Studies of Travel: Italy

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Freeman Edward Augustus. Studies of Travel: Italy

Arezzo

Cortona

Perugia

The Volumnian Tomb

Præ-Franciscan Assisi

Spello

Veii

Fidenæ

Antemnæ

Ostia

The Alban Mount

Cori

Norba

Segni

Iter ad Brundisium

I. Anagni

II. Ferentino

III. Alatri

IV. From Alatri to Capua

V. A Church by the Camp of Hannibal

VI. A Glimpse of Samnium

VII. Benevento

VIII. Norman Buildings in Apulia

IX. Bari

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From Arezzo the next stage will naturally be to the hill on whose height

If the journey be made on a market or fair day, the space between the walls and the station at Arezzo may be seen crowded with white oxen, suggesting the thought of triumphs and triumphal sacrifices. Their race, it was said, prayed to the gods that Marcus and Julian might not win victories which would lead to their destruction. And the prayer seems to have been answered, as the breed specially connected with Clitumnus has clearly not died out, even by the banks of Clanis. The journey is not a long one; yet, if we had time to see everything, we might well wish to break it, as we pass by the hill of Castiglione Fiorentino, with its walls and towers. That strong and stern hill-fortress comes in well between Arezzo and Cortona. Arezzo covers a hill, but it can hardly be said to stand on a hill-top; Castiglione distinctly does stand on a hill-top; Cortona sits enthroned on a height which it would hardly be straining language to speak of as a mountain. We have now come to a site of the oldest class, the stronghold on the height, like Akrokorinthos and the Larissa of Argos. But at Argos and Corinth the mountain-fortress became, at a later stage, the citadel of the younger city which grew up at the mountain's foot. But at Cortona, as at greater Perugia, the city still abides on the height; it has never come down into the plain. So it has remained at Laon; so it has become at Girgenti, where the vast lower space of the later Akragas is forsaken, and the modern town has shrunk up within the lines of the ancient acropolis. From the ground below Cortona we look up to a city like those of old, great and fenced up to heaven; the "diadem of towers" is there still, though it is now made up of a group of towers, ecclesiastical, municipal, and military, none of them of any account in itself, but each of which joins with its fellows to make up an effective whole. At Cortona indeed, as at Argos and Corinth, there is an upper and a lower city, and the upper city is pretty well forsaken. But while at Argos and Corinth the lower city stands in the plain, and the acropolis soars far above it, at Cortona the lower city itself stands so high up the hill that it is only when we reach it that we fully understand that there is a higher city still. The site itself belongs so thoroughly to the oldest days of our European world that there is a certain kind of satisfaction in finding that the main interest of the place belongs to those oldest days. We are well pleased that everything of later times is of quite a secondary character, and that the distinctive character of Cortona is to be the city of the Etruscan walls.

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As an Italian city which has lived, though in rather a feeble way, through the regular stages of Roman colony and mediæval commonwealth, Cortona has of course its monuments which record those periods of its being. There are some small fragments of Roman work, but nothing that can be called a Roman building. There is a crowd of churches and monasteries, but none of any great architectural value, though some contain works of importance in the history of painting. It perhaps marks the position of Cortona as a comparatively modern bishopric that its cathedral church is in no sort the crowning building of the city. The duomo stands about half-way up the height within the town, on a corner of the walls. Its elegant Renaissance interior has been already spoken of; it seems to have supplanted a Romanesque building the columns of which may have been used again. The point in the upper city where we should have looked for the duomo is occupied by the Church of St. Margaret, that is, Margaret of Cortona, described over her portal as "pœnitens Margarita," marked off thereby alike from the virgin of Antioch and from the matron of Scotland. The municipal buildings are not remarkable, though one wall of the Palazzo Pretorio must be a treasure-house for students of Italian heraldry, thickly coated as it is with the arms of successive podestas. Of private palaces the steep and narrow streets contain one or two; but it is not on its street architecture that Cortona can rest its claim to fame. From the lower city, with its labyrinth of streets, we may climb to the acropolis. Here, around the Church of St. Margaret, all seems desolate. The Franciscan convent on the slope below it lies in ruins – not an usual state for an Italian building. The castle above, fenced in by its ditch, seems as desolate as everything around, save the new or renewed fabric of St. Margaret's. This height is the point of view to which the visitor to Cortona will be first taken, if he listens to local importunity. A noble outlook it is; but the traveller can find points of view equally noble in the course of the work which should be done first of all – that of compassing the mighty wall which is the thing that makes Cortona what it is.

The process of going to the back of the city, which may be done in some measure at Arezzo, may be done in all its fulness at Cortona. Happily, very nearly the whole wall can be compassed without, and in by far the greater part of its course more or less of the old Etruscan rampart remains. In many places the mighty stones still stand to no small height, patched of course and raised with work of later times, but still standing firmly fixed as they were laid when Cortona stood in the first rank among the cities of the Rasena. Not that there is reason to attribute any amazing antiquity to these walls. We must remember that the Etruscan cities kept their local freedom till the days of Sulla, and that some Etruscan works are later than some Roman works. The masonry is by no means of the rough and early kind; yet the one remaining gate, unluckily blocked, is square-headed, and might almost have stood at Mykênê. On the highest point, the hindermost point, the wildest and most desolate point, where, though just outside an inhabited city, we feel as if we were in a land forsaken of men, the Etruscan wall has largely given way to the mediæval fortress whose present aspect dates from Medicean days. But it has given way only to leave one of the grandest pieces of the whole wall standing as an outpost in the rear of the city, overhanging the steepest point of the whole hill. The Etruscan wall, the Medicean castle, one seeming to stand as forsaken and useless as the other, form a summary of the history of Cortona in stone and brick.

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