Chapter XXIV: Rome 353 (5)

In this humble chapel where they keep the miraculous crucifix of San Damiano, we seem to draw a little nearer to Francis, who must have come here often to the old priest who gave him lessons in his childhood. Later, when the Assisans had begun to listen to him, he preached here until the press became so great that he was given permission to deliver his sermons in the then unfinished cathedral of San Rufino. Here, too, he lay in state while the people of Assisi wept and gloried over him, just as many years after they wept and gloried over St. Clare. It would have been a gentle thought if these two who had prayed and laboured together in life could have been sheltered by the same roof in death. Madonna Giacobba, who had the privilege of coming to St. Francis in his last illness, lies in San Francesco; but Clare, the Poor Lady of San Damiano, who had so humbly begged that she might once break bread with Francis, lies on the hillside far away from him.

We went down to see her tomb, the rock-hewn vault in which until fifty years ago she lay, just as the world had left her seven centuries before, with sprigs of wild thyme scattered by her mourning sisters still clinging to her robe. To-day she lies in a gilt and crystal chest, decked with flowers and jewels and elaborate velvet cushions. Her strong and rather austere face with its delicate aquiline nose is outlined against her snowy wimple, and in the midst of the incongruous splendour of her resting-place she is clad in the coarse brown robe and black veil of penitence for which she cast aside the luxurious garments of her youth. Candles burn at her head and at her feet, and a phantom-like nun with a lighted taper in her hand glides from behind a veil to draw the curtains. It was so quiet that suddenly I could hear the ticking of my watch out of the stillness, as though time tried to mark the moments in that silent chamber where it had been as nothing for so long.

But how grotesque the wreath of flowers, the thin halo, the gilded bed! Why not have left that sunken figure resting on such hard stones as it chose for comfort in life?

It is only by going out into the highways and hedges as he did that we can find the real Francis;--in the little convent of San Damiano, in the Hermitage of the Carcere, that retreat on Monte Subasio beloved of the early Franciscans, and in the holy places scattered through the fields of Umbria in which he worked and prayed.

A faint odour of romance clings round the ancient stones of San Damiano, for there St. Francis laboured with his own hands to build a habitation of apostolical simplicity which was to be the spiritual home of Clare. This humble place, a mere chapel in the olive-gardens below Assisi, is pregnant with memories of the simple Francis and the saintly Clare. For it was here, as he knelt before a crucifix in the little ruined church, that Francis, the gay merchant-prince of Assisi, heard the voice of Jesus saying, 'Francis, seest thou not that my house is in ruins? Go and restore it for me.' It was just what he needed, this troubled boy. Here was an obvious work for his hands, and in the doing of it he might find relief from the fears and doubtings that had assailed him since he rose from his weary sick-bed and looked upon an altered world. With no premonition of his life-work, truly the rock on which the Catholic Church built up its power when it was in danger of being swept away in tidal waves of lust and avarice during the stormy Middle Ages, the ever-literal Francis bethought him of the letter of his miraculous command.

It is such an old story that it is not worth retelling, how he sold the bales of cloth from his father's warehouse in the market of Foligno and brought the money to the priest of San Damiano; how the good man refused it, being fearful of Pietro Bernardone's wrath; how Francis flung it into the corner of a little window and would not touch it either; how his angry father renounced him; and how St. Francis, having yielded up his earthly goods, begged through the streets of Assisi for the stones with which to accomplish his work. There was no more fitting spot in all Umbria to be the home of the Second Order than San Damiano. But I think that Clare in her long life within its walls must have often wept, seeing the rough stones which Francis, with his tender unaccustomed hands, had fashioned into a house of God and a shelter for the Poor Ladies who had renounced the world to serve his Master.

I remember well coming upon it one evening, breathless with sirocco, when all the world was gray and silver. In the little cloister-garden the flowers were yielding up their fragrance to the night in perfumed sighs, and in the tiny vaulted chapel two brothers and a priest were singing vespers with a few peasants who had wandered in from the fields. A flight of steps led down into the dark chapel, so little altered from the church which Francis built. And here I rested. Every moment the shadows below the olives crept nearer, shutting out the distance. At my feet in San Damiano the altar lights grew brighter in the dusk, and the swinging censer glowed like a live coal in the dark choir. So I waited, thinking of another Clare, in England, who was lying sick unto death, but with peace in my heart, for it was very sweet to hear Vespers in this holy place while the curious shadows of night crept up under the olives. Presently the chanting ceased. The priest went away, and the peasants passed out into the soft dusk.

I went down then into the silent chapel and saw the relics of Saint Clare; the little sacristy with ancient wooden seats, such hard uncomfortable planks, where she and the sisters heard Mass; the room she died in; the hollow in the wall through which she received her spiritual food; her yard of garden overlooking the wide Umbrian plain and Rivo Torto. How often as she stood here upon the convent roof must she have thought of the Seraphic Father toiling down in the valley, for I doubt not she loved him, even as Madonna Pica, his mother, and Giacobba di Settisoli loved him, and hungered over him, and grieved for his poor weary feet, and exulted in the purity of his soul.

What memories of Francis and Clare, the true type of the brother and sister in Christ, are here! Francis indeed came seldom to the convent after the Poor Ladies were installed, for as he was not ordained, he had not the right to hear their confessions or administer the Holy Sacrament. But we know that he often sent to ask advice of the saintly abbess; and he stayed here before his journey to Rieti, when he was worn-out and sick, and almost blind, and took much comfort in her sympathy. Here, too, his body was brought, so that the sisters might look their last upon it before it was borne in triumph to Assisi. But Clare, whose cry of grief still has the power to stir our hearts to pain, lived on through bitter years to see the ideals of the little lover of Poverty shattered by Brother Elias and the Papacy before she followed him up the hill to rest.

The way up to the Carcere is steep and long. The path is a mere track of broken stones which radiates heat, and there is no shade to mitigate the pitiless August glare. And yet I would not have forgone that toil up the side of Subasio, if only for the pleasures of the way. Assisi lay behind us like a city of the Middle Ages, with Gothic towers and palaces grouped in échelon below her fantastic castle. On our right the hillside, veiled in the tender grey of olives, sloped away to the Valley of Spoleto, which was a vision of pure beauty, with mists clinging about the banks of its streams, and its many little cities, Spello, Foligno, Bevagna, tall Trevi and Spoleto, rising from the green folds of encircling hills. Above Subasio was barren except for some scanty oaks, but the bushes by the roadside were heavy with fruit, blackberries, and shiny red and yellow hips and crimson haws. Out of the parched stony earth grew clumps of broom, long-stemmed and slender, with a crest of golden blossoms like a flight of butterflies; and scabious, white and purple, rosettes for a fairy's shoe; and little Morning Glories smiling at the sky; and sugamele, and that wonderful blue thistle, which looks as though it had been soaked, leaves and all, in the rare dye of mountain mists at dawn.

We did not see the Carcere until we were actually upon it. It is completely hidden in a ravine of ilexes, in a fold, as it were, of the brown skirts of Subasio. Small wonder that the Poverello loved this place; it is so humble, so silent, so restful. Often and often while he toiled down in the valley, ministering to the lepers of Rivo Torto, or preaching to the hard of heart, himself beset with doubts and fears, he must have lifted his eyes unto the hills, and longed for the Peace of God, which he knew dwelt in this solitude. Far away on the spur of the mountain is Assisi, where he laboured to bring love; and further away still, beyond the peaceful vales of Umbria, are great cities in which men worked, and hated, and struggled, ay, and loved unceasingly. But here in this leafy ilex grove, in these tiny cells and chapels, there is a little world of dreams and tender memories.

It is so small that a few minutes suffice to see everything--the courtyard with its miraculous well; the narrow cell and chapel of St. Francis, which is polished by the feet and shoulders of a multitude of pilgrims; the hole through which the exasperated devil vanished when he found that his temptations were of no avail; the lonely caves of the Early Companions in the hillside. It is a mere cluster of cells overhanging a mountain torrent; but it has a peculiar beauty as of a place set apart, dedicate to holiness.

And there is peace in the shadowy ilex wood in which St. Francis loved to walk, holding converse with his little sisters, the birds. Myrtle and cyclamens grow among the grey rocks, and the sunlight flickers across the mossy path. In the silence we could hear the song of Brother Wind down in the glen, the humming of an insect near at hand, and, far away, a bird calling to his mate. And all the time the brother, who walked beside us, prated of the miracles of the saint. I hardly listened, for like an echo down the years I seemed to hear Francis, the troubadour of God, singing his canticle of the sun as he toiled up the barren hillside from Assisi.

'Laudato sia Dio mio Signore
Cum tutte le tue creature,
Specialmente messer lo frate sole,
Il quale giorna et illumina nui per lui,
Et ello è bello et radiante cum grande splendore,
De te Signore porta significatione.'

* * * * *

On a day of never-to-be-forgotten beauty we went down into the fields below Assisi, and wandered in the footsteps of Francis and his brother saints. Our way led out of the town by the old Roman road below the ancient Porta Moiana, and there among the olives we came upon Gothic farms, tended by beautiful Umbrian peasants, and many a humble half-forgotten shrine, made holy in the thirteenth century, and fallen now into disuse. There are many such places round Assisi, within whose walls Mass is only said once a year, leaving them for the rest of the days to be store-houses or granaries or sheds in which to keep the wooden plough of the country-side.

Everywhere were snow-white butterflies dancing in pairs before us as we passed, or swinging on the slender flowers that starred the hedges. White doves bowed and sidled in the golden wheat, and wayside shrines rose from a tangle of flowers where the cross roads met. And here, as though it was a custom oft repeated, the milk-white oxen, which once were deemed a fitting sacrifice for Roman gods, paused in their rolling gait while their masters laid down their whips, and doffed their hats and knelt a moment in the dust before the symbol of the suffering Christ.

It was a world of great simplicity and faith in which we walked. For here in Umbria, down in these fields where Francis' 'Camp of the Lord' set up their wattle huts, faith is a real and potent thing. They do not doubt, these people, these rugged-faced men, these Madonna-like women--they never will doubt. To them the mysteries of the Incarnation and Ascension are accepted facts. In simplicity and faith they rise up in the morning and lie down again at night, never fearing that their prayers at dawn and evening, their hastily uttered petitions at a roadside cross, have not winged their way straight to heaven. I too would fain believe it when I am walking in their olive-groves and vineyards, for it is a lovely thing, as dreams are lovely, and young ambitions and young hope. And it is here perhaps that the secret of the intangible beauty of Assisi may be found--because it is a shrine; no matter of St. Francis, or of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the older gods. Out of the wreck of time the flame of worship and faith has been kept burning; the stones upon this altar have never darkened and grown cold.

It was the season of the husking of the maize, and a happy harvest air hung over everything. Each farm had its pile of fragrant white husks outside its door ready to replenish the mattresses of the household, and the corn was spread out on the threshing-floors like a golden carpet. Sometimes we saw the family gathered there to shell the cobs, and sometimes we came upon them sitting below their olive-trees, separating the yellow corn from its white sheaths, and heaping them up on either side the gold and silver largesse of the Great Mother.

It was in the midst of all this pastoral loveliness that we came to Rivo Torto, which is so bare and ugly and un-Franciscan in feeling. Poor and humble, but far richer in the spirit of St. Francis than the great church of Rivo Torto, are the two chapels of Santa Maria Maddalena and San Rufino d'Arce, which may mark the approximate site of the hut in which the saint dwelt while he was ministering to the lepers. We found Santa Maria Maddalena in a field of hemp, whose tall slender stalks and green tassels veiled the ancient apse and narrow lancet windows. Golden pumpkins were piled shoulder-high outside its wall, drying in the sun; and the interior, when at last it was unlocked, proved to be a potato store. Even more dilapidated is San Rufino d'Arce, which stands further from the road near the threshing-floor of a neighbouring farm. Nor could the lovely peasant woman, who brought its key and walked like a queen barefoot among her golden corn-cobs, tell us anything of its miraculous well in which, tradition says, a young boy saint was drowned.

But now, as we drew near it, along the dusty white road which links Perugia to Rome, the dome of Santa Maria degli Angeli towered above the plain. This is the holiest place in Umbria, the Little Portion, beloved of St. Francis and his brethren, in which they lived and worked, and from which they issued forth to preach the gospel of love and repentance to the world. It is sanctified by miracles and the frequent presence of the saint, and is pregnant with the romance of the Franciscan order, which the writer of the _Fioretti_ has set forth so admirably. But overmuch devotion has robbed it of simplicity and nullified many of its gentler associations. It is a pathetic sight to see the little church, consecrated by centuries of prayer, in the centre of the sixteenth-century Leviathan. It looks like an imprisoned thing, a dim unspoken reproach. I wish they could have left it in its fields, where the wild sweet wind would have sung praises through door and window, and the ardent sun have shamed the candles on the altar. But just as the papacy swept away Francis himself, so this great church has swallowed up the Little Portion which was all-sufficing for so many saints. A gentle, white-haired friar took us round the church. 'Here by this pier,' he said, 'Francis dined with Clare. And this is where he died. You know he wished to die here. He loved the Porziuncula better than any other place in the world.'

And then we saw the thornless roses of St. Francis, and his cell, and the garden where he bade the brothers put cabbages into the earth upside down to test their obedience, and the fig-tree which the brothers lately planted at the request of two Englishwomen, to take the place of the tree wherein the cicala praised God continuously with Francis until the saint begged him to rest because he had edified him enough.

He was a simple, dear old man, our guide, who told his stories smilingly and yet with reverence and faith, very different from the unkempt and cynical monk at Rivo Torto. And when he had finished he took us into the sacristy and gave us a little book he had written about Saint Mary of the Angels, and a rose sprig from the bush which lost its thorns when St. Francis threw himself into it. And so we parted, he to his prayers, we to climb up through the fields to Assisi.

GUBBIO

I shall always think of Gubbio as I saw her first, in the magic sunset of a cold grey day, on which summer had been hidden by the jealous clouds, and the wind blew bleakly from the Appennines. September had come in the night before with storm and wind. When we left Assisi the sky was clear and rain-swept, blue as the heavens of Giotto's frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco, and there was a glint of sunshine lighting her Gothic towers between the racing cumuli. But all day the mountains of Nocera and Gualdo 'mourned for their heavy yoke,' hiding their crests in wind-blown veils of cloud; and the rocky stream-beds at their feet, which had lain mute and parched since the last rains of spring, gave voice in swirling torrents.

So we came to the heart of the Appennines, to the broad Valley of the Chiaggio, which is so rich with maize and vineyards. Here in the north three mountains lift their great heads to the sky, and in the hollow where their three slopes meet lies Gubbio, a fairy citadel such as poets dream of. Indeed, Gubbio might well be the home of dreams, for I can think of no place where their gossamer threads could be so lightly spun as in the long, fantastic arcade of the Mercato Vecchio, in the shadow of her Gothic palaces.

As we drew near, the sun slipped from below her mantle of cloud, and in a seeming passion of desire bathed the whole world in flame. Seen by the ruddy torch of this wild sunset Gubbio was all rose, a city of fair dreams, unforgettably lovely. Her towers, palaces and loggias were illuminated, and the bare slopes of Monte Calvo were flooded with roseate light save where the folds of the hill made cobalt shadows. Even the peasants walking in the Piazza del Mercato were caught in the same radiance, which made a glory round the humblest implements of toil. It was so fair a sight that I stood as one enchanted and feared to take my eyes away from it, lest it should vanish like the fairy cities of our childhood, and I should find myself once more upon the bleak hillside of life.

O little town, with the name whose quaintness has made it familiar, do you still sleep at the foot of your mountains under the shadow of your holy houses? Can it be that I have dreamt of you, seeing some picture of a mediaeval city in a psalter? Or does your lamp-lighter still light your ancient swing-lamps in the dusk, with old-world grace and disregard of time, setting out on his slow rounds long before the sunset glow has faded from your brow? I must come back to see if it is true; if your barren hills have really blossomed into shrines and monasteries; if you have still the wistful charm that I remember; if you will greet me after the long journey with that same rosy blush at eve!

And yet, I do not know why I should question, for I have many gentle memories of Gubbio--of steep, quiet streets whose ends are closed by solemn mountains; of Gothic palaces and loggias; of ancient churches full of faded pictures; of saints and Madonnas brooding over city gates; of peasants streaming into Mass of a morning; of women in black mantillas or the graceful fringed shawls of Venice and the March. Nor have I forgotten the hospitality that she extended to us. Gubbio was always famous for her hospitality. There is a story that in the olden days the nobles of Gubbio fought so fiercely for the right of entertaining visitors to their town that to avoid the really serious conflicts which resulted from this rivalry a pillar was erected in the Mercato with rings attached to it, 'each belonging to some separate aristocratic house, and to whosesoever ring a traveller chanced to fasten his horse, to him belonged the right of entertainment.'[18]

Though our inn was humble, even rough, we were lodged in the ancient convent of San Marco, and we took our meals in a vine arbour full of hanging grapes, where the sunlight piercing the leafy roof flecked the snowy table-cloth with silver, and made the floor an arabesque of dappled light and shade. A few yards away among the vines the Carmignano foamed along its rocky bed. And here we were content with simple fare, but of the best--macaroni spread with pomidoro, _misto fritto_, golden eggs, fruit and honey, washed down with amber-coloured _vino del paese_.

Whatever may be the facts about the grandson of Noah, to whom local tradition loves to assign the foundation of Gubbio, there can be no doubt that she is of Umbrian antiquity. Unlike most of the so-called Umbrian cities Gubbio has ample proof of her importance as a city of the older race, which was displaced by the Etruscans; for besides the number of prehistoric utensils discovered in the caves of her mountains, and a short course of Cyclopean wall on Monte Calvo, which point to a remote civilisation, there are certain pieces of money in existence bearing the Umbrian name Ikuvini; and, most conclusive evidence of all, there are the world-famous Eugubian Tables.

These tables of bronze, which have been of such inestimable value to the student of ancient languages, are Gubbio's greatest treasure. They are housed in her Palazzo Pubblico, in her little shrunken museum, which has so few precious things left to-day, except a solitary tazza by the immortal Maestro Giorgio. It would be useless for me to write of them at length, for it is impossible to treat of them scientifically in a short chapter, and only those who come to see them can gauge the romance and mystery which hang about them. There are seven tables in all, four written in Etruscan characters, two in Latin, and one partly in Etruscan and partly in Latin characters. Yet the language that they have immortalised is neither Latin nor Etruscan, but the tongue of that mysterious people, the Umbrians, who have left us so few traces of their civilisation, whose origin is lost in the misty ages.

Since the discovery of these tables in 1444 students and scholars have sought to read their riddle, and it is by the fruit of their labours that we know what an interesting clue they afford to the character of Gubbio. For these fine letters traced by the scribes of long ago are sacerdotal inscriptions, dealing with the religious rites of the Attidian brethren, who paid homage to a strange pantheon of gods--Umbrian, Roman and Greek--and whose headquarters, according to many students, were in the temple of Jupiter Appenninus, eight miles away, at Scheggia, on the old Flaminian way. M. Bréal, however, does not hold this theory, claiming that Jupiter Appenninus is not mentioned in the text; and urging the plea that as the tablets were discovered in a subterranean vault, near the ancient theatre of Iguvium, the college of the confraternity was likely to be found within the city itself.

It would be difficult to say, for necessarily the reading of the tablets is but vague; the only point we can be certain of is that this ghostly echo of a vanished city is one of prayer and invocation, occupied with sacrifices and propitiations rather than with laws or ceremonies, as the inscriptions of Rome and Etruria have been. And this is typical of the city, for the real characteristic of Gubbio to-day is her gentle air of sanctity, just as the most vivid memories of her Middle Ages are concerned with saints and bishops. For the bishops of Gubbio, the saintly Ubaldo, whose name the people of Gubbio venerate in the yearly festival of the Ceri on the 15th of May, the blessed Teobaldo who succeeded him, and Villano, that man 'of pure and saintly life who was, besides, the friend of St. Francis of Assisi,' are only a few of the many holy men who steered her helm through the stormy waves of Time.

And here, as you remember, St. Francis came with song and thanksgiving, although he had been but a short time before stripped naked to the world, to see his friend Giacomello Spada, who clothed him and sheltered him, and whose garden covered the ground where the picturesque Gothic church of San Francesco stands to-day. Nor is there any more familiar story told by their nurses to the breathless children of the Latin countries than the legend of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which is commemorated to this day in the little chapel of S. Francesco della Pace; built, so it is said, on the site of the cave wherein the wolf dwelt after he had been tamed by the brotherly love of Francis. It was to Gubbio Francis came in the first glow of his renunciation, for we read that he was confident of finding shelter and the bare necessaries of clothing with his friends there, but I think there was another reason. Perhaps as he lay on the bleak side of Subasio he thought with longing of the gentle city of Ubaldo, cradled at the foot of its bare mountain, which soared towards the heavens, offering, as it were, upon an altar, the body of its saintly bishop.

Gubbio is a city of vanished splendours, a ghost of her old glory. So that we were amazed on entering Santa Maria Nuova to see anything so brilliant and full of vivid beauty as the Madonna della Belvedere, which Ottaviano Nelli painted there. Like Sant'Agostino and San Pietro, Santa Maria has her share of faded fresco; but this Madonna in her splendid robes, in the midst of her gracious court of angels and saints and kneeling donors, is a vision of the glories of that Gubbio which once raised a proud head among the principalities of the Quattrocento. Yet not even Nelli has succeeded in colouring the past of Gubbio. For nearly all her treasures have been stolen from her, and her tired old walls toppling to their decay enclose more gardens and smiling vineyards than streets and squares. If she had not been so poor and so ready to sell herself for a few _soldi_ to the passing stranger she might have been a museum of lovely things. As it is she has been stripped of everything which could be carried away, from the exquisite majolica of Maestro Giorgio (whose ruby glaze made him as much the glory of sixteenth-century Gubbio as Oderigi was of the city visited by Dante) to the intarsia cabinets in the Palace of Federigo of Urbino.

How typical of Gubbio, the shrunken city, is the ruined palace full of lovely crumbling stones, where Federigo and his beloved wife Battista lived. It is fallen into decay; it has become a mere barrack; a more desolate spot could not well be imagined. And yet it is a fitting symbol of the house of Montefeltro; for Guidobaldo, the weakling son of the great condottiere, was born here, in the house which Federigo built so proudly in his birthplace among the loyal people of Gubbio. And it was the scene of a great tragedy. For here Battista died.

After her death Federigo came here less often, for we read that he loved Battista very dearly. She had inherited the wit and ready sympathy of her great grandmother, Battista da Montefeltro; she was a scholar, and a woman of resource and courage, capable of defending the duchy while Federigo was absent on his long campaigns. And withal she loved him. It was for this reason, knowing his disappointment because she had given him no heir to succeed to his hard-won estate, that this great woman, the grandmother of Vittoria Colonna, listened for her lord's sake to an old wife's tale, and making a pilgrimage to Gubbio vowed to Saint Ubaldo that if a son was vouchsafed to her she would be willing to die for his sake. A curious story. But she did bear a son, here at Gubbio, whither she had come to be under the special protection of the saint. Federigo was away in Tuscany, gaining more laurels by his great victory over the Volterrans. He came back to her as soon as he could, riding swiftly through the Appennines with his honours fresh upon him. And here is the strangest part of the story. For when he was but a few hours away Battista, who had been progressing so well, fell ill, and died soon after his arrival, thus expiating her vow. Federigo's heartbroken letters to the Senate of Siena and the Pope testify his grief. Nor did her love and sacrifice avail him anything, for Guidobaldo was the last of his race to sit upon the throne of Urbino.

But neither Time, nor the wanton hand of strangers, can rob Gubbio of her beauty. She is a dream-city within whose walls we grew forgetful of the world. It is not the imperishable grandeur of her mountains or her monuments which constitute her special charm so much as her Gothic grace and her gentle blending of art and nature. See what a fraction of old Iguvium is left--a theatre, with its memories of vanished pomps and vanities, and some broken tombs standing in the corn-fields, with twisted vines veiling their ragged cores, and brambles tossing wide arms over their crests. And yet I carry with me the memory of a golden hour in that ancient Umbro-Roman theatre of Iguvium, not so much for its importance as a monument as for its beauty; although the vandalism of the last century, which allowed the people of Gubbio to strip it of its marble columns, has left it many interesting fragments, such as a perfect doorway with its jambs complete, and the unspoilt sloping pavement of the wings by which the actors entered the stage. For we approached it through a vineyard below the city walls: its auditorium was a deep semi-circle of grassy steps, broidered with little flowers, and in its proscenium the apples dropped from neighbouring orchards.

We stepped through the vineyard gate on to the raised platform of the stage, denuded of everything except some stumps of masonry and some few feet of pavement. Three blocks of marble served as rough steps from the proscenium to the orchestra, and here a lizard sunned himself, and a happy golden butterfly fluttered, as though these old worn stones were their familiar playground. As we climbed up the seats where once the Romans sat, and perhaps the Umbri, for the theatre was repaired in the lifetime of Augustus, the scent of crushed thyme filled the air. It was very quiet. There were not even cicalas, only the distant bells of Gubbio calling her people to prayer. We sat on the highest circle of the mossy steps, and looked across the vineyards to the little city, asleep in the golden noon below her arid hills.

The poet was deep in _opus reticulatum_ and cornices and friezes, but I could only love the silence and the scented air, the little flowers which starred the ground, the grasses pencilled lightly against the sky on the chain of arches, the lizards sunning themselves on broken marbles, the butterflies dancing above them. And when I raised my eyes Gubbio lay before me with olive-gardens enclosed in her broken walls, and her old grey houses piled one above the other round her lovely Gothic Palazzo dei Consoli, which soars above the lesser roofs, arcaded and battlemented, a crown of beauty on the hillside. Behind rose her three mountains, Monte Calvo, Monte Ingino, and Monte S. Girolamo, barren of everything but lonely cypresses pointing the way to monasteries on high.

Gubbio has the indefinably wistful charm of a city built in the shadow of great mountains, for though she has conquered the three giants which hem her in, and left her monasteries as out-posts on their slopes, and solemn crucifixes as her ensign on their brows, she has not tamed their wildness. It needs only a few steps through the picturesque old Porta Metauro to prove this, for out in that rugged pass which leads to Scheggia, and the Old Flaminian Road, and Cagli, and Urbino we were hemmed in between the hungry mountains, whose sides are scarred by torrents, curiously seamed, and richly coloured.

Along this road the Dukes of Urbino rode in splendid state. How little it is altered from their day! Here you are face to face with Nature, who changes slowly. The strata on the frowning cliffs are a little worn; the road is a little better, though it is a poor _strada_ even now for motors; perhaps there was no wall then between the road and the deep gully where the green Carmignano stirs up its sandy bed. But the peasants rode up the hilly pass then as now with their women riding astride and a-pillion on mules or donkeys, and the traveller in that day would hear as we did the forlorn music of their bells still floating back, long after they were out of sight. On the hillside above was one of Gubbio's wonders--the mediaeval aqueduct which creeps perilously round the shoulder of Monte Calvo, and dips down the hillside to the Bottaccione, which I can best describe by saying that it is a thick wall which joins Monte Calvo to Monte Ingino, and dams the Carmignano, making a reservoir from which water can flow at will into the town for use in mills and fountains. If the Eugubian Tablets testify to the importance of ancient Iguvium, these vast engineering feats testify to her mediaeval greatness. For though they are not as imposing as Roman Monuments, and are built of small poor stones, they are a splendid testimony of the energy of this little hill-girt city in the twelfth and fourteenth[19] centuries, when most principalities were too occupied in petty wars to think of such stupendous work.

It would be unfair to Gubbio to take leave of her without saying one word about the Via Carmignano, which is not only one of the most picturesque streets to be seen anywhere in Italy, but which represents a sphere of life in which Gubbio was extremely active from the twelfth century to comparatively recent years--her woollen industry. It is rather astonishing that Gubbio, who had so many trades and arts, should be so poor to-day. Her school of painting which was mainly of the miniature type--for Ottaviano Nelli was as much a miniature-painter as the mysterious Oderisi, whose name, like Francesca da Rimini's, has been handed down to posterity by Dante--was famous throughout Italy.

I have already spoken of her renown as the home of Master George, the great majolica-maker; she sheltered a school of mosaic-workers from early times; and her wood-carvers, who have left splendid work in her old Church of San Pietro, were reckoned so important that a certain Niccolò was commissioned to carve the great doors of San Francesco at Assisi. But it was by her wool industry that Gubbio built up her wealth; and it was to turn their wool mills that the Eugubians built the Bottaccione out in the pass between Scheggia and Gubbio, and diverted the course of the Carmignano, which till the twelfth century had been a moat round the city walls.

To-day this little mountain torrent still runs through the heart of Gubbio, but the mills are silent. For the woollen trade, which was so prosperous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the nobles passed a law forbidding any of their class to enter its ranks under penalty of forfeiting his title, has been slowly killed by the suppression of the monasteries, which has robbed it of its staple support, the making of habits for religious houses.

The Via Carmignano is a little Venice which loses itself in a mountain torrent as it approaches the Porta Metauro. Behind the arcaded loggia del Mercato, where it runs at the foot of the cypress garden of San Giovanni Battista, a picturesque and ancient church on the site of the early cathedral, the ravine is spanned by as many bridges as a Venetian waterway, mediaeval erections of the maddest shapes, full of fantastic angles, which sometimes only lead to the barred doors of some Merchant of Gubbio's private house. Here are Gothic palaces with gardens pouring over their walls, and coats of arms by their doors like the house near the Via dei Consoli, which has the Lamb of the Templars over its portal. But as the road creeps up towards the Porta Metauro they are replaced by thirteenth-century houses, mere cottages of rough grey stone such as you might find in any mountain village--only these were built in the time of St. Francis. Between the street and the deep river gully is a breast-high parapet with wide-eaved shrines whose hanging lamps are always lit at night; and beyond and above are the everlasting hills, towering overhead, blocking every vista with their rocks and gullies and stony water-courses, lifting their tawny heads up to the soft sky and crowned with giant crucifixes, as though they shouted in triumph to an unheeding world the old war-cry of the Lord, '_In hoc signo vinces!_'

ANCONA

We caught our first glimpse of the shimmering Adriatic across a richly-farmed plain full of the fruit-trees which Horace and Juvenal extolled; and soon afterwards we saw the Eastern Gate of Italy, beautiful Ancona, rising like a city of white marble above its blue, sickle-shaped bay.

The history of the origin of Ancona is unique among the cities of the Adriatic, for she was founded by a colony of Sicilian Greeks who came to the shores of Picenum about 380 B.C., seeking refuge from the tyrant Dionysius. Ancona is a typical Greek site, a natural harbour well adapted to the use of commerce, with a steep hill overhanging the 'elbow' bay. From the earliest times she was rich and prosperous, for besides being the only port on the eastern coast before the growth of Venice and Ravenna she was situated in the fertile fields of Picenum, which were noted for the excellence of their olives and fruits, as well as for their wine and corn. She also had a wonderful purple dye which was said to equal that of Phoenicia, whence came the garments immortalised by Macaulay.

'Woven in the land of sunrise
By Syria's dark-browed daughters,
And by the sails of Carthage brought
Far o'er the southern waters.'

She was one of the first cities to hold out friendly hands to Caesar after he had crossed the Rubicon on his march on Rome, and in the life-time of Pliny she was raised to the rank of a Roman colony. Later when the Emperors and after them the Exarchs held their courts at Ravenna, Ancona was of even more importance than Ravenna as the natural trading port with the Byzantine Empire.

To-day she is a large and prosperous city, with broad streets and boulevards given over to the tyranny of electric trams. She is like Alexandria, or Marseilles, with her busy wharf life on the one hand and her _piazze_ with their fountains and bandstands and their alfresco cafés under avenues of plane trees on the other. Her restaurants are dear, and her inns bad; her inhabitants are the most disagreeable people we met in Italy--with all the taciturnity of the Venetians and none of their picturesqueness; but we were able to forgive her everything for the beauty of her cathedral, and for the first view of her wide bay with the pictured sails of her fishing-boats poised like a flight of butterflies on its mirroring waters.

In Ancona, while I am down in the noisy streets, my heart is always up on the grassy hill above the Mole of Trajan, where the Cathedral of San Ciriaco is set like a jewel on the crest of Monte Guasco. Truly it is on their hills that you may know the cities of Italy. For up there, far removed from the unlovely bustle of her streets with their clanging tramways, their painted kiosks, their matter-of-fact commercialism, we seemed to creep unawares right into the heart of Ancona. Coming straight from the peace and breadth and quiet of Umbria we had found her peculiarly unattractive. We had pictured a city of romance, for Ancona has ever been Italy's link with the Orient; the wealth of Byzantium has been unloaded in her harbour; the merchandise of the East has stood upon her quays. And in the first flush of our arrival, when we stood upon the wharf and saw the brilliant wings of her fishing-boats drifting in from the Adriatic, she seemed for a moment to be the city of our imaginings--a fleeting fancy, not easily recaptured on the boulevards of the modern city. But on the hill of San Ciriaco, far above the noisy town, with the Adriatic filling the horizon, and the soft bells of the incomparably lovely church of the first bishop of Ancona wafting a benediction to the fishing fleet as it sailed into the sunset, she became once more our Port of Romance, true sister to Venice, the beautiful bride of Italy's Eastern Waters.

There was nothing to prepare us for the exquisite vista which unfolded itself before us on the crest of Monte Guasco as we toiled up the steep stair-streets which scale the Cathedral hill. The houses were old but undistinguished, the homes of the very poor, who do not even have windows in Italy, but live behind stable doors in _bassi_. Nor did we realise the moment at which we emerged from them, for our eyes were blocked by the bell-tower of age unknown which stands like a sentinel before Ancona's Cathedral. There is no church in Christendom so enthroned. It is built between two tideless seas on a wind-swept hill, which was once the seat of the white temple of the laughing Goddess of Eryx--Aphrodite, who was born of the foam.

Beside it is the old Episcopal Palace in which Aeneas Sylvius, the last of the crusaders, waited for the false Patriarch of Venice to set sail with him against the Turks. Poor Pius II., with his quixotic and splendid dream of reconquering Jerusalem for the Papacy, how often must he have stood on the bulwark of San Ciriaco's hill watching for the galleys of the Venetian to come into sight. And when at last they did sweep down upon Ancona he was no longer waiting; he had embarked alone upon a longer journey; the last and most incomprehensible of the crusades had failed!

We, too, stood upon the crest of Monte Guasco behind its bulwark of acacia trees, on our first evening by the Adriatic, and looked down upon the busy wharf, with the long arm of Trajan's Mole encircling the harbour, and the white crescent of Ancona stretching round the bay to Monte Astagno. It was nearing the hour of sunset. Across the sunlit water we could see the great Appennines towering towards heaven, aerial as clouds upon the horizon. There Rimini lay, on that fair coast, and Venice and Ravenna, the homes of Poetry and Romance. But near at hand Ancona's fleet of bright-winged boats was spread across the bay. We stood and watched them sailing out into the west, slowly, for there was little wind to fill their gold and copper sails. They looked like argosies of Love journeying into a land of sunset mists across a painted sea. Surely they must come back to-morrow with dreams below their wings, and little lovely treasures from the land whither they were sailing to-night! Slowly they crossed the bar--now a crimson wing tapering to gold with a black griffin rampant; now an orange Gonfalon bearing a lion and anchor; now one of black and gold, now one of Venetian brown. We watched them drifting out, and always the west grew more golden and the distant mountains more aerial until the sea was a path of flame from the far-off coast to Trajan's Mole, where the sunset gilded the black hulks of the coal-ships in the harbour. Ere the last of those fantastic birds had winged its way out to the deep waters, the lights of Ancona had begun to twinkle in the dusk, and the bells of San Ciriaco were stilled.

San Ciriaco is worthy of its site. Begun a thousand years ago in the form of the earliest Christian temples, half Byzantine, half Romanesque, it preserves the original Greek cross of nave and transept, and is crowned by an antique dome, one of the oldest in Italy, which time and the salt breath of the Adriatic have painted a wonderful green, the despair of artists. The exterior of San Ciriaco is of almost Eastern simplicity, but sun and wind have mellowed the dazzling white marbles of its walls to such gracious tints that it is like a perfect fruit ripened slowly to perfection through the centuries. Its chief glory is the Gothic portico of rose-red Verona marble which tradition and Vasari assign to the hand of Margheritone d'Arezzo, the sombre painter of crucifixes, who was so jealous of Giotto that he died of spleen. Two couchant lions at the head of a flight of steps support its outer columns, and within it is blush-hued, with slender columns, alternate rose and white, wrought with a delicate frieze of the heads of saints and the grotesques of mediaeval fancy.

Nor has the interior of this noble church suffered much from the hands of the restorer. It is a granary of rare and interesting Byzantine fragments, and its choir is graced by ten of the marble columns which once stood in the temple of Aphrodite.

Ancona of to-day is a garden where the beautiful flowers of an ancient architecture are still flourishing among the energetic weeds and herbs of everyday life. Between the two horns of her crescent bay, Monte Astagno, crowned by the Spanish bastions of the Fortezza, and Monte Guasco, which enthrones the lovely church of San Ciriaco, there is a network of streets. Let us for the sake of the metaphor suppose that these streets are paths in the garden of Ancona; and let us walk in them, searching in the tangle of hardy commercial upshoots for the delicate blossoms which graced the pleasances of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. More than this, for down in the crowded port we shall discover the ancient growths of the Roman city in many a broken arch on whose blackened stones a Gothic spandril has been grafted, and in the glorious Triumphal Arch which the Imperial Plotina and her sister-in-law raised in honour of Trajan.

Between the shrieking railway station and the Porta Pia there is nothing to detain us; this is more or less a modern suburb which has sprung up since the foundation of the railway; but at the Porta Pia, which stands at the foot of Monte Astagno, we enter the old harbour. To our left is the picturesque Lazzaretto built by Clement XII. in 1732, now used as a sugar refinery; and in front we see before us the curving bay of Ancona, with its grand new quay or Banchina, of which the Anconans are so proud. The Via Ventinove Settembre, whose name like the ubiquitous Venti Settembre commemorates the expulsion of the Papal troops in 1860, takes us into the heart of the modern city; but it is not in her wide Corso Giuseppe Mazzini, or Vittorio Emanuele, or Piazza Cavour that we shall find anything of the old Ancona. Here she is as modern as her names betoken, although the fruit-market in a curious uphill square and the fish-market below the picturesque sixteenth-century fountain of the Corso Giuseppe Mazzini are as picturesque and irrelevant as any market in Italy.

It is in the southern wing of the city that we shall find the flowers we seek, in the steep Strada delle Scuole which runs through the centre of the graceful arcaded Court of the Prefettura, and the Via Aurelio Saffi, the most characteristic and romantic street in Ancona. In the Strada delle Scuole we see the great church of San Domenico with the colossal statue of Clement XII. upon its steps, and San Francesco with its riotous Gothic façade towering over the narrow street from its lofty stairs, and the Palazzo del Comune built by Margheritone d'Arezzo, and much restored and modernised in the seventeenth century.

But it is in the Via Aurelio Saffi that Ancona flowers best; for in this centre of the busy wharf life, which has been given up to the merchants and bankers of the eastern port, we find such gracious little basilicas, enriched with carvings from Byzantine bestiaries, and Gothic porches and façades flowering into the Renaissance under the Oriental touch of Giorgio da Sebenico, the last Gothic architect of Italy. Here is the Loggia dei Mercanti, very florid and flamboyant, with its tilting knight a-horseback; and close beside it Napoleon's home in Ancona, the Palazzo Benincasa, with fifteenth-century Gothic-Renaissance windows; and here, standing a little back from the rattle of the modern port traffic, with pigeons resting on its many little arches, is Santa Maria della Piazza, with a Pisan-romanesque façade, soft and eaten by the years, encrusted with ancient sculptures and dusty majolica plaques. Opposite this ancient and beautiful church a gateway with another relief of a knight on horseback, like the splendid gilt knight of the Loggia dei Mercanti, leads into the big docks; but it is better to go down the Via Aurelio Saffi, though at the first glance it seems to be given up to shipping agents and barbers. For here, in the shadow of the old old Palazzo del Comune, which is carried up on gigantic arches to the level of the road above, we find the little church of Santa Maria della Misericordia, with its curious Renaissance portal, its one Byzantine ambo, and its elegant mosque-like interior of brick with stone cornices, pillars and groinings only thinly disguised by plaster. A little further up is a doorway of Roman masonry, and two ancient arches, with uncemented blocks up to the cornice but Gothic work above. And soon afterwards the narrow street debouches on to the wharf.

Not in all Italy is there such a quay, or such a blaze of colour! A long line of mediaeval wall, of burnt red brick machicolated, runs down the Mole, and in its shadow are some low trattorie covered with Morning Glories. High above these, raised on a flight of steps, the arch of Trajan, with its marble painted grey and gold by rain and the years, is framed in the blue Italian sky. Beside it the bronze and copper sails of the fishing-boats are massed together among the black colliers, and above and behind are the green hills of Ancona, with her red-roofed houses climbing up their wide slopes, and Monte Guasco crowned by the white jewel of her cathedral. It has been said that Trajan's arch is the most beautiful and perfect Roman arch in Italy. I do not know. It is wonderfully unspoiled and graceful, extremely simple in design, plainer even than the arch of Titus on the brow of the Velian. But surely there is no other Roman monument which has so rich a setting!