Cori.
There was some reason in the remark made by Mr. Creighton in the Academy a little time back, that there must be something "irritating to the Italians of the present date in the point of view which is often adopted by English writers towards Italian history." "Their cities," he said, "which are still instinct with political and social life, are regarded as museums of curiosities, which serve to awaken picturesque reminiscences in the mind of the passing tourist." Mr. Creighton was speaking of Genoa, and at Genoa and in cities like Genoa, what he says may be perfectly true. But there are other Italian cities where the political and social life at least hides itself from the passing tourist, and where the curiosity with which he regards the city is as nothing compared with the curiosity with which the inhabitants of the city seem to regard him. The curiosity is not specially irritating; it is perhaps mixed up with a certain open craving after soldi which nothing short of the very highest civilization can get rid of; but it is quite distinct from the endless touting and wearying which the traveller has to undergo in places which are one degree more advanced, or which, to speak more civilly, have fallen less far back. For it is only civil to believe of cities which were once independent commonwealths, members of the League of the Thirty Cities, and, therefore, doubtless instinct with political life, that they were, at least two or three millenniums back, cleaner than they are now, and filled with inhabitants who had something more to do than their successors seem to have. But the interest which the novelty of the stranger awakens in the minds of the present inhabitants—far keener, it would seem, than the interest which the antiquity of the city awakens in his mind—really does him no harm. The modern Latins or Volscians come and look; they wonder; they follow. If the nature of the country requires that the strangers be set on asses and mules, the curiosity, as is only natural, reaches its height. The asses of the Prisci Latini or of their Volscian neighbours are undoubtedly grave and discreet beasts; even the obstinacy of the mule is a virtue when he knows the way so much better than his foreign rider. But there is something grotesque in the way of going; it is not wonderful if the sight gathers together a crowd, if the travellers find themselves the centre, not exactly of triumph, for they are not drawn in a chariot; not exactly of an ovation, for they do not walk on foot; but of a not ill-humoured procession of gazers, it may even be of admirers.
Something of this kind is likely to be the destiny, at some point at least, of those who wish to carry out the full programme of the right wing of the Latin host of Regillus:
Aricia, Cora, Norba,
Velitræ, with the might
Of Setia and of Tusculum.
Tusculum they will, perhaps, have made the object of a separate pilgrimage; Aricia belongs to the following of Jupiter and the Alban mount; "Setia's purple vineyards" it may be hard to take into the line of march; but, with a slight change of order, "Velitræ, Cora, Norba," with the later Ninfa thrown in as a substitute for neglected Setia, will form an admirable group, a day's journey, which those who have made it will perhaps, at the end of a day or two, feel sorry that they have not cut into two. Velitræ—hardly changed in the modern Velletri—has itself but little to show beyond one of the very noblest bell-towers of the second Italian period, where the pointed arch creeps in, a visitor which in Italy is better away, but which at least keeps out the vagaries of a yet later time. The lie of the town is good; it stands well on its hill, of no great elevation among its brighter neighbours. Besides the bell-tower, it has little to show in the ecclesiastical line, save only the eccentricity of having its cathedral church placed as if we were in Wales instead of in Italy, at the bottom of the city instead of at the top. One or two ancient houses and modern palaces may claim some attention, but Velletri, truly barren in Roman remains, cannot be said to be fruitful in those of mediæval times. The chief value of the town is as a starting-point—we can hardly call it centre—for Cora, Norba, and several other of its ancient fellows. The view from Velletri is beyond words. We look over the fertile plain, dying away to the right into the Pomptine marshes, and fenced in by the mighty limestone bulwark of the Volscian mountains. To the right of all the height of Anxur's temple looms in the distance; Circeii, with its following of islands, rises nearer and more plainly, almost itself like a great island, reminding the visitor from the West of England of Brean Down and the Holms in the Severn Sea. But the mountains draw the eyes towards them by something more than their bright masses, something more than a light and shade upon their sides. Several of their strong points are crowned with castles and whole towns; and one point so crowned stands out as the centre of all. We see one spur of the mountain, far lower than the heights beyond it, crowned by a little city coming some way down its sides, with a tall tower rising well from the midst when the sunlight catches it. There stands one of the chief objects for which Velletri is the starting-point; there we have to look for—
... the gigantic watch-towers,
No work of earthly men,
Whence Cora's sentinel's o'erlook
The never-ending fen.
Watch-towers, perhaps, in the strictest sense, we do not see, and we shall hardly find them when we come nearer; but Cora, Cori, still keeps the mightiest of walls, which it was no wonder that men looked on as too mighty to be the work of such mortals—in Homer's phrase—as we now are, and looked on them as reared by no hands weaker than those of the forgers of Jove's own thunderbolts. With Cori we enter on the examination of a long series of towns, whose main feature is their primæval walls, and among these Cori has the merit of showing us the walls that are the most primæval of all. None of its fellows can show such blocks as the mysterious engineers, whose work men love to call Cyclopean, piled together in the lower town of Cori, just outside what is now the gate of Ninfa. Blocks indeed of equal size we may see elsewhere, but surely none of equal rudeness. They are heaped together as they were hewn or torn away from their place in the natural rock; huge limestone blocks of every size and shape, with the spaces between them filled up with similar stones of their own kind. But the whole range of the wall of Cori is not of this primitive sort. The curious in such matters distinguish five epochs: Cyclopean, Latin, Old Roman, Roman of Sulla's day, and—the leap is a great one—mediæval walls of the time of King Ladislaus; we hardly venture to give an Angevin king of the hither Sicily the full Slavonic shape which marks him as sprung from the other side of Hadria. The stones of the first four—we have already spoken of the first of all—are all polygonal, of distinguishing degrees of regularity of work and degrees of size. The rudest wall, as far as we saw, of all is to be found quite at the bottom; the others may be seen side by side in the great walls of the arx which soar high above all, and which shelter the chief ornament of Cori in quite another department.
According to the nearly invariable rule, the arx of Cora contained a temple, and the temple, as so often happens, has been turned into a church. But the change has been less destructive to Cori than in many other places. The house of St. Peter has been built without damaging the portico of the house of Hercules—the old Latin Herculus was hopelessly confused with the Hêraklês of Greek legend—and still keeps the columns of his portico, both on its front and its sides; keeps his entablature, his pediment, the gate-way of his cella, the inscription which records the work of the local duumvirs, Manlius and Turpilius. But what shall we say to the columns themselves? They profess to be Doric, even to be Greek Doric; but they have bases; they stand as wide apart as Etruscan tradition planted the columns of the Capitoline Jupiter; the shafts themselves, instead of being as massive as Pæstum, are slenderer than Nemea. But sin against rule as it may, the upper temple at Cori is still undoubtedly pretty, to say the least, and it is really all the more interesting because of its sin against rule. Far finer in themselves are the Corinthian columns—such as are left—of the temple of the Greek Twin Brethren lower down the hill; but we can see good Corinthian columns in a great many places; the peculiarities of the Hercules temple are special to Cori. Do they not speak of the Hellenizing mind of the great dictator who made Cora rise again after it had suffered deeply at the hands of his Marian enemies? Stern restorer of what he deemed Rome's ancient ways, but votary and favourite of Hellenic gods, the taste of Sulla might well lead him to some such forms as we see in the object, yet prominent from many points of view, that crowns the height of the citadel of Cora.
But we have not gone through the full tale of the antiquities of this strange little mountain-city. Outside the Ninfa gate, spanning at a vast height the deep gorge which on that side forms the foss of Cori, rises a bridge, of days which we call ancient, but which we are tempted to call modern so near to the Cyclopean wall. Not a few fragments of columns may be marked here and there in the streets. We light too on inscriptions. Besides the duumvirs—one might call them the bailiffs—of the Roman Municipium, whose names are carved on the frieze of Hercules, another commemorates two Praitors; surely these, with their archaic spelling, are the abiding magistrates of the Latin Commonwealth—as Cicero's Milo was dictator of Lanuvium—dependent on Rome, but not fully incorporated in her substance. Then, besides the chief temple, other Pagan buildings and objects have been turned to Christian uses. In the church where St. Peter has supplanted Hercules, an altar, if altar it be, bearing rams with horns and the Gorgon's head, has been hollowed out to make a baptismal font. The church of St. Oliva bears a dedication dating only from the sixteenth century; but it is a lovely cloister of that better kind of Renaissance which was in truth only a falling back on Romanesque. In the church are memorials of earlier times, classical columns used again, fitted some of them with capitals of the very rudest Romanesque, whose fellows may be found in Worcester and at Hildesheim. Altogether Cori is emphatically a place for a visit. But a word of warning must be given. Cori and Norba cannot be combined so as to see both worthily in a single day. Let the traveller either make two distinct outings from Velletri, or let him take his chance of sleeping at Cori; it may not be a worse chance than sleeping at Frosinone, where sleep may be had. Then let him rise up early in the morning and saddle his ass, or, if able-bodied, let him rather make his way on his own feet along the mountain-path to Norba.