We visited all our cities, starting from Genoa, and proceeding to Florence, Arezzo, Cortona, Perugia, Deruta, Todi, Siena, St. Gimignano, Passignano, Monte Oliveto, Asciano, Chiusi, Città della Pieve, Assisi, Foligno, Spoleto, Spello, Bevagna, Montefalco, Trevi, Clitunno, Gualdo Tadino, Gubbio, Urbino, Rimini, Ravenna, San Marino, Ancona, Loreto, Terni, Narni, Orvieto, Viterbo, Ferento, Bagnaja, Monte Fiascone, Rome, Tivoli, Milan.
As soon as we had left the mountain heights of Arezzo and Cortona, the Etruscan eyries from which the Romans marched down to their red fate on the shores of the lake Trasimene, we learned how hot mid-Italy can be in midsummer. Even on the rock of Perugia, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, you could not walk on the sunny side of the street without an umbrella on account of the risk of sunstroke, and the heat was almost unendurable as we drove across the hills the thirty or forty miles to Todi, a little city which the Gods of the Middle Ages have kept to themselves.
Perugia was always defiant, from Etruscan times. With a man like Duke Frederick of Urbino to rule and lead its fierce citizens, Perugia would have been more potent than Urbino, or Rimini, or Mantua, or Ferrara, perhaps a city of the first rank, like Milan or Florence. Its rock made the whole city a citadel, and it sits astride the road from Rome to the Alps, with the fertile Vale of Umbria to provision it.
The Vale of Umbria below Assisi is only rivalled by the shores of Lake Trasimene in the beauty of its women—we know them from the pictures of Raphael, Perugino, and Pinturricchio. I wish I could put its magic into words—the nobility of its farm-houses, the soft grace of its orchards and olive-gardens, its antique hermitages.
Summer in the Vale of Umbria was perfect, and certain of its beauties were such as could only be seen in summer, like the translucent sources of the Clitumnus, which, with their lawny banks, remind you of the Twenty-third Psalm. I would rather go and see them, below the tall poplars which are a landmark across the plain, than the graceful little Roman temple above them, which is a landmark for travellers.
Foligno is only a walk from exquisite Spello, a city which is a hill covered with Gothic houses. Foligno and the cities on the hills round it are rich in great pictures by small masters; but Spoleto is, after Perugia, the prize city of Umbria. It is rich in monuments of all ages; in its walls it has prehistoric masonry of three ages; it defied the assaults of Hannibal; you can still see the house of Vespasian’s mother, and other Roman monuments of the classic age; it is rich in the handiwork of the forgotten centuries which followed; it has a church built like a pagan temple in the fourth century after Christ; it has the most stupendous aqueduct in Italy, carried across a valley from the hill of Groves, on arches two hundred and fifty feet high; and a unique cathedral, planted in the valley, like its other great church; it was the capital of the only King of Italy who bore the title before Victor Emmanuel. Standing on the hillside, embosomed in groves, looking over the plain, in an amphitheatre of mountains, Spoleto is a place which never leaves the memory.
We went straight from it to most famous cities—Gubbio was not its equal, except when the sunset fired the façade of its city hall, six hundred years old and three hundred feet high; and Urbino, on its dizzy height, crowned with the fantastic palace of Duke Frederick, is a prosaic place beside it; Ravenna, for all its mosaiced churches, built by Justinian and his successors, when the first millennium was half spent, has no glory of site, nor has Rimini; Ancona has only its site and its glorious Byzantine cathedral, on a green hill between two seas.
We wandered from town to town such as these; we drove all day from Rimini to San Marino, the castled eagle’s nest, which is still an independent Republic; we went to Loreto on the Virgin’s day, and saw peasants, who had come in ox-carts from the recesses of the Apennines. We stood below and above the stupendous waterfalls of Terni, the most stupendous in Europe. But we saw no naturally nobler city than Spoleto.
All that summer we wandered about the byways of Tuscany, Umbria, Latium, and the March of Ancona. We hardly ever saw an English face. We stayed for the most part in humble native inns. It was a hot summer, even for Italy, but we were not frightened by the heat from going where we meant to go, nor by the fetish of malaria, for we stayed a week at Ravenna in September. We never enjoyed ourselves more in our lives. We tested an Italian summer fairly on the hot plains and sun-baked hills. I needed the experience to write How to See Italy.
It was a guide-book on a new principle. While I was writing of the cities and scenery of Italy, generally I grouped them in provinces, but I devoted other chapters to the hobbies of travellers. I told the lover of paintings where all the best paintings in Italy are to be found, and which places have the richest galleries. I did the same for the lovers of architecture, sculpture, mosaics, and scenery. I told the traveller how to see all the principal sights of Italy by rail, without going the same railway journey twice, and I tried to convert English travellers to the delightful native inns of Italy, and I gave them the prices of inns all over Italy.