We are in the country of St. Francis of Assisi, Dante’s great religious ideal; for a morning’s drive or walk up the steep road from Bibbiena brings us right up to the foot of the “Rude crag betwixt Tiber and Arno”[345] which all Christendom reveres.
In taking the old road over the Consuma Pass from Pontassieve, we are following in the tracks of the Florentine host as it marched forth in June, 1289. After much discussion as to the best route, as Villani and Dino Campagni tell us,[346] they wisely decided to take this steeper and more perilous but shorter path. A short way beyond Pontassieve they would have left the Val d’ Arno, to strike the river again but a few miles from its source. They left it flowing north towards Florence; they would find it again running southwards in the direction of Arezzo.
As Dante rode up from the valley with his comrades, his eyes so quick to detect the characteristic features and moods of Nature would note the growing severity of the landscape—in his day perhaps less marked than now, when feckless generations of short-sighted inhabitants have denuded the hills of their timber. As the road wound up the steep he would glance now north, now south, and perhaps occasionally back to the west. Northwards he would see towering up the mass of Monte Morello, the bare heap of a mountain that rises above his native city. Besides it his eye would light upon the small but conspicuous wooded hill of Monte Senario, on which, nearly sixty years before, the sainted founders of the Servite Order had established themselves: Florentines all of good family, and one a scion of that famous house of the Amidei whose quarrel with the Buondelmonti in 1215 had already begun to bear fruit of internal discord in the city—the first drops of the storm that was to sweep poor Dante into exile. Westward, beyond the Arno, the hill of the “Incontro” would catch his eye, the traditional site of the meeting between Saint Francis and Saint Dominic which has provided an inspiring theme for so many artists; while on the south his view would be bounded by the thickly wooded ridge of Vallombrosa, where San Giovanni Gualberto had gathered more than two centuries before (in 1015) a band of followers for whom the discipline of San Miniato had grown too lax. Almost at the watershed of the Consuma range, he would observe the track upon the right—only a few years ago (1905) converted into a strada carrozzabile—by which one might pass on horseback or on foot from Vallombrosa to Consuma, and so into the Casentino. Halting, perhaps, for a few moments in the village of Consuma—probably not very different then from what it is to-day, a collection of charcoal-burners’ dwellings—then trotting down the other side, past the hamlet of Ponticelli, swerving to the right over the shoulder of a ridge, they passed the ancient little hostelry of Casaccia, and stopped, so tradition asserts, for rest and refreshment in the bleakly situated Badiola, which crouches in the midst of a windswept group of unhappy trees, on an outlying hillock to the left of the road, looking down on the Casentino itself.
Resuming their downward journey with lighter hearts, yet some of them no doubt a little fluttered already by the anticipation of an encounter (as Dante confesses to have been on the morning of the battle),[347] they would ride past the ill-omened mound which still gives to a neighbouring hamlet, the grim name of Ommorto or Omo Morto, the spot where Adamo of Brescia[348] was burned alive (as some think only a year before—1288) for counterfeiting the coinage of Florence at the instigation of the Conti Guidi of Romena. And but a little way further on that same Castle of Romena would burst upon their view—the fortress with the seven-fold circle of defensive walls which were to suggest to the poet, in his sojourn of some fourteen years later, the nobile castello[349] of Limbo, wherein the spirits of the just and illustrious pagans lived their dignified life—senza martiri,[350] but also senza speme.[351]
The ruins that can be visited to-day shew but the vague outlines of its former grandeur; yet one may see the green-carpeted cortile where the great spirits walked to and fro sopra il verde smalto,[352] and fragments at least of the very walls within whose shelter the poet probably elaborated this and much else of the Inferno: and within the outer circle of defences, the famous Fonte Branda[353] whose cool waters were recalled to mind by poor Adamo in his torment—waters sipped to-day by the devout Dantist pilgrim almost as though it were indeed a holy well.[354]
We hear of no assault made upon the Castle in passing. Probably the place was too strong and the work before the Guelf Army needed haste. On the other hand the force within, thinned to strengthen the Ghibelline host below, was no doubt too weak to attempt an effective onslaught upon the cavalcade; though, as Dino implies, the Florentines were passing through awkward country, wherein “if they had been found of the foe, they had received no small damage.”[355]
The armies faced one another in the valley’s bottom, on that level stretch of alluvial land which lies to the north of the rock on which stands the Castle and the town of Poppi. North and south the field was commanded by a Guidi fortress; it stretched like a vast “lizza” or tilting-ground between Poppi and Romena.
The corn would be well advanced on that eleventh of June: not so rich a promise, perhaps as that on which the daughter of Ugolino della Gherardesca afterwards commented so bitingly to the daughter of Buonconte, when the ground had been fertilised with torrents of Ghibelline blood.[356] Perchance the approaching harvest may have been already ruined by the devastating march of the Aretines. But the general features of the country would have lost none of their charm. The graceful, whispering poplars and willows surely then as now lined Arno’s banks, recalling to some of the elder warriors the poplars of Montaperti, fringing the Biena, Malena and Arbia—the tall trees that still whisper shudderingly of the day when their three streams ran red.
The vine-festoons—if then as now, and as in the Medicean days, the valley was garlanded with vineyards—would still be in fresh verdure, and would form an effective setting for the gay colours of a mediaeval armament. Dante and his companions would indeed have as fair a scene to fight in as poet or artist turned soldier could wish; albeit the day was cloudy, presaging a night of storm.[357] Immediately behind the gaily decked arena stood the bold grey mass of Poppi, and beyond this again the more distant background of hills, flanked on the left by La Verna with its hallowed and inspiring memories.
And what a glorious prospect of the whole field of battle had the ladies of the Guidi household from the casements of that castle whose walls are still adorned with fragments of affreschi, which Dante’s eyes must have seen! All the pomp and pageantry of the war visible from a place of security, a veritable eagle’s nest. And beyond the battle a clear view across to Romena, Falterona and the sources of Arno; with a peep, perhaps, of the castle of Porciano—the northernmost stronghold of the clan since the practical demolition, after Montaperti, of the neighbouring Castel Castagnajo.