The Story of Perugia

by Margaret Symonds; Lina Duff Gordon

Long even before the birth of S. Bernardino a much older order or Confraternità held its meetings in the small church at the back of the present oratory. This was the Confraternità di S. Andrea della Giustizia, and it was one of the earliest of those remarkable societies—one may almost describe them as religious guilds—which rose up out of that great devotional movement at the end of the middle ages which resulted in the extraordinary processions and displays of the “Flagellants.” “The movement,” says Doctor Creighton, “passed away; but it has left its dress as a distinctive badge to the confraternities of mercy which are familiar to the traveller in the streets of many cities of Italy.”

Morals, as we have seen, were very low in the thirteenth and the fourteenth century; blood flowed freely in party feuds and towns were devastated and corrupted by the strife of church and people. All these things, and the great pestilence which ravaged the country and the cities, were taken, and probably with perfect justice, to be the signs of an offended deity. “It was then,” says Bonazzi, “when men had grown familiar with death, that those strange songs arose which the people sang in the moonlight, wrapped in white sheets, whilst they danced the dances of the dead about the streets, clanging the bones together in weird accompaniment to their songs.” Doctor Creighton[81] dates this movement to the end of the fourteenth century. He says also that it originated in Provence. Perugia, however, lays strong claim to having herself sown the first seed, and this as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, of the displays of the Flagellants.

In 1265 we read the strange tale of a monk who describes himself as “Fra Raniero Fasano de Peroscia Comenzatore della Regola dei Battuti di Bologna.” Raniero tells us that he was accustomed, as a young monk at Perugia, to lead a life of excessive privation and abnegation, and one day, when scourging himself as was his custom, he was joined in a vision by certain saints who accompanied him to the church of S. Fiorenzo, and there they all beat themselves together in front of the high altar. This vision occurred day after day to Raniero, but at last one of the saints spoke to him and told him that it was the will of heaven that men should purge their sins in this same fashion. Raniero carried his tale to the Bishop, who expounded it in a sermon to the inhabitants of Perugia, and this, according to some historians, was the origin of all the fantastic demonstrations of public repentance which soon spread over Italy, and from which, as years went by, there arose the calmer and more practical institutions of Confraternities in the several cities. One of the earliest of these at Perugia itself was the company of S. Andrea, and it is interesting to read its laws and statutes. Through its own annals we find that it was started in 1374, during the reign of Pope Gregory XI. “for the furtherance of the worship of God and of His Mother the blessed Virgin Mary, and of the glorious martyrs and protectors of the city—Messers Sancto Ercolano, Sancto Laurenzo, Sancto Costanzo, and Sancto Andrea the apostle; and for the honour and estate of the Holy Mother Church and her protectors; and further for the maintenance, the governing, the magnificence, and the peaceful state of the people and the city of Peroscia.”

Infinite and careful laws of civil and religious duties follow—laws for the maintenance of peace and the Christian comfort of souls: the day of the saint was to be most strictly kept, fasting if possible, or by him who could not fast, a feast was to be given to a beggar or twenty-five paternosters told, “and all must be at mass that day or pay a fine of twenty soldi.” But the great work of the society of S. Andrea was the help and protection of criminals. Its members got permission from the city government to meet those who were going to execution, and to accompany them to the scene of death, comforting them by the way, and sustaining them with prayers and even sweetmeats to the very last. In early times criminals were beheaded far from the city walls; and in Perugia the place of doom was down in the open country on the site of an old Etruscan tomb, the Torre di S. Manno. “Wherefore,” writes one historian, “in the fatal passing of these miserable people, the pious disciplinati met them on the threshold, comforted them, assisted them, and went with them even unto the gallows.” Hence probably the name of “Giustizia” given to this particular square, and not, as is usually said, because justice was carried out on the spot itself.

The Confraternità of S. Andrea continued to increase both in power and in size. Other societies of the same charitable sort sprang up all through the city, and after the death of S. Bernardino of Siena a new one was started in his name at Porta Eburnea. But in one of the great fights between the nobles, their buildings were so knocked about and mutilated that the members of the society had to seek out different quarters, and they then joined themselves to the older confraternity of S. Andrea down at S. Francesco and thenceforth “worked together, extending their labour of charity to the inspection of prisons, and to the Christian comfort of prisoners.”[82]

S. Francesco al Prato.

To the right of the Oratory of S. Bernardino is the immense, but quite ruined, church and convent of S. Francesco al Prato. S. Francesco, more even than S. Domenico and so many of the churches of Perugia, is only the skeleton of a once beautiful body from which the silken robes, the jewels, even the flesh, have been torn rudely off by men and time. The church was built in 1230, in the form of a Latin cross with a single nave. But from the moment it was built, owing to the crumbling nature of the soil, and the heavy and overweighted style of its architecture, it was threatened with immediate destruction, so that in 1737 it fell in almost completely.

Throughout the history of Perugia we read of great events which centred in S. Francesco, of great men who were buried there, artists who painted, and popes who blessed and prayed. Of all these former splendours, nothing remains beyond a carcase of stone walls. The pictures—the Raphael, the Pinturicchios and the Peruginos, with the exception of Bonfigli’s banner in the chapel of the Gonfalone,[83] and one interesting early fresco down in the crypt,—have been removed to the Pinacoteca and to other towns. Fortebraccio’s bones have gone to the museum, Fra Egidio’s tomb is in the church near the museum, and the roof has fallen in upon a rubbish heap of beams, and bricks, and mortar.

S. Martino.

There are several ways of returning to the Duomo from the Piazza della Giustizia. One of the pleasantest runs through a bit of cultivated land outside the town walls: the Via di San Francesco, and, joining the Via della Conca, passes up under the Arco d’Augusta and back by the Via Vecchia. But another way, which few could find who did not know of it, winds back into the heart of the old town, actually crossing the Etruscan walls in one place, and comes out opposite the Canonica, having passed the little old church of S. Martino.