A Little Pilgrimage in Italy. Olave M. Potter
scabious, blue chicory, sugamele and rare borage, poppies and pink veronica, yellow spanocchi, dandelions, and golden broom. All the dyes of the East were woven there; and brambles and blossoming clematis stretched out long swaying arms towards the little shrines with which the fields were strewn, or twined a crown of flowers and thorns about the rust-worn symbols of the Passion on a lonely crucifix.
Little cities which had been hidden in the folds of the valley grew into our horizon—Torgiano, towering on our left, Deruta and Ripa Bianca. Our road, which had run in a straight line across the plain from the foot of Perugia's hill, crossed the Tiber on a bridge with a fifteenth-century gate-tower, and turned along the banks of the river. Tall Lombard poplars lingered on its brink, and peasant women in gay kerchiefs were washing linen in its green water. Across the valley we could see Perugia, most beautiful of all hill-cities, smiling in the sunshine, already far away; and in front across a sea of lesser hills rose Todi, perched on her mountain like a city in a fairy-tale, which surely could be reached by no other way than on the wings of a genie!
We rested our horses at Deruta, and clambered up into its precipitous streets. It is a mere hamlet, though a great deal of majolica has been made here for the last three hundred years, and it is extremely picturesque, perched high over the Tiber. Deruta is like a piece of its own pottery. It is built of gray stone, much the same colour as the unglazed plates which we saw drying on the walls, and its people dress in bright colours like the pigments on the finished ware. Every one goes barefoot here, and the old women toil up the steep stair-streets with their sandals slung over their arms, and huge bundles of sticks or fodder on their backs. And apart from its picturesqueness Deruta is well worth a visit for the sake of a beautiful fresco by Caporale in Sant'Antonio Abbate.
After Deruta the Umbrian Valley was all vineyards and olive-groves and fig-trees and acacias. Sometimes the Tiber was close beside us like a blue ribbon dividing us from the plain as we jangled through the cicala-haunted woods on the hillside; at others we could only trace it among the vineyards by the tall reedy poplars which followed its winding course.
The day grew hotter; the song of the cicalas swelled up like an anthem, and the butterflies drowsed upon the flowers. Presently we came to a wayside fountain, where a lovely girl with a jar of water poised on her head was talking to a young herdsman, beautiful as an Apollo, who was watering his oxen. There was a garden of ancient olives on the hillside above, and a welcome shade for our horses in the road. And because we had seen Todi on her hill, and that she was beautiful, we ate our lunch and took our siesta there under the olives in the scented air. Near at hand a boy was singing like a lover at his work; there were flowers at our feet, and cicalas fluting in the silver foliage overhead. The great white oxen were still drinking at the fountain, and their bells made pleasant music; sometimes a woman with a water-jar on her head came from the village, or a peasant rode by on his mule. It was a magic day. We had had so many hours of joy, so many hours of sun and wind and beautiful primitive things, that we had left care behind us. As we lay there on the soft earth and watched the cloud-shadows sweeping over the hills, we forgot the toil of life; we no longer heard the world throbbing its soul away in its great cities. The voice of the wind mingled with the shimmering music of summer—the insects, the song of the boy at work, and the bells of the oxen, in a paean of joy. For Umbria is like that garden in which Siddârtha dwelt with Yasôdara, shut off from all ugly and painful things. If you look deep enough you will assuredly find death, even as Siddârtha did—the hawk preying upon the small bird, the small bird upon the gnat, and you will see the sweat upon the oxen as they strain in the sun. You may find the world as sad a place, as full of pain and toil as he did, or you may find it just such a mirror of God's Love as did Francis, the chief of Umbrian saints. Here the butterflies seem to dance more gayly than they do elsewhere, the trees grow free, the flowers stretch upwards to the sun; no questions vex you when you see a wayside shrine. In the garden of Umbria there are only God and Nature, the Soul of Things is at ease.
So, with our hearts attuned to her simplicity, we came to Todi on the top of her hill, with her towers and walls, and her winds and clouds. We caught her asleep in the siesta hour. There was no one astir when we drove into her beautiful golden piazza, where the Middle Ages have never been forgotten: even to-day it is full of mediaeval grace, with its two great palaces and its exquisite cathedral. But if we had come to her in the busy morning stir of the market we could still have found the Middle Ages there, for the peasants ride in on the old leather saddles picked out in brass and scarlet that we see in fifteenth-century frescoes; the asses bear on panniers barrels, or huge bundles of rough wood; the mules are harnessed with bells and tassels, three abreast, so that they straggle across the narrow road as they strain up the hill, and all the women carry their marketing on their heads. The cathedral of Todi is one of the gems of Umbrian architecture. It is a great golden church with beautiful and very ancient doors, and an ornate rose window; it soars above the piazza on a wide flight of steps which not even a gigantic cinematograph advertisement can rob of dignity. Below its southern wall is a row of shabby little shops where the people sit at work in their doorways, but the northern side has flying buttresses and a cornice of fantastic heads of men and birds and beasts; and there is a pleasing baroque arch with shallow, grass-grown steps leading down to the piazza.
DETAILS FROM THE APSE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF TODI.
Like her cathedral Todi is full of quaint and beautiful things. She is an artist's city, solitary and beautiful, unexpectedly rich and frankly poor. Once away from her stately piazza with its three great buildings, which are like three jewels in the crown of King Cophetua's Beggar Maid, we found her humble and out of elbows. Her old brown houses bulged out over the steep little streets, or towered like lean fortresses on her city wall, with all manner of green things, even fig-trees, growing out of them. From below they seemed to be piled up one on the top of the other like children's bricks. The vineyards and olive-gardens, which swept up the hillside, forced entrances at every point; and on the crest of the hill among her palaces was one slender cypress spire, soaring up as though Nature herself must climb through this clear air to heaven. She had long avenues of acacias and flowering laurels, and ancient gateways like the Porta Aurea, through which we had a vista of mediaeval towers, and a Perugino landscape of green valleys with a river winding away to the amphitheatre of blue hills. Here and there in her walls were courses of splendid masonry, Umbrian perhaps, and on the eastern side of the town were four gigantic niches of a Roman basilica. But as in most Umbrian cities, it was the Middle Ages that left Todi her chief treasures, her stately palaces and her cathedral; and further down the hillside, on a flight of earthquake-riven steps, San Fortunato, which was the home of the Antipope Nicholas v. in the days when rebellious little Todi was a thorn in the side of the papacy, and Lewis of Bavaria made her his headquarters. Fra Jacopone of Todi, the author of Stabat Mater Dolorosa, is said to be buried in this church, but though we looked for it we could not find his tomb.
All these things count as nothing in the eyes of the Todesi, for Todi boasts a pilgrimage church; and a pilgrimage church, albeit of the sixteenth century, is an acquisition not to be despised by any city however ancient and picturesque. But in truth Santa Maria della Consolazione is a lovely church, a capolavoro of architecture, and it soars up like a great golden gourd ripened to perfection on the green hillside. We came to it through the Porta Aurea along an avenue of flowering laurels, and its fair proportions gave us a complete sense of satisfaction. As we drew near, its clustered domes dwarfed the amphitheatre of hills. Inside it was airy and gracious, a bubble of light; but its sixteenth-century paganism, which is always the paganism of secular buildings rather than of temples, and its overgrown apostles in the niches that were meant for gods, spoilt its appeal, to the Protestant mind at any rate, as a house of prayer. What is it, I wonder, that makes it easy for the Protestant to worship in Gothic or Romanesque churches, and to respond to the appeal of basilicas like Santa Maria Maggiore or San Clemente in Rome, while sixteenth-century churches still remain the ideal ecclesiastical building to the majority of Roman Catholics? Is it that they all bear the image of St. Peter's and the Vatican in their minds? They argue that at least under the spacious cupolas of the renaissance they have light and space. And it is logic, for Gothic cathedrals are dim and full of shadows. But I could say my prayers more easily in the baths of Caracalla, where the sun