Italian Hours

Other Tuscan Cities

I

I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in

my original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering

notes of years before; but even if there had been meagreness of

mere gaping vision--which there in fact hadn't been--as well as

insufficieny of public tribute, the indignity would soon have

ceased to weigh on my conscience. For to this affection I was to

return again still oftener than to the strong call of Siena my

eventual frequentations of Pisa, all merely impressionistic and

amateurish as they might be--and I pretended, up and down the

length of the land, to none other--leave me at the hither end of

time with little more than a confused consciousness of exquisite

quality on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place of

ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be

general and vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The

Republic of Pisa fought with the Republic of Florence, through

the ages so ferociously and all but invincibly that what is so

pale and languid in her to-day may well be the aspect of any

civil or, still more, military creature bled and bled and bled at

the "critical" time of its life. She has verily a just languor

and is touchingly an***; the past history, or at any rate the

present perfect acceptedness, of which condition hangs about her

with the last grace of weakness, making her state in this

particular the very secret of her irresistible appeal. I was to

find the appeal, again and again, one of the sweetest, tenderest,

even if not one of the fullest and richest impressions possible;

and if I went back whenever I could it was very much as one

doesn't indecently neglect a gentle invalid friend. The couch of

the invalid friend, beautifully, appealingly resigned, has been

wheeled, say, for the case, into the warm still garden, and your

visit but consists of your sitting beside it with kind, discreet,

testifying silences. Such is the figurative form under which the

once rugged enemy of Florence, stretched at her length by the

rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents herself; and I find my

analogy complete even to my sense of the mere mild s****,

the inevitably tacit communion or rather blank interchange,

between motionless cripple and hardly more incurable admirer.

The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that

ideal--slow contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day

and after work done mostly in the particular decent inn-room that

was repeatedly my portion; where the sunny flicker of the river

played up from below to the very ceiling, which, by the same

sign, anciently and curiously raftered and hanging over my table

at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into ornament as

fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal. I add

to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and

of reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet caf*--quiet as

everything at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these

latest days have ceased to be; one in especial so beautifully, so

mysteriously void of bustle that almost always the neighbouring

presence and admirable chatter of some group of the local

University students would fall upon my ear, by the half-hour at

a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a clear-cut

image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost

nothing. I use such terms as "admirable" and "privilege," in this

last most casual of connections--which was moreover no connection

at all but what my attention made it--simply as an acknowledgment

of the interest that might play there through some inevitable

thoughts. These were, for that matter, intensely in keeping with

the ancient scene and air: they dealt with the exquisite

difference between that tone and type of ingenuous adolescence--

in the mere relation of charmed audition--and other forms

of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had

elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were

my loquacious neighbours--as how had n't they to be, one asked

one's self, through the use of a medium of speech that is in

itself a sovereign saturation? There was the beautiful

congruity of the happily-caught impression; the fact of my young

men's general Tuscanism of tongue, which related them so on the

spot to the whole historic consensus of things. It wasn't

dialect--as it of course easily might have been elsewhere, at

Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear Italian

in which all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all the

rest of the result of time recorded; and it made them delightful,

prattling, unconscious men of the particular little constituted

and bequeathed world which everything else that was charged with

old meanings and old beauty referred to--all the more that their

talk was never by any chance of romping games or deeds of

violence, but kept flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into

eager ideas and literary opinions and philosophic discussions

and, upon my honour, vital questions.

They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I

claim for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier

texture. Which comes back to what I was a moment ago saying--

that just in proportion as you "feel" the morbid charm of Pisa

you press on it gently, and this somehow even under stress of

whatever respectful attention. I found this last impulse, at all

events, so far as I was concerned, quite contentedly spend itself

in a renewed sense of the simple large pacified felicity of such

an afternoon aspect as that of the Lung' Arno, taken up or down

its course; whether to within sight of small Santa Maria della

Spina, the tiny, the delicate, the exquisite Gothic chapel

perched where the quay drops straight, or, in the other

direction, toward the melting perspective of the narrow local

pleasure-ground, the rather thin and careless bosky grace of

which recedes, beside the stream whose very turbidity pleases, to

a middle distance of hot and tangled and exuberant rural industry

and a proper blue horizon of Carrara mountains. The Pisan Lung'

Arno is shorter and less featured and framed than the Florentine,

but it has the fine accent of a marked curve and is quite as

bravely Tuscan; witness the type of river-fronting palace which,

in half-a-dozen massive specimens, the last word of the anciently

"handsome," are of the essence of the physiognomy of the place.

In the glow of which retrospective admission I ask myself how I

came, under my first flush, reflected in other pages, to fail of

justice to so much proud domestic architecture--in the very teeth

moreover of the fact that I was for ever paying my compliments,

in a wistful, wondering way, to the fine Palazzo Lanfranchi,

occupied in 1822 by the migratory Byron, and whither Leigh Hunt,

as commemorated in the latter's Autobiography, came out to join

him in an odd journalistic scheme.

Of course, however, I need scarcely add, the centre of my daily

revolution--quite thereby on the circumference--was the great

Company of Four in their sequestered corner; objects of regularly

recurrent pious pilgrimage, if for no other purpose than to see

whether each would each time again so inimitably carry itself as

one of a group of wonderfully-worked old ivories. Their charm of

relation to each other and to everything else that concerns them,

that of the quartette of monuments, is more or less inexpressible

all round; but not the least of it, ever, is in their beautiful

secret for taking at different hours and seasons, in different

states of the light, the sky, the wind, the weather--in

different states, even, it used verily to seem to me, of an

admirer's imagination or temper or nerves--different complexional

appearances, different shades and pallors, different glows and

chills. I have seen them look almost viciously black, and I have

seen them as clear and fair as pale gold. And these things, for

the most part, off on the large grassy carpet spread for them,

and with the elbow of the old city-wall, not elsewhere erect,

respectfully but protectingly crooked about, to the tune of a

usual unanimity save perhaps in the case of the Leaning Tower--so

abnormal a member of any respectable family this structure at

best that I always somehow fancied its three companions, the

Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Campo Santo, capable of quiet

common understandings, for the major or the minor effect, into

which their odd fellow, no hint thrown out to him, was left to

enter as he might. If one haunted the place, one ended by

yielding to the conceit that, beautifully though the others of

the group may be said to behave about him, one sometimes caught

them in the act of tacitly combining to ignore him--as if he had,

after so long, begun to give on their nerves. Or is that

absurdity but my shamefaced form of admission that, for all the

wonder of him, he finally gave on mine? Frankly--I would put it

at such moments--he becomes at last an optical bore or

betise.

[Illustration: THE LOGGIA, LUCCA.]

II

To Lucca I was not to return often--I was to return only once;

when that compact and admirable little city, the very model of a

small pays de Cocagne, overflowing with everything that

makes for ease, for plenty, for beauty, for interest and good

example, renewed for me, in the highest degree, its genial and

robust appearance. The perfection of this renewal must indeed

have been, at bottom, the ground of my rather hanging back from

possible excess of acquaintance--with the instinct that so right

and rich and rounded a little impression had better be left than

endangered. I remember positively saying to myself the second

time that no brown-and-gold Tuscan city, even, could be as

happy as Lucca looked--save always, exactly, Lucca; so that, on

the chance of any shade of human illusion in the case, I

wouldn't, as a brooding analyst, go within fifty miles of it

again. Just so, I fear I must confess, it was this mere face-

value of the place that, when I went back, formed my sufficiency;

I spent all my scant time--or the greater part, for I took a day

to drive over to the Bagni--just gaping at its visible attitude.

This may be described as that of simply sitting there, through

the centuries, at the receipt of perfect felicity; on its

splendid solid seat of russet masonry, that is--for its great

republican ramparts of long ago still lock it tight--with its

wide garden-land, its ancient appanage or hereditary domain,

teeming and blooming with everything that is good and pleasant

for man, all about, and with a ring of graceful and noble, yet

comparatively unbeneficed uplands and mountains watching it, for

very envy, across the plain, as a circle of bigger boys, in the

playground, may watch a privileged or pampered smaller one munch

a particularly fine apple. Half smothered thus in oil and wine

and corn and all the fruits of the earth, Lucca seems fairly to

laugh for good-humour, and it's as if one can't say more for her

than that, thanks to her putting forward for you a temperament

somehow still richer than her heritage, you forgive her at every

turn her fortune. She smiles up at you her greeting as you dip

into her wide lap, out of which you may select almost any rare

morsel whatever. Looking back at my own choice indeed I see it

must have suffered a certain embarrassment--that of the sense of

too many things; for I scarce remember choosing at all, any more

than I recall having had to go hungry. I turned into all the

churches--taking care, however, to pause before one of them,

though before which I now irrecoverably forget, for verification

of Ruskin's so characteristically magnified rapture over the high

and rather narrow and obscure hunting-frieze on its front--and in

the Cathedral paid my respects at every turn to the greatest of

Lucchesi, Matteo Civitale, wisest, sanest, homeliest, kindest of

quattro-cento sculptors, to whose works the Duomo serves

almost as a museum. But my nearest approach to anything so

invidious as a discrimination or a preference, under the spell of

so felt an equilibrium, must have been the act of engaging a

carriage for the Baths.

That inconsequence once perpetrated, let me add, the impression

was as right as any other--the impression of the drive through

the huge general tangled and fruited podere of the

countryside; that of the pair of jogging hours that bring the

visitor to where the wideish gate of the valley of the Serchio

opens. The question after this became quite other; the narrowing,

though always more or less smiling gorge that draws you on and on

is a different, a distinct proposition altogether, with its own

individual grace of appeal and association. It is the

association, exactly, that would even now, on this page, beckon

me forward, or perhaps I should rather say backward--weren't more

than a glance at it out of the question--to a view of that easier

and not so inordinately remote past when "people spent the

summer" in these perhaps slightly stuffy shades. I speak of that

age, I think of it at least, as easier than ours, in spite of the

fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the mark of modern change,

the railway in construction, had begun to be distinct, though the

automobile was still pretty far in the future. The relations and

proportions of everything are of course now altered--I indeed, I

confess, wince at the vision of the cloud of motor-dust that must

in the fine season hang over the whole connection. That

represents greater promptness of approach to the bosky depths of

Ponte-a-Serraglio and the Bagni Caldi, but it throws back the

other time, that of the old jogging relation, of the Tuscan

grand-ducal "season" and the small cosmopolite sociability, into

quite Arcadian air and the comparatively primitive scale. The

"easier" Italy of our infatuated precursors there wears its

glamour of facility not through any question of "the development

of communications," but through the very absence of the dream of

that boon, thanks to which every one (among the infatuated) lived

on terms of so much closer intercourse with the general object of

their passion. After we had crossed the Serchio that beautiful

day we passed into the charming, the amiably tortuous, the

thickly umbrageous, valley of the Lima, and then it was that I

seemed fairly to remount the stream of time; figuring to myself

wistfully, at the small scattered centres of entertainment--

modest inns, pensions and other places of convenience clustered

where the friendly torrent is bridged or the forested slopes

adjust themselves--what the summer days and the summer rambles

and the summer dreams must have been, in the blest place, when

"people" (by which I mean the contingent of beguiled barbarians)

didn't know better, as we say, than to content themselves with

such a mild substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially

elegant apology, for adventure. One wanted not simply to hang

about a little, but really to live back, as surely one might,

have done by staying on, into the so romantically strong, if

mechanically weak, Italy of the associations of one's youth. It

was a pang to have to revert to the present even in the form of

Lucca--which says everything.

III

If undeveloped communications were to become enough for me at

those retrospective moments, I might have felt myself supplied to

my taste, let me go on to say, at the hour of my making, with

great resolution, an attempt on high-seated and quite grandly

out-of-the-way Volterra: a reminiscence associated with quite a

different year and, I should perhaps sooner have bethought

myself, with my fond experience of Pisa--inasmuch as it was

during a pause under that bland and motionless wing that I seem

to have had to organise in the darkness of a summer dawn my

approach to the old Etruscan stronghold. The railway then

existed, but I rose in the dim small hours to take my train;

moreover, so far as that might too much savour of an incongruous

facility, the fault was in due course quite adequately repaired

by an apparent repudiation of any awareness of such false notes

on the part of the town. I may not invite the reader to penetrate

with me by so much as a step the boundless backward reach of

history to which the more massive of the Etruscan gates of

Volterra, the Porta all' Arco, forms the solidest of thresholds;

since I perforce take no step myself, and am even exceptionally

condemned here to impressionism unashamed. My errand was to spend

a Sunday with an Italian friend, a native in fact of the place,

master of a house there in which he offered me hospitality; who,

also arriving from Florence the night before, had obligingly come

on with me from Pisa, and whose consciousness of a due urbanity,

already rather overstrained, and still well before noon, by the

accumulation of our matutinal vicissitudes and other grounds for

patience, met all ruefully at the station the supreme shock of an

apparently great desolate world of volcanic hills, of blank,

though "engineered," undulations, as the emergence of a road

testified, unmitigated by the smallest sign of a wheeled vehicle.

The station, in other words, looked out at that time (and I

daresay the case hasn't strikingly altered) on a mere bare huge

hill-country, by some remote mighty shoulder of which the goal of

our pilgrimage, so questionably "served" by the railway, was

hidden from view. Served as well by a belated omnibus, a four-in-

hand of lame and lamentable quality, the place, I hasten to add,

eventually put forth some show of being; after a complete

practical recognition of which, let me at once further mention,

all the other, the positive and sublime, connections of Volterra

established themselves for me without my lifting a finger.

The small shrunken, but still lordly prehistoric city is perched,

when once you have rather painfully zigzagged to within sight of

it, very much as an eagle's eyrie, oversweeping the land and the

sea; and to that type of position, the ideal of the airy peak of

vantage, with all accessories and minor features a drop, a slide

and a giddiness, its individual items and elements strike you at

first as instinctively conforming. This impression was doubtless

after a little modified for me; there were levels, there were

small stony practicable streets, there were walks and strolls,

outside the gates and roundabout the cyclopean wall, to the far

end of downward-tending protrusions and promontories, natural

buttresses and pleasant terrene headlands, friendly suburban

spots (one would call them if the word had less detestable

references) where games of bowls and overtrellised wine-tables

could put in their note; in spite of which however my friend's

little house of hospitality, clean and charming and oh, so

immemorially Tuscan, was as perpendicular and ladder-like as so

compact a residence could be; it kept up for me beautifully--as

regards posture and air, though humanly and socially it rather

cooed like a dovecote--the illusion of the vertiginously

"balanced" eagle's nest. The air, in truth, all the rest of that

splendid day, must have been the key to the promptly-produced

intensity of one's relation to every aspect of the charming

episode; the light, cool, keen air of those delightful high

places, in Italy, that tonically correct the ardours of July, and

which at our actual altitude could but affect me as the very

breath of the grand local legend. I might have "had" the little

house, our particular eagle's nest, for the summer, and even on

such touching terms; and I well remember the force of the

temptation to take it, if only other complications had permitted;

to spend the series of weeks with that admirable

interesting freshness in my lungs: interesting, I

especially note, as the strong appropriate medium in which a

continuity with the irrecoverable but still effective past had

been so robustly preserved. I couldn't yield, alas, to the

conceived felicity, which had half-a-dozen appealing aspects; I

could only, while thus feeling how the atmospheric medium itself

made for a positively initiative exhilaration, enjoy my illusion

till the morrow. The exhilaration therefore supplies to memory

the whole light in which, for the too brief time, I went about

"seeing" Volterra; so that my glance at the seated splendour

reduces itself, as I have said, to the merest impressionism;

nothing more was to be looked for, on the stretched surface of

consciousness, from one breezy wash of the brush. I find there

the clean strong image simplified to the three or four

unforgettable particulars of the vast rake of the view; with the

Maremma, of evil fame, more or less immediately below, but with

those islands of the sea, Corsica and Elba, the names of which

are sharply associational beyond any others, dressing the far

horizon in the grand manner, and the Ligurian coast-line melting

northward into beauty and history galore; with colossal

uncemented blocks of Etruscan gates and walls plunging you--and

by their very interest--into a sweet surrender of any privilege

of appreciation more crushing than your general synthetic stare;

and with the rich and perfectly arranged museum, an unsurpassed

exhibition of monumental treasure from Etruscan tombs, funereal

urns mainly, reliquaries of an infinite power to move and charm

us still, contributing to this same so designed, but somehow at

the same time so inspired, collapse of the historic imagination

under too heavy a pressure, or abeyance of "private judgment" in

too unequal a relation.

IV

I remember recovering private judgment indeed in the course of

two or three days following the excursion I have just noted;

which must have shaped themselves in some sort of consonance with

the idea that as we were hereabouts in the very middle of dim

Etruria a common self-respect prescribed our somehow profiting by

the fact. This kindled in us the spirit of exploration, but with

results of which I here attempt to record, so utterly does the

whole impression swoon away, for present memory, into vagueness,

confusion and intolerable heat, Our self-respect was of the

common order, but the blaze of the July sun was, even for

Tuscany, of the uncommon; so that the project of a trudging quest

for Etruscan tombs in shadeless wastes yielded to its own

temerity. There comes back to me nevertheless at the same time,

from the mild misadventure, and quite as through this positive

humility of failure, the sense of a supremely intimate revelation

of Italy in undress, so to speak (the state, it seemed, in which

one would most fondly, most ideally, enjoy her); Italy no longer

in winter starch and sobriety, with winter manners and winter

prices and winter excuses, all addressed to the forestieri

and the philistines; but lolling at her length, with her graces

all relaxed, and thereby only the more natural; the brilliant

performer, in short, en famille, the curtain down and her

salary stopped for the season--thanks to which she is by so much

more the easy genius and the good creature as she is by so much

less the advertised prima donna. She received us nowhere

more sympathetically, that is with less ceremony or self-

consciousness, I seem to recall, than at Montepulciano, for

instance--where it was indeed that the recovery of private

judgment I just referred to couldn't help taking place. What we

were doing, or what we expected to do, at Montepulciano I keep no

other trace of than is bound up in a present quite tender

consciousness that I wouldn't for the world not have been there.

I think my reason must have been largely just in the beauty of

the name (for could any beauty be greater?), reinforced no doubt

by the fame of the local vintage and the sense of how we should

quaff it on the spot. Perhaps we quaffed it too constantly; since

the romantic picture reduces itself for me but to two definite

appearances; that of the more priggish discrimination so far

reasserting itself as to advise me that Montepulciano was dirty,

even remarkably dirty; and that of her being not much else

besides but perched and brown and queer and crooked, and noble

withal (which is what almost any Tuscan city more easily than not

acquits herself of; all the while she may on such occasions

figure, when one looks off from her to the end of dark street-

vistas or catches glimpses through high arcades, some big

battered, blistered, overladen, overmasted ship, swimming in a

violet sea).

If I have lost the sense of what we were doing, that could at all

suffer commemoration, at Montepulciano, so I sit helpless before

the memory of small stewing Torrita, which we must somehow have

expected to yield, under our confidence, a view of shy charms,

but which did n't yield, to my recollection, even anything that

could fairly be called a breakfast or a dinner. There may have

been in the neighbourhood a rumour of Etruscan tombs; the

neighbourhood, however, was vast, and that possibility not to be

verified, in the conditions, save after due refreshment. Then it

was, doubtless, that the question of refreshment so beckoned us,

by a direct appeal, straight across country, from Perugia, that,

casting consistency, if not to the winds, since alas there were

none, but to the lifeless air, we made the sweltering best of our

way (and it took, for the distance, a terrible time) to the Grand

Hotel of that city. This course shines for me, in the retrospect,

with a light even more shameless than that in which my rueful

conscience then saw it; since we thus exchanged again, at a

stroke, the tousled bonne fille of our vacational Tuscany

for the formal and figged-out presence of Italy on her good

behaviour. We had never seen her conform more to all the

proprieties, we felt, than under this aspect of lavish

hospitality to that now apparently quite inveterate swarm of

pampered forestieri, English and Americans in especial,

who, having had Roman palaces and villas deliciously to linger

in, break the northward journey, when once they decide to take

it, in the Umbrian paradise. They were, goodness knows, within

their rights, and we profited, as anyone may easily and cannily

profit at that time, by the sophistications paraded for them;

only I feel, as I pleasantly recover it all, that though we had

arrived perhaps at the most poetical of watering-places we had

lost our finer clue. (The difference from other days was

immense, all the span of evolution from the ancient malodorous

inn which somehow did n't matter, to that new type of polyglot

caravanserai which everywhere insists on mattering--mattering,

even in places where other interests abound, so much more than

anything else.) That clue, the finer as I say, I would fain at

any rate to-day pick up for its close attachment to another

Tuscan city or two--for a felt pull from strange little San

Gimignano delle belle Torre in especial; by which I mean from the

memory of a summer Sunday spent there during a stay at Siena. But

I have already superabounded, for mere love of my general present

rubric--the real thickness of experience having a good deal

evaporated, so that the Tiny Town of the Many Towers hangs before

me, not to say, rather, far behind me, after the manner of an

object directly meeting the wrong or diminishing lens of one's

telescope.

It did everything, on the occasion of that pilgrimage, that it

was expected to do, presenting itself more or less in the guise

of some rare silvery shell, washed up by the sea of time, cracked

and battered and dishonoured, with its mutilated marks of

adjustment to the extinct type of creature it once harboured

figuring against the sky as maimed gesticulating arms flourished

in protest against fate. If the centuries, however, had pretty

well cleaned out, vulgarly speaking, this amazing little

fortress-town, it wasn't that a mere aching void was bequeathed

us, I recognise as I consult a somewhat faded impression; the

whole scene and occasion come back to me as the exhibition, on

the contrary, of a stage rather crowded and agitated, of no small

quantity of sound and fury, of concussions, discussions,

vociferations, hurryings to and fro, that could scarce have

reached a higher pitch in the old days of the siege and the

sortie. San Gimignano affected me, to a certainty, as not dead, I

mean, but as inspired with that strange and slightly sinister new

life that is now, in case after case, up and down the peninsula,

and even in presence of the dryest and most scattered bones,

producing the miracle of resurrection. The effect is often--and I

find it strikingly involved in this particular reminiscence--that

of the buried hero himself positively waking up to show you his

bones for a fee, and almost capering about in his appeal to your

attention. What has become of the soul of San Gimignano who shall

say?--but, of a genial modern Sunday, it is as if the heroic

skeleton, risen from the dust, were in high activity, officious

for your entertainment and your detention, clattering and

changing plates at the informal friendly inn, personally

conducting you to a sight of the admirable Santa Fina of

Ghirlandaio, as I believe is supposed, in a dim chapel of the

Collegiata church; the poor young saint, on her low bed, in a

state of ecstatic vision (the angelic apparition is given),

acconpanied by a few figures and accessories of the most

beautiful and touching truth. This image is what has most vividly

remained with me, of the day I thus so ineffectually recover; the

precious ill-set gem or domestic treasure of Santa Fina, and then

the wonderful drive, at eventide, back to Siena: the progress

through the darkening land that was like a dense fragrant garden,

all fireflies and warm emanations and dimly-seen motionless

festoons, extravagant vines and elegant branches intertwisted

for miles, with couples and companies of young countryfolk almost

as fondly united and raising their voices to the night as if

superfluously to sing out at you that they were happy, and above

all were Tuscan. On reflection, and to be just, I connect the

slightly incongruous loudness that hung about me under the

Beautiful Towers with the really too coarse competition for my

favour among the young vetturini who lay in wait for my approach,

and with an eye to my subsequent departure, on my quitting, at

some unremembered spot, the morning train from Siena, from which

point there was then still a drive. That onset was of a fine

mediaeval violence, but the subsiding echoes of it alone must

have afterwards borne me company; mingled, at the worst, with

certain reverberations of the animated rather than concentrated

presence of sundry young sketchers and copyists of my own

nationality, which element in the picture conveyed beyond

anything else how thoroughly it was all to sit again henceforth

in the eye of day. My final vision perhaps was of a sacred

reliquary not so much rudely as familiarly and "humorously" torn

open. The note had, with all its references, its own interest;

but I never went again.