CHAPTER VI
Fortress of Paul III.—S. Ercolano—S. Domenico—S. Pietro—S. Costanzo
FROM an historical point of view the crowning interest of the buildings of Perugia was to be found in the great fortress which Paul III. built in the middle of the sixteenth century in order to amaze the citizens, and to subjugate the rebellious passions of the nobles. For three centuries this huge building performed its office admirably and Perugia lay silent and subdued under the oppressive shadow of its walls. But no sooner did other influences appear, no sooner did the imperial French power open a way to a freer method of government than that allowed by Rome, than Perugia shook herself free of a yoke which had been odious from the first, and on the 23rd December 1848, in the sight of a great crowd of people, and with a pomp and ceremony dear to the Perugians from the very darkest ages of their history, the first stones of the splendid building were torn from their places. By a strange coincidence or, perhaps, agreement, the man to give the first blow was a certain Benedetto Baglioni, and as he let the hammer fall it split the cornerstone on the very spot where the palaces of his ancestors had stood in former years! The masons followed suit, and soon the bricks and stones were tumbling from their places. The whole town joined in the work of devastation, but so splendid was the mortar used by the builders of the indomitable Paul that at times nothing but blasting would destroy the masonry. In one of the great explosions several people were killed, “and thus,” says Bonazzi, “did the Farnese Pope once more avenge himself on us, even after a period of three hundred and eight years!”
No sooner was the Papal fortress gone than the Perugians began to make new buildings on its site. All the modern architecture of the town has sprung, like fresh mushrooms spring, on the site of the old wood, and it is not easy in the present day to reconstruct Paul’s mighty citadel, hampered as our vision is by the open squares and houses which now have taken possession of its site. It was divided into two parts. The top part covered nearly the whole of the level space which the Prefetura, the Hotel Brufani, and the Piazza Emanuele now occupy. The fire of the Pope’s guns could therefore be turned on recalcitrant citizens or nobles, either up the Corso and the Piazza Sopramuro, or down the main approach to the city from the road to Rome. A strong branch or buttress of the fort ran down from this high level to a second fort which, in the shape of a fan, extended itself along the level ground which is now occupied by municipal buildings and the Piazza d’Armi; a large part of the lower building was devoted to a great walled square for games, called the Piazza del Pallone.
Adolphus Trollope was one of the last people to see and to describe the great Farnese citadel. He saw it both before and during its destruction, and the description which he gives of the building and of the hatred which it excited is so vivid that we quote it here at length.[64]
“Few buildings,” he says, “have been laden with a heavier amount of long-accumulated popular hatred than this; and few have more richly merited it. The Perugians were for many ages—nay, it may pretty well be said that they never ceased to be—a hard nut for the grinding teeth of papal tyranny to crack, and this huge Bastille was, at the time of its erection, a symbol of the final destruction of liberty in Perugia.
“When I had last been in Perugia the entire building was open to the curiosity and free examination of the public. There was no crowd when I wandered over the labyrinths of its stairs and passages, guard-rooms, barracks, casemates, and prisons of every sort and size. I had the foul place then all to myself, with the exception of a few workmen, who were beginning to take the roof off one of the upper buildings; for the public of Perugia had already satiated their curiosity. I saw the large dungeons, accessible only by a circular opening in the pavement of the less dreadful dungeons above them; I saw the fearful cells, constructed in the thickness of the colossal masonry, in such devilish sort, that the wretches who had dared to question the deeds of Christ’s Vicar on earth, once introduced into the cavity through apertures barely sufficient to admit a crawling figure, could neither stand nor sit in them. I paced the lofty battlements, which commanded such a panoramic view as can hardly be matched, over the beautiful country and the many cities within its circuit, all priest-trampled and poisoned; and I marked the narrow light-holes in some of the less dreadful prisons, through which a miserable, tantalising strip of far distant sunlit horizon was dimly visible to the immured victim, who knew too well, that he should never, never return to the light of day.”
On Trollope’s second visit, that is to say, in 1862, the work of demolition was progressing, and an inscription had been placed on the wall of the piazza fronting the former main entrance to the fortress, which struck him as ironically satirical in its simplicity. It stated that the magistrates of Perugia were removing the fortress raised for the oppression of the citizens “for the improvement of the prospect from the Piazza”! Some time later Trollope returned to Perugia. The fortress was then being quickly pulled to pieces.
“There were a number of people,” he says, “on the occasion of my second visit gloating over the progressing destruction of the detested walls, as crowbar and pickaxe did their work. I saw one remarkable looking old man, with a long flowing white beard, sitting on a fallen fragment of wall in the sunshine, and never taking his eyes from the workmen who were tumbling down the great masses of concrete as fast as their excessive hardness would permit of their being detached. A gentleman I was with noticed the direction of my look, and said: ‘That old man comes here at break of day, and remains till the workmen knock off at night. He was many years a prisoner in the fortress, and was liberated at the fall of the Papal Government.’
“I felt that his presence there was fully accounted for, and that I could guess without any difficulty ‘of what was the old man thinking?’ as he watched the demolition of his prison home.”
But however great the damage done both to the people and their buildings by the fortress of the great Farnese, it must be admitted that the Pope at least employed a man of taste to carry out his vast designs. In building the new walls and knocking down the old, San Gallo left unharmed some of the finer characteristics of the city. He pulled down all the Baglioni strongholds, he battered down ten churches, and as many as four hundred houses—indeed, he destroyed a little corner of the mediæval town—but he preserved, with a tender carefulness, the church of the patron saint, S. Ercolano, and one of the first Etruscan gates: the Porta Marzia. As it was not possible to keep the latter in the form of a city gate San Gallo used it as a decoration, building it into the west wall of the fortress where, as Dennis rightly says, it still remains, “imprisoned in the brickwork, to be liberated by the shot of the next besiegers of Perugia, and looking as much out of place as an ancient Etruscan himself would look in the streets of the modern city.” The Porta Marzia is surmounted by the usual frieze of short pillars, but the statues of four mysterious persons are inserted in the niches. A tradition in Perugia says that these statues are the portraits of a Perugian family who died from eating a large quantity of poisonous funghi (mushrooms). How this myth originated it is not possible to say, but the figures with their inscrutable history add a phantom touch to the already phantom portal. They are probably Roman divinities.[65] It is worth getting the doors of the Porta Marzia opened to see the funny world inside: a whole small town of battered streets, even the fragments of a chapel, and many house-walls still intact.