IV
The drive from Viterbo to Montefiascone lies across the high plateau between the Monte Cimino and the lake of Bolsena.
For the best part of the way, the landscape is pastoral and agricultural, with patches of oak-wood to which in March the leaves still cling; and on this fitful March morning, with rain in the shifting clouds, the ploughmen move behind their white oxen under umbrellas as vividly green as the young wheat. Here are none of the great bursts of splendour which mark the way from Rome to Caprarola; and it seems fitting that this more prosaic road should be travelled at a sober pace, in a Viterban posting-chaise, behind two plodding horses. The horses are not so plodding, however, but that they swing us briskly enough down the short descents of the rolling country, which now becomes wilder and more diversified, with stretches of woodland interspersed with a heathy growth of low fragrant shrubs. Here the slopes are thick with primroses, and the blue vinca and violet peep through the ivy trails of the hedgerows; but the trees are still leafless, for it is a high wind-swept region, where March practises few of her milder arts. A lonely country too: no villages, and only a few solitary farm-houses, are to be seen as we jog up and down the monotonous undulations of the road to the foot of Montefiascone.
The town overhangs us splendidly, on a spur above the lake of Bolsena; and a long ascent between fortified walls leads to the summit on which its buildings are huddled. Through the curtain of rain which the skies have now let down, the crooked streets with their archways and old blackened stone houses present no striking effects, though doubtless a bright day would draw from them some of that latent picturesqueness which is never far to seek when Italian masonry and Italian sunlight meet. Meanwhile, however, the rain persists, and the environment of Montefiascone remains so obstinately shrouded that, for all we know, the town may be situated “Nowhere,” like the famous scene in Festus.
Through this rain-muffled air, led blindfold as it were, we presently descend again by the same windings to the city gates, and thence, following the road to Bagnorea, come on the desolate church of San Flaviano, lying by itself in a hollow beneath the walls of the town. In our hasty dash from the carriage to the door, there is just time to receive the impression of an immensely old brick façade, distorted and scarred with that kind of age which only the Latin sense of antiquity has kept a word to describe—then we are in a low-arched cavernous interior, with spectral frescoes emerging here and there from the universal background of whitewash, and above the choir a spreading gallery or upper church, which makes of the lower building a species of crypt above ground. And here—O irony of fate!—in this old, deserted and damp-dripping church, under a worn slab before the abandoned altar (for it is only in the upper church that mass continues to be said)—here, a castaway as it were from both worlds, lies that genial offshoot of a famous race, the wine-loving Bishop Fugger, whose lust of the palate brought him to this lonely end. It would have been impossible to pass through Montefiascone without dropping a commemorative tear on the classic Est-Est-Est upon which, till so lately, a good cask of Montefiascone has been yearly broached in memory of the prelate’s end; yet one feels a regret, almost, in carrying away such a chill recollection of the poor Bishop’s fate, in leaving him to the solitude of that icy limbo which seems so disproportionate a punishment for his amiable failing.
Leaving San Flaviano, we press on toward Orvieto through an unbroken blur of rain. The weary miles leave no trace in memory, and we are still in an indeterminate region of wood and pasture and mist-muffled hills when gradually the downpour ceases, and streaks of sunset begin to part the clouds. Almost at the same moment a dip of the road brings us out above a long descent, with a wavy plain at its base, and reared up on a cliff above the plain a fierce brown city, walled, towered and pinnacled, which seems to have dropped from the sky like some huge beast of prey and locked its talons in the rock. All about the plain, in the watery evening light, rises a line of hills, with Monte Amiata thrusting its peak above the circle; the nearer slopes are clothed in olive and cypress, with castles and monasteries jutting from their ledges, and just below us the sight of an arched bridge across a ravine, with a clump of trees at its approach, touches a spring of memory and transports us from the actual scene to its pictured presentment—Turner’s “Road to Orvieto.”
It was, in fact, from this point that the picture was painted; and looking forth on the landscape, with its stormy blending of sepia-hues washed in pallid sunlight, one sees in it the vindication of Turner’s art—that true impressionism which consists not in the unimaginative noting of actual “bits,” but in the reconstruction of a scene as it has flowed into the mould of memory, the merging of fragmentary facts into a homogeneous impression. This is what Turner has done to the view of Orvieto from the Bolsena road, so summing up and interpreting the spirit of the scene that the traveller pausing by the arched bridge above the valley loses sense of the boundaries between art and life, and lives for a moment in that mystical region where the two are one.