I. Anagni.
He who goes steadily from Rome to Brindisi, seeing what comes in his way by the easiest manner of going, will not come very much oftener on the track of Horace and his friends than he to whom Brindisi is the haven for Egypt or India, and who rushes thither as fast as he can along the Italian side of the Hadriatic. The three routes will of necessity coincide at Bari. To Bari the traveller who starts from Rome must add Benevento, and he may, without much trouble, add Aricia. But the sites that lie around the Alban mount, the Alban lake, and its lesser fellow—the relics in short of so many volcanoes, wet and dry, the possible place of Alba, the more certain relics of its child Albano, the path by which the chariot of Marcellus climbed to the temple of which the last Stewart swept away what time had left—all these seem naturally to form a group and a subject by themselves. So may the objects for which Velletri supplies the best centre,—the hill, the walls, the temples of Cori, "Norba's ancient wall," with neither an inhabitant nor an habitation within it—Ninfa's more modern wall, equally without an inhabitant, but with ruined habitations, ruined churches, in abundance—all these may be connected with an iter ad Brundisium, but they hardly form an actual part of it. Let our traveller design to start in modern fashion by railway—we were going to say in prosaic modern fashion, only no way of going could well be more prosaic than that followed by Horace; let him study his time-tables, and he will find that he can, if so minded, visit Segni and go back to Rome in a single day; he can hardly do so by Anagni. Not that we should counsel such a way of dealing with the walks, the gates, the temple-foundations, that crown the height of Signia. It would most likely be found possible to sleep at Segni. Gsell-fels, prince of guidebook-makers, recommends the locanda there as "reinlich und eidlich," and the second adjective does not mean that the traveller will be in any danger of being sworn at. Still some may be more inclined to go to Segni and back again from Velletri, where there is no doubt as to living quite happily at the sign of the Cock. Anagni, Anagnia of the Hernicans, is the beginning of something new. It is the first point distinctly beyond the neighbourhood of Rome. It is not unlikely then that such a traveller as we have supposed may make Anagni his first halting-place. And at Anagni he may certainly rest for the night, though his quarters may be a comedown not only from Rome but from Velletri. But if, by any chance, he takes the earlier points in some other course; above all, if he visits Segni by any course, he will be all the more open to visit Anagni. The city of Boniface VIII., almost beckons to him to cross the valley and the stream. For it is as the city of Boniface VIII., the place where he so strangely met his end, the prisoner—not the last Pope who was fated so to be—of a French ruler, that Anagni will most likely present itself to the mind. In mediæval history Anagni is a thoroughly Papal city, and to this day it keeps a Papal impress on its buildings, a Papal impress meaning something different at Anagni from what it means at Rome. Anagni did not remain a favourite Papal dwelling-place; it therefore did not suffer at the hands of Renaissance Popes as Rome lived to suffer. But, even in the first glimpse of the hill-city, we may well go back to much earlier times. We may remember that first Pyrrhos, then Hannibal, halted thither, each on his vain march towards the Rome which neither was to conquer. And when we have reached Hannibal and Pyrrhos, we may go back to earlier ages. There is a point of view in which Anagnia is, before all things, the head of the confederation of the Hernicans. There is no people of ancient Italy of whom it is harder to get any distinct idea than this stout hill folk. In treading Old-Latin or Volscian ground we can, even without book, call up a few personal names, a few personal figures, of particular Volscians or Old-Latins; we cannot call up the name of a single Hernican, historical or legendary. All that we know of them is their geographical position, and the one great event in their political history; and those tell us a great deal. They must have been a people of no small account whom Spurius Cassius thought worthy to fill the third place in the great Triple League along with Rome and Latium. And this, though, as having neither one great city like Rome, nor a crowd of cities like Latium, they hardly seem to form a power on the level with their two comrades. But their geographical position gave them a special importance. Thrust in as they were between Æquians and Volscians, no alliance could be more precious than theirs to Rome and Latium. They were the most exposed member of the League, the outpost of Latium, as Latium itself was the outpost of Rome. Of all the three, the brunt of the struggle must have fallen most fiercely upon them; the hills of Anagni must have looked down on many a fierce struggle with the invading occupants of the opposite range of mountains. The walls of Anagni must have endured or yielded to many a fierce attack of their ever-threatening neighbours. As we look out from one of the heights of this region to another, we better understand the political relations of the endless little communities which thus lived on in one another's sight. The ally or the enemy was close at the door; there was not even any need to climb up an akropolis to see what was coming in the way of attack or deliverance. Rome and Veii could not see one another; between them therefore there could be long periods of simple peace, without warfare and without alliance. Rome and Tusculum could see one another; but they were not, so to speak, ostentatiously thrust into one another's sight. But look out from Segni, and your chief business is to look at Anagni; look out from Anagni, and your chief business is to look either at Segni or at Ferentino, according to which way you are looking. If in some lights the long circuit of Segni on its mountain-top is less clearly seen, the lesser hill of Gavignano shows itself in front as its symbol or substitute. Cities standing in this relation to one another could not fail to be either bitter enemies or close allies. They must be always doing something to one another in the way either of friendship or of enmity. It was then no small stroke of policy when Spurius Cassius, of whom it has been so truly said that he was the first Roman whose greatness is really historical, won the Hernican land and its head Anagnia to the alliance of Rome and Latium. He did indeed put a bit in the mouth of the advancing Volscian.
We come then to Hernican Anagnia, Papal Anagni, to a hill-city girded in by mighty walls. The hill of Anagni is not, like the hills of Segni and Norba, an actual piece of the mountain itself; it is a hill, an isolated hill, a hill so large that, no less than at Segni and Norba, the city is wholly on the height; the walls merely fence in the hill-top. That hill-top is in some parts wonderfully narrow; in the middle of the town there is hardly more than the width of the chief street between the slopes on either side. And at its eastern end the hill rises to form a truer akropolis, with a steeper path up to it, than can be seen at Segni or Norba. Round the whole of this space, allowing for some late patchings, run the ancient walls of Anagnia, and a mighty and wonderful work they are. But who built them? We must confess that we walked round about them and, as we thought, marked well their bulwarks, in the full belief that we were studying the works of the ancient Hernicans. Let no one fancy that we did not mark the difference between the walls of Anagnia and the strange and mysterious forms which may be seen at Cori and Segni. The walls of Anagni bring us back within the ordinary range of wall-building as practised by ordinary mortals. Hernican Anagnia did not come within either Lord Macaulay's Latin or his Etruscan catalogue; but, had it done so, there would have been no temptation to speak of its bulwarks as "no work of earthly men," or as—
Reared by the hands of giants
For godlike kings of old.
The walls of Anagni are wonderful only as the great works of Rome are wonderful. They are built by men to whom it was more natural to put together rectangular stones with some kind of regularity than it was to pile together huge polygons anyhow. They were built by men who thoroughly understood the principle of the arch, and knew how to use it with all boldness. They remain, in various degrees of preservation, round the greater part of the circuit of the town. In some parts they are broken down altogether; in some they are supplanted, in others merely patched, by walls of later date; in short, they have gone through all the casualties which a wall is likely to go through in the course of two millenniums or so; but the wall of modern Anagni, as a whole, is still the old wall of Anagnia. The construction differs a good deal in different parts as to the size of the stones and as to their nature, and as to the degree of rudeness or finish in the work. In some parts the wall stands single; in others it is strengthened by further defences, buttresses rather than towers—defences, by-the-way, which must be carefully distinguished from the additions of later times. But one general character reigns throughout. The stones, greater and smaller, smoother and rougher, are always rectangular, and always laid with some measure of regularity. In some cases ranges of larger and smaller stones alternate; in one part of the wall stones of two natures and colours almost alternate. The chief material is a light-coloured stone exactly like the puff-stone of Gloucestershire, the material of Berkeley Castle and of not a few other buildings in that neighbourhood. This is eked out here and there by the dark volcanic peperino, which, towards the south-eastern part of the wall, is used much more freely. The general effect, wherever the wall is at all perfect, is stately and striking in the extreme, both in form and colour.
Now was it only a dream when we tracked out these walls, and took a certain pleasure in speaking of them as Hernican walls? We come back to our library; we take down the Dictionary of Geography; we turn to the article "Anagnia," and we find that by far the best contributor to the series, Mr. E. H. Bunbury, has another tale to tell. Our feelings are damped when he says, "The only remains extant there are of Roman date and of little interest." As to the "little interest," we venture to have our own opinion in any case; we should hold that so great an extent of ancient wall still bounding an inhabited town was an object of high interest, even if it could be shown to belong to the latest days which could come under the definition of "Roman date." But what is Roman date? Mr. Bunbury sends us to the correspondence of the Emperor Marcus with Cornelius Fronto. We hope he does not ask us to believe that the walls are later than the days of the philosophic Emperor. For, if he will allow them to be as old as that, we can call the Emperor himself to witness that they must be a good deal older. For Marcus himself read an inscription over one of the gates, "Flamen sume samentum." He did not know what "samentum" meant, and we cannot find the word in our Latin dictionary. But a native explained to him its meaning in the Hernican language; it meant the skin of the victim which the flamen put on his head when he entered the town. We do not want to be unreasonable in our dates, if only we can let in our Hernicans at some corner. When we looked at the walls, we saw at once that they had no fellowship with the primæval works at Cori and at Segni; they did seem to us to have fellowship with the works of the Tarquins at Rome. We shall be quite happy if Mr. Bunbury will allow us to put the walls as early as the year B.C. 307. The next year Anagnia sank from a Hernican city, a free ally of Rome, into a town whose people were burthened with Roman citizenship without the Roman franchise. If we may carry back walls over whose gates Hernican inscriptions could be read between four and five hundred years later, to a date as nearly as that, we shall have done all that we could wish. They will be walls of the days of Hernican independence, walls on which Hannibal and Pyrrhos have looked.
One thing is plain, that the builders of the walls of Anagnia, like the builders of the cloaca at Rome, but most unlike the elder builders of Cora and Signia, knew as well as any men how to turn arches. On the highest point of the town, by the modern gate which looks out towards Ferentino, within the circuit of the ancient arx, we may still see, blocked, partly hidden by the modern gate, disguised by the arrangements of the mediæval castle, the double gate of the ancient wall. It is perfectly plain, but with arches thoroughly well turned, with a double range of voussoirs. A smaller arch of the same workmanship beside them looks almost as if it had been blocked from the beginning. The arx itself, it should be remembered, had its separate wall within that of the city, a noble fragment of which, of exactly the same character as the town wall, is still to be seen in a narrow street a little lower down.
When we actually reach Anagni, there can be no doubt that the character in which it chiefly strikes us is that of the city of the Hernican walls, if Hernican walls we may call them. But historically Anagni is so far more famous as the city of mediæval Popes that it is fitting that it should have something to show in that character also. The town is rich in mediæval fragments. The main street, in its winding courses, displays long ranges of blocked arcades, round and pointed, which, when open, must have given it, narrow and often dim as it is, no small measure of stateliness. Not a few buildings stand out with arches of vast height and boldness, suggesting, as it is fit that one papal city should suggest to another, the mighty works of Rome's absent Bishops at Avignon. Not remarkable for height, but most remarkable for their span, are the exceedingly bold arches which support the communal palace, once, it is said, the dwelling of the Popes, a building which, on its northern side, shows a range of windows which savour of France or England rather than of Italy. The houses with their staircases often present highly picturesque shapes, which in one house in the main street, where the outside staircase is sheltered by two arches resting on a graceful column, grow into a form of genuine beauty. And an elegant form of double window, two round arches divided by a slender shaft, is characteristic of the architecture of Anagni. It is needless to add that at Anagni, as everywhere else in Italy, most of these relics of the skill of former times have been mercilessly disfigured and mutilated.
In the ecclesiastical line the other churches supply a few good fragments of the same character as those in the domestic building; but the cathedral church within the arx is the only one which has the least claim to be looked on as a striking whole. It stands boldly on the edge of the hill with its east end—that is, what would be east according to northern rules, for it is in truth nearly west—rising up nobly with its three apses in good Romanesque style, while a stately bell-tower of the more massive sort, though sadly marred on two sides, stands near the east end which should be west. The crypt is in a somewhat ruder form of the same style. The whole outside of the church is worth study; the inside is of an early and massive type of the Italian Gothic, always, unless in the case of some unusual merit, less satisfactory than Italian Romanesque. The sacristy contains the vestments of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII., and a good many other curious objects. The church is just now suffering restoration; let us hope that nothing very dreadful will happen to it. There, at least, seems no disposition to pull down the apse, after the pattern of the church which Popes and Emperors alike have decreed to be the mother-church of Rome and of the world.