After passing through the agricultural school we crossed the courtyard, and entered the great doorway of beautiful carved stone-work, and so found ourselves in the basilica, which, with its flat, elaborately decorated ceiling, its high altar adorned with lapis lazuli, agate, and other colored stones, and its many columns of granite and marble, is wonderfully rich in depth and harmony of color. Around the sides of the church are a number of large paintings by Vassilacchi, two by Guido Reni, and some charming little paintings by Sassoferrato. But the crowning glory of the basilica, the great Perugino of the Assumption, has been carried off to France, although the five saints that once surrounded it still hover above the altar.
The exquisitely carved choir-stalls of San Pietro, attributed to Raphael, are the most beautiful that we have seen anywhere. The lovely traceries, the infinite variety of faces and figures, the quaint masks interspersed with carvings of beasts, birds, and flowers, could only have been designed by an artist of delicate fancy and marvellous genius.
The verger opened the great doors at the back of the church, thus disclosing a noble panorama of distant hills and fertile valleys.
On the opposite side of the road is the Giardino del Frontone, and beyond, the Porta San Costanzo, inside of which is a church of the same name, dedicated to the patron saint of all Perugian lovers. Here many happy couples are to be seen wending their way along the hillside park, to gain the blessing of the unlovely Byzantine Madonna who presides over the marble doorway of San Costanzo. Beyond the garden and the church lies the wide-spread Umbrian plain, girt about by the ample belt of the Apennines. Off to the north and west are Cortona and Siena, with Lago Trasimeno between, quite near, although shut off from us by a screen of green hills. To the south, following the windings of the Tiber, lies Rome, where our hearts still linger, and to the east, so near that we can see the twinkling of their lights at night, are Foligno and Spello and Assisi, which last, we are told, we shall end by loving more than any other spot in Italy.
XIII
A SUNDAY IN ASSISI
Assisi, Saturday Evening, May 1st.
As we first beheld Assisi from the railroad station at sunset, the delicate mauve pink of her towers and walls glowed with a more rosy hue and it seemed as if the old town for a brief moment must have worn something of the grace of her long-vanished youth.
On one side of the station is the little village of the plain, Santa Maria degli Angeli, with the church from which it takes its name, so christened by St. Francis in memory of the angelic visions here granted him. On the other side of the road, across a sweep of green meadows, is the town, built upon terraces half-way up the hill, Mount Subasio towering beyond it to a height of over three thousand feet above the sea-level. The crowning glory of Assisi is the great basilica of San Francesco, with its remarkable substructure—a vast colonnaded monastery standing guard over the happy valley beneath.