Italian Hours

Tuscan Cities

The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia,

among which I have been spending the last few days. The most

striking fact as to Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset,

is that, being in Tuscany, it should be so scantily Tuscan. The

traveller curious in local colour must content himself with the

deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The streets, away from

the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular; Liverpool might

acknowledge them if it weren't for their clean-coloured, sun-

bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which

is death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit

of the old idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is

singularly destitute. It has neither a church worth one's

attention, nor a municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim

the distinction, unique in Italy, of being the city of no

pictures. In a shabby corner near the docks stands a statue of

one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany, appealing to posterity

on grounds now vague--chiefly that of having placed certain Moors

under tribute. Four colossal n*****s, in very bad bronze, are

chained to the base of the monument, which forms with their

assistance a sufficiently fantastic group; but to patronise the

arts is not the line of the Livornese, and for want of the

slender annuity which would keep its precinct sacred this curious

memorial is buried in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the

other hand there is a very well-conditioned and, in attitude and

gesture, extremely natural and familiar statue of Cavour in one

of the city squares, and in another a couple of effigies of

recent Grand Dukes, represented, that is dressed, or rather

undressed, in the character of heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn is a

city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a journey from the

sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I never took the

time to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I

bore the originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about

them as possible; for it seemed to me that as patres

patrae, in their degree, they might have decreed that the

great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle less ugly.

There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experience of Italy

almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the future not be above

sparing a light regret to several of the hours of which the one I

speak of was composed. I shall remember a large cool bourgeois

villa in the garden of a noiseless suburb--a middle-aged Villa

Franco (I owe it as a genial pleasant pension the tribute

of recognition), roomy and stony, as an Italian villa should be.

I shall remember that, as I sat in the garden, and, looking up

from my book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery the red house-

tiles against the deep blue sky and the grey underside of the

ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediterranean breeze, it was all

still quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the minor key.

If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher

intensity, you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to

Pisa--where, for that matter, you will seem to yourself to have

hung about a good deal already, and from an early age. Few of us

can have had a childhood so unblessed by contact with the arts as

that one of its occasional diversions shan't have been a puzzled

scrutiny of some alabaster model of the Leaning Tower under a

glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its monuments have, in

other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it is astonishing

how well they have survived the process. The charm of the place

is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the

famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and

yet almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to

the classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which

nervous people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an

invalid companion who had had no sleep to speak of for a

fortnight. "Ah! stop the carriage," she sighed, or yawned, as I

could feel, deliciously, "in the shadow of this old slumbering

palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and taste for an

hour of oblivion." Once strolling over the grass, however, out of

which the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked

responsively enough to the present hour. Most people remember the

happy remark of tasteful, old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a

hundred other points in his "Italy" scarce less happily) as to

the fact that the four famous objects are "fortunate alike in

their society and their solitude." It must be admitted that they

are more fortunate in their society than we felt ourselves to be

in ours; for the scene presented the animated appearance for

which, on any fine spring day, all the choicest haunts of ancient

quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more remarkable. There were

clamorous beggars at all the sculptured portals, and bait for

beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them under convoy

of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the

responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow-

tourists and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled

presence, that of the dentist's last words when he is giving you

ether. They suffered mystic disintegration in the dense, bright,

tranquil air, so charged with its own messages. The Cathedral and

its companions are fortunate indeed in everything--fortunate in

the spacious angle of the grey old city-wall which folds about

them in their sculptured elegance like a strong protecting arm;

fortunate in the broad greensward which stretches from the marble

base of Cathedral and cemetery to the rugged foot of the rampart;

fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, plucking

daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold

tone to which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and

darkened their marble plates; fortunate, above all, in an

indescribable grace of grouping, half hazard, half design, which

insures them, in one's memory of things admired, very much the

same isolated corner that they occupy in the charming city.

Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy I know none I prefer to that

of Pisa; none that, on a moderate scale, produces more the

impression of a great church. It has without so modest a

measurability, represents so clean and compact a mass, that you

are startled when you cross the threshold at the apparent space

it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that he works with

colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the most

cunning of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal

screen, covered with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed

over a series of short columns upholding narrow arches. It might

be a sought imitation of goldsmith's work in stone, and the area

covered is apparently so small that extreme fineness has been

prescribed. How it is therefore that on the inner side of this

fa*** the wall should appear to rise to a splendid height and to

support one end of a ceiling as remote in its gilded grandeur,

one could almost fancy, as that of St. Peter's; how it is that

the nave should stretch away in such solemn vastness, the shallow

transepts emphasise the grand impression and the apse of the

choir hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted with golden

stalactites, is all matter for exposition by a keener

architectural analyst than I. To sit somewhere against a pillar

where the vista is large and the incidents cluster richly, and

vaguely revolve these mysteries without answering them, is the

best of one's usual enjoyment of a great church. It takes no deep

sounding to conclude indeed that a gigantic Byzantine Christ in

mosaic, on the concave roof of the choir, contributes largely to

the particular impression here as of very old and choice and

original and individual things. It has even more of stiff

solemnity than is common to works of its school, and prompts to

more wonder than ever on the nature of the human mind at a time

when such unlovely shapes could satisfy its conception of

holiness. Truly pathetic is the fate of these huge mosaic idols,

thanks to the change that has overtaken our manner of acceptance

of them. Strong the contrast between the original sublimity of

their pretensions and the way in which they flatter that free

sense of the grotesque which the modern imagination has smuggled

even into the appreciation of religious forms. They were meant to

yield scarcely to the Deity itself in grandeur, but the only part

they play now is to stare helplessly at our critical, our

aesthetic patronage of them. The spiritual refinement marking the

hither end of a progress had n't, however, to wait for us to

signalise it; it found expression three centuries ago in the

beautiful specimen of the painter Sodoma on the wall of the

choir. This latter, a small Sacrifice of Isaac, is one of the

best examples of its exquisite author, and perhaps, as chance has

it, the most perfect opposition that could be found in the way of

the range of taste to the effect of the great mosaic. There are

many painters more powerful than Sodoma--painters who, like the

author of the mosaic, attempted and compassed grandeur; but none

has a more persuasive grace, none more than he was to sift and

chasten a conception till it should affect one with the sweetness

of a perfectly distilled perfume.

Of the patient successive efforts of painting to arrive at the

supreme refinement of such a work as the Sodoma the Campo Santo

hard by offers a most interesting memorial. It presents a long,

blank marble wall to the relative profaneness of the Cathedral

close, but within it is a perfect treasure-house of art. This

quadrangular defence surrounds an open court where weeds and wild

roses are tangled together and a sunny stillness seems to rest

consentingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness of the

precious relics committed to her. Something in the quality of the

place recalls the collegiate cloisters of Oxford, but it must be

added that this is the handsomest compliment to that seat of

learning. The open arches of the quadrangles of Magdalen and

Christ Church are not of mellow Carrara marble, nor do they offer

to sight columns, slim and elegant, that seem to frame the

unglazed windows of a cathedral. To be buried in the Campo Santo

of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you need only be, or to

have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and there is a

liberal allowance both as to the character and degree of your

fame. The most obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a

most complicated monument to Madame Catalani, the singer,

recently erected by her possibly too-appreciative heirs. The wide

pavement is a mosaic of sepulchral slabs, and the walls, below

the base of the paling frescoes, are incrusted with inscriptions

and encumbered with urns and antique sarcophagi. The place is at

once a cemetery and a museum, and its especial charm is its

strange mixture of the active and the passive, of art and rest,

of life and death. Originally its walls were one vast continuity

of closely pressed frescoes; but now the great capricious scars

and stains have come to outnumber the pictures, and the cemetery

has grown to be a burial-place of pulverised masterpieces as well

as of finished lives. The fragments of painting that remain are

fortunately the best; for one is safe in believing that a host of

undimmed neighbours would distract but little from the two great

works of Orcagna. Most people know the "Triumph of Death" and the

"Last Judgment" from descriptions and engravings; but to measure

the possible good faith of imitative art one must stand there and

see the painter's howling potentates dragged into hell in all the

vividness of his bright hard colouring; see his feudal courtiers,

on their palfreys, hold their noses at what they are so fast

coming to; see his great Christ, in judgment, refuse forgiveness

with a gesture commanding enough, really inhuman enough, to make

virtue merciless for ever. The charge that Michael Angelo

borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure of Orcagna is

more valid than most accusations of plagiarism; but of the two

figures one at least could be spared. For direct, triumphant

expressiveness these two superb frescoes have probably never been

surpassed. The painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he

drives certain gross ones home so effectively that for a parallel

to his process one must look to the art of the actor, the

emphasising "point"-making mime. Some of his female figures are

superb--they represent creatures of a formidable temperament.

There are charming women, however, on the other side of the

cloister--in the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If

Orcagna's work was appointed to survive the ravage of time it is

a happy chance that it should be balanced by a group of

performances of such a different temper. The contrast is the more

striking that in subject the inspiration of both painters is

strictly, even though superficially, theological. But Benozzo

cares, in his theology, for nothing but the story, the scene and

the drama--the chance to pile up palaces and spires in his

backgrounds against pale blue skies cross-barred with pearly,

fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured arches and shady

trellises over the front, with every incident of human life going

forward lightly and gracefully beneath them. Lightness and grace

are the painter's great qualities, marking the hithermost limit

of unconscious elegance, after which "style" and science and the

wisdom of the serpent set in. His charm is natural fineness; a

little more and we should have refinement--which is a very

different thing. Like all les d****** of this world, as

M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has suffered greatly. The space on

the walls he originally covered with his Old Testament stories is

immense; but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off by the acre,

as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the series

are swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless

head or hand peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a

quicksand. As for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what

one would call a mouldering city--for it has a certain well-aired

cleanness and brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity--it

affects the imagination very much in the same way as the Campo

Santo. And, in truth, a city so ancient and deeply historic as

Pisa is at every step but the burial-ground of a larger life than

its present one. The wide empty streets, the goodly Tuscan

palaces--which look as if about all of them there were a genteel

private understanding, independent of placards, that they are to

be let extremely cheap--the delicious relaxing air, the full-

flowing yellow river, the lounging Pisani, smelling,

metaphorically, their poppy-flowers, seemed to me all so many

admonitions to resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean

by saying that the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of

monuments) is a charm of a high order. The architecture has but a

modest dignity; the lions are few; there are no fixed points for

stopping and gaping. And yet the impression is profound; the

charm is a moral charm. If I were ever to be incurably

disappointed in life, if I had lost my health, my money, or my

friends, if I were resigned forevermore to pitching my

expectations in a minor key, I should go and invoke the Pisan

peace. Its quietude would seem something more than a stillness--

a hush. Pisa may be a dull place to live in, but it's an ideal

place to wait for death.

Nothing could be more charming than the country between Pisa and

Lucca--unless possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If

Pisa is dead Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying,

desiring and intending. The town is a charming mixture of antique

"character" and modern inconsequence; and! not only the town, but

the country--the blooming romantic country which you admire from

the famous promenade on the city-wall. The wall is of superbly

solid and intensely "toned" brickwork and of extraordinary

breadth, and its summit, planted with goodly trees and swelling

here and there into bastions and outworks and little open

gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place of a

splendid dignity. This well-kept, shady, ivy-grown rampart

reminded me of certain mossy corners of England; but it looks

away to a prospect of more than English loveliness--a broad green

plain where the summer yields a double crop of grain, and a

circle of bright blue mountains speckled with high-hung convents

and profiled castles and nestling villas, and traversed by

valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one of the deepest and

shadiest of these recesses one of the most "sympathetic" of small

watering-places is hidden away yet a while longer from easy

invasion--the Baths to which Lucca has lent its name. Lucca is

pre-eminently a city of churches; ecclesiastical architecture

being indeed the only one of the arts to which it seems to have

given attention. There are curious bits of domestic architecture,

but no great palaces, and no importunate frequency of pictures.

The Cathedral, however, sums up the merits of its companions and

is a singularly noble and interesting church. Its peculiar boast

is a wonderful inlaid front, on which horses and hounds and

hunted beasts are lavishly figured in black marble over a white

ground. What I chiefly appreciated in the grey solemnity of the

nave and transepts was the superb effect of certain second-storey

Gothic arches--those which rest on the pavement being Lombard.

These arches are delicate and slender, like those of the cloister

at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper air with

real sublimity.

At Pistoia there is of course a Cathedral, and there is nothing

unexpected in its being, externally at least, highly impressive;

in its having a grand campanile at its door, a gaudy baptistery,

in alternate layers of black and white marble, across the way,

and a stately civic palace on either side. But even had I the

space to do otherwise I should prefer to speak less of the

particular objects of interest in the place than of the pleasure

I found it to lounge away in the empty streets the quiet hours of

a warm afternoon. To say where I lingered longest would be to

tell of a little square before the hospital, out of which you

look up at the beautiful frieze in coloured earthernware by the

brothers Della Robbia, which runs across the front of the

building. It represents the seven orthodox offices of charity

and, with its brilliant blues and yellows and its tender

expressiveness, brightens up amazingly, to the sense and soul,

this little grey comer of the mediaeval city. Pi stoia is still

mediaeval. How grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of

idle vistas and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supremely

wonderful, everything was delicious.

[Illustration: THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA.]

1874.