CHIUSI
Night had fallen when we reached Chiusi Junction. A full-blown harvest moon hung over the station-yard like a yellow lamp. It was late, and the lights of Chiusi were a twinkling bunch of fire-flies on a distant hill. We dined at the excellent station buffet, resolved not to spoil the propitious hour by arriving in an unknown city tired and hungry; and afterwards we climbed up to our mysterious destination at leisure, in the glory of a late moon, with the night insects singing by the dusky roadside.
They are among the little joys of Italy these late arrivals, on breathless summer nights, at hill-towns whose features you have only glimpsed heretofore from the windows of a flying train. A fig for the discomforts that you risk! They add a touch of salt to the adventure. The inn you stumble on may be the worst of all bad inns; the dinner will of course be long-delayed; and if you have inadvertently walked in upon a festa it may be difficult to find a place whereon to lay your head. But reckon against these things the charm of mystery—the complete sense of satisfaction with which you watch the ruby tail-lights of your train slipping away into the night, and hear the lessening roar of its engine till your last link with the familiar world is severed, and you are face to face with the unknown. And lastly, remember the joy with which you discover a new world in the morning.
We started in a vettura which was never meant to carry passengers as well as luggage, but before long we slipped out one by one, for we were only going at a snail's pace up the long hill which leads from Chiusi station to Chiusi town, and we could see nothing of the magic of the night, half-buried in boxes, and with the stars shut out by tarpaulin. The driver did not notice, but the horses quickened their pace with the lightened burden, and soon we were left to find our own way up the hillside. It was not difficult. The bright moonlight, which flooded the plain below, turned the road into a band of silver, whose whiteness was barred by the shadows of giant cypresses towering black against the night. The chanting of the frogs and the song of the night cricket almost drowned the jangling bells of our vettura, and high above us we could see Chiusi, no longer a bunch of fire-flies, but a ghostly grey hill-city already wrapt in slumber, with a frowning rocca, and grim old walls. Its silence was a little desolate as we drew near, and it was a relief to see the hospitable yellow lights of the Leon d'Oro outside the Porta Romana, giving us a homely welcome into the mysterious moonlit town.
CITTÀ DELLA PIEVE FROM CHIUSI.
I woke early in the morning. It needed but a glance to tell me that I was back in Umbria. Nowhere else are the dimpled valleys so full of beauty, or the blue hills so softly moulded; and nowhere else is that pellucid sky, or that strange clarity of atmosphere which inspired the landscapes of the Umbrian Quattrocento artists. It was as though I looked straight into the heart of one of Perugino's sacred pictures. There was the soft green valley melting in the distance into the azure folds of mountains; there were the slender trees cleaving the luminous air; there were the towered cities crowning the hills; there was the clear pale sky, the spaciousness, the holiness which Perugino and his school immortalised. But, after all, this rich plain, from which the waters of an inland sea have long ago receded, is peculiarly the land of Perugino. Is not that rose-red city on the crest of the wooded hill which bounds the southern horizon of Chiusi, Città della Pieve, the town which gave him birth? I half expected to see a band of saints walking in the vineyards, or to find Madonna sitting by the roadside with the Infant Christ. But another artist had usurped the landscape. Below my window was a peasant ploughing in his olive-garden. He sang as he bent forward to throw his weight on the wooden shaft, and his clothes were as blue as the heavens at mid-day. Two milk-white oxen moved slowly before him under the tender grey of the olives, and as they passed they left behind them shining furrows of freshly-turned earth. It was a poem of labour, as delicate in colour as a tone-etching, an inspiration for Millet with the poetry of life in his veins, or for the subtle Corot.
Chiusi, the Clusium of Lars Porsena, the great Etruscan Prince who championed the Tarquinii after they were expelled from Rome, is a little self-contained city with an affectation of placing cypresses at becoming angles. She is rather a coquette this old town. She is not unconscious of the picturesqueness of her position as she rises above the shimmering olives which veil her hillsides; she knows the value of cypress spires when they soar above the bastions of ancient walls; she deliberately sets herself out to charm the stranger by filling the gardens of her trattorie with flowering gourds and purple morning-glories. Her picturesque old cathedral has been so cleverly redecorated throughout with painted mosaics, that when we first stepped down into the cool dark nave we were deceived, and gasped to see such jewels outside Ravenna; and she has built herself a delightful museum, in the form of a classic temple, to house her Etruscan treasures.
I think she has never ceased to congratulate herself upon giving the lie to Dante's ill-omened prophecy, when he quoted her as an example of a city falling into decay—