“A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” How high Sienna is set! A lovelier bit of man’s workmanship was never held aloft for man to see.
“To appreciate the outside aspect of Sienna we drove out” (I see in my diary) “to the fortress-villa of Belcaro, with an introduction to the owner, a recluse, who, though he has been to London once, somewhere in the ‘forties, has never been to Sienna.
“The drive to this historic villa was through a perfect Pre-Raphaelite landscape, full of highly-cultivated hillocks, above which the grander distant country unfolded itself. I apologized to the old Masters for what I had said of their landscape backgrounds before I had seen the Siennese middle distances whose type seems to have inspired so many of them.
“Each turn in the road gave us a new aspect of the golden-brown city behind us, on its steep hill. Perhaps the most effective view of it is from near Belcaro, where you get the dark stone-pines in the immediate foreground.
“And the interior of the city! Those narrow streets they call here rughe and costarelle are fascinating, dipping down to some archway through which you see, far below, the sudden misty distance of the rolling campagna, or a peep of a piazza in dazzling sunlight contrasting with the semi-darkness of the narrow stone lane. So narrow are these lanes that a pair of oxen drawing a cart all but scrape the side walls with the points of their enormous horns, and you must manage to avoid a collision by obliterating yourself in the nearest doorway. We found the people beautiful. There are no modern abominations in the way of buildings here, so that one enjoys Sienna with unalloyed pleasure.” ... At last!
I suppose nothing could be more satisfying to the lover of beauty and of that dignity which belongs to the great works of architecture of the past than the aspect of Sienna Cathedral in the light of a September moon, the planets and stars watching with her over that sanctuary in the cloudless heavens.
The silence of a little Italian city like this at night, when the full moon dispenses with the artificial lighting, is always taking. To-night the urban silence is broken perhaps by a burst of singing and the thrumming of a guitar; young fellows with apparently plenty of leisure are coming jauntily along the pavement singing, “Oi! Oi! Oi! Tirami la gamba se tu puoi,” and suddenly dive down a pitch-dark alley; then a burst of laughter from a cavernous wine-shop; then stillness again. A dog barks in a garden over whose walls you see where the “blessed moon tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops.” A fountain bubbles and gushes softly as you come upon its hiding-place in the deep shadow from a bit of loopholed wall that you scarcely recognize as the one you were sketching this morning. Hither a few fire-flies, remnants of the summer host, have strayed from beyond the city ramparts. Footsteps echo in the silence more than in the day-time; not a wheel is heard, but the campagna below is heard. It is murmuring with its invisible life of insects all awake and full of shrill energy—goodness knows about what. Your own energy is ebbing after the day’s enchantment and you feel that to stroll and sit and look is all the bliss you need.
I had a revelation at Sienna about frescoes. In this extraordinarily dry atmosphere you can see, as nowhere else, the fresco as it was originally intended to appear. I do not know that I liked the effect as I came into the sacristy of the cathedral and saw Pinturicchio’s apparently freshly painted scenes. These were so true, not only in their linear, but (strange to say) in their aërial, perspective that the effect was as if the walls had opened to show us these crowds of figures in gorgeous halls or airy landscapes outside the building, and the eye was deceived by a positive illusion. One wants to feel the walls of an apartment, and when its frescoes are flat and faded, and appearing more as lovely bits of decorative colour, as we see elsewhere, the eye is better satisfied. But, looked at as pictures, these richly coloured works are truly masterly, full of character and natural, realistic action.
Much of the beauty of the Middle Ages which we delight in is owing to the mellowing of Time. When first turned out by painter or mason this beauty would not so charm the artist. A brandnew feudal castle must have looked very hard and staring; a walled city like a Brobdingnagian toy town in a round box. No lichens on those walls; no ivy, no clumps of wallflowers, or any of those compassionate veils that Nature, if allowed a free hand, gently lays upon our crudities, and which the modern Italian Sindaco calls “indecenza” and commands to be scraped away. The mind recognises the rightness of the inevitable bare look of a new building, but a scraped ruin offends both mind and eye.