A Little Pilgrimage in Italy

by Olave M. Potter

In Foligno it still rained. From my bed I could see the indigo clouds which had pursued us with such a mighty storm-song all the way from Urbino. Every now and then great splots of water fell from the wide eaves on the paved street, with a pleasant sound like the intermittent music of a fountain.

I was in no hurry to get up. We had arrived late the night before, in such a downpour of rain that we knew nothing of Foligno except that we had driven through a wide avenue of plane trees to the city barrier, where the douane insisted on opening our luggage; and that the Albergo della Posta, whose charming host, Signor Cherubino Pinelli, had made us welcome, was one of the most comfortable hospices in Umbria.

But we were back in Umbria, mystical Umbria, where ancient gods walk hand in hand with saints along the banks of gently flowing streams; where life goes slowly to the tune of bells slung round the dewlaps of snow-white oxen, bred by the waters of Clitumnus and praised by Virgil, Pliny and Propertius; where the soft beauty of the hills and sky forms worthy backgrounds for a gentle people, whose stately and unconscious grace has been immortalised by artists of the Quattrocento—an age in which, we learn from Matarazzo, the human form was worshipped with a touch of the old passion which was mother to the genius of Greece.

And that was enough to take me out of bed and to the window, where I found the wings of the storm sweeping across the bleak blue hills towards Nocera as it fled back to the Appennines, and the sun already shining through the rain upon the white towers of Spoleto, while Trevi, near at hand, rose out of the plain on the top of her conical hill.

In the road below, the men of the octroi, with their long blue cloaks wrapped round them, waited, rapier in hand, to prod the bags and bundles of the peasants as they entered the city gates. And along the fair white road which links the little townships of this Umbrian vale together—Perugia, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Trevi, Spoleto—I saw a stream of people flowing towards the Porta Romana. Some had burdens on their heads, and others were riding pannier-wise on mules; here they walked with free step beside their milk-white oxen, there they rode on wooden tumbrils among their heaped-up fruits and vegetables. Far away where the slim poplars rose up like banners upon the horizon I saw them, mere specks upon the long white ribbon of the road. Below my window they streamed into Foligno through the modern barrier which has taken the place of the old Porta Romana, running the gauntlet of the facetious or overbearing octroi-men, who prodded everything with their long skewers in search of illicit wares.

It was a rare comedy to watch. The gay Lothario, whose cloak thrown well over his left shoulder gave him a swashbuckling appearance, lingered in conversation with the pretty kerchiefed girls, though often they carried nothing in their hands at all; and dare-devil boys fled laughing by on their bicycles, with diminutive dinner-bags tied to the handle-bars, nor slackened speed for the surly old octroi-man who bade them stop, and who, I wager, suspected every one of them.

Foligno, which many people only remember as the little city low in the background of Raphael's Madonna del Foligno, is to-day as it has always been, one of the most important commercial towns in Umbria. Its position down in the plain three miles from Forum Flaminii, the junction between the great Flaminian Road from Rome to the Adriatic, and its loop branch by Interamna, Spoleto, Trevi and Foligno, made the Fulginium of Imperial Rome a city of considerable importance. The proximity of Mevania and Hispellum probably prevented its growth during the Roman Empire; but after the destruction of Forum Flaminii by the Longobards in the eighth century, its scattered inhabitants settled in the then flourishing town of Foligno, which became one of the chief communes in Umbria. Was it not in the market of Foligno that young Francesco Bernardone came to sell his father's bales of cloth before he gave the money to the old priest of San Damiano? And is it not the proud boast of Foligno that in 1472 the earliest copy of the Divina Commedia was printed within her walls, a fact which her citizens claim to prove not only her industrial but her artistic energy?

Standing at the junction of the railways from Rome and Florence to Ancona she is of considerable commercial importance to-day, with numerous sugar refineries and paper mills, and a large carburet factory on the banks of the Topino. But never did a city so small and compact hide the cloven foot of commercialism as well as Foligno. It is true that looking down on her from Perugia or Spoleto, she is seen, lying like a bride in the green valley, below a veil of fine white dust or smoke from the carburet factory; but outside the walls she is still the city Raphael painted for Sigismondo Conti; and in her byways she is the same town which ran with blood when the terrible Corrado Trinci paraded through her streets with the three hundred dead who were the price of his Vendetta.

For when Ser Pietro da Rasiglia, the Governor of Nocera, whose wife Niccolò Trinci had dishonoured, lured Niccolò and his brother Bartolomeo to Nocera and slew them on a hunting expedition, Corrado killed three hundred 'souls' and brought them back heaped up on mules to show his vengeance to the people of Foligno.