A Little Pilgrimage in Italy

by Olave M. Potter

'The Rubaiyat,' Le Gallienne's translation.

We came to Passignano from Chiusi, because we could not resist the beauty of Thrasymene. Most travellers in Italy only view it with passing admiration as they fly by in the express which takes them from Florence to Rome and Naples. It is to them merely another lovely incident in their journey through a landscape of surpassing beauty. Perchance they refer to their Baedekers, and find that it was the scene of Hannibal's great victory over Flaminius, and in a few minutes more their train is in Chiusi Junction, and the lake is lost behind the Umbrian hills. Others, who visit Perugia and Assisi, see more of its beauties, for when they leave the main line at Chiusi they have to make a semi-circular tour of the lake; and even from Terontola, the junction for Florence and Perugia, the line runs for miles along the lake-side, and crosses the actual site of Hannibal's battle-field.

Twice already, in the last month, we had traversed it, on the journey from Cortona to Perugia, and again on our way to Siena. Coming back we could no more resist it. Our intention had been to go straight from Chiusi to Assisi, but at Terontola the little philosopher put in a special plea for Thrasymene. He has a passion for lakes and rivers; no landscape is complete for him without them.

'Let us go down to Thrasymene,' he said. 'Not for the sake of Hannibal, but for the pleasure of its beauty. For I am sick of the petty wars of hill-towns, and am wearied for the moment of Etruscan tombs and Gothic palaces and churches. Let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear and the pomegranates bud forth!'

So we came to Thrasymene and Passignano, which is a mere handful of brown houses pushed into the water at the foot of a rocky hill. Passignano has a flavour of its own. To begin with, its inn is different from any other albergo in Italy. It has an old-fashioned kitchen with a cowl chimney and rows of shining brass saucepans, and it opens on to the village street, where the people sit to gossip while the evening meal is cooking. Its low cottage windows look over the wide expanse of water to towered Castiglione, and the wooded islands of Thrasymene; but it is built so close into the hillside at the back that you can stretch your hand from an upper room and pluck the creepers which pour in a green cascade over the rocks. It is extremely primitive: the menu consists of soup, macaroni, eggs, fresh fish from the lake, and very lean chickens, supplemented by rough country bread, plenty of honey and fresh fruit, and cheese if the proprietor has lately been to market in Perugia. Meat there is none, at any rate in August, nor tea. But the rooms are spotlessly clean, with snowy beds, dainty white valances, curtains edged with hand-made lace, and the finest of linen towels; the daughter of the buxom landlady is as charming as she is elegant, and the serving girl is a beautiful Murillo.

Passignano is full of beautiful women; they form two-thirds of the population of this little lake-side town. There are hardly any men in it except the old fishermen, and a few young lads, apprentices to bootmakers and saddlers. All the rest have drifted away to the towns, or have farms out in the paese. And the women, from the pretty French wife of Signor Arturo of the Albergo Balducci, with her freshly laundered cotton dresses, to the little bareheaded girls whose mothers call to them at night, bidding them bathe their dusty feet in the lake before they come to bed, are all lovely. They are noted for it.

The only other visitor in Passignano that August was a young Apollo—so beautifully dressed in pale grey riding-clothes that he looked as if he must have slipped out of a George Edwards musical comedy. He was, according to the landlady, a student from the University of Perugia, spending his vacation in Passignano because the girls were so beautiful! Oh, young Italy! How natural and unaffected you are! I loved to see him strolling down the village street with a lordly air of indifference, running the gauntlet of eyes as the pretty girls, linked in groups like bouquets of flowers, passed him demurely; while their mothers, sitting on the doorsteps of their cottages, scanned the handsome boy with kindly humour.

Everybody lives out of doors in Passignano. The women are always sitting outside their houses; and their children, half-naked in the summer heat, with halos of sunburned curls, pillow their heads on the rough cobbles of the hilly streets, and sleep after their play, as baby angels might sleep in paradise, tired out with singing. The stables and bakeries and workshops are open to the road, and above them the shabby brown houses clamber up the hillside to the Fortezza, which rears its shaggy head above the highest of their pagoda-like chimneys.

'If we stay here we shall prolong our lives for always,' cried the philosopher. 'Already I have forgotten the world!'