V
Our friends and counsellors had for many years warned us against visiting Vallombrosa in March—the month which oftenest finds us in Tuscany.
“Wait till June,” they advised—and knowing the complexity of influences which go to make up an Italian “sensation,” and how, for lack of one ingredient, the whole mixture may lose its savour, we had obediently waited for June. But June in Florence never seemed to come—“the time and the place” were no more to meet in our horoscope than in the poet’s; and so, one year when March was playing at April, we decided to take advantage of her mood and risk the adventure.
We set out early, in that burnished morning air which seems, as with a fine burin, to retrace overnight every line of the Tuscan landscape. The railway runs southward along the Arno valley to Sant’ Ellero; and we might have been travelling through some delicately-etched background of Mantegna’s or Robetta’s, in which the clear pale colours of early spring were but an effect of subtle blendings of line. This Tuscan hill scenery, which for purity of modelling has no match short of Greece, is seen to the best advantage in March, when the conformation of the land is still unveiled by foliage, and every line tells like the threads of silver in a niello.
From Sant’ Ellero, where the train is exchanged for a little funicular car of primitive construction, we were pushed jerkily uphill by a gasping engine which had to be constantly refreshed by long draughts of water from wayside tanks. On such a day, however, it was impossible to grudge the slowness of the ascent. As we mounted higher, the country developed beneath us with that far-reaching precision of detail which gives to extended views in mid-Italy a curiously pre-Raphaelite look—as though they had been wrought out by a hand enamoured of definition and unskilled in the creation of general effects. The new wheat springing under the olives was the only high note of colour: all else was sepia-brown of new-turned earth, grey-brown of weather-mottled farm-houses and village belfries, golden-black of rusty cypresses climbing the hill-sides in straight interminable lines, and faint blush of peach-blossoms floating against grey olives.
Then we gained a new height, and the details of the foreground were lost in a vast unfolding of distances—hill on hill, blurred with olive-groves, or bare and keen-cut, with a sprinkling of farm-houses on their slopes, and here and there a watch-tower on a jutting spur; and beyond these again, a tossing sunlit sea of peaks, its farthest waves still crested with snow. Half way up, the abrupt slopes of oak-forest which we had skirted gave way to a plateau clothed with vines and budding fruit orchards; then another sharp climb through oak-scrub, across the dry beds of mountain-streams and up slopes of broom and heather, brought us to the topmost ledge, where the railway ends. On this ledge stands the dreary village of Saltina—a cluster of raw-looking houses set like boxes on a shelf (with a Hôtel Milton among them), and a background of Swiss chalets dotted forlornly on a treeless slope. Saltina must be arid even in midsummer, and in March it was a place to fly from. Our flight, however, was regulated by the leisurely gait of a small white donkey who was the only bête de somme to be had at that early season, and behind whom we slowly turned the shoulder of the cliff, and entered the pillared twilight of a great fir-wood. The road ran through this wood for a mile or two, carrying us straight to the heart of the Etrurian shades. As we advanced, byways branched off to the right and left, climbing the hill-sides through deep-perspectives of verdure; and presently we came to a wide turfy hollow, where the great trees recede, leaving a space for the monastery and its adjacent buildings.
The principal corps-de-bâtiment faces on a walled entrance-court with box-bordered paths leading to the fine arcaded portico of the church. These buildings are backed by a hanging wood with a hermitage on its crest—the Paradiso—but before them lies an open expanse studded with ancient trees, with a stone-bordered fish-pond, and grass walks leading down to mossy glens with the sound of streams in their depths. Facing the monastery stands the low building where pilgrims were formerly lodged, and which now, without farther modification than the change of name, has become the Albergo della Foresta; while the monastery itself has been turned into a government school of forestry.
Since change was inevitable, it is a fortunate accident which has housed a sylvan college in these venerable shades, and sent the green-accoutred foresters to carry on the husbandry of the monks. Never, surely, were the inevitable modifications of time more gently tempered to the survivor of earlier conditions. The monastery of Vallombrosa has neither the examinate air of a monument historique, nor that look of desecration and decadency that too often comes with altered uses. It has preserved its high atmosphere of meditative peace, and the bands of students flitting through the forest with surveying-implements and agricultural tools seem the lawful successors of the monks.
We had been told in Florence that winter still held the mountains, that we should find snow in the shady hollows and a glacial wind from the peaks. But spring airs followed us to the heights. Through the aromatic fir-boughs the sunlight slanted as warmly as down the ilex-walks of the Boboli gardens, and over the open slopes about the monastery there ran a rosy-purple flush of crocuses—not here and there in scattered drifts, or starring the grass as in the foregrounds of Mantegna and Botticelli, but so close-set that they formed a continuous sheet of colour, a tide of lilac which submerged the turf and, flowing between the ancient tree-boles, invaded even the dark edges of the forest. It was probably the one moment of the year at which the forest flushes into colour; its hour of transfiguration—we might have tried every other season, and missed the miracle of March in Vallombrosa. At first the eye was dazzled by this vast field of the cloth-of-purple, and could take in none of the more delicate indications of spring; but presently we found our way to the lower glens, where the crocuses ceased, and pale-yellow primroses poured over ivy-banks to the brink of agate-coloured brooks. In the forest, too, ferns were uncurling and violets thrusting themselves through the close matting of fir-needles; while the terraces of the monks’ garden, which climbs the hill-side near the monastery, were fragrant with budding box and beds of tulip and narcissus.
It was an air to idle in, breathing deep the stored warmth of immemorial springs; but the little donkey waited between the shafts of his calessina, and on the ledge of Saltina we knew that our engine was taking a last draught before the descent. Reluctantly we jogged back through the forest, and, regaining our seats in the train, plunged downward into a sea of translucent mountains, and valleys bathed in haze, a great reach of irradiated heights flowing by imperceptible gradations into amber depths of air, while below us the shadows fell, and the Arno gleamed white in the indistinctness of evening.