Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  But the landlord of the pension below, where we took our meals, was no less zealous for the comfort of his guests, and at that table of his, good at any price, and wonderful for the little they gave, he presided with a hospitality which pressed them to eat of this and that, and kept the unstinted wine a-flowing, and communicated itself to Luigi, who, having cooked the dinner, hurled on a dress coat of impenetrable antiquity and rushed in to help serve it; and to Angiolina, the housekeeper, who affected a sort of Yankee old maid’s grumpiness, but was as sweet of soul as Maddalena herself. More than once has that sympathetic spirit, in passing me a dish, advised me with a fine movement of her clasping thumb which morsel to choose.

  We took our rooms in the belief that we were on the sunny side of the house; and so we were; the sun obliquely bathed that whole front of the edifice, and I never can understand why it should not have got indoors. It did not; but it was delightful in the garden, which stretched from the rear of our palace across to the city wall. Just under our windows — but far under, for we were in the fourth story — was a wide stone terrace, old, moss-grown, balustraded with marble, from which you descended by two curving flights of marble steps into the garden. There, in the early March weather, which succeeded a wind storm of three days, the sun fell like a shining silence, amidst which the bent figure of an old gardener stirred, noiselessly turning up the earth.

  In the utmost distance the snow-covered Apennines glistened against a milky white sky growing pale blue above; the nearer hills were purplish; nearer yet were green fields, gray olive orchards, red plowed land, and black cypress clumps about the villas with which the whole prospect was thickly sown. Then the city houses outside the wall began, and then came the beautiful red brick city wall, wandering wide over the levels and heights and hollows, and within it that sunny silence of a garden. While I once stood at the open window looking, brimful of content, tingling with it, a bugler came up the road without the wall, and gaily, bravely sounded a gallant fanfare, purely, as it seemed, for love of it and pleasure in it.

  I call our garden a garden, but it was mostly a succession of fields, planted with vegetables for the market, and closed round next the city wall with ranks of olive-trees. Still, next the palace there were flowers, or must have been in summer; and on another morning, another heavenly morning, a young lady, doubtless of the ancient family to which the palace belonged, came out upon the terrace from the first floor with an elderly companion, and, loitering listlessly there a moment, descended the steps into the garden to a stone basin where some serving-women were washing. Her hair was ashen blonde; she was slimly cased in black silk, and as she slowly walked, she pulled forward the skirt a little with one hand, while she drew together with the other a light shawl, falling from the top of her head, round her throat; her companion followed at a little distance; on the terrace lingered a large white Persian cat, looking after them.

  VIII

  THESE gardens, or fields, of Siena occupy half the space her walls enclose, and the olives everywhere softly embower the borders of the shrivelled and shrunken old city, which once must have plumply filled their circuit with life. But it is five hundred years since the great pest reduced her hundred thousand souls to fifteen thousand; generation after generation the plough has gone over the dead streets, and the spade has been busy obliterating the decay, so that now there is no sign of them where the artichokes stretch their sharp lines, and the tops of the olives run tangling in the wind. Except where the streets carry the lines of buildings to the ten gates, the city is completely surrounded by these gardens within its walls; they drop on all sides from the lofty ledge of rocks to which the edifices cling, with the cathedral pre-eminent, and cover the slopes with their herbage and foliage; at one point near the Lizza, flanking the fort which Cosimo built where the Spaniards failed, a gaunt ravine — deep, lonely, shadowy — pushes itself up into the heart of the town. Once, arid once only, so old is the decay of Siena, I saw the crumbling foundations of a house on a garden slope; but again and again the houses break away, and the street which you have been following ceases in acreages of vegetation. Sometimes the varied and ever-picturesquely irregular ground has the effect of having fallen away from the palaces; the rear of a line of these, at one point, rested on massive arches, with buttresses sprung fifty or seventy-five feet from the lower level; and on the lofty shoulders of the palaces, here and there, was caught a bit of garden, and lifted with its overhanging hedge high into the sun. There are abundant evidences of that lost beauty and magnificence of Siena — she has kept enough of both — not only in the great thirteenth and fourteenth century structures in the Via Cavour, the Via del Capitano, and the neighbourhood of the Palazzo Communale, but in many little wandering, darkling streets, where you come upon exquisite Gothic arches walled up in the fronts of now ordinary houses, which before some time of great calamity must have been the portals and windows of noble palaces. These gave their pathos to walks which were bewilderingly opulent in picturesqueness; walks that took us down sharp declivities dropping under successive arches between the house-walls, and flashing out upon sunny prospects of gardens; up steep thoroughfares climbing and crooking from the gates below, and stopping as if for rest in successive piazzas, till they reach the great avenue which stretches along the high spine of the city from Porta Camollia to Porta Romana. Sharp turns everywhere bring your nose against some incomparable piece of architecture, or your eye upon some view astonishingly vast, and smiling or austere, but always enchanting.

  The first night we found the Via Cavour full of people walking and talking together; and there was always the effect of out-door liveliness in the ancient town, which is partly to be accounted for by the pungent strength of the good air. This stirs and sustains one like the Swiss air, and when not in too rapid motion it is delicious. In March I will own that its motion was often too rapid. It swept cold from the Apennines, and one night it sifted the gray depths of the streets full of snow. The next morning the sun blazed out with that ironical smile which we know here as well as in Italy, and Via Cavour was full of people lured forth by his sarcastic glitter, though the wind blew pitilessly. “Marzo Matto!” (Crazy March!) said the shopman, with a sympathetic smile and impressive shrug, to whom I complained of it; and I had to confess that March was no better in America. The peasants, who took the whole breadth of Via Cavour with their carts laden with wine and drawn by widehorned dun oxen, had their faces tied up against the blast, which must have been terrible on their hills; and it roared and blustered against our lofty eyry in Palazzo Bandini-Piccolomini with a force that penetrated it with icy cold. It was quite impossible to keep warm; with his back planted well into the fireplace blazing with the little logs of the country, and fenced about on the windward side with mattresses and sofa-pillows, a suffering novelist was able to complete his then current fiction only at the risk of freezing.

  But before this, and after it, we had weather in which the streets were as much a pleasure to us as to the Sienese; and, in fact, I do not know where I would rather be at this moment than in Via Cavour, unless it were on the Grand Canal at Venice — or the Lungarno at Florence — or the Pincio at Rome — or Piazza Brà at Verona. Any of these places would do, and yet they would all lack the strictly mediaeval charm which belongs to Siena, and which perhaps you feel most when you stand before the Tolomei Palace, with its gray Gothic façade, on the richly sculptured porch of the Casino dei Nobili. At more than one point the gaunt Roman wolf suckles her adoptive twins on the top of a pillar; and the olden charm of prehistoric fable mingles with the interest of the city’s proper life, when her people fought each other for their freedom in her streets, and never trusted one another except in some fiery foray against the enemy beyond her gates.

  Let the reader not figure to himself any broad, straight level when I speak of Via Cavour as the principal street; it is only not so narrow and steep and curving as the rest, and a little more light gets into it; but there is one level, and one alone, in all Siena, and tha
t is the Lizza, the public promenade, which looks very much like an artificial level. It is planted with pleasant little bosks and trim hedges, beyond which lurk certain cafés and beer-houses, and it has walks and a drive. On a Sunday afternoon of February, when the military band played there, and I was told that the fine world of Siena resorted to the Lizza, we hurried thither to see it; but we must have come too late. The band were blowing the drops of distilled music out of their instruments and shutting them up, and on the drive there was but one equipage worthy of the name. Within this carriage sat a little refined-looking boy — delicate, pale, the expression of an effete aristocracy; and beside him sat a very stout, gray-moustached, side-whiskered, eagle-nosed, elderly gentleman, who took snuff out of a gold box, and looked like Old Descent in person. I felt, at sight of them, that I had met the Sienese nobility, whom otherwise I did not see; and yet I do not say that they may not have been a prosperous fabricant of panforte and his son. A few young bucks, with fierce trotting-ponies in two-seated sulkies, hammered round the drive; the crowd on foot was mostly a cloaked and slouched-hatted crowd, which in Italy is always a plebeian crowd. There were no ladies, but many women of less degree, pretty enough, well-dressed enough, and radiantly smiling. In the centre of the place shone a resplendent group of officers, who kept quite to themselves. We could not feel that we had mingled greatly in the social gaieties of Siena, and we wandered off to climb the bastions of the old Medicean fort — very bold with its shield and palle over the gateway — and listened to the bees humming in the oleander hedge beneath.

  This was toward the end of February; a few days later I find it recorded that in walking half-way round the city outside the wall I felt the sun very hot, and heard the birds singing over the fields, where the peasants were breaking the clods with their hoes. The almond-trees kept blossoming with delicate courage all through February, like girls who brave the lingering cold with their spring finery; and though the grass was green, with here and there daring dandelions in it, the landscape generally had a pathetic look of winter weariness, when we drove out into the country beyond the wall.

  It is this wall with the colour of its red brick which everywhere warms up the cold gray tone of Siena. It is like no other city wall that I know, except that of Pisa, and is not supported with glacis on the inside, but rises sheer from the earth there as on the outside. With its towers and noble gates it is beautiful always; and near the railway station it obligingly abounds in repaired spots which look as if they had been holes knocked in it at the great siege. I hope they were.

  It is anywhere a study for a painter — preferably a water-colourist, I should say — and I do not see how an architect could better use his eyes in Italy than in perusing the excellent brick-work of certain of the smaller houses, as well as certain palaces and churches, both in the city and the suburbs of Siena. Some of the carved brick there is delightful, and the material is treated with peculiar character and feeling.

  IX

  THE ancient palace of the Republic, the Palazzo Communale, is of brick, which allegorizes well enough the multitude of plebeian wills and forces that went to the constitution of the democratic state. No friend of popular rule, I suppose, can boast that these little mediaeval commonwealths of Italy were the homes of individual liberty. They were popular tyrannies; but tyrannies as they were, they were always better than the single-handed despotisms, the governo d’un solo, which supplanted them, except in the one fact only that they did not give continuous civil peace. The crater of the extinct volcano before the Palazzo Communale in Siena was always boiling with human passions, and for four hundred years it vomited up and ingulfed innumerable governments and forms of government, now aristocratic and now plebeian. From those beautiful Gothic windows many a traitor has dangled head downwards or feet downwards, as the humour took the mob; many a temporiser or usurper has hurtled from that high balcony ruining down to the stones below.

  Carlo Folletti-Fossati, a Sienese citizen of our own time, has made a luminous and interesting study of the “Costumi Senese” of the Middle Ages, which no reader of Italian should fail to get when he goes to Siena, for the sake of the light which it throws upon that tumultuous and struggling past of one of the bravest and doughtiest little peoples that ever lived. In his chapters on the “Daily Life” of the Sienese of those times, he speaks first of the world-wide difference between the American democracy and the mediaeval democracies. He has read his De Tocqueville, and he understands, as Mr Matthew Arnold is beginning to understand, that the secret of our political success is in the easy and natural fit of our political government, the looseness of our social organisation; and he shows with attractive clearness how, in the Italian republics, there was no conception of the popular initiative, except in the matter of revolution, which was extra-constitutional. The government once established, no matter how democratic, how plebeian its origin, it began at once to interfere with the personal affairs of the people. It regulated their household expenses; said what dishes and how many they might have at dinner; clipped women’s gowns, and forbade the braid and laces on their sleeves and stomachers; prescribed the fashion of men’s hats and cloaks; determined the length of coats, the size of bricks, and the dimensions of letter-paper; costumed the different classes; established the hours of pleasure and business; limited the number of those who should be in this or that trade or profession; bothered in every way. In Siena, at a characteristic period, the signory were chosen every two months, and no man might decline the honour and burden of office except under heavy fine. The government must have been as great a bore to its officers as to its subjects, for, once elected, the signory were obliged to remain night and day in the public palace. They could not leave it except for some grave reason of state, or sickness, or marriage, or the death of near kindred, and then they could only go out two at a time, with a third for a spy upon them. Once a week they could converse with the citizens, but solely on public business. Then, on Thursdays, the signory — the Nine, or the Twelve, or the Priors, whichever they chanced to be — descended from their magnificent confinement in the apartments of state to the great hall of the ground floor, and heard the petitions of all comers. Otherwise, their official life was no joke; in the months of March and April, 1364, they consumed in their public labours eleven reams of paper, twenty-one quires of parchment, twelve pounds of red and green sealing-wax, five hundred goose-quills, and twenty bottles of ink.

  Besides this confinement at hard labour, they were obliged to suffer from the shrieks of the culprits, who were mutilated or put to death in the rear of the palace; for in those days prison expenses were saved by burning a witch or heretic, tearing out the tongue of a blasphemer, striking off the right hand of a perjurer or bigamist, and the right foot of a highwayman. The Sienese in course of time became so refined that they expelled the mutilated wretches from the city, that they might not offend the eye, after the infliction of their penalties; but in the meanwhile the signory could not bear the noise of their agony, especially while they sat at dinner; and the execution-grounds were finally changed to a remote quarter.

  It is well enough for the tourist to give a thought to these facts and conditions of the times that produced the beautiful architecture of the Palazzo Communale and the wonderful frescos which illumine its dim-vaulted halls and chambers. The masters who wrought either might have mixed the mortar for their bricks, and the colours for their saints and angels, and allegories and warriors, with human blood, it flowed so freely and abundantly in Siena. Poor, splendid, stupid, glorious past! I stood at the windows of the people’s palace and looked out on the space in the rear where those culprits used to disturb the signory at their meals, and thanked Heaven that I was of the nineteenth century. The place is flanked now by an immense modem prison, whose ample casements were crowded with captives pressing to them for the sun; and in the distance there is a beautiful view of an insane asylum, the largest and most populous in Italy.

  I suppose the reader will not apprehend a great deal
of comment from më upon the frescos, inexpressibly quaint and rich, from which certain faces and certain looks remain with me yet. The pictures figure the great scenes of Sienese history and fable. There are the battles in which the republic triumphed, to the disadvantage chiefly of the Florentines; there are the victorious encounters of her son Pope Alexander III. with Barbarossa; there are allegorie s in which her chief citizens appear. In one of these — I think it is that representing “Good and Bad Government,” painted by Lorenzetti in 1337 — there is a procession of Sienese figures and faces of the most curious realistic interest, and above their heads some divine and august ideal shapes — a Wisdom, from whose strange eyes all mystery looks, and a Peace and a Fortitude which, for an unearthly dignity and beauty, I cannot remember the like of. There is also somewhere in those dusky halls, a most noble St Victor by Sodoma; and I would not have my readers miss that sly rogue of a saint (“We are famous for our saints in Siena,” said the sardonic custodian, with a shrug) who is represented in a time of interdict stealing a blessing from the Pope for his city by having concealed under his cloak a model of it when he appears before the pontiff! For the rest, there is an impression of cavernous gloom left from many of the rooms of the palace which characterizes the whole to my memory; and as I look back into it, beautiful, mystical, living eyes glance out of it; noble presences, solemn attitudes, forms of grandeur faintly appear; and then all is again a hovering twilight, out of which I am glad to emerge into the laughing sunshine of the piazza.