A Little Pilgrimage in Italy

by Olave M. Potter

The poet sighed.

'I could almost envy you because you do not know her. See how her loggia'd towers frame the heavens, and how she stretches out her lovely arms to welcome us!'

We came to Perugia from Cortona. In an hour we slipped from that austere Tuscan citadel into the heart of an enchanted land—Umbria Mystica—the home of saints, where Beauty and Romance walk in the valleys with the gentle Gods of Arcady; where brooding peace hangs in the luminous air, and on whose aerial hills great memories dwell in the little cities full of dreams that men have built for them. We skirted the enchanted shores of Thrasymene, the spell-bound lake which lies like an opal in the bosom of the Umbrian Hills, and found ourselves among vineyards and olive-gardens, where the Madonnas of Perugino and Raphael are living their beautiful and simple lives in the fields, and the great-eyed oxen draw Virgilian ploughs below the olives, or roll along the dusty roads with scarlet fillets on their milk-white heads.

Perugia is the queen of this enchanted land, the crown of Umbria. Think of her name—Perusia Augusta the Romans called her; was there ever a more lovely name, or one which History enriched with more poetic legends? For Felice Ciatti, that brilliant scholar of the seventeenth century, in summing up the Greco-Trojan tradition and the popular belief that Noah, the Patriarch, was the founder of the city, thought nothing of addressing the Perugians, in one of his Lenten sermons, in these stirring words—'No marvel is it if, to-day, ye Perugians possess the justice of the Armenians, the wisdom of the Greeks, the prosperity of Augustus, and the sanctity of Noah, for ye are descended from them all.'

And if these legends leave you cold, think of the Carlovingian tradition in which such great names as Oliver the Paladin, and the puissant knight, Count Roland, 'the Falcon of Christendom,' and the tyrant Orgoglioso, play their parts with the lovely lady Prossimana. Or, if this does not stir you, would you rather learn romance from the nomenclature of her ancient gates? Here, long since vanished, was the Portal of the Sun, the gate through which blind Homer thought that dreams entered into a city from the east. It still gives its name to a whole quarter of Perugia—the Rione della Porta Sole—and though no man can point to the actual Porta Sole, when the wind blows coolly through any of Perugia's eastern gates, and you look across the valley at Assisi, it will be strange if you do not think of Dante's words:

'There hangs

Rich slope of mountain high, whence heat and cold
Are wafted through Perugia's eastern gate:
And Nocera with Gualdo, in its rear
Mourn for their heavy yoke. Upon that side,
Where it doth break its steepness most, arose
A sun upon this world, as duly this
From Ganges doth; therefore let none, who speak
Of that place, say Ascesi; for its name
Were lamely so delivered; but the East,
To call things rightly, be it henceforth styled.'[2]

PERUGIA: ARCO DI AUGUSTO.

Here, at the end of a winding street of mediaeval houses, is the Porta Eburnea, the Ivory Gate through which Homer thought that False Dreams were expelled from a city; and close to Sant'Ercolano is the Porta Cornea, the Gate of Horn, whence issued all True Dreams. The Porta Eburnea was, indeed, the gate of False Dreams, for it was by that way, so Matarazzo tells us, that the Baglioni, that strange and beautiful and ungodly race who lived and died by violence, always passed out to battle. Of the others the Porta Augusta, the greatest of the Etruscan gates, once bore the proud name Porta Pulchra, because of its beauty even in a beautiful city; and another was named, and is still named, after the God of War. Is it not irony that all the rest should bear the names of saints, for Perugia, a city of turbulent desires, has ever bred more warriors than saints? Even to-day there are few monks or nuns in Perugia; it is the military who are in evidence, and not a few churches and cloisters have been despoiled to house them. In fact Perugia, notwithstanding her mediaeval monuments, is a gay and much begarrisoned city, not provincial like Siena, but really the capital of a state. I have never seen so many smart and pretty women in any Italian town of the size as I found at Perugia in high summer, nor so many soldiers. The Corso is full of them, both morning and evening. They promenade up and down, 'wearing out the pavements,' in the phrase of the immortal and energetic Fortebraccio; or they sit at cafés gossiping after their siestas. At night they become an army. It seems as though the entire population congregated then in the Corso and the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where there is a band and a mushroom growth of tables and chairs. On Sundays they promenade in the cathedral in just the same gay and careless fashion, except that the boys doff their hats, and that here you see shaggy-haired and devout peasants kneeling among the beautifully-dressed Perugian ladies.