Spoleto.
Late in the light of a thundery evening we drove into the town of Spoleto. As our weary horses dragged us through the city gates, and up and under the walls of the silent town, a sort of terror and of gloom possessed our spirits. Here was something new and big and strange. What did it mean? Gradually we became accustomed to the spirit of the place, and seemed to realise the reason of its grim impression.
For days we had been steeped in Umbrian landscape as one expects to know it nowadays, in gentle fields, in lanes, and hills and sunny pastures—in those same things which gave to the Umbrian saints and painters the spirit of peace. Spoleto had none of these. Spoleto is purely Umbrian, as far as geography goes, she was at one time the head of Umbrian matters, but the town was always independent, a thing apart, or rather, perhaps, influenced by the influence of larger rules and kingdoms. Hers is a stirring history,[121] and the sense of her wars and of her dukes lives on within her stones, and is stamped upon her houses and her church walls. There was a smell of dukes and cardinals, of pomposity and vastness, even in the rooms of our inn[122]; and the very landscape round seemed throttled by the passing of imperial people. It was as though a great emperor had taken a peasant girl and dressed her up in gorgeous clothes and given her a splendid palace for a home. The girl (the gentle spirit of Umbria) withered, but the palace built for her remained, and the best thing about it—its grand supply of freshest water from the hills above, brought down in great Roman aqueducts—has never been removed.
As we pondered these things we remembered the brown roofs and the square of S. Lorenzo at Perugia, and we thought them better than all the grandeur of imperial powers stuffed into a narrow creek of the Umbrian hills.
Yet Spoleto is a place which excites a strong and lasting fascination. Its situation is magnificent. The citadel of Theodoric soars above it: a mighty block of masonry; at its feet the Duomo and the town, and at its back the towering crags, covered here and there with a dense growth of ilex, box, and oak. Town and mountain are divided by a deep gorge, but this is spanned by the Roman aqueduct, 266 feet in height, and the most remarkable point of the whole town. To get a full impression of Spoleto one should cross the aqueduct and walk or ride to Monte Luco, a convent built immediately above the city, in the midst of the ilex woods. Thence, on a broad bastion, outside the cell where S. Francis came to pray, one’s eye wanders over a magnificent stretch of plain and hill and river, backed by a land of barren mountain tops and gorges.
Very few treasures of art are left in the town itself, and these are as bruised, as scattered, and unsatisfactory as those of any city whose history is one of fighting and perpetual sieges rather than of artists or of fame. Lo Spagna lived at Spoleto, and worked there largely; but the gentle style of his colouring, the peace and often affectation of his figures seems out of place on the altars of half barbaric or barocco churches. Everywhere there are bits of Roman building picked up and stuck about on pavements and façades: a painful mixture, lacking care and order. Several of the churches have good Lombard fronts; the Chiesa del Crocifisso is built from the ruins of a Roman temple, but the place is only a pain to see in its dilapidation.
The Duomo is a really impressive building, with a splendid Lombard front—a broad balcony supported by columns, and eight rose windows above it. The roof of the choir is painted by Filippo Lippi.
Filippo Lippi died at Spoleto in 1489. He was poisoned, some say, this Florentine monk, because of his loves with an Umbrian lady. Lorenzo de’ Medici tried to get his body back that they might bury it in Florence, but the Spoletans refused, pleading that they possessed so few objects of interest of their own that they must needs keep the bones of this great painter for an ornament. So Lorenzo caused his tomb to be built in the cathedral of Spoleto. As we turned from the long Latin inscription written above it we felt that Browning’s lines would have served the purpose just as well, and much more shortly:
“Flower o’ the clove,
All the Latin I construe is, ‘amo’ I love!”