And tend the shrine,
Some Deity on wandering wing
May there incline;
And, finding all in order meet,
Stay while we worship at her feet.
ORVIETO: THE CITY OF WOE
'To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.'
Dante.
The broad white steps of Orvieto Cathedral were strewn with thousands of dead flies, killed by the merciless glitter of its new mosaics in the eye of the sunshine. Poor little dust of life scattered at the door of Madonna Mary's temple, with your shattered wings and your sightless crawling agony, meeting your death unwittingly in the heart of this city of woe! You are the key to its desolation, you with your myriads of dead, the horrid harvest of an insatiable ghoul. For not even the shrill music of Luca Signorelli's angels, hovering above the gloomy fortresses of Orvieto with their hair streaming in the breeze of the dawn, can raise her up to life. She is a city of the dead—shrivelled and dark-browed, standing high over the plain on an island of volcanic rock, 'dark-stained with hue ferruginous,' like Malebolge within the depths of hell. Death lies around her in the valleys where the earth is riddled with the tombs of Etruria—one vast necropolis—and she herself, though she held life so dearly, as we can see by her grim Romanesque houses each with its back to the wall as it were, each armed at every point, would be almost dead to the world if it were not for the Tuscan glitter of her great Miracle Church.