarance of practice, but it is set upon a fine brae, and commands a view of others as fine or finer. In particular, the view of Volterra impresses itself upon the memory. Many a city (notably Montepulciano) makes a grander flight into the VI MASSA MARITTIMA 127 clouds, but none shows more strength, none seems more charged with fate. The country side, over which your eye must needs roam, adds to the impressiveness — so vacant, so weather-cursed it is. There is also to be seen, at eight miles' distance, Rocca Sillana, that massive castle alone upon a hill, from whose keep you may survey the whole length and breadth of Tuscany: I speak as a fool, for I have not tested it. Sir Henry Layard certifies as to the length, for he says that your range extends from the Apennines into Umbria. Local report adds a sight of both seas. After this there is climbing to be done: Vassi in Sanleo, e discendesi in Noli ; Montasi su Bismantova in cacume Con esso i pie ; ma qui convien ch' uom voli . . . 128 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. It is much an affair of that sort. You climb a great circular hill-road by cliffs of shining mica ; The -way you l°°k across a gorge to a pyramidal to Massa. rock ^tne denuded core, doubtless, of a volcano), wooded from base to point, and see atop of it the invariable frontier castle, a warden of the western sea for the prince-bishops of Volterra. Upon the top of the next hill you will have a full view of Lardarello and the boracic acid works — if such you desire — and, more picturesque, of Monte Cerbole, a little round and walled village capping justly its mountain. Its mountain is isolated, set in the middle of a glen ; behind it a broad down rises equably to the sky-line. There is nothing in this eyrie of savages to distinguish it from any other. You may count such places by scores and fifties ; withal, they never fail to stir the pulse. An odd thing about them is this, that whereas they are on a much lower level than the Apennine villages, they carry altogether more weight. Fivizzano, for instance, in the Garfagnana, is walled and towered, and fulfils the top of a rock, just as this Monte Cerbole. Yet Monte Cerbole, Roc castrada, Radicofani, and others like them are horrific ; Fivizzano, San Marcello, " picturesquely situate," to quote a favourite phrase of Herr Baedeker's. One reason, I take it, may be that vi MASSA MARITTIMA 129 these Volterran hills are all volcanic; they are more abrupt; the towns upon them gain value, and seem (as they actually are) more inac cessible than those of the mountainous north. The Apennines make architecture a ridiculous pretence ; but among these downs, to continue the sheer of a cliff some fifty or a hundred feet is to achieve something.1 One more of these savage nests, and I have done with them for the present. Castelnuovo in Val di Cecina is the last of them upon the stage to Massa Marittima; the last of them, and as good as any — a stern, ruddy village, rising in steps up the rock of its foundation, charged to overflowing with tangle-haired women and children, fierce and wild. They herd and clamber about you with yells; or they watch you, bold-eyed, from their doors. Life here is that of one great family. All must have common blood, for there can be none which has not been mingled in the isolation of hundreds of years. Not a door, as I passed, but was wide open ; not a window had a pane of glass in it. A huddle of stone byres, I assure you — a life lived here with out privacy or the desire of it. Marriage-bed, child-bed, sick-bed, death-bed, and upon each 1 In the same way Salisbury Plain makes Stonehenge a foolishness. But imagine those ranked boulders in Hyde Park. They would look monstrously. Salisbury Plain is on far too great a scale. VOL. II K 130 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. in turn the eyes of whoso pleased to turn them that way. Why not? For all that, some ten paces removed from the last hovel in the street, under a knotty old thorn-tree, I saw a youth courting a maid retired from the rest. She looked down at her fingers rest less in her lap ; he bent his head to whisper in her ear. One does whisper then in the Tuscan hills ! I had imagined one stormed, not wooed, a girl. Aweary of volcanoes and abrupt, dreary villages, the reader will be as glad as I am to Massa consider a town of pretence. Massa Marittima. Marittima, when you reach it, — and the ways are long to do that, — will approve itself worthy your sore feet, though the wise Dennis did not think so.1 It is old, it has a magnificent church, it is on the edge of a plain and a shore peopled thick with memories. Hereby were Populonia, Vetulonia, Ansedonia, Talamon. But hear old Fazio : . . . vedi piana Con altri colli la Maremma tutta, Dilettevole molto e poco sana. Ivi e Massa, Grosseto, e la distrutta 1 Massa Marittima was one of the few cities of the Maremma which betrayed him out of his urbanity. "A mean, dirty place," says he, "without an inn." He speaks of its "dreary dulness," and prefers the mosquitoes of Follonica. I don't agree with him at all. vi MASSA MARITTIMA 131 Civitavecchia, ed ivi Populonia Ch' appena pare, tanto e mal condutta, La e ancora dove fu Ansedonia, La e la cava dove andar a torme Si crede i tristi, ovvero le demonia. Well might the honest man believe that troops of devils rode shrieking through the night. The view of the Maremma which you get from the citadel of Massa shows you a flat plain of un speakable desolation. In Fazio's day — as in Dennis's — it was thick in a jungle of scrub and brushwood. Dante tells you : Non han si aspri sterpi ne si folti, Quelle here selvagge che in odio hanno, Tra Cecina e Corneto i luoghi cold.1 To my own mind it looks infinitely more hag ridden now than any wooded prospect could ever look. However, I must not anticipate what I was destined to see of it in a few days' time. Let me return to Massa Marittima. The city occupies the western slopes and the 1 Dennis says that it was thick with wood when he first saw it in 1847. "The boar, the roebuck, the buffalo, and wild cattle" lurked in it in those days. Everything was then in a state of primitive nature ; a dense wood ran wild over the plain ... a tall underwood of tamarisk, lentiscus, myrtle, dwarf cork-trees . . . fostered by the heat and moisture into an extravagant luxuriance, and matted together by parasitical plants of various kinds." There is nothing of this now, of course. The brakes are all cut down, some of the land is under the plough ; but the soil is so poor that very httle rewards the husbandman. 132 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. top of a long and very steep hill, and consists of one serpentine street which turns upon itself three times before it reaches the citadel. Thus it happens that the back door of the inn is in the first stretch of the spiral, and that to reach the front door you must either ascend some sixty steps or walk a quarter of a mile. Here and there precipices are to be discovered between the houses, and stepped ways up them, which give short cuts to the stout of heart. But, naturally, such traffic as there is — and there is next to none — must work its way round and round about. In the long course of this one street you will discover some fine buildings : a Palazzo del Podesta, a Palazzo Comunale, a really noble church, one of the very best in the south of Tuscany, a Gothic washing-place, and atop of all the Citadel. Ruined palaces there are in abundance, of the true, inscrutable southern kind; Sienese in type, effect, and material — grey stone, namely, plain and heavy, flat-fronted, with a piaii nobile of Venetian windows. In one of these was born the raciest saint in the calendar, and by all accounts the most free- a great spoken — San Bernardino of Siena, Massetanbirth. nQ less a man> j ^^ ^.^ ^q^ ever, that the Massetani can claim more of him than to have cradled him, and to have given him VI MASSA MARITTIMA 133 a mother. His father, Tollo di Dino di Baldo Albizeschi, was a Sienese gentleman of family; Nera di Bernardino di Ranieri Avveduti of Massa was his mother. Orphaned at five years old, he was taken to Siena to live with his aunt jf MASSA MARITTIMA. of the mother's side, Donna Diana, and only returned to Massa to sell his belongings. One more connection with his birthplace he had. It was a Massetano — Padre Galgano — who in 1402 admitted him into the Franciscan order. He said his first mass in 1404. A man of extra ordinary burning zeal he was, as all the world knows, of native pungency, and of sound political 134 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. sagacity. He did, indeed, far more than Savona rola, who had no sagacity at all, and really more than Saint Catherine, his countrywoman, who had a great deal. For if she moved the Pope, he moved Christendom, and has moved it ever since. The tale of his invention of the divine monogram may be fable : — though I see no reason to suppose it so: that he used it in his mission is entirely true. Its success was as remarkable as his own ; since the invention, or introduction, of the rosary there has never been so moving a device. You may say, " A formula the more." I am not at all concerned to deny it. The world was ruled by formulas before J. -J. Rousseau and his friends set about to destroy them ; and just as much as he did but substitute new formulas for old ones, so the world is still ruled by them since Jean-Jacques died and was buried. Is not the Cross itself a formula ? Nay, have we not been driven to contrive higher formulas yet ? And, to put it at its lowest, that is a wise man and a statesman who can found a formula and carry it through. 1 It is very well known. San Bernardino made so many converts by his preaching that he ruined those sort of men and women who live on the vicious. One of these — a maker of dice he was — came to see him, with his grievance that what was fish to the preacher's net was starvation to his. Bernardino thereupon traced out the I. H. S. upon a stone, and bade him make tablets with that upon them instead of his deuce, ace, and tray. And so he did. vi MASSA MARITTIMA 135 For by such the world has always been wagged, and there seems to be no other way. If the palaces of Massa recall Siena, the cathedral church of San Cerbone1 is nearer the great model of Lucca. There is Massaohurcni none to approach its grandeur in wltnout Siena. It is in shape a severely long and plain basilica, with a triply-arcaded facade, an arcaded side, with a clerestory in black and white bars. It has a lead cupola — which is like Siena — upon an octagon of brick, a square stone belfry with a conical cap of pink brick ; and out of this belfry pushes and flourishes a fig-tree. The facade is fantastic but perfectly successful. I have said that there are three arcades of round arches ; and it is true. But the uppermost arcade is deeper than the others, and behind it you may discover a true Gothic window with flamboyant tracery. Italy at large has the secret of this composite building which breaks all the rules and looks beautiful. The colour here is as variegated as a spring parterre — warm pink, French grey, pale lemon- yellow, black, lichen-gilt stone. Severity, age, permanence : think of their value in a yeasty little state such as this where parties change as 1 Dennis, perversely out of touch with this place, calls it " a neat edifice," which it precisely is not. Not Lassels, who applied it to Siena church, made worse choice of an adjective, 136 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. the wind veers, and to-day you embrace Siena, and to-morrow you spring at her throat. Chris tianity, the Church, the Faith — these three, who then were one, never changed, though Popes raised armies and burned and pillaged like condottieri. All Italy, I say, had the secret of this ; but only Tuscany had the great way of doing it. You cannot accuse Ligurian archi tecture of style ; nor Venetian architecture when it takes such forms, for instance, as the Santo of Padua. But Pisa, Lucca, this Massa Marittima — they compel your admiration, partly by effron tery, but mainly by character. And character in a man is style in art. Inside, this church is still splendid in its old age. Pale old Sienese frescoes — dreamy Madon nas, languishing saints and angels, and within. & & & knights on horseback, hawks and greyhounds — are still on the walls. Even Dennis admired the baptismal font. He says it is made of one block of stone, and very likely it is. At any rate it is large enough to swim or drown in, has a beautiful scroll-work screen of iron round about it, and ancient carvings upon its four sides — semi- Byzantine things, where the waves of Jordan fall like a cope over the Saviour's shoulders ; and for its feet lions mangling prostrate lambs. A date, 1267, is upon it. The church itself was VI MASSA MARITTIMA 137 built in Bishop Albert's time in 1225. At the west end there are also carvings in black basalt: grotesque, dwarfed images of holy persons, earlier in date by the look of them, and not unlike those figures of Roland and Oliver which one remembers at Verona. I****1 *¦&$&¦ *H;:-w> Wjr'J ii!*.- r to 2*1 A THE PIAZZA, MASSA MARITTIMA. The church and palaces of Government are at the second turn of the spiral, upon an outpushing spur of the hill, called 1' Oriolo. The citaaei— Below them is the public fountain— Monte Regio. a deep and broad tank under Gothic arches, like Fontebranda at Siena. To reach the citadel, which was the castle of the bishops when they 138 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. lorded it here,1 you must climb the last third of the spiral, to the top of the hill which is called Monte Regio. If you do this you will find what I believe, and Dennis unwillingly admits, to have been the original Etruscan town : Vetulonia or another, all's one now. There is here, to all intents and purposes, a separate town behind walls. A great square tower rises in the midst — the bishop's rock of offence. The walls are built in courses of stone and tufa ; but Dennis says — and no doubt he is right — the blocks are not big enough to be Etruscan. There is therefore nothing but tradition to go upon in this matter of Etruscan Massa ; but I shall refer you to Dennis, if you don't know him already — a mature old Scots gentleman, an enthusiast and a great scholar, you will find him. His book is one of the few good ones written about Tuscany. A great and broad view of the Maremma, misty purple when I saw it, brooding but not unkindly, shows the traveller whither he must tend on the morrow if he wishes to find Grosseto. 1 See the Appendix to this chapter for an outline of Massa's history. vi MASSA MARITTIMA 139 APPENDIX HISTORIES OF MASSA MARITTIMA There are two histories of this little nation — a political, which is worthless, and a domestic, which is tragic, and might be of the highest instruction . But its only h istorian — an industrious Dottore Luigi Petrocchi — has heard the drums and trumpets too kindly to have much of an ear left for the groanings of the poor. Massa was always the seat, and by degrees became the principality of a bishop ; and so remained until the first quarter of the thirteenth century, when Bishop Albert, falling heavily into debt, pawned to the Massetani their own liberties and immunities. There was a relapse for a few years, but the city acted as a full-fledged republic in 1225. Its first outside struggles were with the highland chiefs round about it — ¦ notably with the Pannocchieschi, and Aldobrandeschi of Santa Fiora, very notable and puissant ruffians — as to whom Mr. William Heywood has much of interest to report in his Ensamples of Fra Filippo (pp. 205 sqq.). This was the way of all Tuscan communes. The Massetani prevailed against some of them. In 1232 Ranuccio di Guglielmo and Ildebrandino di Malpollione with their following became citizens en bloc. Thus, having sowed peace outside the walls, they had to reap discord within, and were driven into the camp of this or that stronger nation according as the winds blew at home. They leagued with Pisa against Florence, with Florence against Pisa and Castruccio ; they sided with Volterra against San Gimignano ; they joined the Ghibelline League, the Guelf League ; but on the whole they remained loyal to Siena and the Emperor, and, borrowing money from that state, were taken into what was virtually a servitude. In the fall of Siena Massa was involved, and so severe had been the yoke upon them that the Massetani were the 140 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. first subject-state of the Sienese dominion to submit to Cosimo of Florence. With the weight of his heavy, but fatherly hand upon them, their political history stops short at this point. But neither Cosimo, who was a just man, nor Francis, who was not unkindly, could help Massa against her real and constant enemy. Long before the Medici rule, long before the Sienese, had reached its harvest, the Maremma had begun to levy tribute. The marshes encroached upon the hill, the jungle rotted year by year. Minotaur that it was, it demanded a yearly tribute of youth, and got it. Repetti shows that in 1428 the population of the city had fallen to 400 lost souls. What it must have been in 1560 one cannot imagine ; accord ing to Dr. Petrocchi, in 1737, when Gian Gastone's wig was taken off, there were only 26 poderi in cultivation in all the contado, and no more than 527 persons alive within the walls. The saw ran in that time — Va' a Massa ; guardala e passa. The Lorrainers finally saved the place, after one false start. Francis IIL, thinking population was the needful thing, colonised Massa with 146 families from the Rhine country, 600 souls in all. Land, corn, a yoke of oxen, were given to each household, which was bidden then to thrive and replenish the earth. There seemed to those poor Rhinelanders only one way to do that, which was to die : that they did with extraordinary rapidity. One by one their houses were left empty. They perished utterly : left no descendants, says Repetti. The two Leopolds really brought salvation in by draining the swamps and letting in the hill- torrents. The Ghirlanda bog, the Ronna, the Pozzajone, the Venella were all ditched and emptied ; but Leopold II. had to get the horrible lagoon of Piombino pumped before he could cut his drains. And here is Repetti's table of popula tion to speak for the house of Lorraine : vi MASSA MARITTIMA 141 In 1640 there were 165 families of 586 souls ». '745 „ H5 ,, 442 „ » 1833 ,, 457 „ 2482 „ „ 1839 » 446 „ 2840 „ It is these peaceful feats of the Lorrainers that make men still regret the days of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. lifts @®ww5! A SHRINE, PONTE VECCHIO. CHAPTER VII GROSSETO AND THE COAST ROAD: ORBETELLO I have reason to believe that, had I gone from Massa to Follonica, from Follonica to Grosseto, I should have been better justified in Choice of roads. . heading this chapter as I have. I should have got more sea and more of a coast road ; but I should also have got more sand, which seems incredible. For the benefit of the adventurous, however, I say that there is such a road, three times as long as the other, not always carriageable, but giving you Follonica to inspect, and the pineta to traverse — both of which I missed. What did I gain ? Possibly something in the matter of roads, though it was mighty little, for a three-quarter wind was raging which blew the grit in my face and smothered up the marshes in grey smoke. What else ? Nothing, upon my honour, but a few hours more in Grosseto, and a nearer view of the Maremma Grossetana. This did not strike me, though it was forlorn 142 chap, vn GROSSETO — ORBETELLO 143 enough, as being so arid as the Pisan marshes; and certainly it held none of the sinister menace NEAR ORBETELLO. of the Volterran wilderness. It is cut up, as the Lincolnshire Fens are, into large fields with 144 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. grass dykes and ditches between them. A cer tain amount of land is under the plough ; cattle and sheep feed some off; a good deal of grass had been put up for hay, which was being carried when I was there — on the 24th of May. No doubt it is infected land: there are no villages anywhere in sight, and such tene ments as there are — railway stations and the like — have wire gauze over the windows. The mosquito's bite, they say now, is death. It may have been a mosquito that killed young Pia de' Tolomei, whose life and death the critics are denying with one accord. They rave.1 There is a range of low hills — the Monti d' Alma — which you must cross, driving my way to Gros seto. La Pia's prison stood just at the foot of these, facing north. The Castello di Pietra it is called ; but it lay far from my road, with none of its own, so I never saw it. Here in these swamps, amid standing pools and tangled brakes, sterile breadths of reed, out of sight or call of man, she than whom Siena had made nothing more fair, grew hollow-cheeked and filmy-eyed, and very ready for Death when he had pity upon her. 1 This is one of those fruitless, empty exercises so much in vogue at the present. Francesca's age, La Pia's marriages, Beatrice's substance : how in the name of Wonder can such things matter? Dante, the author (as far as we are concerned) of their being, has provided for all these things. I adhere to Keats' dictum in these matters. vii GROSSETO — ORBETELLO 145 Beautiful, poignant, slim figure of a young girl, carved immortal in one line : Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma. It is after passing these hills that the Grossetan Maremma, strictly speaking, begins. It is not near so wide as ours in Lincolnshire, for you are never out of sight of the hills ; but it is excessively miserable. I think we scarcely passed more than one substantial house : the rest were hovels. One such I do remember — Monte Pescali by name, a villa of pretence, standing, cypress-girt, upon a little hill, with a carriage-drive, flower-beds, and many statues gleaming in groves of ilex and myrtle. A palazzo it was called by a little boy of whom I inquired its name. After this, enormous plains opened on either hand, some broken up, some left fallow, in which the great dun cattle stood motionless, each apart from other, staring into space. Whether they were wild or tame I know not : they were a forbidding spectacle. At last, half-hidden in a clump of trees, I descried Grosseto, and was thankful. It has prosperity, it has many industries, a brisk air of business, a first-rate inn — the Stella d' Italia, one of the best in Tuscany1 — but it has 1 Here Dennis agrees with my ruling. He lays it down as the best inn between Pisa and Rome. I would go further, and say that I only 146 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. lost the picturesque. It has rebuilt its Palazzo Comunale in the most modern antique. I hardly remember a villa on the Riviera as its parallel. Harsh red brick, pointed to death with white plaster; thin, exaggerated battlements which could not withstand a boy's catapult; painted mouldings — but enough. The Cathedral is no THE FERRY ROAD TO ORBETELLO. better. An extremely ancient site, a finely severe shape, once of -vtriped marble (of which some few bars remain), it has been coated in and out with plaster, and painted in stripes of red and yellow. These mimic the hue but not the tone, nor of course the quality, of the marbles which lie under- know one to approach it between Genoa and Rome — the Croce di Malta at Spezzia. But inns have their traditions. From what Dennis says, the excellence ofthe Stella d' Italia goes with the good-will ofthe house. VII GROSSETO — ORBETELLO 147 neath all this rubbish, awaiting the general resurrection.1 Leaving Grosseto, your road is never far from the sea, and at Orbetello, as it seems, takes you bodily into it. For a small portion of ToOrbeteiio: your course, a range of low limestone Talamone- hills lies between you and it: the Monti dell' Uccellina is the name of them, at whose southern extremity you behold Talamone standing in the water — a heap of pale ruin. Here was the place where Telamon the companion of Jason upon the Argo may or may not have set up his rest ; what is certain is that the Sienese, among many crack-brained projects, had one of making it their Leghorn. Sapia, sending messages by Dante from her toilsome way up the Hill of 1 There is little or nothing to be said here of the history of Grosseto. The Counts of Sovana (Aldobrandeschi) had it under the Emperor, and sub-enfeoffed a kinsman, whose descendants held it until the thirteenth century. In 1224 the Sienese sacked and possessed themselves of it ; save for a very few years — from the death of Frederick II. to the morrow of Montaperto, when there was a republic of Grosseto under Grossetan consuls — it depended upon Siena, and with that city fell to Cosimo. The real history, as in Massa's case, began with the tussle of the Grand Dukes and the Marshes. The first three Medici did much, the remainder let all go to ruin ; so the Lorrainers had to begin again. What the two Leopolds accomplished — in the banking of the Ombrone and poldering of the accursed Pescaja of Castiglione, may be read at large in Repetti (s.v.) ; and fine reading it is for those who see in this kind of warfare the real heroism which it involves. Here are his figures : In 1640 there were 238 families of 1340 souls „ I74S » 2I2 » 648 » » 1833 » 452 » 2321 /. 148 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. Purgation to her kinsfolk upon earth, tells him where to look for them. Tu li vedrai, she says, tra quella gente vana Che spera in Talamone, e perderagli Piu di speranza che a trovar la Diana ; Ma piii vi metteranno gli ammiragli. Bitter scorn, all this : — " You will find them among that windy folk who trust in Talamone, and will lose more good hope there than in digging for Diana — and their admirals will lose yet more." The Diana was that supposed underground river for which the Sienese were always groping under their hill ; but even that was a more hopeful scheme than to deepen the Ombrone and cut a navigable waterway from Siena to it, and from it to Talamone. The houses that huddle there were once called a city; the broken mole once made a haven. A few poor fevered wretches linger there now; and the bay is so choked with silt and weed that, accord ing to Dennis, there is scarcely water enough to float a coasting steamer in. You cross a couple of creeks by ferry-boats — one before Talamone, one after it. The second of them is the Albegna, and marks what was the southern extremity of Tuscany until the Congress of Vienna in 1814. A little fortress on the further bank is testimony of that. For Orbetello and that delta of land vn GROSSETO — ORBETELLO 149 between the Albegna and the Fiora formed the Presidij — the last garrison of the Empire in Italy. Not all the Medici strength in Cosimo I., nor any of their guile in his successors, could get that away from the Kings of Spain, or of Naples, their successors in this inheritance. However, it was Tuscan for more than half a century, though THE FRONTIER FORT IN THE MAREMMA. there is little enough show of it there now. From opposite Talamone until you cross the draw bridge, by which alone access is possible, you see it beyond you, lying as it seems in the sea ; behind it rises the Monte Argentario, a rocky, green-clad island of two peaks. On the further promontory of the mainland lay — and there still lies ruined — Ansedonia, a great Etruscan city. Orbetello, in fact, lies upon a sandy isthmus 150 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. connecting Italy with Monte Argentario. What, once was sea on either hand has been enclosed by the action of wind and tide into two lagoons.1 Strange, amphibian little place that it is — half fortress, half fishing village. It had great strength once — so much is evident in Orbetello. its double line of defence, the ports and antiports. Traces of the Spanish occupancy are not awanting. Fountains, statues, obelisks, carry the castles and lions upon escutcheons, and pompous ascriptions to Carlos and Philip and Ferdinand below them. There is a certain excess of plaster-magnificence in building which is unlike Tuscany. Audacity was a mark of the Cinquecento, tawdry luxuriance of the Seicento; but to swagger and strut in plaster was never a Tuscan foible. It may be coincidence, or it may be an evidence of blood, but it is the fact that in the poor, pretentious church of this town the altars are adorned with dolls in glass cases exactly as you find them in Spain. I did not remark any pronounced Spanish type in the inhabitants : nobody was superbly idle enough, nobody stared at me as if I were at once curious and beneath contempt, 1 There are therefore three isthmuses, so to speak. Orbetello stands upon the first formed of them. The others were no doubt made by the same agents as had made the first. VII GROSSETO — ORBETELLO 151 nobody was to be seen chasing a woman as if she were his natural prey; many wore rags, but none as if they were a mantle-royal. No: the Orbetellani were as busy, playful, hungry and patient, as fond of their children and little dogs, ORBETELLO. as decorous without care to be so, as apt to dis play and as deprived of the means to do it, as any of their lovable kindreds on the mainland. It may be true that their Toscanity dates but from the nineteenth century; they had been Tuscans aforetime without knowing it. They say that the two salt-water lagoons are unwholesome, and I daresay they are. They are 152 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. blue, however, and laugh as innumerably as ever the waves of the /Egean ; and they are full of large fish. In the creeks and inlets are many little flat-bottomed boats wherein to adventure them. Dennis says that the fishing is done by night, with torches and spears. They " burn the water," in fact. I did not see any such thing; but an old man, whose acquaintance I made over a pipe, told me that a good deal was net-work. Lines they had, and stake-nets. He said that the fish were poor eating, and the bigger they were the poorer they were. The little ones, however, were excellent — a kind of whitebait. He showed me portions of the old walls: roba antichissima, he said, roba etrusca. And then, pointing his hand southwards to a headland, " See," said he, "the ancient city of Ansedonia: a wonderful place, by all accounts." It was like a misty blot in the blue — little or nothing to be seen. I asked him about Orbetello : he confessed it a miserable lodging. The winds cut it all to pieces in the winter, and the sea very often broke through the sandy bar. In the summer it was full of fever. By talking about it he seemed to become suddenly aware of its ill-fortune. He looked wildly about him, then at me. " Che brutto paese ! " he said, " cursed by the water, cursed by the land!" He nodded his head: VII GROSSETO — ORBETELLO 153 " Brutto ! brutto paese ! " He lived there, he added, because he had been born there. He was a fisherman : out yonder — he pointed across the lagoon to a reed-encumbered strip — were his nets. In the public gardens I saw palm trees and ORBETELLO. women with children; and I conversed with the gardener. He knew his business, I found out, though it is none of our business who garden at home ; for he saw me pulling snails off his carna tions and seemed to wonder what I was about. But he showed me feats of his which were beyond my powers : cannas and cactuses, to wit, growing like weeds in the open. His carnations would i-54 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap, vn have been excellent if the snails had not been more excellent ; his roses, which he succeeded in growing under trees, were by no means bad ; his stocks grew like saplings ; his verbenas and phloxes were flowering shrubs. In lilies I think I could have beaten him ; he could not grow delphiniums — I could only pity his attempt towards it ; his bamboos, as he admitted, were vexed by the salt- gales. He knew not the name of hollyhock. We sized each other up, boasted of what we could and extenuated what we must. He presented me with a nosegay; we parted on very good terms, he to his watering, I to the garlicky inn and a night with the fauna of Orbetello. It is a poor and dull little town, in sooth. I can only promise the traveller such comfort as may accrue from lying in mid-lagoon between Ansedonia and Talamone, cities of Etruria. For the rest, he will be capered over by fleas, and will toss under the shadow of mosquitoes' wings. There is little else. Orbetello is a name of some pretence ; it has few diversions and a bad inn — and there's no more to say. CHAPTER VIII ACROSS COUNTRY GROSSETO TO SIENA To the landlord of the Stella d' Italia at Gros seto I owe many things — cool and sun-guarded chambers, wine and pasta of the best, Ataieofmy a sunk marble bath and abundance landlord- of water, the sight of his hairless dog, and the attendance of his handsome serving-maid ; but for one thing I cannot praise him. As a guide to the roads of his country he is not only in competent, but believes himself the contrary. Of the three ways from Grosseto to Siena — one good, one bad, one impossible — he stoutly re commended the last.1 He said that he himself 1 The high-road, which is (for Southern Tuscany) excellent, goes by Monte Pescali, Roccastrada and Chiusdino, the two last being fine hill- towns — Roccastrada one of the very finest. I have only seen it from a distance. Close to Chiusdino is the ruined Cistercian abbey of San Galgano — the model (never approached) of Gothic building in all the Sienese dominion. An alternative road is to follow that by which I was induced to adventure as far as Paganico, thence to Montalcino and Buonconvento. Here you join the Via Romana, and have a good level course to the gate of Siena. Montalcino is the great attraction of this road, Mine gave me little but a fired brake and an appetite. 155 156 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. always used it, that it was shorter than the others by some eighteen miles, that it had poca salita and little dust, that it was in excellent repair. In short, it was madness to go by any other. The truth is that it is the route of the crows when they wish to go to Siena; it is a dead straight; over hill over dale, thorough bush thorough briar. It is not to be mistook; for when you see a mountain before you, you know you must scale it, and when an abyss yawns, you know you must leap down. There is no dust, it is true, for most of it is at the height where super-terrestrial winds rage from one peak to another; but it is fur rowed by the channels of winter torrents. It is not graded, not engineered in any way. It is, as I say, a track marked out by the droppings of crows as they wing a flight to the North from the pickings of dead cattle in the Maremma. Possibly the shepherds of the Garfagnana use it, as they feed their way to their own mountain pastures in the summer — it is nothing to them, to the crags upon which they perch, or the zigzag paths over which they go barefoot. But to Flor entine horses, or automobiles of France, it is a deadly enterprise. Your few gains may be counted on the fingers of your right hand: a derelict mountain village or two, a view of Roccastrada upon your left VIII GROSSETO TO SIENA 157 hand- and of Montalcino on your right — Montalcino and that great range of hills, Monte ROCCASTRADA. Amiata, Monte Labbro, Monte Civitella, and the rest, which divide the Ombrone from the Orcia. 158 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. This, of course, is something ; and something is the woodland nature of the road. These hills — for you cross the chain upon which Roccastrada stands — are densely wooded, and their only deni zens are charcoal-burners, their dogs and their cattle ; and the only buildings their squat kilns. I don't forget Paganico — that is great gain, nor the view of Siena. To those only I address myself. From Grosseto to Batignano the road presents the usual features of the Maremma Grossetana — of which I, for one, have had more than enough. It passes nearly, but does not discover, the site of the Etruscan city of Rusellae ; 1 Batignano itself, a cheerless little rock village of grey and russet, is the only haunt of men in all this region. Then, after an up and down woodland road, very English, being mostly grown with oak and hornbeam, you see in front of you Paganico — that, too, like an English walled hamlet — red brick with a red church and square tower, not unlike Old Basing in Hants, with ivied walls of defence broken in many places. It stands upon a ridge of the land, and in the valley below it the Ombrone runs between woody banks, 1 The intrepid Dennis fought his way to Rusellae through a jungle so dense that he had to cut it with bill and axe. It is on the steep wooded hill of Moscona, some two miles off the road on the right. vm GROSSETO TO SIENA 159 crisply over a pebble beach, and takes to itself a ROCCASTRADA. brook called Gretano. But the Ombrone is by no means like an English river; its colour is 160 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. peacock-green, its wave is semi-opaque, and its winter course too furious for our level and com fortable land. Nor is Paganico English by any means the moment you are within the great gateway, which still stands, with its fellow at the other end of the street. It is built a square — about the size, let us say, of the Piazza Annunziata at Florence — within double walls, and has been arcaded all round in its days of prosperity. The houses are tumbling this way and that, there is hardly a window with unbroken glass. The pavements — for the whole was once paved — have been broken up, weeds alone flourish at Paganico ; there are no shops, no signs of wheeled traffic, very few people, and, worst sign of all in Tuscany, very few children. One prosperous house in the whole place could I see — a whitewashed house with a wall of its own and an iron gate, through which I made out a flowery terrace and some orange-trees in tubs. These are signs that Paganico has fallen on evil days, that it has known greater. Some one of the Pannocchieschi clan had it under Sienese suzerainty; a shield of their arms is still to be seen outside the church ; but its position made it important. It was fortified by the Frati Umiliati, — a warlike body of religious, chamberlains, vm GROSSETO TO SIENA 161 ex officio, of Siena — and many times besieged, once by Castruccio himself.1 Then, when the Medici hi d it, it was created a Marquessate for Don Antonio, called by that name — I mean the lad whom Bianca Capello, a barren wife, bought in the Via del Fosso. Other Marquesses — the Patrizii of Siena, a great family — it knew. But now they are as dead as Adonais, and very soon Paganico will mingle dust with them. Last of it to go, I predict, will be the church, a sturdy, squared rectangle of brick, with the English tower aforesaid. That this has been a well-adorned place in days long past and over, may be due to a miraculous crucifix which still hangs there behind a curtain, and has done wonders among the people within the last thirty years, as various tablets record. " Most ancient, most venerable is the image of the Crucified carved in wood, which is adored in the parish 1 It was in 1328, the last year of his life, and as busy as any. He had subdued a rising in Pisa in the spring of the year ; he stayed a serious attack of the Florentines upon Pistoja in September, whereof he died. But in August he had dashed out southward to assist the Pan nocchieschi snatch Monte Massi in the Maremma from the Sienese ; Paganico lay in his road, — which was mine the other day, — so he raised his engines of war about it and very shortly had it at his discretion. He succeeded also at Monte Massi, but being called off suddenly to Pistoja, was forced to leave it. The Sienese, helped by Florence, had it again after a brisk assault, and were highly elated at their success. That fine equestrian figure painted in the Palazzo Pubblico — Guido Riccio of Modena upon a much-housed horse — commemorates the exploit. See the Appendix to this chapter for the death of Castruccio. VOL. II M 162 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. church of Paganico, and can be traced there into the thirteenth century " ; so says the severe Repetti with unwonted warmth. He adds that there are about its altar pictures by Taddeo di Bartolo, which I confess I didn't see there. I saw a pretty Benvenuto di Giovanni over the west door, and a whole chapelful of Lorenzettesque frescoes in the choir — Nativity, Epiphany, Weighing of Souls, Last judgment — with no particular merit but their seriousness and mellow aspect to recommend them. Other pictures were there, seicento, but not impossibly so ; sober, dark, and academic pieces they appeared — none of your pink mammoths and blue-flounced angels, of the sort Pocetti set shrieking at you in Florence. Lastly, on a lunette outside a north door, there do remain the vestiges of a beautiful thing, of the Simone Memmi school : a tall fair Virgin holding up an overgrown Bimbo, Saint John Baptist and an angel in attendance — the whole swaying together, sweet and graceful, coloured warm orange, crimson, and green. While we saw the sights of Paganico, the Pagani saw us and our equipage, and marvelled greatly. The whole population of some fifty souls — I take it some were afield cutting clover — stood about the carriage. A pleasant and friendly race they were, entirely cut off from any such VIII GROSSETO TO SIENA 163 world as we moved in, yet entirely contented. They were very thin, very unclothed, and as brown as nuts. The women wore the hats of Siena, those haloes of lemon-coloured straw than which no head-gear in the world is more becom- WALLS OF SIENA. ing to a pretty girl, nor any more disastrous to a plain one. The road is still long and inconceivably toil some to Siena, leading through a spacious upland country, mainly through woods, but . . , . L'Imposta, with clearings here and there which Petrioio, show you the deep Val d' Orcia and the grey hills beyond. From the summit of 1 64 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. L' Imposta, indeed, you have a view on either hand ; on the right Montalcino to the far north east, a dark red fringe to the mountain, then the whole range of Monte Amiata with clouded crown ; on the other hand, where the country rises and falls more gently, Civitella is to be seen, a little warm town with a single tower, and, almost on the sky-line, a clump of building on a height which I believe was Roccastrada. After L' Imposta comes a gentle fall, then a long and winding climb through ilex woods, and a terrific descent into the gorge of the Farma, which made my brake red-hot. At the foot of this really im possible hill are the swift green river, a steep bridge, a ruined fortress in a green wood, and a sul phur spring gushing white vapour from the rocks. This is Petriolo, once a famous bath, where Pope Pius II. was wont to dip his anointed person.1 I gather that it is still used during the summer, though I did not see the bath itself. There was an inn, however, where (an old woman told me) I could have lived like a signorone for three liras a day. At this point you are eighteen miles from Siena, and may begin to look out for the frontier 1 Montaigne, most diligent in hunting out medicated baths in Italy, missed Petriolo. He tried two in the Sienese country — Vignone, near San Quirico, and Naviso by Montefiascone. vm GROSSETO TO SIENA 165 fortresses. There are many of them perched about upon the hillsides and ridges, — San Lorenzo, Stigliano, Fitello, and others, — but it is nine miles more before you see the city. Then you pass a village on a common, and just beyond MONTALCINO. that have a magnificent apparition of the moun tain's flushed crown: Siena herself, carmine and white, upon her own three-capped hill. No town makes so splendid a show as this one ; no hill- town in all Tuscany, nor any city in all Italy. The Zebra tower gleams like an agate, the Mangia tower is like a red lily. Splendid from any side — to be seen from twenty miles' distance- 1 66 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. on the approach from Rome — I think this is the best view of all. The hill is so green and the city so rosy; you look upon it from an almost equal height ; it seems to be sailing in the cloud. But to reach the walls you have much still to do; you must descend far into the gorge, and get up again by long circuits to the Gate of St. Mark. Thence your way is through streets of red palaces — empty streets, very silent — to the Piazza Tolomei and good fare at the Albergo La Toscana, which once housed a Tolomei chief. APPENDIX THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANE Since my last mention of this hero is to be here, here is as good a place as any to report his death. It was in 1328, as has been said above, at the close of a year of great business. John Villani tells the story — so well that it cannot be bettered. Let him speak for me, therefore. " Now when Castruccio had got back Pistoja by his pro found science, and care, and prowess, in the manner which we have related already, he regarrisoned and replenished the place with men and stores, and put the Ghibellines into it again ; and returned to his city of Lucca with glory and honour after the fashion of an emperor in triumph ; and found him self at a very height of renown and respect, such as no lord or tyrant of Italy had obtained for three hundred years or more -J— as the chronicle will bear out ; and, moreover, lord of the VIII APPENDIX 167 cities of Pisa and Lucca, of Pistoja and the Lunigiana, of a great part of the Genoese shore, and of more than three hundred walled towns. And then, as it pleased God, who, for the debt we owe to Nature, draws in the big with the little, and the rich with the poor, he — through excess of undue fatigues undertaken with his host at Pistoja (as standing armed at all times, now riding, now afoot, setting the guards and relieving the pickets of his force, overseeing the siege engines, cutting the trenches, ah, and working at them with his own hands lest any one should say, Catch him working in the dog-days) — he, I say, was taken with a chronic fever, whereof he sickened and fell very ill. And, in truth, more than enough good men of his, when they left Pistoja, sickened and died. Among other notables there was Master Galeasso de' Visconti of Milan, whowas in Castruccio's service, but had been a great lord and tyrant on his own account before the Bavarian deprived him of his estate — lord of Milan he had been, and of Pavia, Lodi, Cremona, Como, Bergamo, Novara, and Vercelli ; and he died a wretched death, a soldier in Cas truccio's pay. And this showeth that a man may stretch the sentences of God, but not overpass them. " Now Castruccio, before he fell sick, remembering that the Bavarian was on his way back from Rome, and would be offended with him for having upset his emprise of that realm, by staying in Tuscany, and by resuming the city of Pisa into his dominions against leave and authority, was afraid of what he might do — even that he might deprive him of his signiory and estate just as he had deprived Galeasso of Milan ; and he was about to go to work for a secret treaty of agreement with the Florentines, when, as it pleased God, his sickness overtook him, and there he lay ; and, growing worse, established his last will, leaving Henry his eldest son Duke of Lucca, and directing, that as soon as he should be gone, without any days of mourning, this Henry should post tp Pisa with his cavalry and overrun the city, and so keep. 1 68 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. his authority alive ; and this done he departed this life, on Saturday, the third of September 1328. In person this Castruccio was very limber, and tall, and of a great appear ance, bluntish looking, not fat, fair and inclined to be pale, with straight yellow hair about a comely face. In age when he died he was forty-seven years. And a little before his death, when he knew it was upon him, he said to his closest friends : ' Here I lie adying ; and when I am dead you'll see the web unravelled ' — which was his Lucchese way of saying, You will see revolution, or, You will see my world depart. And he prophesied justly, as you will presently see. And, as we now know from his nearest kindred, he confessed himself, and took the sacrament decently, and had the holy oil ; but he re mained in his great error, never admitting that he had sinned against God by the wounds he had dealt to His holy Church, soothing his conscience with the belief that he had acted rightly for the good of the Empire and his own State. So he departed, and they kept his death a secret until the 10th September; and as he had left it to be done, so did his son Henry with his knights overrun the cities of Pisa and Lucca, and broke up assemblies of the Pisans wherever he found them. Which done he went back to Lucca and performed the dule, clothing all his people in black, and with ten horses to draw the bier, covered with silken housings and with ten flags — with the arms of the Empire two, with those of his duchy two, with his own two, and one for Pisa, one for Lucca, one each for Pistoja and Luni. So they buried him with great honour in Lucca, in the place of the Friars Minor of Saint Francis, on the 14th September. This Castruccio had been an intrepid and magnanimous tyrant, wise and wary, anxious and laborious, expert in arms, provi dent in warfare, highly adventurous in his undertakings, highly feared and respected ; in his days he did some fine and notable feats, and proved a very scourge to his countrymen, to the Florentines, Pisans, Pistojese, and to all the Tuscan nations VIII APPENDIX 169 in those fifteen years of his lordship over Lucca. He was cruel in that he dealt death and torture to men, thankless for the services he got in his need, desirous ever for new friends and for dependents, very proud of his estate and dominion, and above all things in the world desired to be lord of Florence and a king in Tuscany. And the Florentines re joiced and hugged themselves at his death, scarcely able to believe that dead indeed he was." — (Gio. Vill. 10. 86.) ~ ¦ ON THE MUGNONE, FLORENCE. CHAPTER IX SIENA I name the two cities of Tuscany in which it is pleasant to live to be Lucca and Siena; and they are the only two which have reckoned Siena and Lucca com- up pleasure among the assets of life. And I say that there are two cities in Tuscany which excel all the others in beauty, and whose beauty consists mainly in elegance ; and that these are Lucca and Siena. And lastly I say that, of any two Tuscan cities which one could pick out as alike in the quantity of their charm, it would be impossible to find two more dissimilar in the quality of it than this chosen pair. For one is impossible to be hid, the other most difficult to find. One flaunts it on the top of a mountain, the other nestles darkling in a thicket. And as for the people, if the Lucchese are the salt of the earth, the Sienese are the mustard. The Lucchese have prospered quietly, the Sienese have blusterously failed. And yet, with all their recluse ways, you cannot walk the 170 CHAP. IX SIENA 171 streets of Lucca without seeing signs of great and forcible character; and flamboyant, pre posterous, absurd as the Sienese have been and still are, it is not possible to affirm that any one thing they have said or done is unworthy of NEAR SIENA. great blood, or a proof of ignoble desire. If — and here is another likeness in diversity — if the Lucchese have left no name in history, it is because they have never tried to make one ; if the Sienese, it is because they have always failed. Over and over again they have bid for a starry crown ; but above that of all the Tuscan nations 172 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. their history is futile, stultifying, and outrageous. They have no literature, no Dante, no Sacchetti ; no science, no Galileo ; no great art, no Giotto, no Michael Angelo; no Castruccio, no Farinata, no Medici, no Machiavelli. What Florence was able Siena and t° do had been clean impossible for Florence. Siena, which started earlier on the race and had the greater advantage. Money she had ; but foresight, power, magnanimity, longa nimity, were wanting in Siena. These things, which are testimonies and fruits of character, abounded in Florence : Siena had none of them. And yet a walk down one street of the place will reveal to you finer, rarer, more poignant, more salient character than a whole month of prying into the untouched corners of Florence ; and so you will find it if you walk back along the great alley — Shakespere's "primrose path" — and compare the Sienese whom you meet with the Florentines. Sienese history is bafflingly absurd, but it touches the heart, which Florentine history seldom does. And thus you may state the difference : you must esteem but cannot love a Florentine, you must love but can hardly esteem a Sienese. I defy that erring wight, the man of sensibility and ardent associations, not to be the Des-Grieux of this good-for-nothing, flaming, dear, wheedling Manon of a nation, whose IX SIENA *73 beauties of mind and person may be, as Mr. Ruskin used to say, parasitic, but for all that are piercingly present. Mystery, pathos, romance are her properties ; and very likely they may prove but funguses PIAZZA SAN DOMENICO, SIENA. when you try to set them up for absolutes, and make the poor, pretty things pose The properties as the Sublime and the Beautiful. ofSiena- I am sure I don't know ; but I do know what it is which stirs the pulse of every sojourner in Siena's desolate places — the blend of the tragic and the trivial. The savage, gaunt, great houses, incurably noble, and the lovely and frivolous 174 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. people within them ; the mystical, gilded art which lays a finger on its lip, and shuts up — nothing ; the memories of her saints, the fra grance of their names and dust : I know that these things are desperately romantic. I know that the city cries and wails in my ears. Tragic, dauntless, high-flying race ! What was said of the Celts by a Celt of old time is true of Siena, and over-true. They went forth to war, but they always fell. So did the Sienese — always. They lost, as they must needs, in the long tussle with Florence; they dedicated themselves to their suzerain, the Madonna, and were four times heard ; but she for sook them at the fifth, in their hour of extremity. They conquered the seaboard, but never put to sea : Talamone, lonely and weed-choked, if it were theirs, was of no use. They began the greatest church in Italy, and finished no more than one quarter of it ; their only good artist — and he was Michael Angelo's master — made for them his noblest work ; but they broke it, or let it be broke ; and one must go to Bologna now to study Della Quercia.1 Their painters' work, which (if we are to credit Mr. L. Douglas, as I think we are not) began upon a scale 1 1 refer to the Fonte Gaja, ruins of which may be seen in the Opera del Duomo, and a dead copy on the original site in the Campo. ^^z^ii^M^^S^^t^. rJ^e^. IX SIENA 175 unattainable by Giotto, dwindled off into a school of trite copyists and shallow chiaroscurists, J.v, , u THE MARKET, SIENA. betrayed by Pintoricchio, the driest of the Um- brians, and Sodoma, the emptiest scholar Lionardo 176 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. ever tried to fill. For grace and beauty the Sienese women have been famous, and are famous still. They are meet to be loved — but who dare love them ? Quick and proud, high-spirited and vivacious, luxurious, idle, and superb at once, they are inconstant lovers, and in the old days were even so. They fought like Lapiths on the walls when Marignano and his Spaniards held that last grim leaguer of a year and a half ; but when the capitulation was signed they threw themselves into their enemies' arms, and wel comed the slayers of their kin with carpets in the windows and flowers for their feet. Or fii giammai Gente si vana com' e la sanese ? cries the keen, great Florentine, scorning this chivalrous, feather-headed, mettlesome brood. And well he might, being of whom he was — of the conquering race. For this people went forth to war, but they always fell. It is not the least of Dante's credentials by any means, this lightning glance of his at Siena ; nor is it for nothing that of all the figures- he chose to stand for the city in his dread vision of things as they were, three emerge out of the gloom and horror: Sapia, to wit, who flouted God ; Albero, who tried to fly ; and La Pia, who rx SIENA 177 was beautiful, unhappy, and died young.1 As they were then, so they are now ; they and they only have made their Siena ; the flushed hill-city is the vesture of their spirit. Tragic, futile, amorous, ardent, unhappy, above all of them . '¦ ¦¦¦ c«,:;^r THE CONSUMA, SIENA. La Pia stands before time as the emblem of her nation. " Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma." 2 1 See back, Chapter II., for the consideration of this great power of Dante's. 2 My brief summary of Sienese history, such as it is, must be sought in the Appendix to this chapter : what I have not been able to say there may be indicated here. It is that, just as character is what one sees all over Siena, so it is what one can find detailed in every page of Sienese history : the blend — if I may repeat myself — ofthe tragic and the futile. Not a person upon her scene but betrays some twist, some salient peak ; not a biography could be made but it would, be notable for some sharpness VOL. II N 178 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. It is the firm opinion of the other nations of Tuscany that the Sienese are mad. I remember Young men of driving once to the city from Colle in siena. a pelting storm of rain, and how Trombino, the pertest Florentine that ever sucked a lemon, and one of the best drivers, prepared me for the worst by loud confidences from his box. " The skies weep, signore," he said, "and well they may, for we are going among a people to whom those imbecilli of Volterra are as senators and statesmen." I told him that this was what they call fiorentinismo, and hurt him by the imputation. " To begin with, sir," he replied, " con rispetto parlando, I am not a Florentine. No, thank God, but a plain Pont'-a-Mensolano. Moreover, all the world knows that I am telling you the truth. These people of Siena — why, did your lordship never hear of the Grand Duke Leopoldo, what he of disaster, some splendid push for fame, and disastrous recoil, some heart ache, some cry prolonged and solitary. Provenzano Salvani, for example, no doubt the greatest of the Sienese — upon what does his fame rest if not upon his sardonic end in the field of Colle, his death, and the rout of his host, which depended upon a comma ? Pandolfo Petrucci — how high he soared, what a palace he built ! He was the Magnificent for a season ; yet the person of a vicious, pretty baggage of a Salicottina dragged him down into the mire. Pienza, a broad city without citizens, is the ridiculous monument of zEneas Sylvius, who sat the throne of Peter and is otherwise famous for a luxurious tale. Saint Catherine, true daughter of her nation, coaxed and stung the Popes into Rome, but she could not make them Christians. And I don't think any failure recorded of any son or daughter of Siena is more pathetic to consider than this of hers. rx SIENA 179 replied to the Sanesi when they asked him for the profits of the dazio for ten years, to build themselves a manicomio ? ' Manicomio ? Che, 180 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. che!'' says his Excellency, 'what next? Shut your gates, my brothers, and lock them, and there is your manicomio ready made, and all your madmen inside it.'1 Now, certainly, he would never have made a speech like that, to which all Europe would listen, unless he had good reason." It is not true that the Sienese are mad, but it is quite true that they have strongly marked idiosyncrasy, very hard to describe, but finding its readiest outlet in " peacockery." Processions, displays, spectacles, and shows — these things are innate. Just as with us, when we think well of a compatriot we entertain him at dinner, so the Sienese give him a procession. And as our notion of a public holiday seems incompletely realised without a bugler upon the box-seat of a four-horse brake, so theirs can only be satisfied by tossing flags. Florence has her day of San Giovanni, her Easter Saturday and Giorno dei Grilli ; but processions are a small part of these : a general junketting is more truly what goes on. Whereas in Siena, at the festivals of Saint Catherine or of the Virgin Mary, or at that of Corpus Domini, whatever solemnities mark the *This is a good story of Trombino's, and shows that a Lorrainer could wield a rapier. Compared with it, Lorenzo's gibe is bludgeon-work. "To a Sienese who condoled with him upon his eyesight, and added that the air of Florence was bad for the eyes, Lorenzo retorted, ' And that of Siena for the brain.' " — Armstrong, Lorenzo de' Medici, 301. TX SIENA 181 day — and sometimes it may be horse-racing, and always it is Mass — one begins it and ends it with processions, music, banners to the wind. The young men are extremely expert with flags, and very small provocation is needed — a birthday, a party of pleasure, five-and-twenty francs in hand '"" ' f:-r- - ^::;.« f ¦-;:; V*j ¦ * Sa Wk«r fk FONTE OVILE, SIENA. — to set the alfieri twirling down the streets with the solemn gaiety of dervishes, tossing their great silken banners, now up, now down, now level with the telegraph-wires, now carpets for the pavement, now drapery for the slim body of the handler, and becoming his sinuous graces mighty well. Clothes again! They are very fond of 182 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. mediaeval dress, parti-coloured trunks, slashes and points, doublets, short cloaks, red caps and plumes : " targetted tailzies," as Knox used to call them, they wear them bravely and admire each other. One after another the contrade have their day of flagging. In Saint Catherine's honour the Goose struts before every door in Fontebranda, and the flag-bearers dance before her silver image up and down her street just as David did before the ark. The Madonna of Provenzano has her day, San Bernardino his ; the Madonna del Voto is never forgotten ; on two days of the year all the contrade together vie with each other who shall make the greatest display ; and the city bristles with the totem-signs of chosen creatures. The Snail's horns are exalted, the Giraffe snuffs war in the air, and says among the captains, " Ha, ha ! " The Goose defies the Panther, the Dragon and the Grub, worms alike, forget their common parent. They know that men will be ready to die this day that their name may be glorious ; and that, likely enough, some man will die. Then indeed, as Mr. Heywood says, husband and wife, should they have come together from opposing signs, will separate for the occasion ; and the woman will go to her father's house, " there to exult or weep " in her nation's fate. For though Siena is a nation, it JZt&?&as ^Z&rns CZa?z£ J&zadtzs. IX SIENA 183 contains seventeen nations within its walls, not one of which has a good word to say for another.1 But I have been led away from Sienese youth, which I must describe as flamboyant, and from Sienese maidenhood, which, of a Maidensof surety, is not coy. Flaming is the Siena" word for her young men, so soon set afire, but superb for her young women, so dangerous to importune. They give you to understand that they are there to be wooed ; but the same lazy eyelids proclaim that they may hardly be won. Doubt not but that there are girls of Siena of the pleading, tender, die-away sort, divine children, dangerous to men. Of such was Aurelia Gualandi, whose tale is yet to be told. Also there are the secret, slow-smiling, green-eyed, ivory-pale women celebrated by Matteo, son of Giovanni, who are to be found not only in the Accademia delle Belle Arti, but at Mass in the churches or with children on the Lizza. But the typical Sienese virgin is not one of these ; rather she is tall, lithe, free-moving as a panther, hath a bold glance and a very high head, fncessu patet Dea: her gait is Dian's if her deeds are not. Nor are they often. All things seem lawful to her; she walks thorny paths with the light foot of a 1 See Mr. W. Heywood's Palio of Siena for a popular, but most excel lent account of these strange affairs. 1 84 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. nymph ; she dips her hands in muddy pools, but fouls them not. Of such was Livia, the divine, PALAZZO TOLOMEI, SIENA. the remarked Livia, with whom you shall be acquaint before this book is Qne chapter the IX SIENA 185 heavier ; and a good note in the Appendix hereto will give you the names and deeds of three more. They were, then, a people of French habit, a chivalrous people — frank, noble, attracted by the best of its kind, furious lovers of good alike and evil. They loved the Lady of heaven, but they THE SERVI, SIENA. loved no less the Lady of the stews — that im perious, kindly, beautiful, but altogether abomin able Venus of the plebs, who maddened their Checho Angiolieri and drained their Pandolfo down to the lees. It is most pertinent to inquire what sort of outlet this people found, what sort of a flood-mark, so to speak, they left upon the 186 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. shores of Time ; for mark, besides a pathetic name, they must needs have made. What mark? None in literature, that's certain. One poet, Checho Angiolieri — unless Perfetti, the improvvisatore, whom Literature, Monsieur de Brosses admired, is to be reckoned ; one novelist, San Bernardino ; one humanist, /Eneas Sylvius ; one historian, Mala- volti, with nothing but volume to recommend him; and the tale is told. Mr. L. Douglas, in a recent work, gives two bad reasons for the absence of literary faculty, and one good one — so excellent, indeed, that it is impossible to have a better. " The Sienese," he says, thirdly, " were not a literary people." Can there be a better reason for the absence of literature in a race of men ? That the Sienese, as he urges in his firstly and secondly, "wasted their energies in political strife," is beside the mark ; for what else, pray, did every other people in Tuscany? Or if political excitement forbade artistic energy, why, as he labours afterwards to show, were the painters so active ? Had he rather pointed out that literature demands leisure of the heart, — which may perfectly subsist in the midst of a whirlwind of politics, — and that in Siena there never was any such blessing, I should have had no quarrel with him. Both terms of that pro- Mir bjh ¦^HaAAac y/zrc'cfunf&rwvi/. cft&ncu IX SIENA 187 position are true. Leisure of the heart can always be secured by the poet whose heart insists THE CATHEDRAL, SIENA. upon it. Dante had it, though he was seethed in the Florentine ferment, and wandered abroad 188 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. from bitterness to bitterness. Yet he had it. That heart which he gave into the green-eyed lady's keeping in her ninth year he never asked back again. But the Sienese never had their hearts at rest. Two love-affairs at once kept them continually and love- astir, neither of them within the affairs. Florentine grasp, and neither of them inducive of literary exercise. The first was chivalry, the meat of the eyes; the second piety, the wine of the soul. These are ardours which involve a splendid strenuousness in pursuit fatal to letters; and they were blent here in a way peculiar to the Sienese among Italian peoples. The Sienese were militant pietists, devout chevaliers. Their service of the Virgin was exactly feudal ; she was their suzerain, their liege lady. At one time or another every armigerous male in the city must have put his hands between her hands and sworn to be her man. There is room for passion in all this, but none for artistry, without which literature will not thrive. If Dante was too great, Petrarch was, in a sense, too small a man to have been a citizen of the Virgin's city. So there was not enough freedom from preoccupation either for a humorist like Sacchetti, or a miniaturist of Boccaccio's sort. In letters, as in most other fine things, 'tis love that makes the world go k SIENA 189 round ; and it may be love of God, or country, or a woman. But another love there must be mingled with it — the love of paper and ink. For that kind of love the Sienese had no time to spare. Let us pry more narrowly into the city. By 1 » H i | 1$ 9 rl «$ *##&>( ' " - r 6 THE RED PALACE, SIENA. position it is one of great outlooks, and can be magnificently seen from any point of Architecture the compass ; but it is unique, I believe, and ProsPeot- in this, that within the walls there are great views. Siena, like the king's daughter, is all glorious within, but, unlike the damsel, she can see herself so. The hill on which she stands is three-peaked — one more than Parnassus ; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that this hill, whose highest ioo THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. point bears the cathedral, is like a star of five points, whereof there are three greater and two lesser rays.1 From any one of these you may look upon two others, and as often as not see yet other two beyond. From the Lizza you see past San Domenico, whose ugliness not even Sienese prestige can redeem, to the ray upon which the cathedral stands. This gives you — odd effect ! — the grey dome in front of the bell-tower, the whole north side in severe profile, and the top of the Baptistry like a ragged cliff. The background of your picture is of hills grey and thunderous — the mountains of Volterra. From the steps of the Servite church there is as good a view, if not better; from the market-place at the back of the Palace, from the top of the Via Sant' Agata : and all these prospects of purple, white, and rose — sweet-pea colour — with bright green interspersed, are to be had without passing the walls. But just as Dante, by the twist of his genius, 1 The five rays of the star end in the five great gates of Siena, to which steep streets run down into the gorge along the spines of the rock. Porta Camollia, Porta Pispini, Porta Romana, Porta San Marco, are the gates — these and the Gate of Fontebranda. The culmination of the star itself is where the church stands, on a solitary spur immediately above a cliff. You reach it, you leave it by stairs. You look upon its striped side, from San Domenico, across a glen clothed now by russet- purple roofs, green only at the bottom, where vineyards are still fruitful and shade abundant. Out of this live rock, out of the heart of Siena, the cool water flows which brims a fountain at every gate — Fontebranda, Fontegiusta, Fonte Nuova, and so on. IX SIENA 19* is not apparently Florentine, so Siena, by thrust of character, is not obviously Tuscan. Something Hi ...._ . __._.. .... a» at once rational and gay, a plain habit with some thing light-hearted, marks the long, yellow-faced, 192 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. broad-eaved streets of Florence, Arezzo, and Pistoja, and is to be discerned in towns of more individuality, towns like Lucca and Pisa. There are whole quarters of Siena where you won't see it at all. A typical Florentine palace of the Quattro cento is the Riccardi. The Strozzi is of the same order, but carried up to the superlative. The Pitti is the dream of a megalo-maniac. But compare with these the great Sienese hotels of the same century; remember that magnificent red house on the left arc of the Campo.1 There is an allure upon it, a grace, a distinction, a bid for the apple which the Florentines knew not of. Even the Piccolomini, Rossellino's though it be, has (to my eyes) a curious felicity of design, and a choiceness denied to what he did for the Rucellai in Florence, and certainly denied to the great Strozzi heap. But it is when one comes to the Gothic houses, the Tolomei, for instance, or the Palazzo Pubblico, that one finds out wherein the specific flower of Sienese beauty still blows. There are whole streets of the like of these 2 — 1 As for the Campo, Montaigne says with excellent judgment, " The Piazza of Siena is the finest of any city in the world." I am very sure he is right, if great palaces, space, and a tower like an aloe-blossom have anything to do in a comparison. Next to it, in Italy, I should put the Prato della Valle of Padua. These two places seem to me as if they had been sprung whole — totus teres, etc. — out of a man's brain. 2 I don't mean, of course, that there are whole streets of thirteenth- century palaces, but of palaces inspired by thirteenth-century art. ,ff>ap./^jt'c'i/' ¦'^Oe; ix SIENA 193 empty streets, left for you and the wind to wander as you list. Here are the places wherein to woo the muse of Siena ; for chivalry has thriven here, or there is nothing expressive in architecture. Siena's, however, is a case where architecture was only good when it was domestic. Its people felt Gothic when they built a palace : ... . Churches. in church-building they did worse than most of their neighbours. You will find no church in Siena worth an hour's serious con templation. Personally, I may wonder at the Duomo — and I do;1 but I am not going to sup pose it good building; and nobody pretends that it is good Gothic. Like many other churches in Tuscany — like the Duomo of Florence for one — it dazzles you, takes your breath away, and so far succeeds. If that were the simple ambition of its contriver, he has his reward. All the world wonders and applauds. Inside, there is no gain saying that the stark measures taken do produce an effect not unlike that of a fine Gothic cathe dral-church. It seems to have been got by out lining. With striped columns, with picked-out ribs, starry spandrils, loaded window-soffits, dappled pavement — well, with all this you do 1 Or, rather, I have wondered in my day. Let me refer the reader who cares for such a little matter to Earthwork out of Tuscany, 3rd edition, P- "35- VOL. II O 194 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. succeed in getting the kind of dsedal illusion which pure Gothic gives you by more lawful means ; but of course you get none of the mystery of Gothic. The Sienese did, in fact, by outlining in paint and coloured stone what the French did by masses and forms. The effect is nothing so good ; it is enormously heavy ; but it is an effect, a strong effect, and, incredible as it may seem, a Gothic effect.1 Lovers of the Queen of heaven, they have not been able to build her a house; but have they painted her portrait? Assuredly Painting. . , they have tried, as never lover yet, to show her to us as she showed herself to them, without spot, utterly kind, of peerless beauty, yet a crowned queen. To see Sienese paintings is to have no doubt of this. Their Madonnas have a beauty not of this world; but their paintings are not pictures. The gallery at Siena is evidence of love, but not of art. Just as a doting husband will dress his wife delightfully, hang her little person with jewels and chains, and set a crown upon her empty little head, and 1 For one instance out of many of unlawful practice, take the line of popes' heads under the clerestory windows ; what is that but a way of embossing ? But to emboss a building with popes' heads which cannot even be seen for what they are, is more than unlawful — is outrageous. The culmination of busyness, overlaying and overdoing, is to be sought in the Piccolomini Library, whose frescoes, if they were not gilt, would be nothing. It is as if one were to keep one's books in a jewel-case. ix SIENA 195 with every ounce of value he puts on her will be spending and allaying his frenzy of adoration — so I find the Sienese painters to have been, from Duccio, whom Mr. Douglas so strangely exalts, to Neroccio, beloved by Mr. Berenson. They loved Madonna far above their force as msmm THE OSSERVANSA, SIENA. artists ; but, mercifully for themselves and us, they had gold-leaf in plenty and a wonderful knack of pattern. Herein they found their consolation and their snare. They thought they were showing her worthy of their love when they were showing their love worthy of her. Their pictures are less pictures than panels of conventional ornament, 196 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. and, as such, excellence can go no farther. I don't suppose the world can show a vision more exquisitely frail and lovely than a picture of Matteo of Siena's ; and yet a vision it is, lighter than vanity itself, and emptier, and easier pricked, if one had the heart to do it. And the truth, of course, is that it lay not in the Sienese nature to do anything wholly or long.1 1 Two things will strike the candid visitor to the Belle Arti of Siena. The first is that the Sienese painted little but the Madonna ; the second, that they painted her flat. A rocky background here and there, a suggestion of an horizon somewhere, a sky which is neither black nor scratched gold, semblances of men and of angels, are not enough to break down the law. So far as life is concerned, all these things are hieroglyphs • life has nothing to do with the business; the world is a cloister-garden, a place of temporary sojourn fit to dream in. It is the fact that the Sienese painters were illuminators from first to last, with the one possible exception of Ambrogio Lorenzetti. From Duccio, the Byzantine, through Taddeo and Sano, to Benvenuto the embroiderer, to Matteo and Neroccio, the neurotic and the fantastic, there is but one subject, the Sacra Conversazione, one treatment, the gilder's. Whether with the blue background and diapered crimson curtain of fresco, or the fondo d'oro of the altarpiece, the miniaturist method persists ; and it is equally impossible to deny the charm it has, or the speed with which it can cloy. Both are due to its cloistral, recollected air, its flavour of the oratory, its intense limitation, its lavish ornament and extreme beauty. It is undoubtedly true that the man who calls himself a miserable sinner every day for a year either forgets it or doubts it profoundly at the end of the term. So here, if you steadfastly behold a painted ecstasy, you may be rapt out of yourself for a season ; but not if you behold nothing else ; not if you continue to behold it for years. But decoration, for example ! It would indeed be difficult to get more magnificent wall-covering than the great devotional fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico of this place. Types of more refined spiritual beauty than those of Benvenuto and Matteo I do not believe to exist. And here, at least, are two Sienese painters who are illustrated by life (if they do not illustrate it) ; for these lovely, frail, desirous women are national ; they are Sienese, than whom there are none more beautiful ix SIENA 197 But then — all deductions made : history denied, painter's work decried — what a city of cities Siena remains ! All her gallant, im possible memories — the Spending Club, whose house still stands ; Checho and his beautiful wench at Fontebranda ; Provenzano begging in the Campo ; Pier Pettignano, the inspired comb- seller; poor fragrant Saint Catherine, whose shrivelled head you may still see if you care ; Pandolfo Petrucci doting on a bad girl ; ^Eneas Sylvius penning a love-tale and making epigrams upon the Miraculous Blood of Mantua; Livia in all long Italy. Matteo's Madonna, in a halo of golden straw, walks the Via di Citta at this hour, with the same ivory tints, the same doubtful smile. Her green eyes sparkle and peer as ever they did ; her slim fingers play with each other as you speak to her; they would go on playing if you spilled your heart over her feet. A lazy beauty; either she hath vice or she is stupid. Half the host of Benvenuto's heaven may be seen in the Campo on those white-hot days of August when the Palio is running. As for Neroccio's impossible blondes — impossibly fair, impossibly slim — with their hair like pale silk and their faces' like pink peonies, these belong to some still seraglio of the mind, have lived neither on earth nor live in heaven. Gracious images of green-sick adoration, nymphs of the nynrpholept — look at them, wonder, desire (if you choose) : they are art, and good art, but they are the art of them who believe that the world is a garden enclosed. Painting is more than outline and surface ornament; Giotto's Florence knew better, and Carpaccio's Venice too, and Mantegna's Padua. It may be a question, when discussing the absolute in this matter, how far any Italian painting of any school whatever may stand beside that of the Low Countries: my say has been said; the quarrel is an old one and somewhat musty. But, like for like, there can be none at all that where the Florentine pushed up from height to height of mastery over scope and method, the Sienese never rose above a softened and elegant ideography. Fra Angelico himself, the painter of faery without peer, is a realist when confronted with Sano di Pietro. 198 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. Fausta in Dian's buskins and white tunic1 — absurd, pitiful, gallant, lonely race ! Your unthrift is to me more splendid than all the snug Floren tine masserigia! They tell the tale of the Madonna of Provenzano, that hollow-eyed, armless goddess of three centuries' devotion, that she constituted herself patroness of that ill-famed quarter of the city, did miracles upon the bruised bodies of her clients, and was adored by them all. Of what secrets was she not a partaker? Of what griefs was she not consolatrix ? What halting feet did she not sustain ? It is highly characteristic of a city which never thought of anything but love of women, and whose virtues, as well as whose failings, sprang from that prepossession that they should invoke such a goddess. Patroness of 1 There were three Hippolytas in the field : the Signora Livia Fausta, the Signora Laodamia Forteguerra — was ever a more glorious name? — and the Signora Piccolomini. The occasion was the Spanish leaguer : and here they are, as Monluc saw them in their gear of war : "Toutes les dames de la ville de Sienne se despartirent en trois bandes. La premiere estoict conduicte par la Signora Forteguerra, qui estoict vestue de violet, et toutes celles qui la suivoient aussi, ayant son accoustrement en facon d'une nymphe, court et monstrant le brodequin; la seconde estoict la Signora Piccolomini, vestue de satin incarnardin, et sa troupe de mesme livree; la troisieme estoict la Signora Livia Fausta, vestue toute de blanc, comme aussi estoict sa suitte avec son enseigne blanche." A picture, surely, for Ghirlandajo ! And here is Monluc's tribute : "II ne sera jamais, dames siennoises, que je n'immortalise vostre nom, tant que le livre de Monluc vivra; car, a la verite, vous estes dignes d'immortelle louange, si jamais femmes le feurent." Gallant tribute to gallant doing; but it all availed them nothing. ix APPENDIX 199 hetairtz! One can imagine a more ignoble office, I think. APPENDIX SIENESE HISTORY To say — as I do say — that of history in the proper sense, of significant, correlated history, Siena has none whatever, is only to insist that her unhappy biography, if one could by pains get at it, will be found to be the sum of her character and environment. The things which stir the pulse of every sojourner in her solitudes — to which I have abundantly re ferred ¦ — are very worthy to be felt, proper objects of inquiry for the archaeologist, and not to be lost sight of by the histo rian who shall build with his bricks. They may some day give substance to a history of the Tuscan race, but they will never make a history of Siena — as of late Mr. Douglas has essayed to compose it. Such a thing as that Siena has not to give to him or any learned man ; nor could we have had it by any possibility. Let us examine this matter a little. Born, as every other Tuscan nation was, of a Frankish graft upon an Etruscan stock, she endured, with every other, the same phases of development, and shared, with every other but one,1 the same unavoidable fate. Whether Bishop or Gastaldo was the nucleus round which the little body- politic was formed, matters nothing to the traveller in her quiet and shadowed streets. Suffice it, for present purposes, that we find a commune of Siena in the twelfth century at war with that of Florence in 1141. They warred about a frontier town, - — Semifonte the lost, in this case — and strengthened them selves by the very act of loss, as mostly happens in warfare. Wars, too, if raids and counter-raids can be so called, with 1 That one, of course, was Florence, born to dominate all. 200 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. the feudal chiefs of the hills absorb the next full century ; slowly the commune is too many for the mountain thieves — Aldobrandeschi of Monte Amiata, Pannocchieschi in the dreary Volterran country, brigand-haunted then as now ; one does not need their names. Florence went through the same courses with her Uberti and Alberti, having been driven to them by the same needs. What Tuscan state did not ? Be fore a quarter of the thirteenth century had gone by, the last of her neighbours fell in to Siena ; then began an age of pos sible government. The rule of the Ventiquattro was set up under Provenzano Salvani, greatest of the Sienese, and Bona- guida Lucari, one of the most pious,1 and had a splendid setting-off. The Ghibellines of Florence, chased from their own city, became guests and allies : one of them was Farinata degli Uberti. In 1260 was fought the red field of Montaperti, by virtue of which crowning mercy, for four or five years, Florence virtually lay at the feet of Siena, and was only saved from lying literally there by the daring and patriotism of Farinata. Every reader of Dante has pictured the scene at Empoli : all the savage little States yapping and snarling at the beaten Florence, and Farinata confronting them.2 They yapped and snarled, but they did no more. Followed three terrible years, each with its smashing blow to Siena and the Ghibellines: Benevento in 1266, Tagliacozzo in 1268, Colle in 1269. In this last affair the capture, death, and shameful fate of Provenzano Salvani made it out of the question that Siena could ever be more than a provincial town. Now here too, except for the last struggle of all, when she was brought into the vortex set swirling by Caesar Borgia, and went down in it, the relations of Siena with history cease. As for the general stages of her biography, feuds, vendettas, 1 With San Bernardino, he seems to have been the only Sienese who knew how to combine piety and common sense. 2 See back, Chapter XVI. of this volume. ix APPENDIX 201 and faction-fights which count for much in all Tuscan story, make up the rest of Siena's. They were never so paralysing as the Florentine or Aretine, nor pursued to such ravenous lengths as the Pisan, nor spread so widely as the Pistoiese ; in fact, they were confined to two families, and made little or no stir outside the contado. The Salimbeni and Tolomei were protagonists in the blood-spattered little melodrama which began about 13 15 and did not stop until Duke Cosimo de' Medici stopped all. Independently of these squabbles the story of government ran the usual Tuscan course. The Twenty-Four went down in the ruin of Tagliacozzo. It had been a temperately compounded oligarchy, such as has always been found to suit best to the Italian temper, half feudal, half mercantile. The Nine who followed them were frankly bourgeois, with money to lend and bills to discount — peace-at- any-price men. The plague killed them, and the Twelve reigned in their stead, a government of small tradesmen. Theirs was the day of the Condottieri (whom they and their predecessors had called up to save them) : free-riding, free- booting gentry with resounding, brazen names — " Enemies of God," Companions of the Hat, Companions of St. George, White Companies, Hawkwood, and the likes of Hawkwood ; petty raiders making way for greater men of larger ideas, Castruccio, Sforza, Piccinnino, Montefeltro. A government bolstered by such buttresses could not last, and did not. In 1368 the remnants of the old factions — the Ventiquattro, the Nove, and what not — arose, carried the Palace by assault, and made opportunity for a lower class yet : that of the arti sans. Those were great days for the popol minuto — 137 1 or thereabouts ; days for the Company of the Grub and their redoubtable leader, one Domenico an old-clothes man, with a pretty knack of piety and murder. But why pursue the tale, which is that of every town in Tuscany, and is exemplified once and for all in that of Florence ? So far, the reader will see, every step can be 202 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. watched on the Arno ; so forth also it can be matched. For upon the shoulders of Domenico and his riformatori of Siena, just as surely as Cosimo Vecchio upon those of the Ciompi and their sequels, there climbed up one Pandolfo Petrucci to the tyrant's chair ; and he might have held it, as the Medici held theirs, but for two reasons. The Visconti-Valois marriage (old affair of Milan) let Europe into Italy, and Pandolfo took the wrong side — here is one reason ; and the other is that he had no descendants worth a rush and no collaterals either. I observe that Mr. L. Douglas T thinks meanly of Pandolfo. Machiavelli thought highly of him, and Professor Villari shares the opinion. Students of the man and his times will take their choice of sides, remembering, however, that Machiavelli had had a hand in most of the rubbers he reports. Pandolfo's fate was to contend with Caesar Borgia, at long odds. Against the papal battalions what had he but the name of the King of France ? It may fairly be said that he made a match of it. He outlived Pope Alexander, saw one of his sons made Cardinal by Pope Julius, and died leaving his tyranny intact. His son Borghese was a worthless bully who could neither use his inheritance nor procure its use by a successor. He was worse than Piero de' Medici in this at least, that he could not beget a Lorenzo. The Petrucci dynasty, so to call it — a dynasty of one — came to an end in 1524 ; and then afterwards the end of Siena as a State was a matter of a few years. The Emperor Charles marched in in 1526, and his Spaniards were expelled, by the gust of a dying flicker of patriotism, in 1536. But in 1553 Don Garcia brought them back, and the end was at hand. Of that bitter siege I shall say nothing, but refer the reader to Captain Napier and the Commentaries of Monluc, as brave a Gascon as ever crooked an arm. In spite of this matchless Monluc, in spite of Piero Strozzi, an explosive Florentine outlaw, in spite of the noble lady Livia Fausta and her 1 In his painstaking " History" of Siena. ix APPENDIX 203 company of Amazons, in spite of Brandano and his soothsay, in spite of Madonna, in 1555 Monluc walked out, a beaten man of a beaten master, and Marignano walked in. Two years later Siena was handed over to Duke Cosimo of Florence. Here is the tale told. First Tuscan state to be marked out by Florence for conquest, she was the last to fall. But why she was so marked, and why she was doomed to fall, are questions which belong not to Sienese history, but to Florentine, to European history. I shall add here, and with that pleasure one always has in recommending a good book, that Mr. William Heywood seems to me the only English writer who really knows, and has been able to convey, the specific nature of this extraordinary people. The three of his books best known to me are, Our Lady of August and the Palio of Siena (1899) ; The Ensamples of Fra Filippo, a Study of Mediczval Siena (1901); A Pictorial Chronicle of Siena (1902). All these are published by the excellent and expert Signor Torrini in the Via di Citta. Mr. Heywood 's work has that rare combination of humour and erudition, and that even rarer blend of the critical with the enthusiastic faculty, which makes good and wise readers as it is followed from stave to stave. To love Italy, and to give her lovers, a man must be a classic, something of a pedant, and a humanist. The past lives in every angle of the road ; the forms are so precise, the air so clear, that exact scholarship is of the essence of the contract ; and yet one must be tender with the people, see them the best thing in their country, be patient, be just, and yet be a lover. Italy has been well served before now by men of our race. Evelyn loved her, so did Dennis, and Storey, the American sculptor, whose " Roba di Roma " should have earned him something like immortality. At this hour Mr. Carmichael and Mr. Heywood, each in his own way, are upholding the tradition. But I give the palm to Mr. Heywood. CHAPTER X THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA When Livia told me that she was eighteen, and tall for her age, I could only reply that her years had done well for her, since inches became her. She admitted it without any kind of complacency ; she glanced over her shoulder to the little mirror and looked at her straight back. " Non c' e male," she said, and then, turning about, nodding brightly a farewell to her counterfeit — " E pure bellina — It's rather pretty " ; which undoubtedly it was. Her father, who was mending one of his boots with part of a cardboard box, paused from his labours, tack in mouth, to admire this re markable progeny of his. He looked her up, he looked her down, he nodded, chuckled, rubbed his hands. "One would not find her fellow in all the nations of Siena," he said to me. " Senta, signore — she rears up her crest like the Mangia tower." Livia then, not choosing to be praised by any one but herself, flamed into scolding and 204 chap.x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 205 drove him out-of-doors to his business. Ad- ON THE WAY TO SIENA. miring her more than ever, he departed with uplifted hands. " Cosa straordinaria ! E quas 206 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. un arcagnuolo! Davvero, davvero, e quasi Gabriello ! " I should like to do her portrait in Boccaccio's manner, for she certainly belongs to his gallery. Livia, at eighteen, to the indolent graces of a growing girl was able to add the self-possession and stored knowledge of the world which you look for in a woman of thirty. Her composure and arrogance could not be an offence, because they seemed so reasonable and she so good- tempered. Nothing startled her, nothing stirred her to raptures either of wonder or delight, nothing hurt, nothing disturbed, and, so far as I can tell, nothing shocked her. I have seen her walk through the crowded market, and cross the Campo when it was packed with men, as calmly, as unconsciously, as idly as a queen might pass down a corridor between her ranked and bowing suitors. She had a long, slow, swinging manner of going, carried her head very high, and looked straight in front of her. Comments were many: the Sienese are great amateurs of beauty and very outspoken : they affected her not at all. If she became aware — and she was ever aware — of some person to whom she wished to speak, she stopped and said her say, but rarely looked at him. Her voice was low and thrilling; there was the soft blur upon it — like the bloom on a plum — which x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 207 her nation has. In speech she was short, clear, and succinct ; it was impossible — often unhappily so — to doubt her meaning. She was the most vividly beautiful girl I have ever seen, without any kind of exception ; and those are not terms to apply at random. Pretty, handsome, lovely, charming, a many young woman may be ; but she who is beautiful (it must be said) shares that quality with the Venus of Milo, Helen of Troy, Desdemona, Imogen, Ethel Newcome, and Diana Vernon — and with nobody else. Therefore she belongs to the narrowest circle, the most ex clusive society in this world or the next. Livia, without cavil, was a member of that society ; and I had rather state it thus bluntly than essay the auctioneer's catalogue, the " Item, a grey eye or so," which Shakespere has made ridiculous. Her eyes, by the way, were more green than grey, and the effect she had upon one was that of a moonlight night, compact as that is of ivory pallors and velvet darks, at once clear and cold, severe and calm. I may add that I never saw her wear a hat. That wondrous halo of lemon straw which the maids of her city affect would have become her as her crescent sets Dian apart from her bevy ; but Livia chose to be crowned only by her black hair. She denied herself many other advantages: 208 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. she was capable of high rages, and looked then like Medusa ; but mostly she was superbly still. Her tongue could be shrewish — nay, it could bite like vitriol, but mostly it was idle. I don't know that she was affectionate ; I never saw any kindly passion in her, and only once her steady eyes dimmed by tears. She was always friendly with me, after our first introduction, which I must show to have been a delicate affair, and never failed to salute me in the street, though, after her usual fashion, she never seemed to see me there. I don't know that it matters much, or that it would be very interesting, otherwise I could tell how I have accompanied her to feasts and festivals, to pro cessions and Church mysteries, have sat with her at singular tables, and knelt by her side at dusky little shrines unknown to any casual travellers. It seems better to tell how she expounded to me the cult of the great Madonna of Siena, and in so doing herself and her father's nation ; and for a beginning of that I must show how she and I became acquainted. I was on the Lizza one breezy May morning — that wooded spur from which you look past the rock of San Domenico to that of Citta, and have the whole length of that wonderful striped church in focus, with its light-poised dome thrust, by accident of the ground, actually in front of its x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 209 sable and white guardian, the bell-tower. If I tired of this, I had the far view of Monte Maggio to feast upon, and all the purple west. About me and above were sunlight and the fragrance of flowering trees ; below my feet the players at PIAZZA, SIENA. pallone, who never forego the grand gesture for the great shot. It seemed good for me to be there — but then, desiring to smoke, I found my match-box empty, and was a baffled voluptuary indeed. " These are my crosses, Mr. Wesley," — one remembers Fitzgerald's good story. Now I suppose that I had looked round about 210 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. in that vaguely harassed manner an Englishman is so ready to wear. I have no doubt of it. In so doing I became aware of some one by my side, courteous, deferential, a Tuscan. An old, anxious man, hawker of matches, must have been on the watch : he had seen his opportunity bursting-ripe, and had pounced upon it. His tender air con strains me still. " Ecco, signore, fiammiferi — buoni, freschi," said he. It was not, believe me, that he wished to trade, but that he was resolute to please. The instinct is as old as the Caesars ; and so is that which moved him next — the deci sion to improve upon so auspicious a moment. I selected my matches, paid him, and saluted ; he fixed me with a penetrating, melancholy eye, and with a wheedling air inquired, " Vuol vedere una raggazza ? " Upon my soul, this was a very different thing; and yet I suppose ten men out of eleven would have avoided, as I did, with my " Che raggazza ? " He bowed his head, but did not cease to pierce me with those melting, deprecating eyes. " Mia figliuola," he said gently, and for some minutes I was dumb. He too being at the end of his tether, I was enabled to reflect upon this singular proposition. The new is the unexpected, the unexpected the irregular, the irregular either shocking or a bore x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 211 to my orderly nation; but this was a chain of habit which I was young enough then to discard. And, apart from it, there seemed no reason parti cularly cogent why I should not see this person's daughter, and many reasons why I should. Homo sum, etc. — here was one, and a plausible argu ment ; the gratification of curiosity, the achieve ment of an adventure, the gratification of a solicitous parent — here were sufficient others. To be short, I wrote his address upon a card : Tortoni, Tertulliano, Vicolo al Vento, No. — 4" and promised to wait upon him in the course of the afternoon. He professed himself my ser vant, his house my inn, and withdrew. This Vicolo al Vento is an alley neither savoury nor polite which runs out of the Via del Re into the Piazza di Provenzano. I knew it for the recognised parade-ground of the beggars, who meet there one day in the week to apportion the coverts, as you might say, which each is to draw. The ground-floors of its houses are let out as black little wine-shops, coffee-shops, tinsmiths' and chandlers' shops. These I had seen and dis approved. But now I was to penetrate deeper into the arcana ; and I did it not without excite ment, for my transient view of the mystagogues who ruled there, got, so far from my inn windows, 212 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. had asserted them to be Jews, procuresses, demi reps, and unfortunates of all sorts and either sex. However, it appeared that my eyes had been too sweeping. The first floor of number — , for in stance, announced a Captain of Light Horse — a perfectly reputable employment ; the second floor had a card pinned to the door with the name Bazzi, Antinoo — I quarrelled with the Christian name ; the third floor sheltered the Vedova Sas- setti, who was a midwife ; and the fourth, though it did not say so, my Tortoni, Tertulliano, whom I suspected to be an old scoundrel. He was bowing in his doorway as I reached it, bowing very low and making passes with his hands. He looked uncommonly like a hoary spider webbing me to my destruction, and I could fancy with what bright and avid eyes he would begin his meal — his f era pasta, like Ugolino's, upon the top of my head. He was quite with out speech, but his hands were his eloquent apologists : backing and bowing, weaving his spells, he ushered me into a low white-walled room, where from an open window leaned a girl, her elbows upon the ledge, her eyes fixed upon the street below. I could see nothing of her except her back, which was clothed in a print blouse and green skirt, her hair lustrous black and built up into a tower, and, through the glass, THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 213 her severe profile, like the head of Ligieia on a coin of Syracuse, silver-cold, remote, and keen. Not more aloof could Jezebel have shown as she looked down upon the Man of God in the court yard than did this proud daughter of Tortoni, :Tf l!.8 ¦-rv^r^ll:, i ^^gg^jni MARKET, SIENA. Tertulliano, upon the atoms two hundred feet or more below her feet. This, then, was the position. My chattering, most agitated host was in misery which I could hardly guess at. He dared not call his daughter from the window, and could do nothing without her. He tried to make a joke of it, and me a 214 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. party to the joke. He affected a mock despair — ruefully enough — and looked to see if I would take it. But I would not. Instead, I looked about me at a humble but perfectly decent room. A curtained bed was in a corner, a rep-covered sofa against a wall. Above it hung a confec tioner's almanac, which showed a young man, very decollete in a blue and white vest and pink socks, rowing a lady in pale mauve up an Alpine waterfall. The lady had a scarlet parasol in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and boots which buttoned nearly to the knee. There was no doubt about that. The only other picture was a small card displaying a miraculous Madonna. She was crowned and had seven swords sticking into her heart. Gowns were no doubt concealed behind a second hanging curtain ; a crucifix stood on a little table by itself: I think that was all. The whole establishment seemed to me scrupu lously decent. I suppose it was very poor, but certainly I should never have noticed that had not Livia chosen that I should ; and when she brought herself into the midst of it, we might have been in the Palazzo del Magnifico. Tortoni, Tertulliano, having attained what, apparently, was to be a coup of magnitude, was now in a hurry to say his Nunc Dimittis. In fact, he was too ready, and in fact he said it too x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 215 soon. Badly in want of breath was he ; he lifted and let fall his arms as if he were dandling a baby. Wits had left him as well as breath, and as for manners, what remained of them but some poor tattered instincts ? " S' accommodi, s' accom- modi," was all he had to say; and then, without showing me any accommodation at all, he threw up his hands like a man drowning. " Io non posso piu. ! " I heard him wail, as he fled stum bling from the room. I heard him blunder down stairs : he had sought the sanctuary of the street. If one needed adventure by any chance — ! I looked at the young queen by the window. One frail hand was on the sill, one slim finger just grated on it. I had nothing to say, and she intended to say nothing. What the deuce ! The comic edge of the crisis struck me, and I broke into innumerable laughter. She was very much puzzled ; she frowned ; but I suppose she saw that I was a human being and not a milch- cow. We very soon became friends ; or if that is too great a word, reached that comfortable footing of intimacy where each is able, without effort, to get the best out of the other — as a free will offering. Livia, when you had got thus to know her, was an extremely innocent girl ; I apply the word deliberately. Her self-possession was innocence. 216 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. She had character, knew what she wanted, and exactly how far she deserved to have it. She did not choose to make bargains with Pro vidence on any but the greatest occasions of need ; but she believed that if by some fortunate chance she got more than she deserved — why, that then she had deserved it. I have said that she was hot-tempered ; she was, and proud too — as proud as a wound. She was proud of all sorts of things, but not of her beauty. This was, unhappily, too necessary a commodity of hers for any satisfaction to be in it. Certainly she was proud of being Sienese, though she always denied it. " What else could I be ? " she used to say, which sounds arrogantly enough. But when I got to know her well, I found that her real pride lay deeper, and was the faster to hold because never sure of its ground. To fetch it up flame- hot there always needed to be some speck upon the object of it — just as you may make any girl blush by saying, There's a smut on your face. Livia's contrada was her darling pride, and upon that there were as many smuts as you chose to look for. She belonged, you must know, to Pro venzano, to the contrada della Girafifa, a quarter of little fame, with a badge which had never brought luck. As a consequence, if you desired to see Livia at her fiercest, you either said of CZteo x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 217 some one that he was "andato a Provenzano" (which is our "gone to the devil"), or spoke of the Palio as the peculium of Oca or Tartuca — the Quarter of the Goose, or that of the Tortoise. Now, I never saw the Palio run in her com pany, and that is how I found her out. She said that she didn't care to go, that it was too hot, that there were too many people ; but she did go — there's the truth of it — she did go ; and screamed Giraffa ! with her neighbours, and with them had beleaguered her famous Madonna di Provenzano with petitions for weeks together. And when the race was over and the contrada of the Wave had won it, she sulked, and would not enter the church of her armless goddess. All this transparency flashing and flaunting under the eyes of a friend was too much for me ; I roundly taxed her with it, and am glad now that I did. She saved one pride by means of another, in the prettiest way. For when I had cornered her, and got her to confess that her Giraffe never had won a palio, never entered, was not even required to enter in these days, she flew upon me with a vehemence beyond belief — asking what need, pray, had the Giraffe to struggle in a crowd of thieves and assassins, when everybody knew that the patroness of the whole stupid business 218 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. was the Madonna of Provenzano — whose banner graced and crowned the field, without whom not a hand could be raised, not a vote cast ; before whom every nerbo must be laid for benediction, every knee be bent for strength to be given ? " And would it be a tolerable thing, a thing of decency, do you suppose" — she startled me: it was magnificent to see her fluttering nostrils as her scorn fanned them — " would it be decency that the sons of the patroness themselves should compete in the thing ? " It is, of course, quite true that the armless Madonna of Provenzano is the queen of the Giraffa, and Foundress, in some degree, of the Palio. I said, the Provenzani had competed ; she waved her hand. Shame had killed their base desires. Nothing now would bring them to offer themselves for the prova. " Shame — yes, and Fear." She came close to me, hissing the words in my ear. " Fear, signore. I'll tell you why. It is reasonable in every man who competes for this thing, that he should desire to win it. Well, well then, do you not know that my people could bring home the Palio more times than Bellino ever did for his poor Tartuca?" Bellino was a famous rider, unbeaten, I believe. " More times ! " cried Livia, appealing to the skies — x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 219 "they would win it for ever. They could win it on the Last Day, if there was time." I asked, how could this be ? She bunched her fingers together, and bound them closely with thumb and forefinger of the other hand. "By HOUSE OF ST. CATHERINE. hiding our Madonna of. Provenzano. Then those others could do nothing — nothing at all. There is the truth." She rose up, majestic and inspired ; she looked like a Herald Angel. The dialectic was superb — I could have kissed her foot. When she had recovered her composure and was perfectly good-tempered, I got her to talk about her Madonna — which she would have done 220 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. by the hour together. What I gathered was this much : Once the Lady of Provenzano had had a son, a Gesii of her own. It was true he was dead ; but she carried him on her knees and tended him with her hands, fanning the flies away — and she was happy, although she had hardly any worship. She lived on the outside of a house in the piazza : very few people had noticed that she was there, but she had her dead Gesu — that was company enough. But some enemies of hers — Spaniards, Floren tines, Volterrani, Livia didn't know who, and cared nothing — broke through the Camollia Gate and murdered a branca di gente (a horde of people), and settled down in Provenzano, and went out shooting whenever they chose. One of these birbanti — ruffians by profession, I think she meant — became acquainted with a donna allegra of that quarter, and used to visit her ; and this donna allegra lived in the piazza, just opposite to the Madonna, who was in the open air then, and nursed her dead Gesu day and night, and was happy, as I had been told. Well, this birbante was one day at the house of his arnica — that donna allegra she had been speaking of — and he was leaning out of the window — and I might be sure that his gun was handy. He was idle, had nothing to do ; so presently his x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 221 eye falls upon our Madonna across the way. " Tut ! " says the birbante. " See how she nurses that carrion. I'll soon put a stop to that," says he. Whereupon he ups with his gun, pulls, and pam ! he shoots the dead Gesii all to shivers, and blows into fine powder the Madonna's tending hands. The neighbours run out of doors, or look out of windows. " Who would be dead of that shot ? " they ask each other. They look up and down, round about, they see nothing extraordinary — only the smoke of the gun floating up to the chimneys. Va benissimo. They return to their affairs ; so also the birbante. But the donna allegra, who happened to be alone that evening, about the prima di notte was leaning out of her window — not looking for anybody; just looking out into the warm evening and thinking of little or nothing. She was of a happy nature, living from day to day as best she could or as she must ; and now she was certainly very happy ; but — cosa strana ! her eyes were full of tears, which flowed and flowed. They ran down her cheeks to her arms on the window, and in little streams down to the ground ; but she let them run freely, since they seemed to make her happy. And the more they flowed the happier she became. And then the miracle 222 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. occurred which I am about to tell you. Listen. There was this Giulia — that was the name of the donna allegra — crying softly to herself at the window ; and presently, down in the street, she hears, as it were, an echo of her own sweet grief — more gentle crying, and a low sobbing of words of grief: "O lasso! O poverina, che faro? O lasso! Oime!" She listened for a little — her own tears not ceasing to fall — and then, as if she knew what she was going to do, she goes to her door and down the stair, and steps across the piazza, and stops in front of the house opposite to her own, and looks up, and says : " Buona pasqua, Madonna Santissima. Che hai ? " " Oime ! " says the Madonna. " They have taken away my son." " Eh," says La Giulia, " but you know that that had to be. He is gone to Paradise ; and that is where your ladyship will find him." " They shot him, Giulia," says the Madonna ; " and my arms which held him — see, they are gone, too." Giulia looked up through the dusk — and it was as I tell you. Her arms were shot clean away at the shoulders. La Giulia cried out : " Oh, the assassins ! Oh, the cut-throat dogs ! Who has done this blasphemy ? " x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 223 " It was your caro amico, Giulia," says the Madonna. Giulia looked at the white Madonna and knew that she could not lie, even if she would. Then she ground her teeth together, and cursed the Knivsfc-4 birbante in a low voice. " Lo piglia un' acci- dente," she said — and it came true, as she learned the next day ; for the birbante had his neck broken in a fight, being thrown out of an upper window. " But," says La Giulia, " if you have lost a son you have gained a daughter; and if your arms are gone, my heart has come back." She made her reverence, and went about the 224 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. piazza from house to house, calling her neighbours and friends, women all, of her own profession. " Come all of you," she said ; " come this moment. A miracle has happened. The Madonna is crying for her son : we must be her daughters. Come, and bring tapers." So all those women came out with lighted tapers and made a great ring round about the maimed Madonna, and joined hands, singing Laudi and the Litany of the Virgin ; and kept all the hours, and never left off the rosary. And whomsoever passed by, whether man or woman, they compelled to kneel and say the Ave Maria, and lay down a quattrino in honour of their Madonna. This nightly devotion went on for many weeks of the summer, until the Madonna, being com forted, was grateful, and her gratitude, taking the heavenly form, was noised all over the city. For she made many notable miracles among women, healing them when they were sick, turn ing their hearts, and the like. And soon there was enough treasure to build the fine church, which you can see any day you please in the Piazza di Provenzano; within which, when it was finished, she herself was carried upon the shoulders of lords and cardinals, under the eyes, as Livia believes, of the Holy Father. Upon that great festa a palio was run in her honour, 'Sffyzn- zZk?7?z£m^o6^ Cfye&uty. x THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 225 and a man of the Giraffa won it, and presented it to her. And so, by degrees and degrees, nobody dared enter for the palio without seeking her benediction, or vowing her a heart, or whatsoever he could find that would please her. Livia here bent her brows at me. " This is why she is the greatest of all the Madonnas of Siena, and the Giraffa, which contains her, the greatest of all the contrade." " And you love her, Livia ? " " Gia," said Livia ; " we all love her. But I shall love her more when I am older." I objected. " Why so ? You cannot be too young, I suppose, to love her." " No," said Livia. " But it is more convenient to love her afterwards — and she quite under stands." I hope she did — in fact, I know she did, though Livia didn't think so. I remember that I ended the conversation by saying : " Livia, Livia, I am going to prophesy. I prophesy that there will be a miracle. But you must love the Madonna extremely." Livia turned away her head. " Come," I said, rising. " Take me to see her now." " I think I will not," she replied ; but after a while she proposed it herself, as if she had suddenly thought of it. 226 THE ROAD IN TUSCANY chap. The Madonna of Provenzano is in a niche, high over the altar of her somewhat gaudy temple. Every visitor to Siena must be familiar with her pinched white face and sunken eyes, her veil, her crown, her cuirassed, armless trunk. To see this magnificent young Livia kneel stiffly there, the picture of health and bodily perfection, and look steadily up at her woe-begone divinity, and gravely and familiarly talk to her, was to be assured of what I asserted before, of Livia's innocent mind. The Madonna di Provenzano, patroness of donne allegre! They all come to her in time. Upon this occasion the talk between mistress and servant was very grave. Livia was pale ; she had shawled her head to enter the church, and now drew the lace close about her chin. Conversation, slow to begin, grew very earnest; Livia seemed to be arguing with the Madonna, rather hot for her own opinion, not willing to be convinced. A footfall sounded in the church, she looked round, she touched my shoulder. " See, see," she said. " Here is old Imperia ; watch what she does." A very wizened, partly mad old woman with wandering grey hair came in upon her crutches, curtsied to the Madonna of Provenzano, and then, suddenly, changed her mind, or seemed to change it, and went out again. " We must follow her," said Livia. " Come." THE PORTRAIT OF LIVIA 227 And she took my arm. We went, very slowly (for Imperia had to drag one leg), up the hill to the f 'j^^% ; - 3* y.f^~ ^f : - , : ,; *. Wi'u KM ¦¦r:y : : ^sri l-t^iS^'i: " ~y:-f