Chapter XXIV: Rome 353 (3)

Then the cavalcade formed up again, the drummer and the _alfieri_ leading, the knight on foot with his five pages, the _fantino_ on horseback, and behind him a man leading the noble beast[9] he was to ride in the Palio. With a rattle of drums they went off to toss their banners in another piazza.

By this time Siena was alive with mediaeval processions, and the music of their drums was borne in upon our ears from every side. On our way to the Piazza del Duomo, which was the rendezvous of all the _contrade_, we met many a gay company coming up the dark alleys; or heard the stirring music of their drums as they paused to fling their banners below the decorated windows of fifteenth-century palaces. But the Piazza del Duomo was the culminating point. The air was thick with silken banners, and at every moment some fresh _contrada_ came up the hill, till it seemed as though the square could hold no more. Was it by chance, or to spite the other by diminishing his glory, that the Oca swaggered up at the same moment as his ancient enemy the Torre? The _alfieri_ flung their silken banners high into the air, catching them as they fell, and made them flutter like a carpet round their feet, or between their legs, or about their necks, in honour of the Virgin. And, in faith, how could she be otherwise than pleased to see these pretty boys with beating drums and fluttering banners doing her honour so merrily in the sunshine before her house!

From the Gothic windows of the Bishop's Palace the Cardinal, who yesterday had blessed the people in the cathedral, looked down upon the scene. Once, when the _alfieri_ of the Wave tossed their blue and white flags thirty feet into the air and caught them again, he clapped his jewelled hands. The press thickened, but always the silken banners clove the sunshine, and the drums sounded merrily, now in the narrow street leading up between the vescovado and the ancient hospital, now from the Via del Capitano. We saw knights on horseback mingling with the crowd, and little children of the Quattrocento, and Pinturicchio townsmen in scarlet and green and orange and blue with fur-edged tunics and peaked caps. It was the Pinturicchio of the library come to life again; or rather it was the old light-hearted Siena who, even in the horrors of the Spanish siege, would have her games, though she had no bread. The gay drummers of the different _contrade_ seemed to have caught the rhythm of her joyous heart-beats.

When we reached our seats the police were already clearing the course, and the centre of the piazza was a seething crowd, with fans which fluttered like butterflies over a field of wheat. What a gay scene it was! The sunlight gilded La Mangia, and flamed from Bernardino's monogram on the Palazzo Pubblico. The amphitheatre of seats all round the course was filled, and every window and balcony was peopled, and hung with scarlet and crimson cloths. Up the steep Via Casato we could see the massed banners of the _contrade_, and hear their impatient drumming as they waited for the signal to enter. The voice of the people was like the roar of waves on a distant shore.

At last every one seemed to have been driven behind the barrier except a few sellers of beer and lemonade. A patrol of horse carabinieri galloped round the course. Bang! went the gun. La Mangia gave voice. To the fanfare of trumpets and the dull roar of the people mediaeval Siena swept into the piazza.

Slowly and stately they came on. First a horseman in scarlet and blue bearing the great Comunal Banner of the city, followed by trumpeters in the livery of the Palazzo, and then the companies of the ten _contrade_ who were to compete for the Palio. As each one entered the piazza the whole procession paused for them to toss their banners. Then with a blare of trumpets they passed on--knights in burnished armour with drawn swords, pages in silk and velvet with flowing cloaks and waving plumes, _alfieri_ with proud banners, _fantini_ riding slowly with their racers led behind.

Victorious Montone, the winner of the July Palio, came first, waving and tossing its red and yellow banners; then came the gay Giraffe, scarlet and white; and then the Snail, who looked depressed because he had drawn a sorry white nag more fit for tilting at windmills than racing. The Tortoise followed him, yellow and blue and red; and then the Wave, in pale blue slashed with white; and next the stately Goose, St. Catherine's _contrada_, wearing the red and white and green of United Italy. Behind them marched our friends the Porcupine in their brave purple velvet and shining armour, and the splendid Golden Eagle and the Blue Men of the Nicchio, and the _Contrada_ of the Wolf. Still they came on, with many pauses while the _alfieri_ waved and tossed the silken banners, now carpeting the ground with the fluttering folds, now whirling them round necks and under arms and legs, or tossing them up before the Casa Nobile, till the course was like a bed of flowers. And still the Mangia's deep voice acclaimed, and still the trumpets blared and the drums rolled, till the procession stretched all round the Campo, and the great banner of Siena at its head was furled before the Palazzo Comunale.

Then came the Palio itself, borne on the great _carroccio_ decorated with the banners of Siena and her _contrade_. How the people yelled as the enormous waggon, so splendidly mediaeval with its poles and banners and its four heraldic horses, rumbled round the square. Before it went two rows of children, little Quattrocento children in striped jerkin and hose, scarlet and green and black, linked together with long festoons of laurel. And round the car rode knights in jousting helmets, clad in velvet and cloth of gold, on richly caparisoned steeds with jewelled reins. Just so did the victorious and exultant Sienese bring back the _carroccio_ of the Florentines which they had captured in the bloody fight of Monte Aperto when they trampled the lilies of Florence into the dust. And there, below the black and white oriflamme of Siena, was a great banner of crimson velvet and gold--the colours of the famous banner of the Florentines, which was brought back to Siena more than six hundred and fifty years ago!

Although the tiers of seats erected for knights and pages below the Palazzo Comunale already looked like a bed of tropical flowers, more banners came fluttering down the Via Casato--the _comparse_ of the seven other _contrade_ who were not to take a part in the race. They fluttered round the course to gay mediaeval music, and joined the parterre of colour below the Palazzo beside the great _carroccio_.

And now everything was ready. Two ropes were stretched across the course at the starting-point--one the whole width of the track, the other leaving a gap through which the horses could pass into line so as to get as fair a start as possible; though every one knows, and the _fantino_ as much as any one, that the start has little to do with the race. His great object is to try and place himself out of reach of the _nerbate_ of his special enemies, but even this is hopeless if two or three have come to an arrangement to hold a mutual enemy back until some outsider has carried off the prize.

Down in the crowded square the man who was to give the signal of gun-fire had his fuse already lighted. In the dark courtyard of the Palazzo we could see the _fantini_, no longer in their bravery of velvet and silk and burnished steel, but clad in the colours of their _contrade_, and wearing on their heads painted wooden caps to guard their skulls from the blows of the _nerbi_.

Bang! There was a rattle of drums. Out came the _fantini_. They moved slowly to the starting-point, and a great shout rent the air as Siena with one voice acclaimed them. In the crowded square, on the housetops, from the windows and the balconies, men waved their hats, and women their scarves and handkerchiefs. Even little children forgot their toy balloons, clapping their hands and shouting while their erstwhile treasures floated away unnoticed.

They edged their horses between the ropes. Some blows were exchanged; a horse reared, and one _fantino_ almost lost his seat. Bang! went the _mortaletto_. Down went the ropes.

They were off!

From the start the Oca never had a chance. As for the Snail, the whole field passed it before it had completed one round. The Porcupine made a good effort, but the impetuous and dashing _fantino_ of the Nicchio headed him off at the difficult turning of San Martino. As they came up the hill for the last time it was a race between the Tortoise and the Nicchio. The Tortoise was leading, but the Nicchio overhauled him as they mounted towards the Via del Casato, and as they came into the straight they were neck and neck.

How the people yelled! How they called upon the Virgin and St. Antony to come to the assistance of their _contrada_!

There was an indescribable confusion.

Bang! They had passed the post.

It was the Tortoise won the race!

In a flash the crowd had burst through the barriers and flooded round the horses. The carabinieri came at a double to the rescue of the Victorious Tartuca, for the men of the Oca were attempting to mob him. The horse had already been spirited away lest it should come to harm. The great mass of people swayed and roared.

Rattle-tap-tap; rattle-tap-tap. Through the crowd, with an escort of stalwart troopers, came the waving banners of Tartuca with the Palio in their midst, and away they marched with it to get the blessing of Madonna.

It was all over, though the Mangia was still ringing overhead, and the people were still shouting themselves hoarse.

'Or fù giammai
Gente si vana com'è la sanese?'[10]

SAN GIMIGNANO DELLE BELLE TORRI

'And far to the fair south-westward lightens,
Girdled and sandalled and plumed with flowers,
At sunset over the love-lit land,
The hillside's crown where the wild hill brightens
Saint Fina's town of the Beautiful towers,
Hailing the sun with a hundred hands.'

SWINBURNE.

We left Siena to her merry-making, and stole away early in the morning to San Gimignano delle Belle Torri. From Poggibonsi we drove right into the heart of Faery-land. Were we not bound for Tuscany's most mediaeval city, which is still caught in the web of beautiful thoughts spun round her towers by poets from Messer Folgore, the thirteenth-century San Gimignanese, to our own Swinburne? Our way lay through the rich Val d'Elsa, 'smiling in the sweet air made gladsome by the sun.' Little hills ringed round with the slender conventional pine-trees which Gozzoli loved to plant in his Gardens of Paradise rose from the billowing plain. The vines were linked from tree to tree in great festoons, heavy with grapes; the plumy tassels of the maize were taller than a man; the roadside was full of flowers--bright pink cloves, crimson wild peas, chicory and Canterbury Bells. Indeed it was a veritable Paradise, a Promised Land, not flowing with milk and honey, for milk is sometimes very difficult to obtain in Tuscany where there are no pasture grounds, but heavy with wine and corn, and the manifold fruits of the earth.

Long before we reached San Gimignano we saw her towers rising up above the festooned vines like those Giants in Dante's _Inferno_, which from a distance he took to be a city of many towers. He must have been thinking of San Gimignano as he had seen it more than once when he rode across the Tuscan vales from Florence, for it looks ridiculously like a city of giants striding among miniature houses. Its thirteen square towers of uneven heights massed on the top of its little hill make the most fantastic sky-line in Italy, and if the chroniclers speak truth the city to which Dante came as Ambassador in the year of grace 1300 boasted no fewer than seventy-six of these ambitious towers.

San Gimignano is like the Enchanted Princess in our childhood's fairy tales. I think she must have fallen asleep one summer day, wearied with waiting on her little hill for the Prince who was to wed her. Perhaps she watched them jousting in the plain, those petty princelings who tried to win her hand and always proved themselves unworthy of her beauty and her ancient lineage, and I know she sickened to hear their battle-cries as they issued by night from their towers to plunder and slay. No laughing Tuscan princess this, but a grave-eyed dreamy girl who loved to think of saints although she blushed and trembled at a poet's tale, and dreamt of queening it over the valleys which rippled from her old brown walls to Volterra, or the fair city of Certaldo where Boccaccio was born. She fell asleep in the fourteenth century when she yielded up her keys to Florence, tired of waiting for the prince who never came; and she dreams on among her flowers, very beautiful, and happy at last with her poets and her saints, wearing the threadbare garments of her ancient glory as befits a queen, and at rest now that the faithless Salvucci and the unhappy Ardinghelli no longer wage their useless warfare under her towers.

San Gimignano is a city where one could dream the world away, and count its loss as nothing compared to the fragrant memories in which she dwells. I think the people of San Gimignano do really dream. They are very gentle and grave, and occupied with simple tasks--the men working in the vineyards, and the women sitting at their spinning-wheels outside their fourteenth-century palaces, or plying their distaffs on the steps of the ancient well in the Piazza del Pozzo, whose wall is worn into grooves, the width of my hand, by the ropes of seven hundred years.

Flowers and grasses grow from her ancient towers, and white doves nest in the narrow windows whence men-at-arms kept watch upon the streets. It is as though the spirit of gentle Saint Fina lingers still in the old grey town which gave her birth. The sweet-smelling flowers 'called of Saint Fina' run riot on its walls and towers, and her name is ever on the children's lips when they meet the traveller at their city gates.

Let us go then to her chapel, for they will not let us rest till we have seen it: they can find no beauty in their ragged palaces, and no appeal in their gaunt grey towers or their lovely broken walls. And we soon found that we must pay our respects to Fina first if we would have peace to look elsewhere.

It was Domenico Ghirlandaio, in his way as great a poet as Botticelli, whom the San Gimignanesi commissioned to paint the story of their beloved Santa Fina; and in no other picture, save his great 'Nativity' in the Accademia of Florence, did he reach such a high poetic standard. He has chosen only two scenes from the life of the little girl saint of San Gimignano--her vision of St. Gregory, who appeared to her some days before her death and warned her of her approaching end, and the miracle of the healing of her old nurse Beldia as she lay in state awaiting burial.

With what simplicity and charm has he depicted the apparition of St. Gregory! The Blessed Fina lies on her wooden plank in a little white room which is empty of ornament or furniture--except for a long, low settle bearing a plate, and a dish of pomegranates, and a flask of wine covered with a napkin of fine linen. The door and window both stand open to the sun and wind, and through the casement we see the Tuscan landscape, soft with the green of early spring, with a towered city crowning a hill, and little white clouds on the clear blue sky. Two women in wimples sit beside her, the old nurse Beldia supporting the child's head on her hand, for the chronicler tells us that, notwithstanding, 'the strength of her body lessened and waned even to swooning, yet, withal, she suffered exceedingly from within her head.' The other woman, obviously a neighbour who has looked in to see the sick child, sits on a chair beside them. Her hand is raised and her head turned towards the open door, as if she has been startled in the midst of speaking, or is listening to some unwonted sound. But Saint Gregory in cope and mitre, in a glory of cherubs, has floated in at the door and is speaking to the saint, who listens with rapt attention and hands folded in the attitude of prayer.

There is no reference to the horrible corruption of the Holy Fina's fair body which her hagiographers insist upon. 'She was palsied all over, and in no wise could she rise from her couch, nor yet move hand or foot. And as God willed that she should be thus afflicted she would not that her body rest upon any soft and yielding thing, rather laid she herself down to sleep upon a plank of wood; and because one side of her body was afflicted with the sickness and wearied her greatly, she slept upon the other; and during the space of five years she did so lie upon that side, neither would she allow any one to move her or yet change her raiment. For so many a long day lay this holy virgin upon her one side only, that the flesh became corrupted and the plank begat vermin which devoured her flesh. Moreover, because of the corruption of these things, the rats gathered together and devoured her flesh.'

Ghirlandaio could read no poetry into this perverted moral. He forgot the rats and vermin and the sore corruption, thinking of her only as the fair maiden, so goodly to human eyes, whose claim to saintship rested on her holiness and chastity and patience. Listen once more to the words of Fra Giovanni her chronicler. 'Whilst yet a little maiden she withdrew herself from all converse that could imperil her soul, forswearing those pleasures in which her like often indulged; such as to gambol and frolic, and such-like frivolities and pleasantries, and the setting fast of their hearts and minds on fine raiment and worldly joys.... She avoided all frivolous comings and goings as being harmful to her peace of mind, and if peradventure she walked abroad, she first made treaty with her eyes that they should look always upon her feet; lest by their vain outward glance they should tempt her guileless spirit. And whilst it pleased God that she should possess a fair countenance, be of tall stature, and all things in her were goodly proportioned; yet in no fashion would she adorn her face, willing only to please God and not to gratify the sight of worldly men.... And she worked unremittingly with her hands in the calling of women folk; but all these acts she would perform, not for the great need she were in, but to eschew idleness, which the Holy Scripture saith is a snare for the feet of the Lord's servants. Likewise, when not in prayer, she laboured steadfastly, following thus in the footsteps of our Mother the Virgin Mary: as of her it is spoken in the Epistles of St. Jerome, that she earned each day the wherewithal for the sustenance of her body.'

Nor does the artist give us any hint of the miraculous fragrance which pervaded her chamber and her person, and of the flowers which blossomed from the board on which she lay. Unless he meant to represent them by the sweet spring sunshine and fresh air, scented by the breath of flowers grown without, which fills her white room.

On the other wall we see her lying in state on a bier of gold brocade, clad in fine silk, her poor fair head at rest on a rich cushion. Round her stand the bishop and the choristers with candles and banners, and behind them are the stolid citizens who, in the usual manner of Quattrocento burghers in frescoes, pay no attention to the little ceremony. A small, tearful child is kissing the dead saint's feet. It is the moment of the healing of Beldia, who stands grief-stricken beside the bier; and Santa Fina, 'lifting her arm as though she were yet quick,' has taken the afflicted hand in her slender fingers. The artist has forgotten nothing--in the background he has painted the towers of San Gimignano whose bells, 'each one and severally, not being pulled by hands of mortal men, were set to ring with sweetest unison and melody.' Even the little angel who set them ringing is there, flying in haste from tower to tower with the sunlight gilding his wings.

It is small wonder that the people of San Gimignano are proud of their Cappella della Beata Fina, for besides the frescoes of Ghirlandaio it contains the exquisite shrine which Benedetto da Maiano wrought of white marble, finely gilt, to hold the bones of the saint.

San Gimignano was the home of saints, and it is to them that she turns now in her poverty and simplicity, glad of their ancient sanctity which has survived the years, and has not vanished in memories like her dreams of glory. From the beginning she was beloved of saints. Is not her very name an echo of the legend of St. Geminianus, the Martyr of Modena, who appeared before her walls during a siege and routed the barbarians of Attila? Until that day the city had borne the enchanted name Castello della Selva--the Castle of the Wood--because of the great oak forests which clothed the hillside and the plain, where now the olive sheds its silvered shade. But when Attila, who, like Totila and the other invading barbarians, was often defrauded of legitimate victory by patriotic saints, retreated from the citadel, the people changed its name to San Gimignano in memory of the martyred Bishop's timely appearance.

Putting aside this legend she had four saints: the Holy Fina; the Blessed Bartolo, whose life was spent in humble service, and who for twenty years was a victim of leprosy which he caught from the plague-stricken people to whom he devoted his life; the hermit San Vivaldo; and Saint Peter, who was one of the first in the brotherhood of St. Francis to suffer martyrdom.

After Saint Fina it is the Blessed Bartolo, 'the Angel of Peace,' whom the San Gimignanesi venerate most. Like Santa Fina he has a noble shrine by Benedetto de Maiano; and he lies, as we are told he wished to do, in Sant'Agostino, the great bare friar's church on the hillside, which is a treasure-house of mediaeval art.

If all the towers of San Gimignano were chimneys belching smoke, and all her mediaeval palaces were ugly modern houses, the world would still visit her to see Gozzoli's inimitable frescoes of the life of Saint Augustine. They are so fresh and unspoiled, so stately and human, so full of quaint imaginings. For he was a great humorist this pageant-painter of the Renaissance, and his naïve pictures are the ideal illustrations to the naïve Confessions of that very human saint, Augustine!

Gozzoli came to Sant'Agostino from his work in the Riccardi Chapel at Florence. There he had slipped beyond the monastic conventionalities of his master, Fra Angelico, and adventured into the gay Florentine life of the fifteenth century with its sports and pageantry. Here he has wandered further from his gentle instructor, and does not hesitate to reproduce with genial wit the humour as well as the pageantry of the age in which he lived. For it goes without saying that his Augustine is transplanted to the Quattrocento, and his life pictured in Gothic cities where Gozzoli himself and his gay compatriots all play their parts. From the beginning, if we except perhaps the first of the series in which the saint is being spanked by his schoolmaster for some small misbehaviour, Augustine is a charming and dignified figure, whether we see him a thoughtful youth setting out in state for Milan through a typical Gozzoli landscape, or he wanders disconsolately in the monastic habit upon the shore, and is rebuked by the little child making mud-pies there, in the immemorial fashion of childhood, for trying to probe into the mysteries of the Trinity.

This great church has many other treasures, frescoes and tombs, such as Gozzoli's San Sebastiano or the effigy of the Augustan brother who fell asleep in the worn pavement so many years ago; or, best of all, the tomb of Fra Domenico Strambi, the grand old monk who commissioned Benozzo Gozzoli to paint his choir, and who lies below a fresco which Mr. Gardner aptly calls 'a masterpiece of municipal sentiment.'

San Gimignano is extremely rich in frescoes, considering that she had no native school of painting, but drew her artists first from Siena and later from Florence, when she had yielded her freedom to that city. The Pieve or Collegiata is like an ancient missal full of illustrations. Besides the frescoes of Ghirlandaio in the Cappella della Beata Fina, and his Annunciation in the Oratory of St. John,[11] the walls of the nave are covered with the quaint and primitive frescoes of Taddeo di Bartolo and Bartolo di Fredi; and many other painters besides Piero Pollaiolo and Benozzo Gozzoli have added their quota to this ancient scroll of art. The choir of Sant'Agostino, as I have remarked above, is a masterpiece by Gozzoli; and the museum in the Palazzo Comunale boasts a fine collection which includes two beautiful pictures by Pinturicchio and Filippino Lippi.

Of all the Palazzi Comunali of vanished republics San Gimignano's is the most forlorn. It seems to have fallen asleep like the rest of the city, and forgotten to do anything but flower and be beautiful. Its faded fourteenth-century courtyard has an outside stairway leading to a raftered loggia; grass grows in its brick pavement; and tall grey towers, fringed with flowers, rise above its walls. Without the Tuscan sunshine to beautify its stones it would be a little desolate, all faded fresco and broken plaster. And this, mark you, although it is the _nuovo_ palace of the Podestà. The _antico_ Palazzo, facing the Pieve, so picturesque with its loggia and tower and municipal clock under its wide Tuscan eaves, is older and more ruinous still. It is not battlemented like its neighbour, and it has no processional staircase; nor is its tower, which 'marked the limit to which noble citizens might build their private towers,' as lofty as the Torre del Comune, for this bestrides a street and is the giant of the city, a monument to the vanity of the San Gimignanesi, being built with the money contributed by magistrates who wished their arms to be fixed to it when they went out of office.

We went up the steps which have seen so many municipal pageants to try and learn the history of San Gimignano from the threadbare splendour of her garments. How like they all are to each other, these little cities of United Italy, with their smug municipal dignity sitting in the midst of tatterdemalion glory! Here, in this very chamber where to-day Lippo Memmi's great fresco of the Virgin and Child, enthroned among the angels, looks down on office chairs and ink-stained tables covered with American cloth, came Dante in the year of the first jubilee, 1300, in all the splendour of Florentine embassy! Here he spake to the lords of San Gimignano, and invited them to send representatives to the election of a captain to lead the Ghibelline League of Tuscany. Here, where all the petty business of a little town is ratified, the men of San Gimignano were wont to deal with their affairs of state, to settle wars, and speak of popes and emperors. We read the story of it round the walls--Memmi's fresco with its proud baldachin of armorial bearings surmounted by the Ghibelline eagle has effaced the greater part of it, but under the timber roof are the arms of the noble families of San Gimignano; and below them jousting knights tilt at invisible combatants, long ago lost in plaster; and huntsmen chase their vanished prey; and the Guelphs and Ghibellines fight out their everlasting warfare in dim distemper.

The sunset was gilding the towers of San Gimignano when we came out again, and all the bells were ringing for evensong. Already the streets were bound in shadows, so we wandered out among the olive-trees to the little ruined church of the Templars. From here we passed out of the city by an ancient gate, and down the hill to the Gothic washing-pool, where the women of San Gimignano wash and wring their linen in the cool of the evening. The delicate afterglow of Tuscany filled the sky, and the tall poplars whispered and shivered in the sunset wind. Up and down that steep and stony hill under the old Gothic gate went the women, with their snowy linen piled in baskets on their heads. The sound of their voices and laughter floated back to us, mingled with the music of bells from the city above. In the hollow below the road a little waterfall babbled to the stones as it leapt over them to the plain. Between the whispering poplars a white road wound up the hill like the roads up which Benozzo Gozzoli's stately young men rode to their Gothic cities. And below, stretching far away to the east where it was lost in rose and purple mists, billowed the vast Val d'Elsa.

Seen through the magic of a summer evening--when the poplars were making music in the breeze, and the shadows were sweeping across the Tuscan plain; when the women, having folded their linen under the silver olives and piled it on their heads, climbed the steep hill into their tower-girt home--the world and all its doings were as beautiful as a sacrament. Here, at least, in these dim forgotten _paesi_, 'glory and loveliness have not passed away.'

But, after all, it is at night that San Gimignano is most beautiful. Then she is a city bewitched, unspeakably lovely and romantic. Her silent streets are thronged with memories; her shuttered palaces are given back to ghosts; her proud old towers loom up against the star-lit sky like mediaeval giants.

A silver moon was riding low in the heavens when we left the doorway of the Leon Bianco and passed through the Arco de' Becci, the great gateway of the ancient circuit of walls, which leads at once into the heart of San Gimignano. It was velvet-black under its ghostly tower, and the Gothic palaces of the Castello Vecchio within seemed to be holding their breath as they watched the shadows creeping over the pale stones of the piazza. How silent and deserted it was! The lovely grave-eyed children, who had been our guides all day, had vanished with their gentle mothers, whom we had seen spinning in their doorways through the sunny hours. Where had they gone? There were no lights in any of these silent palaces, and the narrow streets were empty except for the shadows of the towers, grim as bloodstains.

A white owl, soundless of wing, sank on to the parapet of an ancient palace. Imagination plays strange tricks in this city of ghosts, in whose streets an August moon, more than five hundred years ago, bore witness to the greatest tragedy in the vendetta of the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci. Was it a bird, or did I see a scrap of paper flutter from the window of that dark tower? No. It was only a piece of broken glass glittering among the stones--fit emblem of the broken hopes of those two hapless boys whom Benedetto Strozzi so foully did to death by the persuasion of the treacherous Salvucci. Their letter went astray, thrown from the prison tower, in the hope that a friendly breeze would carry it to the feet of an adherent of the Ardinghelli. And very soon afterwards they met their death, by the steps of the Palazzo Comunale, early on a summer morning, hurriedly, because Strozzi and the Salvucci knew that the messenger who was riding from Florence with their pardon would be delayed only a few hours by the rising of the Elsa. He came too late, as he was meant to do. The Salvucci had already reaped their bloody harvest--the heads of Primerano and Rossellino, the flowers of the noble house of Ardinghelli, had fallen to the sickle.

It was late, and the sleepy porter of the White Lion yawned reproachfully as we passed him on our way to the Porta San Giovanni, whither we were bound to view the city and rid ourselves of shadows. If tragedy lurked within the narrow streets and byways of San Gimignano, we found nothing but beauty without. The moonlight, flooding her broken walls and picturesque old gates, transformed her into a city of pale jade, crowning a gloom-dark hill. Her diadem of ghostly towers seemed enamoured of the sky, and soared towards the heaven like young Endymion, stretching out his arms to his enchantress. Down the hillside poured her palaces, white as marble, rising in terraces from their dark gardens, and far away we could hear the plaintive cry of the city watchmen as they went their solitary rounds. At our feet a sheer cliff, filled to the level of the road with trees, fell into the night. From its mysterious depths ascended the fragrance of wet earth and the bell-like chant of frogs. And beyond, and all round, lay the broad fields of Tuscany, filled with a sea of moonlit mists, from which the fantastic outlines of little hills rolled up, like shadowy waves, with towered farms and slim black cypresses upon their crests.

MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE

Austere and terrible, barren as the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is the desert of Accona, where Bernardo Tolomei founded the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore.

At Asciano we left behind us the fruitful gardens of Tuscany, rippling with vines, and rich with maize and olives, and embarked upon a sea of pallid hills. It was as though a blight had fallen. The naked earth was parched and rent with gaping fissures; the tamarisks and spurges and the drab grass which fringed the roadside were old and dry. The smiling valleys fled to the north and the south as from a land accursed, 'and lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness.'

Our way lay along a bleached white road which seared the grey hillside and writhed among volcanic mounds and precipices. Here and there the drab monotony was broken by the clustered spires of cypresses round scattered farms; but their black foliage, like funeral plumes, only added a deeper note of melancholy. It was hot too. The August sun beat down upon us from a brazen sky, and the glare of the road made our eyes ache for cool green shadows. But when we reached the plateau a vision of surpassing beauty burst upon us. It was as though, after sojourning for many hours in the wilderness, we looked from Pisgah on the promised land. To our right, across miles of pale clay gorges and volcanic mounds, Siena lay rosy and smiling in her vineyards; on the other hand a wide valley full of precipices rolled away to the purple hills of Umbria, which hung like a mirage between earth and sky, with Monte Amiata lifting her proud head above them all. And presently, after we had passed through Chiusure, a shrunken little town in the heart of a green oasis, we caught our first glimpse of Monte Oliveto.

Below the road the hill fell away in a deep ravine, whose tortured sides were torn and scarred by torrents, as though the pallid earth had bared an ancient wound. And in the midst of the grey desolation, with towering cliffs above, and wild precipices leaping down into the valley below, stood the Abbey of the Blessed Bernardo. Grim and forbidding as a fortress were its bare red walls, devoid of ornament, only redeemed from positive ugliness by their austerity and rugged strength. And yet, as we approached the monastery through the fragrant shade of cypress avenues, the scent of pine needles and the song of cicalas rose together like the voice of the wilderness and the solitary place which has been made glad.

For, indeed, S. Bernardo and his companions laboured to make this wilderness blossom like a rose. Early in the fourteenth century he put aside the vanities of life. At the height of his glory, when all Siena was ringing with his brilliance and prodigality, he left the city, fleeing, like Shelley, from the awful spectre of his veiled self, asking 'Are you satisfied?' And coming into the desert of Accona he dwelt here in poverty and simplicity, building a little chapel to Santa Scolastica, the sister of St. Benedict, and leading a life of prayer and meditation. We read that a great number of followers, many of them noble, came to him, and lived upon the hillside, striving by the sweat of their brows to transform the Tuscan desert into a garden. But in that day of Guelph and Ghibelline disorders the rulers of Siena feared that he was sowing the seeds of a rebellion; and, if we believe his legend, tried to poison him. It is certain that he was accused of heresy, and forced to make the long journey to the Papal Court of Avignon with Ambrogio Piccolomini, one of his earliest companions, and a scion of the noble house of Piccolomini. Nothing more is said of the charge of heresy. The Pope, John XXII., received them with favour and gave them letters to Guido Tarlati, the splendid old warrior-bishop of Arezzo, in which he asked that most unconventional of prelates to furnish them with a monastic rule. Here again the legend adds a picturesque touch, for it tells us that Tarlati had a miraculous vision, in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and commanded him to give the rule of Benedict to 'the pious solitaries' of Accona, to clothe them in spotless white, the symbol of her purity, and to give their hermitage the name of St. Mary of Mount Olivet.

So with their own hands Bernardo and his companions, no longer clad in the garb of penitents, began to build their church and convent on the spot where he had his vision of a celestial ladder stretching up to heaven, with angels leading his companions to the throne of Christ. But their work was stopped by news of the great plague which was spreading desolation throughout the country. Going himself to Siena, Bernardo sent out the brothers two by two to tend the people, bidding them depart with good courage, saying that they should all meet together in Siena for the Festival of the Assumption. He never saw his cloistered home again; he died in the stricken city with nearly all his companions, and other hands took up the building of his monastery; and, later, beautified it with frescoes by Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma, and rare intarsia by Fra Giovanni of Verona.

But I was not thinking of the Blessed Bernardo or of his white-robed Olivetans as we drew near the monastery. Some touch of faery lingered in that cypress grove. We had come out to see a convent. And lo! a battlemented gateway rose before us, with drawbridge and portcullis, as warlike as a castle of the Sforzas. It was as though we had ridden like princes of eld across the grey inferno of Childe Roland, where the grass 'grew scant as hair in leprosy,' only to wind our horns before the gate of an enchanted city.

And the fancy grew. We passed without challenge under the portcullis, with a smiling Godspeed from its Della Robbia Madonna, into one of those enchanted woods of Italy, where stone-pines make a frieze against the sky, and cicalas sing their little hearts away in rapture. Two paths led through the flickering shadows. We hesitated which to take, and glanced behind us, half expecting some warden to issue from that ancient gate to ask our pleasure and direct our steps. No one was there. But, just as St. Mary welcomed us without, so from his niche above the arch St. Benedict, clad in the spotless robes of Oliveto, gave us his blessing. We went forward then, past a huge brick jebbia full of green water and down to the stables where we dismounted by a well, as Aeneas Sylvius and his brilliant suite of knights and choristers dismounted when they rode here from Siena and marvelled to find so fair a garden in that barren land.

Still no one came, and still the enchanted silence of the woods prevailed. We wandered round the old red walls, seeking to find an entrance, and since there was no one to say us nay, we went into the cool white monastery. How still and desolate it was! Our footsteps ringing on the flags dismayed us, and when we pealed the bell it echoed like derisive laughter down the empty corridor. Truly the spirit of the place has taken flight, now that the white-robed brethren no longer dwell in their inheritance. Not more than three monks live here to-day; and these, they told us rather sadly, as _custodes_ only, for their order is suppressed nearly everywhere, and the state has made a national monument of their treasures. So the ancient law that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath, is fulfilled. And I will confess at once that from the sentimental point of view my sympathies are all with the monks, for they are one of our most picturesque links with the past, and it was with their own hands that they sowed this harvest which another reaps.[12]

So there are only ghosts to people the deserted cells and chapels and refectories of Mount Olivet to-day. Time and the hand of man have robbed this sanctuary. Everywhere the eye sees frescoes fading from the walls; and Napoleon, who never saw any harm in robbing Peter to pay Paul, stole some of the exquisite intarsia stalls of the convent church to enrich the cathedral of Siena. Only in the great cloister, where Signorelli and Sodoma painted the life and miracles of St. Benedict, is the imagination fired. What does it matter that the story has been often told? That we have conned it in a hundred other frescoes? It is like the magic stories of our youth, which gained an added joy by repetition, because no two people ever told them quite the same. Here we could find inhabitants for all those empty cells; here we could fill the pleasant groves with white-cowled monks who knelt in prayer below the cypresses, or paced the shady avenues in meditation; here we could picture Bernardo himself, building his abbey, and see him sitting in the old refectory with Patrizi, and Ambrogio Piccolomini, and the other nobles who followed him into the wilderness. 'The series forms, in fact, a painted _novella_ of monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles.'[13]

And then, because it was long after mezzogiorno, and we were to sleep at Chiusi that night, we went back to the magic cypress-woods to eat our lunch and rest before we drove to Asciano. Our coachmen had prepared a place for us, which they explained was _molto arioso_ for so warm a day, on a terraced slope in the wide avenue of cypresses leading from the monastery church to the little chapel which contains the cell of Bernardo. The bank was carpeted with pine-needles, and the air was fragrant with the scent of crushed thyme. We lunched excellently well off wine and bread, figs and peaches; and our smiling drivers brought us a great _fiasco_ of sparkling ice-cold water--an acceptable addition to the meal, for we were thirsty, and good spring water is not found everywhere in Italy. And then we pillowed our heads on the soft bank, and lay in silence, entangled in a flickering web of sun and shadow.

Surely it was an enchanted wood of cypresses that summer afternoon! As I drowsed I dreamt that I saw a boy come idly through the trees singing to his lute. His eyes were heavy-lidded, and long black love-locks lay on his shoulders. He was dressed fantastically in scarlet stockings, a silken cap, and a gay cloak, which evidently pleased him well, for at times he plucked at it and pulled it closely round him to admire its folds. A monkey with a gilded chain was on his shoulder, and a badger walked solemnly at his heels. Who could he be? I wondered. He was too gay and worldly to have thoughts of entering the Brotherhood, and as he drew nearer I could hear that his song was in the praise of love. Some poet of the Renaissance, perhaps, whose lord was resting in the monastery.

He drew nearer still, till I thought he must have seen me; and then, as though he was a little weary of his song, he dropped his lute and pillowed his gracious young head upon the flowery bank and drifted into sleep, lulled by the fragrance of the warm pine-woods. It seemed to me as if he dreamed, for he stirred, and turned his face away.

Was it I who dreamt the rest?

I saw a lady moving towards him across the flowers as lightly as a butterfly upon the wing. Fair of face and form was she, fashioned very lightly, full of airy grace; with child-like laughter on her lips and a half-defiant, wholly-alluring challenge in her tender eyes. Her dress was blue and of so light a texture that it rippled from her rosy limbs like water, and scarce bruised the flowers. As she ventured near she laughed, and wantoned with some golden fruit. The sunshine and the breeze, greatly daring, played in her filmy yellow hair and fashioned the tender blue of her robe into little wings. Half a child was she, and half a woman, full of the joy of living and the joy of beautiful things; the very spirit of an azure butterfly who flutters through a summer day, dancing from sheer delight.

Who could have dreamt that I should find her here, on this bleak hillside, in this austere old house? These baked clay cliffs and desolations should have driven her away to gay Siena long ago, even if she outstayed the bitter winds which thrash the stone-pines round the forsaken monastery in winter.

She was standing by the poet now, and smiling down at him, pouting a little because he did not wake. Who could resist her, this happy butterfly fashioned so beautifully for love on a golden summer day?

A pine-cone fell into my lap and startled me. I moved. And in a flash the spell was broken. They had vanished, the beauteous lady and the sleeping boy whose dreams had conjured her. The yellow sunlight was slanting in between the cypresses, and from the stables came the sound of horses being harnessed. It was already time to go.

And yet they say that Benedict sent her away with harsh words and admonitions.

And the youth who dreamed was not a poet but a painter; his name was Sodoma. You may see her picture in the cloister, and his own as well, in the gay clothes of which he was so proud, for they were part-payment for his work, and had belonged to a gentleman of Lombardy who took the monastic habit.

But it is still a miracle to me that I should have met her on this bare hillside.

CHIUSI

Night had fallen when we reached Chiusi Junction. A full-blown harvest moon hung over the station-yard like a yellow lamp. It was late, and the lights of Chiusi were a twinkling bunch of fire-flies on a distant hill. We dined at the excellent station buffet, resolved not to spoil the propitious hour by arriving in an unknown city tired and hungry; and afterwards we climbed up to our mysterious destination at leisure, in the glory of a late moon, with the night insects singing by the dusky roadside.

They are among the little joys of Italy these late arrivals, on breathless summer nights, at hill-towns whose features you have only glimpsed heretofore from the windows of a flying train. A fig for the discomforts that you risk! They add a touch of salt to the adventure. The inn you stumble on may be the worst of all bad inns; the dinner will of course be long-delayed; and if you have inadvertently walked in upon a festa it may be difficult to find a place whereon to lay your head. But reckon against these things the charm of mystery--the complete sense of satisfaction with which you watch the ruby tail-lights of your train slipping away into the night, and hear the lessening roar of its engine till your last link with the familiar world is severed, and you are face to face with the unknown. And lastly, remember the joy with which you discover a new world in the morning.

We started in a vettura which was never meant to carry passengers as well as luggage, but before long we slipped out one by one, for we were only going at a snail's pace up the long hill which leads from Chiusi station to Chiusi town, and we could see nothing of the magic of the night, half-buried in boxes, and with the stars shut out by tarpaulin. The driver did not notice, but the horses quickened their pace with the lightened burden, and soon we were left to find our own way up the hillside. It was not difficult. The bright moonlight, which flooded the plain below, turned the road into a band of silver, whose whiteness was barred by the shadows of giant cypresses towering black against the night. The chanting of the frogs and the song of the night cricket almost drowned the jangling bells of our vettura, and high above us we could see Chiusi, no longer a bunch of fire-flies, but a ghostly grey hill-city already wrapt in slumber, with a frowning rocca, and grim old walls. Its silence was a little desolate as we drew near, and it was a relief to see the hospitable yellow lights of the Leon d'Oro outside the Porta Romana, giving us a homely welcome into the mysterious moonlit town.

I woke early in the morning. It needed but a glance to tell me that I was back in Umbria. Nowhere else are the dimpled valleys so full of beauty, or the blue hills so softly moulded; and nowhere else is that pellucid sky, or that strange clarity of atmosphere which inspired the landscapes of the Umbrian Quattrocento artists. It was as though I looked straight into the heart of one of Perugino's sacred pictures. There was the soft green valley melting in the distance into the azure folds of mountains; there were the slender trees cleaving the luminous air; there were the towered cities crowning the hills; there was the clear pale sky, the spaciousness, the holiness which Perugino and his school immortalised. But, after all, this rich plain, from which the waters of an inland sea have long ago receded, is peculiarly the land of Perugino. Is not that rose-red city on the crest of the wooded hill which bounds the southern horizon of Chiusi, Città della Pieve, the town which gave him birth? I half expected to see a band of saints walking in the vineyards, or to find Madonna sitting by the roadside with the Infant Christ. But another artist had usurped the landscape. Below my window was a peasant ploughing in his olive-garden. He sang as he bent forward to throw his weight on the wooden shaft, and his clothes were as blue as the heavens at mid-day. Two milk-white oxen moved slowly before him under the tender grey of the olives, and as they passed they left behind them shining furrows of freshly-turned earth. It was a poem of labour, as delicate in colour as a tone-etching, an inspiration for Millet with the poetry of life in his veins, or for the subtle Corot.