Studies of Travel: Italy. Freeman Edward Augustus
fashion of mercilessly spoiling the mediæval houses which has gone on as merrily at Spello as at Perugia and Assisi. But that is no fashion of yesterday. The general old-world air, strong in some parts of Perugia, stronger at Assisi, is strongest of all at Spello, while at Spello there seems less eagerness than at Cortona to seize the stranger and make a prey of him. The look-out is perhaps the finest of all; it takes in as prominent objects sharp-peaked mountains and ranges deep with snow, which barely come into the other views, and the long series of hill-towns is pleasantly broken by the towers and cupolas of Foligno in the plain. The mediæval walls and towers, at all events on the south-eastern side, form a line which is not easily surpassed; the walk outside Spello, though it lacks both the antiquity and the wildness of the walk outside Cortona, outdoes it in mere picturesque effect. The particular objects at Spello are perhaps a little disappointing: Spello itself, as a whole, is certainly not disappointing.
At Spello we have reached an Italian town which is not a bishop's see; even in Italy it was not likely to be so, with Assisi so close on one hand and Foligno on the other. There is therefore no duomo, nor is there any other church of much architectural importance. The best are two small forsaken Romanesque churches outside the walls, one on each side of the town. One of them, that of St. Claudius, forms one building of a group by which we pass on the road from Assisi to Spello, a group lying in the plain, with Spello on its height rising above them. There is a large modern villa which seems to be built on Roman foundations; by its side lies the little Romanesque church; nearly opposite is the amphitheatre of Hispellum, keeping some fragments of its walls and with its marked shape deeply impressed on the ground. Here the amphitheatre is down in the plain; at Assisi it stands in the higher part of the present city; in both it lies, according to rule, outside the original Roman enclosure. It shows the passionate love for these sports wherever the influence of Rome spread, that two amphitheatres could be needed with so small a distance between them as that which parts Assisi from Spello. More nearly opposite to the villa are other Roman fragments which are said to have been part of a theatre; but the form of the building is certainly not so clearly stamped on the ground as that of its bloodier neighbour. Indeed we are in a region of Roman remains; other fragments lie by the roadside between Assisi and Spello, and when we reach the latter town, we find that, next to its general effect, it is its Roman remains which form its chief attraction.
As we draw near from Assisi, the Julian colony of Hispellum, the Flavia Constans of a later day, is becomingly entered by a Roman gateway which bears the name of Porta Consolare. But on the road from Foligno the consular gate is reached only through a mediæval one, which bears, as we have said, all the names of the town prominently set forth for the stranger's benefit. The consular gate stands at the bottom of the hill: for Spello thoroughly occupies the whole of its hill; there is plenty of climbing to be done in its streets; but it has all to be done in continuous streets within the town walls. The consular gate has been patched in later times; but the Roman arch is perfect. It is a single simple arch, plain enough, and of no great height, a marked contrast to the lofty arch of Perugia. Another gateway on the side towards Assisi, known as Porta Veneris, must have been a far more elaborate design. But the whole is imperfect and broken down; one arch of the double entrance is blocked, and the other is supplanted by a later arch. Yet there is a good effect about the whole, owing to the bold polygonal towers of later date which flank the Roman gateway. Another gateway, higher up on the same side, is cut down to the mere stones of an arch hanging in the air. This is locally known as the arco di trionfo. Of the arco di Augusto within the town, said to be a triumphal arch of Macrinus, there is nothing left but a single jamb. In short the Roman remains of Hispellum, though considerable in number, are slight and fragmentary in actual extent. Yet there is a pleasure in tracing them out. Conceive them perfect, and Hispellum would come near to rival Verona, not as it was, but as it is. But, after all, there is a certain perverse turn of thought which is better pleased with tracing out what has been than with simply admiring what still is. Spello will make the end of a mid-Italian series seen after the great snow-tide to match the mid-French series seen before it. Everything cannot be seen in one journey. All roads lead to Rome; but thirty-seven days are enough to spend on any one of them. From the colony of Hispellum then we must hurry on to aurea Roma herself, even though we have to rush by many a town and fortress on its hill-top, by Trevi and Spoleto, and, proudest of all, by
… that grey crag where, girt with towers,
The fortress of Nequinum lowers
O'er the pale waves of Nar.
Marry, Narni is somewhat; but Rome is more. Rome, too, at each visit, presents fresh objects, old and new. The oldest and the newest seem to have come together, when one set of placards on the wall invites the Roman people to meet on the Capitol, and when the Quæstor Bacchus – it is taking a liberty with a living man and magistrate, but we cannot help Latinizing the Questore Bacco– puts out another set of placards to forbid the meeting. We are inclined to turn to others among our memories, to others among our lays. We might almost look for a secession; we might almost expect to see once more
… the tents which in old time whitened the Sacred Hill.
But those who were forbidden to meet on the Capitol did not secede even to the Aventine; the secession was done within doors, in the Sala Dante.
Veii
The student of what M. Ampère calls "L'Histoire Romaine à Rome" must take care not to confine his studies to Rome only. The local history of Rome – and the local history of Rome is no small part of the œcumenical history – is not fully understood unless we fully take in the history and position of the elder sites among which Rome arose. With Rome we must compare and contrast the cities of her enemies and her allies, the cities which she swept away, the cities which she made part of herself, the cities which simply withered away before her. And first on the list may well come the city which was before all others the rival of Rome, and where she did indeed sweep with the besom of destruction. A short journey from the Flaminian Gate, a journey through a country which might almost pass for a border shire of England, with the heights of Wales in the distance, brings us to a city which has utterly perished, where no permanent human dwelling-place is left within the ancient circuit. In a basin, as it were, unseen until we are close beneath or above it, hedged in by surrounding hills as by a rampart, stands all that is left of the first great rival of Rome, an inland Carthage on the soil of Etruria. There once was Veii, the first great conquest of Rome, the Italian Troy, round whose ten years' siege wonders have gathered almost as round the Achaian warfare by the Hellespont. There are no monuments of the departed life of Veii such as are left of not a few cities which have passed out of the list of living things no less utterly. Of the greatest city of southern Etruria nothing remains beyond a site which can never be wiped out but by some convulsion of nature, a few scraps to show that man once dwelled there, and tombs not a few to show that those who dwelled there belonged to a race with whom death counted for more than life.
A sight of the spot which once was Veii makes us better understand some points in early Italian history. We see why Veii was the rival of Rome, and why she was the unsuccessful rival of Rome. Above all, we understand better than anywhere else how deep must have been the hatred with which the old-established cities of Italy must have looked on the upstart settlement by the Tiber, which grew up to so strange a greatness and threatened to devour them one by one. Veii, the great border city of Etruria, was the only one among Rome's immediate neighbours which could contend with her on equal terms. Elsewhere, in her early history, Rome, as a single city, is of equal weight in peace or war with whole confederations.
The happy position of certain hills by the Tiber had enabled one lucky group of Latin settlements to coalesce into a single city as great as all the others put together. But at Veii we see the marks of what clearly was a great city, a city fully equal in extent to Rome. And when the ancient writers tell us that, in riches and splendour, in the character of its public and private buildings, Veii far surpassed Rome, it is only what we should expect from a great and ancient Etruscan city which had entered on the stage of decline when Rome was entering on the stage of youthful greatness. There was little fear of Veii overthrowing Rome; but both sides must have felt that a day would come when Rome would be very likely to overthrow Veii. Two cities so great and so near together could not go on together. Two cities, very great