Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

We four rode through the woods silently, drinking in the crystal freshness of the air; and then, almost before we knew it, we were out in a blaze of heat, leaving the Alban Hills behind and crossing the plain that divides them from the Sabines, one of the old roads to Naples. In that first week of September it was like an unroofed hot-house, vines and corn and pomegranates crowding against each other till one would hardly have known where to get in the shears or the sickle; the dust from our horses’ feet rose in golden clouds as we went along, and everywhere was the whirr of wings and the long droning note of the cicala. We were glad enough to reach Genazzano and pause in the shade before the old Church; but we had had some difficulty in penetrating so far, the Piazza and every street leading to it being full of peasants, who had come in from all the surrounding district to pay their respects to the Madonna del Buon Consiglio, on this the 8th of September, our Blessed Lady’s birthday. Of course the greatest concourse takes place here on April the 25th, the especial feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel, but the people are always glad to repair to this famous sanctuary, and on the day we visited it the little town was full of the brilliant costumes which one very rarely sees now. The picture round which so much devotion centres is a very sweet one, rather Byzantine in character, as is natural, for it came to Italy from the other side of the Adriatic—miraculously transported, probably at the time when all that country came under Moslem rule. It was thus that the Holy House of Loreto, when the Holy places of Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Turks, was carried by the Angels to Christian shores, and thence to Italy, the dwellers near its last Eastern resting-place mourning despairingly round the deserted spot from which it disappeared between dark and dawn on the night of the 9th of December, 1294. I am writing of Genazzano and not of Loreto just now, but I must pause to remark that this miracle of the transportation of the house of the Blessed Virgin is far more clearly attested than many events in our own modern history; yet there are people, who would stake their lives on the truth of those events, who dismiss the miracle of Loreto with a smile of incredulity.

This picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel would not interest them. Yet I would advise even such persons to go and have a look at the beautiful copy of it in St. John Lateran’s. It is quite small, a half length or less; the Blessed Mother holds the Child in her arms, and he is reaching up to whisper in her ear; she listens, with her heart in her deep sweet eyes, and the “counsel” is stored up for the children who appeal to her in their perplexities. There is an exquisite expression of confidence and familiarity on both the celestial Faces. Our Holy Father Pius X has such a great devotion to Our Lady of Good Counsel that, as all Catholics know, he has added the invocation “Mater Boni Consilii, ora pro nobis,” to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

From Genazzano we went on to Palestrina, arriving there in time to go and watch the sunset from the ruined terraces of the Temple of Fortune. The place has passed from hand to hand, used as a fortress at one time and another since the fourth century before Christ; but to me its interest never lay in those comparatively modern developments. It is the story of times lost in the mist of ages, when those first cyclopean blocks were fitted together without the aid of cement—when a race, whose only traces are these mute huge stones that suggest all and tell nothing, lived and fortified itself on this outpost of the mountains—that is the story that I want to hear. There at Palestrina, when the sun was sinking into the level gold of the sea—forty miles away, but so clear and calm—I leaned over the stone bulwark, red in the sunset, hot to my hand (had it not baked in four or five thousand years of sunshine?), and felt that unearthly thrill of a revelation palpitatingly near, yet still withheld. It has come only a few times in my life—once at Torcello, once among the lost tombs of Etruria, there at Palestrina, and in the great hall of the unmarked sepulchre of the last Ming Emperor in Pechilia. That was modern, indeed, a Seventeenth Century affair, but the ancient spirit was there—something that brooded over a lonely, mighty country, unchanged, untampered with, before the beginnings of history.

At Palestrina—or to give the place its right name, Præneste—the Emperors were mere upstarts; Camillus, who took it and made it an appanage of Rome four hundred years or so before this time—Marius and Sulla, and the Roman ladies who had summer villas here and left those amazing “vanity boxes” (such arsenals of cosmetics and beautifiers as surprise even our modern beauty-artists) behind them—all these seem vulgar intruders on that sacredly ancient ground.

For, of all the cities of Romagna, Præneste has, I think, the most perfect situation. It seems to have grown out of the wall of the hills to watch over the southern roads to Rome. Before it the Campagna stretches away to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so towards the sea; in the near distance a castle or a single tower breaks the plain, midway Rome shimmers like a net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber; but the West is the empty West always, left to the sun and the wind, with the wide Heavens above and that one long sword of light laid on its further bound where the tideless Mediterranean laps against the shore. To the south, at an almost direct angle, rise the Alban Hills, near, familiar, friendly, with their symmetrical volcanic slopes so restful to the eye; where they sink to the plain farthest from Palestrina the Appian Way leads on to Naples, and that is the way most of the world travels; but the more beautiful road is the one which leads, right past the foot of the Sabines, through the level valley which separates them from the Alban range, to Anagni and Valmontone and Frosinone, following the classic Liris as it takes an almost straight course through the garden it has ploughed and watered. Seen from the Campagna, the Albans seem to be a range running east and west, thrown up to make a frame and background for Rome; but travel down the Liris and you will realise that all we see from Rome, Monte Cavo, and his lesser brethren, with their scores of white towns, is simply the culmination of a long branch of the Apeninnes, set up like a screen between the central range and the fever-haunted seaboard called Maremma. When about two-thirds of the distance to Naples is accomplished, the range rises in the isolated peak of Rocca Monfina to the height of nearly four thousand feet and becomes merged in the central Apeninnes once more. The railway runs through now, but it is still a wild, remote country, very feudal in its ways, with half-ruined castles on every point of vantage, scowling down on a land that needs them no longer, where fighting has ceased, and the good soil that has had its way for centuries has brought forth those stores of corn and wine and oil which seem to be South Italy’s inalienable dower.

From Palestrina, looking down on that September evening, the bursting richness of it all seemed almost incredible. Right at the foot of the hills a deep, abandoned watercourse was a golden river of standing corn, bordered far on either side with dense greenery fringing off into vineyards so teeming with fruit that, seen from above, it was like a great mantle of dark amethyst patterned here and there, where the white grapes grew, with jade. The woody slopes of the Sabines sank into the rich carpet, and rose, away to the north, in stormy outlines, now softened into dreamy rose and lilac, against the clear evening sky. As the sun sank, even the cold silver of the olive trees, standing tier above tier on their shallow terraces, took on the flush, as if bathed in wine, and the darker foliage of oak and chestnut burned with sombre yet vivid intensity. Then the sun touched the sea—lingered, a ball of living crimson, for an instant, and plunged out of sight. One star hung its newborn silver against the paling west; another and another answered it, till all the dying blue overhead was pierced and patterned with the faint sparklets in their eternal dance. Then from behind the wall of peaks a broad fan of misty silver was thrown up against the sky, growing, spreading, washing purple and crimson to one untinted sheen; another moment, and the harvest moon heaved a golden shoulder over the crags, rolled up, rounded itself, and hung, a great honey-coloured globe, flooding the hills and the Campagna and the distant sea with calm, all-embracing effulgence.

At the time of my first visit to Palestrina I was still sufficiently attracted by the Middle Ages to find much romance in the struggles of the Colonnas and their contemporaries, struggles which dragged the harrow over the vast Temple of Fortune—reputed the biggest in the world,—threw its stones one upon another, and left the place merely a beautiful tomb. Since then, I confess, my interest has died away. I can feel no sympathy with the noble cut-throats—Sciarras, Colonnas, Orsinis—whose deeds are written in blood over every page of the time. I used to weep over the sufferings they inflicted on Boniface VIII, but, apart from the outrage on his sacred office, which can never be condoned, one cannot help feeling that he deserved something of what he got, and that, in spite of his high courage and notable intellect, he had treated those his enemies very basely and cruelly. His election in 1217 had been bitterly opposed by two Colonna Cardinals—Giacomo and Pietro—who were furious at the thought that the Papal chair should be filled by one of the Gaetonis of Anagni, the hereditary rivals and enemies of their own family. The election went through, in spite of them, and they, fearing the new Pope’s wrath, fled to Palestrina, taking every member of the family with them. This was an open declaration of war, and the Pope realised that there would be no peace for his realm till they were subdued. With truly mediæval promptitude, he at once confiscated all their estates and called on all good Christians to take up arms against them. Their other strongholds fell one by one into his hands, but Palestrina, with its tremendous defences and commanding position, resisted every attack of the besiegers. It seemed impregnable. Then Pope Boniface remembered that the most victorious and ruthless leader of the day, Guido de Montefeltro, was down on his knees in a convent at Ancona, praying to be forgiven some of his deeds of blood before death should call him to judgment. He commanded him to leave his retreat and come to give his advice as to the reduction of Palestrina. Very unwillingly the old soldier obeyed, and returned to that world which he had left just in time to save his wicked soul. He went and looked at the Colonna fortress, examined the defences with the eye of an expert, and returned to the Pope, who was at Rieti. He told him that there was no hope of taking Palestrina by force of arms. “What, then, am I to do?” cried Boniface. Guido knew, but was unwilling to say. The Pope insisted on his giving his opinion, and the crafty old fighter proffered the counsel for which Dante with some justice put him in Malebolge—“Prometter lungo e tenere corto!” “Promise much—fulfil little,” it would run in English.

Boniface instantly acted on the advice. The Colonnas were promised full forgiveness. They thought it wise to accept and submit. In all the habiliments of mourning repentance they issued from the stronghold they were never to see again, and came in a body to Rieti. The Pope received them, pronounced their crimes against himself forgiven, and kept them at Rieti as his guests. But prudence, as he apprehended it, forbade that he should leave that eyrie and refuge of rebellion standing for them to fly to the next time they picked a quarrel with him. So, while they were sunning themselves in his favour in the mountain city of the South, he secretly despatched a faithful friend, Ranieri, the Bishop of Pisa, to wipe Palestrina off the face of the earth. Nothing was to be spared, except the Cathedral. And very thoroughly did Ranieri do his work. Every vestige of the fortress and palace and the big town which had grown up with them was destroyed—“a plough was driven over the ruins, the ground was sown with salt, and even the famous marble staircase of a hundred steps, up which people could ride their horses into the palace,” was swept away.

Then the Colonnas, landless, homeless, penniless, understood how much the Pope’s forgiveness was worth, and they fled from his domains to nurse their wrongs and wait for revenge.

That came in good, or rather very evil, time, and Boniface paid in full during the awful days at Anagni, days so dreadful that one quarrels with Dante for not regarding them as sufficient expiation for the harassed Pontiff’s one great sin. He was driven into a quarrel with Philippe le Bel, the King of France, and Sciarra Colonna, the Head of the proscribed House, caught at the chance and offered his services to the French. In company with their leader, William de Nogaret, he broke into Anagni, Boniface’s own city where he had taken refuge, and, but for the opposition of Nogaret, he would, apparently, have murdered his great enemy on the spot.