Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

There was more than mere fun in Thackeray’s tale of “The Rose and the Ring.” When the Fairy Blackstick frowned at Prince Giglio and said, “What you need, young man, is a little misfortune!” she asserted a most obvious and irritating fact. But it has one delightful side to it—that bitter draught that wise Doctor Fate insists on our taking from time to time; the good things, even tiny little ones that we never noticed before, do taste so wonderfully sweet afterwards!

But we were talking of shore forests. There is one, not of pine but beeches, on the Adriatic, exactly opposite Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea.[13] Here a great promontory runs out towards the east, rising into mountains which have caused the whole to be called the “Monte Gargano,” though each peak has its own name besides. People call the isolated district (which really belongs to the Province of Molise) Manfredonia, from the name of its chief town, long a pet stronghold of Suabian King Manfred, who founded and fortified it in the Thirteenth Century. But Nature protected the Monte Gargano in another way and a very effectual one. It was meant to be an island; on the western side the Abruzzi shrinking back in the real mainland, and the Adriatic, withdrawing slowly from the coast, have left a strip of land many miles wide—flat, marshy, abominably feverish—as a kind of defensive trench to cut off the Gargano promontory from the rest of Italy, and, as it were, remind it for ever that by formation it does not belong to her at all, but to the limestone plateau of Dalmatia, across the way. This vast plain (for it stretches far and far past the promontory, towards the south) refuses to nourish a single tree on the few feet of soil which cover the mother-rock, but it provides such splendid food for sheep that, since time immemorial, it has been given up to them. Alphonsus I annexed it as a royal meadow in 1445, and imported his Spanish merinos with such success that two hundred years later four and a half millions of the beautiful creatures were herded by Neapolitan peasants on these pastures. Even now, though only a scanty half million graze on them, the sheep are lords and owners of all that ground. During the summer they are led to the mountains, partly for their own sake, partly for that of their keepers, who could not live in the miasma-haunted plains in August and September. In crossing, even by train, the twenty-two miles that separate Foggia from Manfredonia, the traveller is always warned to close the carriage windows; but in October the sheep are all driven back, and for weeks the three great roads that converge towards the flats are just broad ribbons of dust, through which comes the drumming of invisible millions of little hoofs. Along the edges of the yellow cloud phantom figures of shepherds dressed in sheepskins take shape at intervals and disappear again; and the dogs, dear faithful things, fly round and herd up the stragglers and nip at the legs of truants with the noisy joy that even long marches through the scorching plains can never quite suppress.

From every point on those plains Monte Gargano can be seen, raising its peaks against the blue, and clothed down to the very water’s edge in magic beechwoods, homes of light and shadow and flickering gold, musical with song, fragrant with wild flowers, and carpeted with the rich mould that a thousand autumns have spread along its ways. Nothing is ever disturbed on Monte Gargano. But for the sea and the fever-land, the forest would long ago have been cut down, its riches dispersed, its very site perhaps forgotten; but now all stands as it did from the first, and winter and summer have their own way there, and the herdsmen fold their cattle in the deep caves of the hills even as they did fourteen hundred years ago, in the reign of the holy Pope, St. Gelasius, when Heaven’s gates opened one May morning to let through a flash of wings and the gleam of an Archangel’s sword, and the fairest of Gargano’s peaks became Monte Sant’ Angelo.

And this was the way of it. While the rest of Italy was torn with the struggles of rival barbarians, and desolated by the rapacity of men like the Galla who drove his poor captives before him to the feet of St. Benedict at Monte Cassino, the peasants of Monte Gargano, safe in their isolation, lived as they live to-day, obscure, contented, minding their own affairs—which are chiefly their own cattle—with all their mind. In that wild place the cattle stray sometimes and it is hard to find them again, and so it happened that on the 8th of May, towards 493, or thereabouts, a young herdsman went climbing into the hills with some companions to look for a valuable steer that he had lost. Having wandered and searched for some time in vain, they were feeling deeply discouraged, when they perceived the creature hopelessly entangled in a thicket of briars at the entrance of a deep cavern. In fear, or irritation, one of the pursuers drew his bow and let fly an arrow at the animal, but, to the man’s amazement, the missile turned in the air and struck him who had shot it. Terrified at this portent, they all fled and did not stop till they reached the town of Sipontum, far below, where they related what had happened to them. Fear fell on the inhabitants, and no one had the courage to go and examine the cavern, though all were consumed with curiosity to know what, or who, it contained. In this dilemma they referred the case to their Bishop, and he replied that he must lay the thing before the Lord, and ordained three days of fasting and prayer for all the population, during which they were to join him in begging that Heaven’s will in the matter might be made clear.

And the petition was granted, for on the third day the great Archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop and told him that the portent of the returning arrow was intended to show that he wished to have a sanctuary consecrated in that cave to the glory of God and in honour of the Angels. So immediately the Bishop came forth and, gathering all the people to him, led them, with prayers and chants, into the heart of the hills to the mysterious cavern, and, entering in, they found it hollowed out and disposed in the form of a Church, with all things ready, so that the Bishop at once said Mass there; and from that hour so many wonderful miracles took place on that spot that all men knew certainly that it was greatly favoured by Heaven. And from that day to this it has been a place of holy pilgrimage, where many sinners have been converted, and many afflicted with terrible diseases cured.

The Church celebrates the Apparition of St. Michael the Archangel on Monte Gargano on the 8th of May, but the feast of that spring morning is not the only one in which she commemorates his glorious interventions on her behalf. Far away in the North, another promontory, strangely like that of Monte Gargano, once encircled by forests, too, but now cut off from the land at each return of the tide, the Mont Saint-Michel, stands as the last outpost of France, flinging defiance at its twin peak across the water in Britain. There is something strangely significant in the choice of these two points for the most notable apparitions of the great Archangel, who commands the heavenly hosts and watches with such sublime benignity over the destinies of men. One in the North and one in the South, the great lonely rocks rise sheer from the sea as if set apart as resting-places where the glorious pinions might be folded for a while, and the effulgence of the angelic countenance, too overwhelming for man to bear as it comes straight from the Presence of God, a little tempered and veiled by the mists of sorrowful earth. But one feels, too, that the purity of the lonely rock, the brave song of the wind, the long roll of Atlantic surge, and the chant of Adriatic billows were dear and welcome to the Warrior Angel, who holds our world in his hands as the Creator’s chief Minister, who carries out His mandates, chastising when he must, but so tender to the contrite, so inspiring to the valiant, so royal in protection to the oppressed!

Of all the peaks that bear his name through the length and breadth of Europe none has been more signally his own than this one on the coast of Brittany. The East has its own, in Phrygia, where also the Archangel deigned to manifest his love for us poor mortals by his visible presence, and where the marvel of that love is commemorated under the title of “The Synax of Michael, Prince of the Army and of the other Incorporeal Powers.” The Greeks always give such thunderously full tides to their Friends in Heaven! But I am sure they cannot honour their great protector half so heartily as he has been honoured on the Mont Saint-Michel ever since he touched it and consecrated it for all time, in the Eighth Century. The details that have come down to us of that apparition are somewhat less full than those of the one at Monte Gargano, but the subsequent history of the French Sanctuary, which stood for just a thousand years as an impregnable fortress, is connected, right through, with humanity as the lonely shrine of the South has never been. Its name alone is like a war-cry—“Saint Michel au Péril de la Mer”—St. Michael of the Peril of the Sea—and bespeaks the invincible ally of the race that was once the ardent apostle of Christianity and its most valiant champion. It was to St. Aubert that the revelation came, when he was Bishop of Avranches, in the reign of Childebert III. The Archangel appeared to him in his sleep, says the Breviary, and bade him build a Church on the sentinel rock, round which already many pious hermits were gathered to serve God in solitude. Now St. Aubert was a man who reflected much before taking any new step, and he hesitated so long that the Archangel had to repeat his visit three times before he was obeyed—a great encouragement, this, to timid souls!—but then the Saint went to work valiantly enough. The rock was of a strange rounded shape, and he built on its summit a great round Church, as closely resembling the holy cave at Monte Gargano as possible. Then he sent to that place to fetch stones and relics from it, all of which he set with great honour in the newer sanctuary; and when all was done he established and endowed there a monastery of twelve “holy clerks for the perpetual service of the Blessed Archangel.” But Richard I, Duke of Normandy, wished still further to honour St. Michael, so he sent away the clerks and established the Benedictines in their place; and the fame of the Shrine and of the many miracles performed there drew a great concourse of pilgrims from all over the world, especially royal pilgrims, from England and Europe generally, so that when the order of the Knights of St. Michael was instituted, this was their Chapter House. By that time it was already one of the most ancient and one of the few “maiden” fortresses of the realm, and never, until the monarchy succumbed to the Revolution, did a single foe to France succeed in setting foot within its walls. For a thousand years, seven times a day, the praises of God had rang out from it over the sea; for a thousand years the standard of France floated stainless above its battlements. “Monsieur Saint-Michel, Archange, premier Chevalier, qui pour la querelle de Dieu victorieusement batailla contre le dragon” (it is thus that his titles are given in the Institutes of the Order founded in 1469) took care of his own—till France drove him away.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1]. Montalembert.