A Little Pilgrimage in Italy

by Olave M. Potter

For, indeed, S. Bernardo and his companions laboured to make this wilderness blossom like a rose. Early in the fourteenth century he put aside the vanities of life. At the height of his glory, when all Siena was ringing with his brilliance and prodigality, he left the city, fleeing, like Shelley, from the awful spectre of his veiled self, asking 'Are you satisfied?' And coming into the desert of Accona he dwelt here in poverty and simplicity, building a little chapel to Santa Scolastica, the sister of St. Benedict, and leading a life of prayer and meditation. We read that a great number of followers, many of them noble, came to him, and lived upon the hillside, striving by the sweat of their brows to transform the Tuscan desert into a garden. But in that day of Guelph and Ghibelline disorders the rulers of Siena feared that he was sowing the seeds of a rebellion; and, if we believe his legend, tried to poison him. It is certain that he was accused of heresy, and forced to make the long journey to the Papal Court of Avignon with Ambrogio Piccolomini, one of his earliest companions, and a scion of the noble house of Piccolomini. Nothing more is said of the charge of heresy. The Pope, John XXII. , received them with favour and gave them letters to Guido Tarlati, the splendid old warrior-bishop of Arezzo, in which he asked that most unconventional of prelates to furnish them with a monastic rule. Here again the legend adds a picturesque touch, for it tells us that Tarlati had a miraculous vision, in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and commanded him to give the rule of Benedict to 'the pious solitaries' of Accona, to clothe them in spotless white, the symbol of her purity, and to give their hermitage the name of St. Mary of Mount Olivet.

So with their own hands Bernardo and his companions, no longer clad in the garb of penitents, began to build their church and convent on the spot where he had his vision of a celestial ladder stretching up to heaven, with angels leading his companions to the throne of Christ. But their work was stopped by news of the great plague which was spreading desolation throughout the country. Going himself to Siena, Bernardo sent out the brothers two by two to tend the people, bidding them depart with good courage, saying that they should all meet together in Siena for the Festival of the Assumption. He never saw his cloistered home again; he died in the stricken city with nearly all his companions, and other hands took up the building of his monastery; and, later, beautified it with frescoes by Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma, and rare intarsia by Fra Giovanni of Verona.

But I was not thinking of the Blessed Bernardo or of his white-robed Olivetans as we drew near the monastery. Some touch of faery lingered in that cypress grove. We had come out to see a convent. And lo! a battlemented gateway rose before us, with drawbridge and portcullis, as warlike as a castle of the Sforzas. It was as though we had ridden like princes of eld across the grey inferno of Childe Roland, where the grass 'grew scant as hair in leprosy,' only to wind our horns before the gate of an enchanted city.

And the fancy grew. We passed without challenge under the portcullis, with a smiling Godspeed from its Della Robbia Madonna, into one of those enchanted woods of Italy, where stone-pines make a frieze against the sky, and cicalas sing their little hearts away in rapture. Two paths led through the flickering shadows. We hesitated which to take, and glanced behind us, half expecting some warden to issue from that ancient gate to ask our pleasure and direct our steps. No one was there. But, just as St. Mary welcomed us without, so from his niche above the arch St. Benedict, clad in the spotless robes of Oliveto, gave us his blessing. We went forward then, past a huge brick jebbia full of green water and down to the stables where we dismounted by a well, as Aeneas Sylvius and his brilliant suite of knights and choristers dismounted when they rode here from Siena and marvelled to find so fair a garden in that barren land.

Still no one came, and still the enchanted silence of the woods prevailed. We wandered round the old red walls, seeking to find an entrance, and since there was no one to say us nay, we went into the cool white monastery. How still and desolate it was! Our footsteps ringing on the flags dismayed us, and when we pealed the bell it echoed like derisive laughter down the empty corridor. Truly the spirit of the place has taken flight, now that the white-robed brethren no longer dwell in their inheritance. Not more than three monks live here to-day; and these, they told us rather sadly, as custodes only, for their order is suppressed nearly everywhere, and the state has made a national monument of their treasures. So the ancient law that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath, is fulfilled. And I will confess at once that from the sentimental point of view my sympathies are all with the monks, for they are one of our most picturesque links with the past, and it was with their own hands that they sowed this harvest which another reaps.[12]

So there are only ghosts to people the deserted cells and chapels and refectories of Mount Olivet to-day. Time and the hand of man have robbed this sanctuary. Everywhere the eye sees frescoes fading from the walls; and Napoleon, who never saw any harm in robbing Peter to pay Paul, stole some of the exquisite intarsia stalls of the convent church to enrich the cathedral of Siena. Only in the great cloister, where Signorelli and Sodoma painted the life and miracles of St. Benedict, is the imagination fired. What does it matter that the story has been often told? That we have conned it in a hundred other frescoes? It is like the magic stories of our youth, which gained an added joy by repetition, because no two people ever told them quite the same. Here we could find inhabitants for all those empty cells; here we could fill the pleasant groves with white-cowled monks who knelt in prayer below the cypresses, or paced the shady avenues in meditation; here we could picture Bernardo himself, building his abbey, and see him sitting in the old refectory with Patrizi, and Ambrogio Piccolomini, and the other nobles who followed him into the wilderness. 'The series forms, in fact, a painted novella of monastic life; its petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its indescribably petty miracles.'[13]

And then, because it was long after mezzogiorno, and we were to sleep at Chiusi that night, we went back to the magic cypress-woods to eat our lunch and rest before we drove to Asciano. Our coachmen had prepared a place for us, which they explained was molto arioso for so warm a day, on a terraced slope in the wide avenue of cypresses leading from the monastery church to the little chapel which contains the cell of Bernardo. The bank was carpeted with pine-needles, and the air was fragrant with the scent of crushed thyme. We lunched excellently well off wine and bread, figs and peaches; and our smiling drivers brought us a great fiasco of sparkling ice-cold water—an acceptable addition to the meal, for we were thirsty, and good spring water is not found everywhere in Italy. And then we pillowed our heads on the soft bank, and lay in silence, entangled in a flickering web of sun and shadow.

Surely it was an enchanted wood of cypresses that summer afternoon! As I drowsed I dreamt that I saw a boy come idly through the trees singing to his lute. His eyes were heavy-lidded, and long black love-locks lay on his shoulders. He was dressed fantastically in scarlet stockings, a silken cap, and a gay cloak, which evidently pleased him well, for at times he plucked at it and pulled it closely round him to admire its folds. A monkey with a gilded chain was on his shoulder, and a badger walked solemnly at his heels. Who could he be? I wondered. He was too gay and worldly to have thoughts of entering the Brotherhood, and as he drew nearer I could hear that his song was in the praise of love. Some poet of the Renaissance, perhaps, whose lord was resting in the monastery.

He drew nearer still, till I thought he must have seen me; and then, as though he was a little weary of his song, he dropped his lute and pillowed his gracious young head upon the flowery bank and drifted into sleep, lulled by the fragrance of the warm pine-woods. It seemed to me as if he dreamed, for he stirred, and turned his face away.