A Little Pilgrimage in Italy. Olave M. Potter
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
PERUGIA
'For bodiless dreams through double gateways go
Of horn and ivory, from night's realm forlorn;
And those that through the ivory gate are borne
Deceive, and what they tell is unfulfilled;
But those that issue through the polished horn
Fulfil themselves for mortals to whose sight
They issue.'
J. W. Mackail's Translation of the Odyssey, xix. 562.
'Look!' said the chronicler, 'there is Perugia. Perugia, whom I have loved so long for her name alone.'
The poet sighed.
'I could almost envy you because you do not know her. See how her loggia'd towers frame the heavens, and how she stretches out her lovely arms to welcome us!'
We came to Perugia from Cortona. In an hour we slipped from that austere Tuscan citadel into the heart of an enchanted land—Umbria Mystica—the home of saints, where Beauty and Romance walk in the valleys with the gentle Gods of Arcady; where brooding peace hangs in the luminous air, and on whose aerial hills great memories dwell in the little cities full of dreams that men have built for them. We skirted the enchanted shores of Thrasymene, the spell-bound lake which lies like an opal in the bosom of the Umbrian Hills, and found ourselves among vineyards and olive-gardens, where the Madonnas of Perugino and Raphael are living their beautiful and simple lives in the fields, and the great-eyed oxen draw Virgilian ploughs below the olives, or roll along the dusty roads with scarlet fillets on their milk-white heads.
Perugia is the queen of this enchanted land, the crown of Umbria. Think of her name—Perusia Augusta the Romans called her; was there ever a more lovely name, or one which History enriched with more poetic legends? For Felice Ciatti, that brilliant scholar of the seventeenth century, in summing up the Greco-Trojan tradition and the popular belief that Noah, the Patriarch, was the founder of the city, thought nothing of addressing the Perugians, in one of his Lenten sermons, in these stirring words—'No marvel is it if, to-day, ye Perugians possess the justice of the Armenians, the wisdom of the Greeks, the prosperity of Augustus, and the sanctity of Noah, for ye are descended from them all.'
And if these legends leave you cold, think of the Carlovingian tradition in which such great names as Oliver the Paladin, and the puissant knight, Count Roland, 'the Falcon of Christendom,' and the tyrant Orgoglioso, play their parts with the lovely lady Prossimana. Or, if this does not stir you, would you rather learn romance from the nomenclature of her ancient gates? Here, long since vanished, was the Portal of the Sun, the gate through which blind Homer thought that dreams entered into a city from the east. It still gives its name to a whole quarter of Perugia—the Rione della