ONE day in April ‘99 I was reading a fascinating little book by Miss Duff Gordon on Perugia as I sat on a fallen pine-tree trunk in our wood at Rosebank in remote Cape Colony. I read it with intenser longing than ever to be back in the world of art, of history, of culture, of well-known and well-loved things, and, thinking we were likely to be in our lovely exile for at least three years (with a short flight home to England in the interval, perhaps), I thought of several precious things I would give to be at Perugia in reality. That very day in that very month of the following year I was there!
Why do we fret about the future? Vain weakness! In my experience the future has brought more than I wished for and better things, and the sad things that have come have been those I had not feared.
It is a lovely journey from Florence to Perugia—all beautiful, and one wants to be at both ends of the railway carriage at once so as to miss nothing. The old brown cities along the route are as frequent as the Rhine castles; they still have their battlemented walls and gateways to delight the artist for a long while yet. Perugia did not frown upon us so mediævally this time, as we drove up the long zigzag to it, as when you and I first saw it. I think some of the frown has been demolished since those days, and indeed I do not regret this. They are raising some good public buildings where, I am told, the old castle stood, and in these you see lovely pillars of rosy marble or granite quarried from Assisi. That old castle had gloomy memories for the Italians and had no claim to stay.
Like all Italian cities, Perugia has a strongly marked character of its own. This local character of her cities is one of Italy’s richest possessions. Genoa, brilliant in white, salmon-pink, and buff, the colouring of her palaces, and scintillating in the sun as it beats upon her pearl-grey roofs; Florence, sombre with the brown of her local pietra serena and roofed with the richer brown of her Tuscan tiles; Verona, regal and stately, throned on the foothills of the Alps, her rich colouring focussed in the red and tawny curtains which the Veronese hang before their church doors; Padua, shady with trees, sedate and academic, on the level, and uniform in tone, a city of arcades; Perugia, a mountain fortress of brown bricks, her austerity mellowed by the centuries—what a series they make! How carefully the “Young Nation” should deal with these precious things that have all come into her hands! Almost every great city in this land was once a capital. If only the Italians would build as they used to I should rejoice in seeing lovely things rising new and strong in the place of decay and thus giving promise of a new lease of architectural beauty for Italy. But the pity of it is that most of the new things are characterless and dreary. Every cultivated Italian deplores the fact and one wonders who the Goths in authority are that have the doing of these things.
To you and me there are certain conjunctions of words that carry a swift sense of delight to the mind. Amongst these none are more appealing than “the Umbrian Hills.” Here in Perugia we are seated amongst them, and when I saw them again on that magic April day it was towards evening, and in despairing haste I made the best sketch I could on arriving, from the hotel window, to try and record those soft sunset tones on the Perugino landscape. When next morning we were being shown the treasures in the church of San Pietro, and I was particularly directed to examine the lovely paintings on the shutters of the sacristy windows, I found it hard to look at the shutters of windows that opened upon such a prospect, where lay Assisi on the slopes of the “Umbrian Hills”!
In the Uffizi, in the Vatican Galleries, it is the same—one eye roving out of the open windows at the reality that is there! A Lung’ Arno with Bello Sguardo calling to you over the pink almond blossoms on its slopes; a dome of St. Peter’s, silky in its grey sunlit sheen against the Roman sky—too much, to have such things outside the gallery windows, distracting you from your studies within. But, of course, it is the right setting, and if you feel it gives you too much, call to mind the prospect outside one of the British Museum windows. That, certainly, will never inconvenience you with distractions; so be thankful for the “too much.”
A BIT OF DIARY
“23rd April 1900.—All day ‘on the wander’ through ripe old Perugia. A silent city, full of memories, brimming over with history, lapped in Art! Everywhere the flowering fruit-trees showed over the brown walls, the sunshine fell pleasantly on the masses of old unfinished brickwork and lent them a charm which on a wet day must vanish and leave them in a grim severity. Quiet tone everywhere; no ornament in the Roman sense, but here and there exquisite bits of carving and detail such as one can only find in the flat-surfaced Italian Gothic which is here seen in its very home. How that flat surface of blank wall spaces and the horizontal tendency of the design suit the Italian light. Architecture may well be placed as the most important of the Arts. It adds, if beautiful, to nature’s beauty, showing the height to which the human hand may dare to rise so as to join hands with the Divine Architect Himself. How it can disgrace His work we have only too many opportunities of judging!