Читать книгу A Little Pilgrimage in Italy - Olave M. Potter - Страница 9

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Cortona! Not one of us but thrilled as we drew near her. For few cities bear so fair a name or seem as full of promise as Cortona. Although the world has long since passed her by, she loiters on her hill-top between the valley and the sky like a forgotten goddess who is loth to quit her great estate. Her towering walls encompass her about, those mighty walls built for a mighty people which Virgil sings of in the Aeneid; she frowns as though she were still girt for war, and had forgotten how to smile; her lean grey castle, stark upon the crest of the hill, points to the heaven like an avenging sibyl.

No wonder that her history is spare since the days when she and her great neighbours, Arretium and Clusium, joined the Etruscan League in 310 b.c.; for even to-day, with excellently engineered roads scaling her hill, she is difficult of approach, and her stout walls and impregnable position offered no inducement to invading armies, who were content with harrying her fertile plain, as they passed by to Umbria and Rome. We know she was a Roman colony in the time of the historian Dionysius, but scant mention is made of her under the Roman Empire; and although she was one of the earliest Episcopal sees, and is still the seat of a bishop, it was not until the thirteenth century that the chronicles of Cortona began to take a place in mediaeval history. She is still withdrawn from the world upon her mountain; her houses are still huddled together in the shelter of her great walls, built by the Unknown People; she still hides her poverty from the eyes of the careless traveller as he rushes past the foot of her hill on his way to Rome or Florence.

After the motor-omnibus had deposited us in the Piazza Signorelli, and we had deposited our luggage in a rather dreary-looking inn whose only claims to notice were its exquisite views over the Tuscan plain to the inland sea of Thrasymene, we sallied out full of anticipation to see the legendary birthplace of three such widely different characters as the mythological Dardanus, founder of Troy; Brother Elias, the erring and ambitious follower of St. Francis; and Luca Signorelli, that courtly gentleman and great painter of the fifteenth century.

But we were disappointed. Cortona, notwithstanding her lovely name and her ancient and picturesque site, is a dirty little place, with unsavoury streets and a baroque cathedral. She has treasures, of course. What little town in Italy has not? Her tumble-down palaces are built of warm red brick; her churches have some fine pictures; her Palazzo Pretorio is covered with the escutcheons of the princes who were her overlords, but she has no charm unless you catch her unawares before the sleep is shaken from her eyes early on a summer morning.

CORTONA FROM THE PIAZZA GARIBALDI.

We found so little to detain us in her dingy, unkempt streets that we decided to push on the next day to Perugia. We tried our tempers in the inn, the most lethargic inn that it was our misfortune to visit, endeavouring to get some lunch, and after waiting an hour and a half we found the gnocchi stale and the coarse meat uneatable. So we went out again into the siesta heat, determined at least to see the great Etruscan lamp which is the pride of Cortona's museum, and the pictures which Luca Signorelli painted for her churches.

Cortona was asleep. She was as still as a lizard on a sunny wall; even the tiresome children who had followed us all the morning, agape for soldi, had vanished; the air was vibrant with the tremolo of the cicalas; the sunlight stretched like a shimmering veil across the valleys. And in a moment all our vexation vanished. Italy the Beautiful came out to meet us, smoothing away all disagreeable memories as a cool hand laid on the forehead will smooth out pain; we forgot the hatefulness which had been piling itself up all day—the dust, the smells, the too-glaring sun, the stupid inn with its bad-tempered maid-servant, the screaming children, the baroque cathedral!

In the cool grey church of San Domenico, which stands in the flowery public gardens of Cortona, we found not only one of Luca's great pictures but a pageant of Quattrocento saints and Madonnas in richly gilt Gothic frames over the three altars which fill its eastern wall. In the Gesù, a little ancient church which clings to the hillside close to the cathedral, we discovered an Annunciation by Fra Angelico, almost as beautiful as that exquisite picture which he painted on the wall of his monastery-home in Florence. It is very like the fresco in the corridor of San Marco. The Madonna is sitting in the same light and airy loggia reading in some little book, as the Angel Gabriel, with his iridescent wings still poised for flight, alights at her feet, filling the air with glory. Outside, the grass is starred with the flowers which Angelico loved to paint; and far away, silhouetted against the sky, we see the Angel with a flaming sword driving Man and Woman from their Garden of Paradise, whose gates not even the coming of Christ could reopen on earth.

And then, remembering the story of Filippo Brunelleschi, we went into the Duomo to see the famous sarcophagus which legend claims to be the tomb of the Consul Flaminius, and which the great architect of the dome of Florence Cathedral walked sixty miles to see. For one morning when he was discussing antique sculpture in the Piazza of Santa Maria del Fiore with Donatello and some other artists, Brunelleschi heard of a Roman sarcophagus in Cortona. Straightway he left his companions, and fired by his passion for the works of antiquity, 'just as he was, in his mantle, hood and sabots, without saying a word of where he was going,' came to Cortona and made a drawing of it, returning at last to Florence where he showed it to the astonished Donatello, who had not been able to guess where his friend had disappeared.

But it was in the early morning, as I have said, that we discovered the nameless charm of Cortona—that same charm which we found in a different guise in all the little towns of Umbria and Tuscany. Our inn, though it towered more than a thousand feet above the valley, was at the bottom of the city, for Cortona in the immemorial Etruscan fashion hangs from the crest of her hill. Even the ambitious motor-bus could not climb higher than the Piazza Signorelli, because nearly all the streets above it are so steep that they are built in shallow steps. And they are so deserted that in one of them we found rabbits contentedly nibbling the grass which grew between its paving-stones. So the next morning, very early, while the day was cool, we climbed up to the great church of Santa Margherita, which stands with the ruined Fortezza on the crest of Cortona's mountain.

To me it is always rather strange that this harsh Tuscan citadel should ignore the name of Brother Elias, that great and restless spirit who sought to wed Love not to Poverty, as Francis did, but to Ambition. His name is hardly spoken in Cortona, but the body of Santa Margherita, whom some call the Magdalen of the Franciscans, because they love to draw comparisons between the life of Christ and His humble follower, is enshrined upon the hill-top like the light that cannot be hid. Her church has been restored, and there is little of the ancient building left except her beautiful fourteenth-century tomb, the silver shrine which was the gift of Piero da Cortona, and the lovely rose-window which is preserved in the modern façade. In the aisle are the flags and ship-lantern of some knight of Malta, who prayed to Margherita in the hour of peril, and was saved by her intercession.

Yet it was not for Santa Margherita that we climbed Cortona's hill at dawn, but to see the rich plain of Tuscany in its amphitheatre of blue hills, each with a towered city for its crown—Chiusi, Città della Pieve, Montepulciano, and a host of others to which we had not learned to give their names. It was a panorama of surpassing beauty which opened out before us. Fold on fold the mountains lifted their heads above the mists of the valley, rising always towards the mighty crest of Monte Amiata, which was to loom upon so many of our horizons while we were journeying through the heart of Italy. And far away the sunshine lightened the opal waters of Lake Thrasymene, lying like a forgotten sea in the bosom of the Umbrian hills, with the towers of Castiglione del Lago rosy in the dawn.

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Cortona from the Porta S. Margherita.

Even here the Rocca stood above us on its scarp, the key of the strong citadel which claims descent from Dardanus of Troy. On either side of Santa Margherita the mighty walls, including many courses of Cyclopean masonry, climbed down towards the peaceful plain. We passed through a gap which had once been a gate, and saw them plunging down the hillside holding the crumpled brown roofs of the little shrunken city in their elbow. So was Cortona of the Unknown People fortified; so was the city of the Etruscans girt about, and Hannibal and Flaminius have looked upon these walls as they passed by to battle upon the reedy shore of Thrasymene.

Up on the hillside men and girls were reaping in the shadow of the ancient wall. 'And the reapers, reaping early,' quoth the poet softly to himself. Their laughter floated down to us. Every now and then a girl would straighten her lithe figure, stand upright curved scythe in hand, and sing, her clear notes soaring like a lark's in the crystal air. At our feet Cortona nestled in the embrace of her great wall, and far below, the plain of Tuscany rolled away to the hills where the sunlight fired the towers of other mountain cities.

So in the dawn we grew to love Cortona, for the fantastic beauty which is her own, and for her aloofness. As we passed down into her steep-paved streets we paused a moment in San Francesco, where Brother Elias lies buried with his hopes and ambitions; where, too, is kept the ivory case with a fragment of the True Cross which the Patriarch of Constantinople gave to Elias when he visited that Court as Nuncio of Frederick II. And we lingered in little San Niccolò, which, with its loggia and cypress-garden, is the loveliest of Cortona's churches; and which, for all its poverty, treasures three pictures by Luca Signorelli, who belonged to its confraternity.

Down in the Piazza Signorelli we found the motor-omnibus already waiting to take us to the station. The narrow streets were crowded with black-browed Tuscan peasants selling fruit and vegetables, and doing a thriving business in skinned frogs strung on wooden skewers. These looked particularly unappetising in pails of not too clean water, and the atmosphere was putrid after the freshness of the air above. Again we had the sense of stifling heat and odour, and again the swarms of dirty children who had tracked us yesterday rose, as it were, out of the earth. We were glad enough to leave Cortona, but not until we had experienced many vexatious delays. For when we had fetched our luggage from the inn and settled our account with the rather difficult landlady, the driver of the omnibus was not forthcoming. And when at last we persuaded him to leave the shelter of the cool Palazzo Comunale, a glazier took the ill-chosen opportunity of mending two of the broken windows in the omnibus. We had given up all hope of catching our train when half an hour later we swung out of the town and began our perilous descent down to the plain.

After all we had some minutes to spare, though I should not care to make the journey again, for we took more than one corner of that switchback road on two wheels. But the driver was confident of our approval. 'Ecco signore, the train has not yet arrived,' he cried triumphantly. Facilis descensus Averni!

PERUGIA: DETAIL FROM THE CHOIR OF S. PIETRO DE' CASSINENSI