WE cannot study the history of a single town without acquiring a certain knowledge of the towns around it, for the character of one set of people was formed and influenced by that of another, and the land on which cities are built is often in itself an explanation of their past. In no country perhaps are these facts more strongly marked than in Umbria, where even the smallest hamlet is perched upon a high hill-side as though to provoke attention, and where the larger cities glare at each other from commanding eminences, seeming, even in this peaceful nineteenth century, to challenge one another by the mere aspect of their mighty walls.
We cannot stay long in Perugia without getting its surrounding landscape stamped upon our minds. That circle of small cities so distinctly seen: Assisi, Spello, Foligno to the east, Montefalco, Trevi, Bettona, and Torgiano to the south, and Città della Pieve westwards, all of them perched upon their separate hill-top around the bed of the now vanished lake (see chapter i.), excite one’s fancy and one’s longing, at first perhaps unconsciously, and later with an irresistible persistence. Finally we are driven to pack our trunks and wander out amongst them.
From a practical point of view, travelling in Umbria, even in its most remote villages, is made extremely easy. The inhabitants are friendly and courteous, and utterly unspoiled by tourists. The inns are clean, the main roads excellent; prices reasonable, and carriages, with few exceptions, good. From a romantic or artistic point of view, nothing can excel the charm of such travelling. We are weary of hearing the stated fact that every town in Italy is worth the visiting; but, however hackneyed the remark, we must make it once again in the case of the towns around Perugia. Each has an individual charm, a long and carefully recorded history. We exclude Assisi, for that town is a study in itself, a thing above and apart. Assisi may be called the Jerusalem of Italy; its connection with one of the greatest Saints of the Catholic world has made its churches monuments of art and history, a centre for pilgrims and for painters throughout a period of nearly seven hundred years; and quite apart from its history as a town (the walls of Assisi date back to 400 B.C.) this presence or possession of the saints has excited a whole literature of art and of devotion.
But besides the towns we have mentioned above, there are a host of other cities very near: Gubbio, Arezzo, Città di Castello, Terni, Spoleto, Narni, Orvieto, Chiusi, Cortona and many others less or better known. It is the diversity and contrast of these towns which charms one, but space forbids that we should offer anything beyond a few small travelling notes concerning one or two of them.
Gubbio.
The road to Gubbio from Perugia leads over a mountain pass as wild, and as forbidding in its aspect, as that of any in the Alps. Leaving the broad and wooded valley of the Tiber it winds in long fantastic wind-swept curves across the spines of the lower Apennines, then plunges somewhat suddenly down into the smiling fields and oak woods of the valley under Gubbio. The position of the town is most remarkable. It looks out on a smiling peaceful valley, but is backed by a terrific mountain gorge which would serve as an iron breastplate in the time of siege. Gubbio is a small brown-coloured town, compact and perfect in its parts; it has never changed since the middle ages. A fine Roman theatre, a mysterious Roman mausoleum, fallen asleep on the cornfields outside the city walls, tell of her early prime, but the character of the place, as we see it now, is purely mediæval. The people themselves have the spirit of their ancestors; the worship, which is almost like a fetish worship, of their patron Saint Ubaldo is as passionate in its intensity to-day as it was seven hundred years ago, when Barbarossa threatened to destroy the town.[113] There is scarcely a single new building in Gubbio. The great weaving-looms in the piazza are a relic of the city’s commerce in the Middle Ages, and the exquisite line of the palace of her rulers, Palazzo dei Consoli, with the slim bell tower soaring up against the barren outline of the gorge, lives in one’s memory long after many other points of Umbrian cities are forgotten.
Gubbio’s bell tower and Gubbio’s Madonna are points which we remember with delight. Almost every Umbrian city has its local painter. Nelli is the painter of Gubbio and the gem of all his works has been left on the actual wall for which it first was painted. It was icy wintry weather, although the month was May, when we arrived at Gubbio, but in the fields all round it the flax shone grey and blue like a lagune. Had Nelli seen such flax fields when he painted his Madonna’s and his angels’ gowns? The stuffs he gave them were as blue, as pure, as all these flowers put together.[114]
Spello.
Early one morning we left Perugia and passed along the plain to Spello. We found it in a halo of May sunlight. There was nothing grim or forbidding, nothing Etruscan about the smiling little town; the sunlight and the air crept into the heart of its streets and seemed to linger there. Yet these were narrow and steep and made for war and not for peace or comfort, just like the streets of Perugia. Their character indeed is so purely mediæval and untouched, that the chains which guarded them at nightfall are even left hanging in one place to the walls.