Rossi, who must not be confounded with the tragedian of his name, is the first comedian who has ever been knighted in Italy, the theory being that since a comic actor might receive a blow which the exigency of the play forbade him to resent, he was unfit for knighthood. King Humbert seems somehow to have got over this prodigious obstacle.
The theatre was always filled, and between the acts there was much drama in the boxes, where the gentlemen went and came, making their compliments to the ladies, in the old Italian fashion. It looked very easy and pleasant; and I wish Count Nerli, whose box we had hired one evening when he sent the key to the ticket-office to be let, had been there to tell us something of the people in the others. I wish, in fact, that we might have known something of the count himself, whom, as it is, I know only by the title boldly lettered on his box-door. The acquaintance was slight, but very agreeable. Before the evening was out I had imagined him in a dozen figures and characters; and I still feel that I came very near knowing a Sienese count. Some English people, who became English friends, in our pension, had letters which took them into society, and they reported it very charming. Indeed, I heard at Florence, from others who knew it well, that it was pleasantly characterised by the number of cultivated people connected with the ancient university of Siena. Again, I heard that here, and elsewhere in Italy, husbands neglect their wives, and leave them dismal at home, while they go out to spend their evenings at the clubs and cafés. Who knows? I will not even pretend to do so, though the temptation is great.
A curious phase of the social life in another direction appeared in the notice which I found posted one day on the door of the church of San Christoforo, inviting the poor girls of the parish to a competitive examination for the wedding portions to be supplied to the most deserving from an ancient fund. They were advised that they must appear on some Sunday during Lent before the parish priest, with a petition certifying to these facts: —
“I. Poverty.
“II. Good morals.
“III. Regular attendance at church.
“IV. Residence of six months in the parish.
“V. Age between 18 and 30 years.
“N.B. — A girl who has won a dower in this or any other parish cannot compete.”
XVI
THE churches are very rich in paintings of the Sienese school, and the gallery of the Belle Arti, though small, is extremely interesting. Upon the whole, I do not know where one could better study the progress of Italian painting, from the Byzantine period up to the great moment when Sodoma came in Siena. Oddly enough, there was a very lovely little Bellini in this collection, which, with a small Veronese, distinguished itself from the Tuscan canvases, by the mellow beauty of the Venetian colouring, at once. It is worse than useless to be specific about pictures, and if I have kept any general impression of the Sienese work, it concerns the superior charm of the earlier frescoes, especially in the Public Palace. In the churches the best frescoes are at San
Domenico, where one sees the exquisite chapel of St Catherine painted by Sodoma, which I have already mentioned. After these one must reckon in interest the histories with which Pinturicchio has covered the whole library of the cathedral, and which are surpassingly delightful in their quaint realism. For the rest, I have a vivid memory of a tendency in the Sienese painters to the more horiffic facts of Scripture and legend; they were terrible fellows for the Massacre of the Innocents, and treated it with a bloodier carefulness of detail than I remember to have noticed in any other school; the most sanguinary of these slaughters is in the Church of the Servi. But there is something wholesome and human even in the most butcherly of their simple-minded carnages; it is where the allegorists get hold of horror that it becomes loathsome, as in that choir of a church, which I have forgotten the name of, where the stalls are decorated with winged death’s heads, the pinions shown dropping with rottenness and decay around the skulls. Yet this too had its effectiveness: it said what some people of that time were thinking; and I suppose that the bust of a lady in a fashionable ruff, with a book in her hand, simpering at the bust of her husband in an opposite niche in San Vigilio, was once not so amusing as it now looks. I am rather proud of discovering her, for I found her after I had been distinctly discouraged from exploring the church by the old woman in charge. She was civil, but went back eagerly to her gossip with another crone there, after saying: “The pictures in the roof are of no merit. They are beautiful, however.” I liked this church, which was near our pension, because it seemed such a purely little neighbourhood affair; and I must have been about the only tourist who ever looked into it.
One afternoon we drove out to the famous convent of the Osservanza, which was suppressed with the other convents, but in which the piety of charitable people still maintains fifty of the monks. We passed a company of them, young and old, on our way, bareheaded and barefooted, as their use is, and looking very fit in the landscape; they saluted us politely, and overtaking us in the porch of the church, rang up the sacristan for us, and then, dropping for a moment on one knee before the door, disappeared into the convent. The chapel is not very much to see, though there is a most beautiful Della Robbia there — a Madonna and St Thomas — which I would give much to see now. When we had gone the round of the different objects, our sacristan, who was very old and infirm, and visibly foul in the brown robes which are charitable to so much dirt, rose from the last altar before which he had knelt with a rheumatic’s groans, and turning to the ladies with a malicious grin, told them that they could not be admitted to the cloisters, though the gentlemen could come. We followed him through the long, dreary galleries, yawning with hundreds of empty cells, and a sense of the obsoleteness of the whole affair oppressed me. I do not know why this feeling should have been heightened by the smallness of the gardened court enclosed by the cloisters, or by the tinkle of a faint old piano coming from some room where one of the brothers was practising. The whole place was very bare, and stared with fresh whitewash; but from the pervading smell I feared that this venerable relic of the past was not well drained — though I do not know that in the religious ages they valued plumbing greatly, anywhere.
XVII
IN this and other drives about Siena the peculiar character of the volcanic landscape made itself continually felt. There is a desolation in the treeless hills, and a wildness and strangeness in their forms, which I can perhaps best suggest by repeating that they have been constantly reproduced by the Tuscan painters in their backgrounds, and that most Judean landscapes in their pictures are faithful studies of such naked and lonely hills as billow round Siena. The soil is red, and but for the wine and oil with which it flows, however reluctantly, I should say that it must be poor. Some of the hills look mere heaps of clay, such as mighty geysers might have cast up until at last they hid themselves under the accumulation; and this seems to be the nature of the group amidst which the battle of Montaperto was fought I speak from a very remote inspection; for though we started to drive there, we considered, after a mile or two, that we had no real interest in it now, either as Florentines or Sienese, and contented ourselves with a look at the Arbia, which the battle “coloured red,” but which had long since got back its natural complexion. This stream — or some other which the driver passed off on us for it — flowed down through the uplands over which we drove with a small volume that seemed quite inadequate slake the wide drought of the landscape, in which, except for the cypresses about the villas, no tree lifted its head. There were not even olives; even the vineyards had vanished. The fields were green with well-started wheat, but of other husbandry there was scarcely a sign. Yet the peasants whom we met were well dressed (to be sure it was Sunday), and there was that air of comfort about the farmsteads which is seldom absent in Tuscany. All along the road were people going to vespers; and these people were often girls, young and pretty, who, with their arms about one another’s waists, walked three and four abreast, the wide brims of their straw hats lifting round their faces like the discs of sunflowers. A g
reat many of them were blonde; at least one in ten had blue eyes and red hair, and they must have been the far-descended children of those seigneurs and soldiers among whom Charlemagne portioned his Italian lands, marking to this day, a clear distinction of race between the citizens and the contadini. By and by we came to a little country church, before which in the grassy piazza two men had a humble show of figs and cakes for sale in their wagon-beds, and another was selling wine by the glass from a heap of flasks on his stand. Here again I was reminded of Quebec, for the interior of this church was, in its bareness and poverty, quite like the poor little Huron village church at the Falls of Lorette.
Our drive was out from the Porta Pispini southward, and back to the city through the Porta Romana; but pleasure lies in any course you take, and perhaps greater pleasure in any other than this. The beauty of the scenery is wilder and ruggeder than at Florence. In the country round Siena all is free and open, with none of those high garden walls that baffle approach in the Florentine neighbourhood. But it seems to have been as greatly loved and as much frequented, and there are villas and palaces everywhere, with signs of that personal eccentricity in the architecture and inscriptions for which the Italians ought to be as famous as the English. Out of the Porta Camollia, in the Palazzo del Diavolo, which was the scene of stirring facts during the great siege, when the Sienese once beat Duke Cosimo’s Florentines out of it, the caprice of the owner has run riot in the decoration of the brick front, where heads of Turks and Saracens are everywhere thrusting out of the frieze and cornice. At Poggio Pini, an inscription on the porter’s lodge declares: “Count Casti de’ Vecchi, jealous conservator of the ornaments of the above situated villa Poggio Pini, his glory, his care, placed me guardian of this approach.” The pines thus tenderly and proudly watched would not strike the American as worthy of so much anxiety; but perhaps they are so in a country which has wasted its whole patrimony of trees, as we are now so wickedly wasting ours. The variety of timber which one sees in Tuscany is very small: pines, poplars, oaks, walnuts, chestnuts — that is the whole story of the forest growth. Its brevity impressed us particularly in our long ride to Belcaro, which I visited for its interest as the quarters of the Marquis of Marignano, the Imperialist general during the siege. Two cannon-balls imbedded in its walls recall the fight, with an appropriate inscription; but whether they were fired by Marignano while it was occupied by the Sienese, or by the Sienese after he took it, I cannot now remember. I hope the reader will not mind this a great deal, especially as I am able to offer him the local etymology of the name Belcaro: bel because it is so beautiful, and caro because it cost so much. It is now owned by two brothers, rich merchants of Siena, one of whom lives in it, and it is approached through a landscape wild, and sometimes almost savage, like that all around Siena, but of more fertile aspect than that to the southward. The reader must always think of the wildness in Italy as different from our primeval wildness; it is the wildness of decay, of relapse. At one point a group of cypresses huddling about the armless statue of some poor god thrilled us with a note, like the sigh of a satyr’s reed, from the antique world; at another, a certain wood-grown turn of the road, there was a brick stairway, which had once led to some pavilion of the hoop and bag-wig age, and now, grown thick with moss and long grasses, had a desolation more exquisite than I can express.
Belcaro itself, however, when we came to it, was in perfectly good repair, and afforded a satisfying image of a mediaeval castle, walled and fossed about, and lifting its mighty curtains of masonry just above the smooth level of the ilex-tops that hedged it loftily in. There was not very much to see within it, except the dining-hall, painted by Peruzzi with the Judgment of Paris. After we had admired this we were shown across the garden to the little lodge which the same painter has deliciously frescoed with indecenter fables than any outside of the Palazzo del Tè at Mantua. Beside it is the chapel in which he has indifferently turned his hand, with the same brilliant facility, to the illustration of holy writ and legend. It was a curious civilization. Both lodge and chapel were extraordinarily bright and cheerful.
From these works of art we turned and climbed to the superb promenade which crowns the wide wall of the castle. In the garden below, a chilly bed of anemones blew in the March wind, and the top where we stood was swept by a frosty blast, while the waning sunshine cast a sad splendour over the city on her hill seven miles away. A delicate rose-light began to bathe it, in which the divine cathedral looked like some perfect shape of cloud-land; while the clustering towers, palaces and gates, and the wandering sweep of the city wall seemed the details of a vision too lovely for waking eyes.
PITILESS PISA
I
As Pisa made no comment on the little changes she may have observed in me since we had last met, nineteen years before, I feel bound in politeness to say that I found her in April 1883 looking not a day older than she did in December 1864. In fact, she looked younger, if anything, though it may have been the season that made this difference in her. She was in her spring attire, freshly, almost at the moment, put on; and that counts for much more in Pisa than one who knew her merely in the region of her palaces and churches and bridges would believe. She has not, indeed, quite that breadth of orchards and gardens within her walls which Siena has, but she has space enough for nature to flourish at ease there; and she has many deserted squares and places where the grass was sprouting vigorously in the crevices of the pavement. All this made her perceptibly younger, even with her memories running so far back of Roman times, into twilights whither perhaps a less careful modern historian than myself would not follow them. But when I am in a town that has real claims to antiquity, I like to allow them to the uttermost; and with me it is not merely a duty, it is a pleasure, to remind the reader that Pisa was founded by Pelops, the grandson of Jove, and the son of Tantalus, king of Phrygia. He was the same who was slain by his father, and served in a banquet to the gods, to try if he knew everything, or could be tricked into eating of the hideous repast; and it was after this curious experience — Ceres came in from the field, very tired and hungry, and popped down and tasted a bit of his shoulder before they could stop her — that, being restored to life by his grandfather, he visited Italy, and, liking the situation at the mouth of the Arno, built his city there. This is the opinion of Pliny and Solinus, and that generally adopted by the Pisan chroniclers; but the sceptical Strabo would have us think that Pisa was not founded till much later, when Nestor, sailing homeward after the fall of Troy, was cast away on the Etruscan shore at this point. There are some historians who reconcile the accounts by delaring that Nestor merely joined the Phrygians at Pisa, and could never have pretended to found the city. I myself incline to this notion; but even if Pisa was not built till after the fall of Troy, the reader easily perceives that a sense of her antiquity might affect an Ohio man, even after a residence in Boston. A city founded by Pelops or Nestor could not be converted to Christianity by a less person than St Peter, who, on his way to Rome, was expressly wrecked on the Pisan coasts for that purpose. Her faith, like her origin, is as ancient as possible, and Pisa was one of the first Italian communities to emerge from the ruin of the Roman Empire into a vigorous and splendid life of her own. Early in the Middle Ages she had, with the arrogance of long-established consequence, superciliously explained the Florentines, to an Eastern potentate who had just heard of them, as something like the desert Arabs — a lawless, marauding, barbarous race, the annoyance of all respectable and settled communities. In those days Pisa had not only commerce with the East, but wars; and in 1005 she famously beat back the Saracens from their conquests in the northern Mediterranean, and after a struggle of eighteen years, ended by carrying the war into Africa and capturing Carthage with the Emir of the Saracens in it. In the beginning of this war her neighbour Lucca, fifteen miles away, profited by her preoccupation to attack her, and this is said to have been one of the first quarrels, if not the first, in which the Italian cities asserted their separate nationality and thei
r independence of the empire. It is supposed on that account to have been rather a useful event, though it is scarcely to be praised otherwise. Of course, the Pisans took it out of the Lucchese afterwards in the intervals of their more important wars with the Genoese by sea and the Florentines by land. There must have been fighting pretty well all the time, back and forth across the vineyards and olive orchards that stretch between the two cities; I have counted up eight distinct wars, bloody and tedious, in which they ravaged each other’s territory, and I — dare say I have missed some. Once the Pisans captured Lucca and sacked it, and once the Lucchese took Pisa and sacked it; the Pisans were Ghibelline, and the Lucchese were Guelph, and these things had to be. In the meantime, Pisa was waging, with varying fortune, seven wars with Genoa, seven other with Florence, three with Venice, and one with Milan, and was in a spirited state of continual party strife within herself; though she found leisure to take part in several of the crusades, to break the naval supremacy of the Saracens, and to beat the Greeks in sea-fights under the walls of Constantinople. The warlike passions of men were tightly wound up in those days, and Pisa was set to fight for five hundred years. Then she fell at last, in 1509, under the power of those upstart Florentines, whom she had despised so long.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1243