A Little Pilgrimage in Italy

by Olave M. Potter

FOLIGNO: SAN DOMENICO.

Foligno is full of ancient churches, some with their ruddy mediaeval grace unspoiled, like beautiful Santa Maria Infra Portas, a little Romanesque building of rose-coloured Subasian stone with a gracious porch and a square bell-tower, which is a treasure-house of frescoes, and contains an interesting Byzantine chapel. And others like San Feliciano, the Cathedral, modernised within, but still one of the chief glories of Foligno with its exquisite facciata minore in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, rich with the art of the Comacine Masters, and the beautiful reconstruction of the western front by the Scuola di Arti e Mestieri.

FOLIGNO: WELL IN THE CASA NOCCHI.

But it is the fruit of her mightiest days that makes Foligno rich in monuments—the years between 1305 and 1439 in which the Trinci, having finally driven the Ghibellines out of the city, were its despots, until Eugenius IV., to whom the memory of Corrado's terrible vendetta had an evil savour, deprived him of power, and put him and his family to death. For to this period Foligno owes the vast church of San Domenico, whose picturesque campanile Mr. Markino has sketched rising over the trees of Signor Tradardi's garden; and little San Giovanni dell'Acqua with its gracious doorway; and San Francesco and San Salvatore, and the dismantled church of Santa Caterina, and many another façade of rose and white Subasian stone, on which the years have wrought a tender bloom as of fruit ripened in the sun. And not churches only, for to the Trinci she owes the stately Palazzo Trinci long since fallen to decay, but still linked to San Feliciano by a covered archway, still preserving its great processional stairway, still decorated with the frescoes which Ottaviano Nelli painted for the bloodthirsty Corrado.

Foligno has many charms too often overlooked by the traveller because she is such an admirable headquarters both by rail and road for seeing Central Umbria. The courtyards of her ancient palaces have lovely well-heads of wrought iron, and many of their doors have quaint and interesting epigrams over the lintel. She has a little Venice on the banks of a canal, half dammed by docks and water weeds, crossed by a Roman bridge; and a water mill, where the women wash their linen in a long arcade of red brick overhanging the brown millstream. Her churches are full of golden pictures by the greatest exponents of the Foligno school, Niccolò d'Alunno, and Pier Antonio Mesastris, a painter little known outside his native town, whose beautiful Angels and Madonnas, combining an ideal tenderness and sweetness of conception with a real depth of feeling, have earned, in the language of the people, the name of Maestà Bella.

Speaking of the Foligno school of painting, which was characterised by an earnestness not to be found in every branch of Umbrian art, whether it is the grace and delicate spirituality of Mesastris or the tragic intensity of Niccolò d'Alunno, brings me to Foligno's modern school of art, of which she is justly proud. It is housed in the old cloisters of San Niccolò where Canova once had his studio, and where he left many of his plaster casts. And it is under the direction of Professor Arturo Tradardi, a delightful enthusiast who never wearies of studying the glories of his native town, or seeking to recreate them. In the beautiful cloistered garden of the Scuola di Arti e Mestieri he has gathered together reproductions in plaster, toned to the exact colour of the originals, of all the most beautiful monuments in Umbria. A labour of love which may be responsible for some of the extraordinary energy to be found in Foligno, which with Viterbo leads the way among the smaller towns of Italy in the glorious work of freeing ancient monuments from the plaster prisons in which they have lain hidden from the world during the last three centuries.

It goes without saying that Foligno, which lies low in the heart of Umbria, not more than ten miles from Assisi, the cradle of the Franciscan legend, should be the birthplace of a saint. But, notwithstanding the picturesque legend of the Blessed Angela, which tells us that as she walked through the fields of Umbria, wearied by her struggles, and despairing of overcoming the burden of her sins, she heard the voice of Christ bidding her be of good cheer because He loved her better than any other woman in the Valley of Spoleto, we hear more of the Blessed Angelina within Foligno than of Sant'Angela, who lies buried in the church of San Francesco. For it was the Blessed Angelina, Countess of Civitella and Montegiove, who founded the Convento delle Contesse, that quiet retreat in a forgotten corner of Foligno where noble women have continued to work and pray unceasingly since its foundation towards the end of the fourteenth century. Just as it was the Blessed Angelina's chapel in the church of the Franciscans which sweated blood seventeen years after her death because, as she related in a vision, the Christians had lost Constantinople.