A Little Pilgrimage in Italy

by Olave M. Potter

No wonder that her history is spare since the days when she and her great neighbours, Arretium and Clusium, joined the Etruscan League in 310 b.c.; for even to-day, with excellently engineered roads scaling her hill, she is difficult of approach, and her stout walls and impregnable position offered no inducement to invading armies, who were content with harrying her fertile plain, as they passed by to Umbria and Rome. We know she was a Roman colony in the time of the historian Dionysius, but scant mention is made of her under the Roman Empire; and although she was one of the earliest Episcopal sees, and is still the seat of a bishop, it was not until the thirteenth century that the chronicles of Cortona began to take a place in mediaeval history. She is still withdrawn from the world upon her mountain; her houses are still huddled together in the shelter of her great walls, built by the Unknown People; she still hides her poverty from the eyes of the careless traveller as he rushes past the foot of her hill on his way to Rome or Florence.

After the motor-omnibus had deposited us in the Piazza Signorelli, and we had deposited our luggage in a rather dreary-looking inn whose only claims to notice were its exquisite views over the Tuscan plain to the inland sea of Thrasymene, we sallied out full of anticipation to see the legendary birthplace of three such widely different characters as the mythological Dardanus, founder of Troy; Brother Elias, the erring and ambitious follower of St. Francis; and Luca Signorelli, that courtly gentleman and great painter of the fifteenth century.

But we were disappointed. Cortona, notwithstanding her lovely name and her ancient and picturesque site, is a dirty little place, with unsavoury streets and a baroque cathedral. She has treasures, of course. What little town in Italy has not? Her tumble-down palaces are built of warm red brick; her churches have some fine pictures; her Palazzo Pretorio is covered with the escutcheons of the princes who were her overlords, but she has no charm unless you catch her unawares before the sleep is shaken from her eyes early on a summer morning.

CORTONA FROM THE PIAZZA GARIBALDI.

We found so little to detain us in her dingy, unkempt streets that we decided to push on the next day to Perugia. We tried our tempers in the inn, the most lethargic inn that it was our misfortune to visit, endeavouring to get some lunch, and after waiting an hour and a half we found the gnocchi stale and the coarse meat uneatable. So we went out again into the siesta heat, determined at least to see the great Etruscan lamp which is the pride of Cortona's museum, and the pictures which Luca Signorelli painted for her churches.

Cortona was asleep. She was as still as a lizard on a sunny wall; even the tiresome children who had followed us all the morning, agape for soldi, had vanished; the air was vibrant with the tremolo of the cicalas; the sunlight stretched like a shimmering veil across the valleys. And in a moment all our vexation vanished. Italy the Beautiful came out to meet us, smoothing away all disagreeable memories as a cool hand laid on the forehead will smooth out pain; we forgot the hatefulness which had been piling itself up all day—the dust, the smells, the too-glaring sun, the stupid inn with its bad-tempered maid-servant, the screaming children, the baroque cathedral!

In the cool grey church of San Domenico, which stands in the flowery public gardens of Cortona, we found not only one of Luca's great pictures but a pageant of Quattrocento saints and Madonnas in richly gilt Gothic frames over the three altars which fill its eastern wall. In the Gesù, a little ancient church which clings to the hillside close to the cathedral, we discovered an Annunciation by Fra Angelico, almost as beautiful as that exquisite picture which he painted on the wall of his monastery-home in Florence. It is very like the fresco in the corridor of San Marco. The Madonna is sitting in the same light and airy loggia reading in some little book, as the Angel Gabriel, with his iridescent wings still poised for flight, alights at her feet, filling the air with glory. Outside, the grass is starred with the flowers which Angelico loved to paint; and far away, silhouetted against the sky, we see the Angel with a flaming sword driving Man and Woman from their Garden of Paradise, whose gates not even the coming of Christ could reopen on earth.

And then, remembering the story of Filippo Brunelleschi, we went into the Duomo to see the famous sarcophagus which legend claims to be the tomb of the Consul Flaminius, and which the great architect of the dome of Florence Cathedral walked sixty miles to see. For one morning when he was discussing antique sculpture in the Piazza of Santa Maria del Fiore with Donatello and some other artists, Brunelleschi heard of a Roman sarcophagus in Cortona. Straightway he left his companions, and fired by his passion for the works of antiquity, 'just as he was, in his mantle, hood and sabots, without saying a word of where he was going,' came to Cortona and made a drawing of it, returning at last to Florence where he showed it to the astonished Donatello, who had not been able to guess where his friend had disappeared.

But it was in the early morning, as I have said, that we discovered the nameless charm of Cortona—that same charm which we found in a different guise in all the little towns of Umbria and Tuscany. Our inn, though it towered more than a thousand feet above the valley, was at the bottom of the city, for Cortona in the immemorial Etruscan fashion hangs from the crest of her hill. Even the ambitious motor-bus could not climb higher than the Piazza Signorelli, because nearly all the streets above it are so steep that they are built in shallow steps. And they are so deserted that in one of them we found rabbits contentedly nibbling the grass which grew between its paving-stones. So the next morning, very early, while the day was cool, we climbed up to the great church of Santa Margherita, which stands with the ruined Fortezza on the crest of Cortona's mountain.