FAIR AND SOFT SIENA.
"For there where I go is enough and to spare."
"Read it so, if you will, in my Book."
Even pilgrims of old on their way to Rome sometimes tarried in castle or village. We could not pass through Siena, discourteous though her first welcome had been, as we had through smaller and less fair towns. So for a day or two we put away our tricycle and the "cockle-shells and sandal shoon" of our pilgrimage. We went to a pension, one at which J. had stayed before, and which he liked. I admit it was better in many ways than the inns in which hitherto we had slept and eaten. There was carpet on the floor of our room, and in it easy-chairs and a lounge. There were elaborate breakfasts at one, and still more elaborate dinners at six, and there was always a great plenty,—as the Englishwoman who sat next me, and who I fear had not always fared so well, said when she urged me to eat and drink more of the fruit and wine set before me. "You can have all you want in this house," she finished with a sigh, as if her crown of sorrow was in remembering unhappier things. But we both thought regretfully of the dining-rooms with the bad prints on the walls, and the more modest dinners of our own ordering. I think too we had found more pleasure in the half-understood talk of padroni and waiters than we did now in the elegant and learned conversation of our fellow-boarders, for they were all, it seemed, persons of learning and refinement. There was the retired English major-general who sat opposite and who had written a book, as he very soon let us know. He recognized us as Americans before we opened our mouths to speak, which fact he also let us know by his reminiscences, addressed not to us but to our neighbors. He had travelled in Spain with Mr. Fillmore, the ex-President, "the most courteous of gentlemen;" he said he well knew Mr. Marion Crawford, the talented novelist, and his uncle, "dear old Sam Ward;" he had counted among his best friends Bayard Taylor, "as you remember I have said in my book." This same book which made the major so communicative appeared to have crushed the spirit out of his wife; she sat silent during dinner, fortifying herself at intervals with weak whiskey and water.
Then there was the elderly English lady travelling abroad with her daughter "who has just taken up architecture;" she informed us, "she has always painted heads till now, but she is fascinated by her architectural work. Then I, you know, am so fond of water-colors." And there was the Swedish lady, who could talk all languages, speaking to us in something supposed to be English, and who was as eager in her pursuit of food for the body as for the mind. I count the way in which she greedily swallowed the vino santo in her glass, when our host passed round the table the second time with his precious bottle, one of the wonders of our visit to Siena. It was pathetic too to see her disappointment when he turned away, just before he reached her, his bottle empty. And there were still others who knew much about pictures and palaces, statues and studios, and no doubt we might greatly have profited thereby.
But we liked it better upstairs, where we were alone and there was less culture. Our window overlooked a high terrace in which marigolds and many-colored chrysanthemums were blooming, the gardens of the Piccolomini Palace full of broad-leaved fig-trees and pale olives, and the wide waste of mountain and moorland stretching from the red city walls to the high, snow-capped Apennines on the horizon. All the morning the sun shone in our windows, and every hour and even oftener we heard the church bells, and the loud, clear bugle-calls from the barracks, once a monastery, whose mass of red and gray walls rose from the near olives. They say it snows in Siena in the winter-time, and that it is cold and bleak and dreary; but I shall always think of it as a place of flowers and sunshine and sweet sounds.
But best of all were the hours when we wandered through the town, up and down dark alley-ways and flights of steps, under brick arches, along precipitate narrow streets where we had to press close to the houses, or retreat into an open door, to let the wide-horned oxen pass by with their load; now coming out at the very foot of La Mangia, on the broad, sunny piazza; now by the tanneries where little streams of brown water trickled down towards the washing-place at the foot of the hill, and where the walls were hung with dripping brown skins, probably just as they were when the little Catherine—her visions already beginning—and Stefano walked by them and towards home in the fading evening light, from a visit to the older and married sister Bonaventura. One hour we were with the past in the shadowy aisles of the Duomo, where Moses and Trismegistus, Solomon and Socrates, Sibyls and Angels looked up at us from the pavement, and rows of popes kept watch from above the tall black and white pillars, while in the choir beyond priests chanted their solemn psalms. Next we were with the present in the gay Lizza, under the acacias and yellow chestnuts, by flower-beds full of roses and scarlet sage, and walls now covered with brilliant Virginia creepers; and out on the fort above to see a golden sky, and the sun disappearing behind banks of purple, golden-edged, and red clouds, and pale, misty hills, and to look back across the hollow to the red town climbing up from low olive-gardens towards the Duomo on its hill-top, and tall La Mangia towering aloft from its own little hollow beyond. From every side came the voices of many people,—of soldiers in the barracks, of women and children under the trees, of ball-players in the old court below, and of applauding lookers-on lounging on the marble benches.
By the River. Page 50.
The tall unfinished arch of the Duomo that rises above houses and churches, and indeed above everything but the lofty La Mangia and the Campanile, tells the story of greatness and power and wealth suddenly checked. But the deadly plague, which carried off so many citizens that not even enough were left to make their city beautiful as they meant it should be, could not take away the great beauty it already had, nor kill the joyousness of its people. There are no Spendthrift Clubs in Siena now, nor any gay Lanos like him Dante met in the Inferno. But there are still laughter and song loving Sienese who in their own simple fashion go through life gathering rosebuds while they may. It seemed to me a very pretty fashion when I saw them holiday-making on Sunday afternoon, peasants, priests, officers, townspeople, all out in their Sunday best, and when on the Via Cavour, near the Loggia, we met two wandering minstrels singing love-songs through the town. One played on a mandolin which hung from his neck by a wide red ribbon, and as he played he sang. His voice was loud and strong and very sweet, and like another Orpheus he drew after him all who heard his music. His companion sold copies of the song, printed on pink paper, gay as the words. He went bowing and smiling in and out of the crowd,—from the women whose broad hats waved as they kept time to the singing, to the men who had stuck feathers in their soft felts worn jauntily on one side; from demure little girls holding their nurses' hands, to swaggering soldiers. Then when the first singer rested he, in his turn, sang a verse. There was with them a small boy who every now and then broke in in a high treble, so that there was no pause in the singing.
Wherever we went that afternoon, whether by the Duomo or out by the Porta Romana, on the Lizza or near San Domenico, we saw large written posters, announcing that at six in the evening there would be, at No. 17 Via Ricasoli, a great marionette performance of the Ponte dei Sospiri. Apparently this was to be the event of the day, and to it we determined to go. When a little before the appointed hour we came to the Via Ricasoli, we half expected to see a theatre ablaze with light. What we did find after much difficulty was a low doorway on the ground floor of a many-storied palace, and before it a woman by a table, lighting a very small lamp, to the evident satisfaction of half a dozen youngsters. Over the open doorway was a chintz curtain; behind it, darkness. This was not encouraging. But presently a woman with a child came to buy tickets. One of the groups of youthful admirers was then sent up and a second down the street, and after they had come back with mysterious bundles another lamp was produced, lit, and carried inside, and the first two of the audience followed. It was now five minutes of six, so we also bought our tickets, three soldi, or cents, for each, and the curtain was drawn for us.
A low crypt-like room with vaulted ceiling; at one end two screens covered with white sheets; between them a stage somewhat larger than that of a street Punch, with a curtain representing a characteristic Sienese brick wall enclosing a fountain; several rows of rough wooden benches, and one of chairs,—this was what we saw by the dim light of one lamp. We sat on the last bench. The audience probably would be more entertaining than the play. But the humble shall be exalted. The woman on the front row bade us come up higher. The small boy who acted as usher told us we might have two of the chairs for two soldi more. The ticket-seller even came in, and in soft pleading tones said that we might have any places we wanted; why then should we choose the worst? But we refused the exaltation.
The audience now began to arrive in good earnest. Five ragged boys of the gamin species, one of a neater order with his little sister by the hand, two soldiers, a lady with a blue feather in her bonnet, and her child and nurse, two young girls,—and the benches were almost filled. Our friend the ticket-seller became very active as business grew brisk. She was always running in and out, now giving this one a seat, now rearranging the reserved chairs, and now keeping the younger members of the audience in order. Ragazzini, she called the unruly boys who stood up on the benches and whistled and sang, so that I wondered what diminutive she gave the swells on the front row. This was amusing enough, but our dinner-hour was half-past six. J. looked at his watch; it was a quarter past. The ever-watchful keeper of the show saw him. "Ah, the Signore must not be impatient. Ecco! the music was about to begin." Begin it did indeed, to be continued with a persistency which made us fear it would never end. The musicians were two. A young man in velveteen coat and long yellow necktie played the clarionet, and another the cornet. They knew only one tune,—a waltz I think it was meant to be,—but that they gave without stint, playing it over and over again, even while the ticket-seller made them move from their chairs to a long, high box by the wall; and when a third arrived with a trombone they let him join in when and as it best pleased him. When we had heard at least the twenty-fifth repetition of the waltz, had looked at the scuffling of the ragazzini until even that pleasure palled, had seen the soldiers smoke sigaro Cavour after sigaro Cavour so that the air grew heavy, and had watched the gradual growth of the audience until every place was filled, our patience was exhausted. Behold! we said to the woman with the gentle voice, it was now seven. The play was announced for six. Was this right? In a house not far off every one was eating, and two covers were laid for us. But here we were in this dark room in our hunger, waiting for marionettes whose wires for aught we knew were broken. She became penitent. The signorini must forgive her. The wires were not broken, but he who pulled them had not arrived. There was yet time. Would we not go and dine and then come back? She would admit us on our return.
And so we went and had our dinner, well seasoned with polite conversation. The ticket-agent was true to her word. When we reappeared at her door, the curtain was pulled at once. In the mean time the musicians had been suppressed, not only out of hearing but out of sight. The room was so crowded that many who had arrived during our absence were standing. Indeed, there must have been by this time fully five francs in the house. All were watching with entranced eyes the movements of four or five puppets. The scene represented an interior, which I suppose, was that of the prison to one side of the Bridge of Sighs. That it was intended for a cell also seemed evident, because the one portable piece of furniture on the stage was a low, flat couch of a shape which as every one who has been to the theatre, but never to prison, knows is peculiar to the latter. It was impossible to lose sight of it, as the dramatis personæ made their exits and entrances over it. It was rather funny to see the villain of the piece after an outbreak of passion, or an elegant long-haired page in crimson clad, after a gentlemanly speech, suddenly vault over it. We could not discover what the play was about. Besides the two above-mentioned characters there was a puppet with a large red face and green coat and trousers who gave moral tone to the dialogue, and another with heavy black beard and turban-like head-dress, and much velvet and lace whom we took to be a person of rank. As they came in and out by turn, it was impossible to decide which was the prisoner. With the exception of the jumps over the couch, there was little action in the performance. Its only two noticeable features were—first, the fact that villain, page, moralist, and magnate spoke in exactly the same voice and with the same expression; and, secondly, that they had an irrepressible tendency to stand in the air rather than on the floor, as if they had borrowed Mr. Stockton's negative-gravity machine. The applause and laughter and rapt attention of the audience proved the play to be much to their liking. But for us inappreciative foreigners a little of it went a great way. As nothing but talk came of all the villany and moralizing and grandeur and prettiness,—which may have been a clever bit of realism of which the English drama is not yet capable,—and as there was no apparent reason why the dialogue should ever come to an end, we went away after the next act. The ticket-seller was surprised at our sudden change from eagerness to indifference, but not offended. She thanked us for our patronage and wished us a felice notte.
With the darkness the gayety of the town had increased. In the large theatre a play was being performed by a company of amateurs. Having had tickets given us, we looked in for a few minutes, but found it as wordy as that of the puppets. In a neighboring piazza the proprietor of a large van, like those to be seen at country fairs at home, was exhibiting a man, arrayed in a suit of rubber, with a large brass helmet-like arrangement on his head, who, it seemed, could live at the bottom of the sea, along with Neptune and the Naiads, as comfortably as on dry shore. Ecco! There was the tank within, where this marvel could be seen,—a human being living under the water and none the worse for it! Admission was four soldi, but per militari e ragazzi ("for the military and children") it was but two! So it seems that the soldiers who abroad are to strike terror into the enemy, at home are ranked with the young of the land, since like them their name is legion! There were about a dozen in the crowd, and, all unconscious of the sarcasm, they hurried up the steps and into the show, while an old man ground out of a hand-organ the appropriate tune of "O, que j'aime les militaires!"
But dramas and shows were not the only Sunday-evening amusements. The caffès were crowded. Judging from the glimpses we had into little black, cavern-like wine-shops, another Saint Bernardino is needed to set makers of gaming-tools in Siena to the manufacture of holier articles. And more than once, as we walked homewards in the starlight, we heard the voices of the three minstrels singing of human passion in the streets where Catherine so often preached the rapture of divine love. If swans were now seen in visions by fond Sienese matrons, they would wing their way earthward and not heavenward, as in the days when Blessed Bernardo's mother dreamed dreams.