The town felt very quiet and deserted. The grass grew everywhere through the stones of its piazza. In silence the children played, in silence the women sat at their doors, the place had fallen asleep. But once the city knew prosperity, and many painters climbed the steep roads from the plain below, and came to Montefalco to leave some impress of their art upon the walls of chapels and of churches. Hither came Benozzo Gozzoli in 1449, and here he painted many of his early frescoes. What brought the splendid Florentine to the tiny town we wondered? He came in the very prime of his youth, and they say that he did so, simply because he was connected with the Dominicans of the place. Certainly he settled here for seven years or so, did good work, and spread the influence of Florence throughout the minds of the rising Umbrian masters. Benozzo’s early work at Montefalco is fresh, raw, naïve. It lacks the finish and the gilded ornaments of the Riccardi chapel, but in exchange it holds a certain simple and religious sentiment which is lacking in his later frescoes. The best of his paintings are in the church of S. Francesco,[118] and there are several other good pictures of the Umbrian painters here—a fine Tiberio d’Assisi and some things by Melanzio. In one of the latter, a portrait of the painter by himself—a tall, slim youth with long light hair and earnest face full of quiet thought and strength. Melanzio is the painter of Montefalco, and luckily his work is well preserved in many of the churches. The little frieze of angels playing with carnations above the left hand altar as one enters the church of the Illuminata, is one of the most fascinating bits of detail that we have ever seen.
Before leaving Montefalco we drove out to the convent of S. Fortunato, which lies to the east of the town. There were pictures there—of these we remember little; but the lanes which led to the convent we never shall forget. They were warm deep lanes and the hedges above were full of dog-roses and honeysuckle, the light inside was green and blue like the landscape down upon the plain. The lanes of Montefalco were as beautiful a vision as we have ever seen. Like the frescoes of Melanzio they had the colour of a tropic butterfly, and like the flight of butterflies they hover in our memory.
Foligno to Spoleto.
In the very height of the midday we left Foligno and took the road to Spoleto. It is a fine broad road, passing along the site of the old Flaminian Way, grand, dusty, white, with a feeling that Rome is at the end of it, and Umbria but a little land to be passed quickly by. As we trundled along in our clumsy landau dragged by a pair of miserable horses, we thought of all the popes, the emperors and legions, who, going south or northwards, had passed in this direction. The dust flew up and almost choked us; it was the week of the wild roses, and the hedges were all aglow with their delicious blossoms, their petals bent wide back as though to catch the very essence of the sunlight on their golden stamens. We left the main road a little below Trevi, and driving through fields and oak woods, passed up the hills by a steep short cut which leads to the town above. This road cannot be recommended to travellers unless they go on foot; our poor little city horses struggled painfully over the sand and pebbles of the numerous streams it crosses. But what a stretch of country for the artist! Everywhere the poppies were in flower—a shimmer of pure cadmiums and carmines under the oaks and the olives. After about an hour’s climb we came out suddenly on the broad bastions of the road which runs from Trevi to the convent of S. Martino.
Trevi.
The tiny town of Trevi is a familiar object to all who pass along the line to Rome. It stands, as one expects all Umbrian towns to stand, a crown of buildings closely packed upon a little hill-top. The city felt bare and baked when we entered it, and we left it soon to wander round its bastion-road; a thing which was fairer far than all the pictures in the churches.[119] Long we sat in the grasses, tracing out the landmarks in the heat mist far below us: Montefalco in the foreground, Perugia behind it, Assisi and Spello a little to the right, and, sunk in the broad plain of the Clitumnus, just as Raphael painted them four hundred years ago, the houses and the towers of Foligno.
The Temple of Clitumnus.
“Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges, et maxima taurus
Victima, saepe tuo perfusi flumine sacro,
Romanos ad templa Deum duxere triumphos.”
Georg. ii. 146.
Barely three miles from Trevi, just off the dusty road, in the burning heat of a brewing storm, we came to the Temple of Clitumnus. This marvellously romantic spot needs no description of ours, for the tiny temple seems to hold the very essence of what is best in pagan art and worship, and its praises have been sung by classic poets throughout the course of centuries.[120]