The Story of Perugia

by Margaret Symonds; Lina Duff Gordon

Heavy drenching rain of spring. Under the darkness of the clouds, soaring high as a glorious vision above the miserable houses—a peacock in a hen-coop, a miracle of marbles and mosaics—the Duomo of Orvieto!... No one who has ever seen the building can forget it, for it is like a great surprise; it startles and astounds one in the midst of the decay around it. Here, if anywhere in Umbria, the power of the Pope or of the Church was sealed on the rebellious souls of its inhabitants; here to commemorate a dubious miracle men made a dream in stone.[126] To describe its splendours were in this small sketch a mere impertinence. But if we wish to see what is perhaps the finest bit of Gothic work in Italy, if we wish to learn the power of Signorelli’s painting, it is certain that we must come hither and study at Orvieto.

As we turned our back on the cathedral we wondered what it was about her people which had allowed them to foster such a mighty piece of purest art throughout a turbulent history. Certainly the popes had power in the city.[127] They made it a mighty church, they made for it an almost mightier well! When Clement VII. fled from Rome in 1527 he took refuge in Orvieto, and, haunted by the fear of drought in case of siege, conceived the extraordinary idea of building a colossal well, for which purpose he employed the same architect as Paul III. employed to build his fortress at Perugia.

Signorelli painted a picture of the Inferno for Orvieto, Sangallo built for it an Inferno in bricks! Feathery mosses, sombre ferns have grown across the inside walls of the great pozzo (which was built on a scale to suit a train of ascending and descending elephants); they seemed to seethe like sulphurous smoke in the dark and fetid air and we hurried from it gladly into the rain of the street....

Chiusi.

From Orvieto we went to Chiusi. The rain went with us too, and of the town itself we saw but little, only all around us in the dense woods, in the silent soaking air of night, the nightingales were singing their piercing penetrating songs of love and May. The air was full of the strong sweet voices and of the scent of growing leaves, of privet, and wet earth. Chiusi is a centre of interest to students of Etruscan history, and although the little town exports its treasures to every museum in Europe its own is full of beauties still. We lingered long among them, fascinated by the goblin birds which are perched upon the vases and the pent roof of the tombs, fascinated by the excellence and the variety of the greater part of all the objects in the cases. The rain poured pitilessly upon the streets of Chiusi; it swept in sheets across the lake and over the towers of Montepulciano, and we abandoned all hopes of going to the tombs themselves and drove away across the marshes and up the wooded hills to Città della Pieve.[128]

Città della Pieve.

... “j’étais tout de même persuadé que Città della Pieve reste la ville la plus merveilleuse de l’Ombrie,” says M. Broussole; and we ourselves in many ways agreed with him. The charm of the town consists firstly, in its situation, and secondly, in its association. It commands wide views northwards over the lakes of Chiusi and of Trasimene, and southwards towards Rome. The hill on which it stands is densely wooded, there is perpetual peace in its streets, it is the birth-place of Pietro Perugino and contains some faint fair bits of the master’s later work. All day we wandered through the town, and when the evening came we found ourselves at service in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi.

It was May, the month of Mary. The people from the town came pouring in for benediction. They were nearly all of them very poor people, the men haggard with perpetual labour in the fields,[129] quiet and eager even when very old; the girls fair, slim, colourless, their shawls too well defining the slender slope of their thin shoulders; the children brown and fascinating, and the older women lost in prayer. (We have noticed that the veriest hags in Umbria seem to pray as though they fully realised the sins of their forefathers, and felt the present generation needed all their prayers.) Peace and poverty were the two things which were stamped most clearly on the faces of the congregation. The priests themselves looked poor and worn, shorn of their fat homes and privileges. There were not many candles on the altar and these they lighted slowly one by one. Then they begun to sing a long low wailing chaunt in praise of Mary.

It had thundered and rained since morning. The day died out in an orange glow which filtered through the hedges on the road outside and fell through the door of the church, gilding, as though with the softness of a vision, the groups of tired people. It rested with a wonderful radiance on the faded fresco above the chapel where we sat.[130]