Studies of Travel: Italy

The Volumnian Tomb

The ancient Etruscans have some points of analogy with the modern Freemasons. This last familiar and yet mysterious body seems to let the outer world know everything about itself, except what it is. We have read various books by Freemasons about Freemasonry, about its history, its constitution, its ritual. On all these points they seem to give us the fullest particulars: we have only to complain that the historical part is a little vague, and its evidence a little uncertain. We should not like rashly to decide whether Freemasonry was already ancient in the days of Solomon or whether it cannot be traced with certainty any further back than the eighteenth century. But we know the exact duties of a Tyler, and we know that at the end of a Masonic prayer we should answer, not "Amen," but "So mote it be." Still, what Freemasonry is, how a man becomes a Freemason, or what really distinguishes a Freemason from other people, are points about which the Masonic books leave us wholly in the dark. So it is with the Etruscans. We seem to know everything about them, except who they were. As far as we can know a people from their arts and monuments, there is no people whom we seem to know better. We have full and clear monumental evidence as to the people themselves, as to many points in their ways, thoughts, and belief. We know how they built, carved, and painted, and their buildings, sculptures, and paintings, tell us in many points how they lived, and what was their faith and worship. We have indeed no Etruscan books; but their language still lives, at least it abides, in endless inscriptions. But who the Etruscans were, and what their language was, remain unsolved puzzles. The ordinary scholar is half-amused, half-provoked, at long lines of alphabetic writing, of which, as far as the mere letters go, he can read a great deal, but of which, save here and there a proper name, he cannot understand a word. He knows that one ingenious man has read it all into good German and another into good Turkish. He curses every Lucumo whose image he sees for sticking like a Frenchman to his own tongue. Why could they not write up everything in three or four languages? How happy he would be if he could light on a Latin or Greek crib which would give life to the dead letter. For surely nothing in the world so truly answers the description of a dead letter, as words after words, most of which it is not hard to spell, but at the meaning of which we cannot even guess.

It is natural that in the museums of the Etruscan cities the monuments of a kind whose interest is specially local should form a chief part of the show. At Florence, at Arezzo, at Cortona, at Perugia, the collections which each city has brought together make us familiar, if we are not so already, with much of Etruscan art and Etruscan life. Or shall we say that what they really make us familiar with is more truly Etruscan death? Our knowledge of most nations of remote times comes largely from their tombs and from the contents of their tombs, and this must specially be the case with a people who, like the Etruscans, have left no literature behind them. The last distinction makes it hardly fair to attempt any comparison between the Etruscans and nations like the Greeks or the Romans, with whose writings we are familiar. But suppose we had no Greek or Roman literature, suppose we had, as we have in the case of the Etruscans, no means of learning anything of Greek or Roman life, except from Greek and Roman monuments. The sepulchral element would be very important; but it would hardly be so distinctly dominant as it is in the Etruscan case. At all events, it would not be so distinctly forced upon the thoughts as it is in the Etruscan case. Take a Roman sarcophagus: we know it to be sepulchral, but it does not of itself proclaim its use; there often is no distinct reference to the deceased person; at all events, his whole figure is not graven on the top of the chest which contains his bones or his ashes. But in the Etruscan museums it is the sepulchral figures which draw the eye and the thoughts towards them far more than anything else, more than even the chimæra, the bronze lamp, and the painted muse. Of various sizes, of various degrees of art, they all keep one general likeness. The departed Lucumo leans on his elbow, his hand holding what the uninitiated are tempted to take for a dish symbolizing his admittance to divine banquets in the other world, but which the learned tell us is designed to catch the tears of those who mourn for him. Sometimes the Lucumonissa– if we may coin so mediæval a form – lies apart, sometimes along with her husband. On the whole, these Etruscan sculptures seem to bring us personally nearer to the men of a distant age and a mysterious race than is done by anything in either Greek or Roman art.

But if these works can teach us thus much when set in rows in a place where they were never meant to be set up, how much more plainly do they speak to us when we see them at home, untouched, in the place and in the state in which the first artist set them! The Volumnian tomb near Perugia is one of the sights which, when once seen, is not likely to be forgotten. The caution does not bear on Etruscan art; but it is well to walk to it from St. Peter's Abbey; going by the railway is a roundabout business, and the walk downwards commands a glorious and ever-shifting view over the plain and the mountains, with the towns of Assisi, Spello, and a third further on – can it be distant Trevi? Foligno lies down in the plain – each seated on its hill. The tomb is reached; a small collection from other places has been formed on each side of the door. This is all very well; but we doubt the wisdom of putting, as we understood had been done, some things from other places in the tomb itself. But this is not a moment at which we are inclined to find fault. We rejoice at finding that what ought to be there is so happily and wisely left in its place, and are not greatly disturbed if a few things are put inside which had better have been left outside. The stone doorway of the lintelled entrance – moved doubtless only when another member of the house was literally gathered to his fathers – stands by the side; it was too cumbrous to be kept in its old place now that the tomb stands ready to be entered by all whose tastes lead them that way. We go in; the mind goes back to ruder sepulchres at Uleybury and New Grange, of sepulchres at least as highly finished in their own way at Mykênê. But those were built, piled up of stones; here the dwelling of the dead Lucumos is hewn in the native tufa. The top is not, as we might have looked for, domical; it imitates the forms of a wooden roof. From it still hang the lamps; on its surface are carved the heads of the sun-god and of the ever-recurring Medusa. Nor is the sun-god's own presence utterly shut out from the home of the dead. It is a strange feeling when a burst of sunshine through the open door kindles the eyes of the Gorgon with a strange brilliancy, and lights up the innermost recess, almost as when the sinking rays light up the apses of Rheims and of St. Mark's. In that innermost recess, fronting us as we enter, lies on his kistwaen– may we transfer the barbarian name to so delicate a work of art? – the father of the household gathered around him. He is doubtless very far from being the first Felimna, but the first Felimna whose ashes rest here. The name of the family can be spelled out easily by those who, without boasting any special Etruscan lore, are used to the oldest Greek writing from right to left. Children and grandchildren are grouped around the patriarch; and here comes what, from a strictly historical view, is the most speaking thing in the whole tomb. The name of Avle Felimna can be easily read on a chest on the right hand. On the left hand opposite to it is another chest which has forsaken the Etruscan type. Here is no figure, no legend in mysterious characters. We have instead one of those sepulchral chests which imitate the figure of a house with doors. The legend, in every-day Latin, announces that the ashes within it are those of P. Volumnius A. F. That is, the Etruscan Avle Felimna was the father of the Roman Publius Volumnius. We are in the first century before our æra, when the old Etruscan life ended after the Social War, and when the Lucumos of Arretium and Perusia became Roman Clinii and Volumnii. To an English scholar the change comes home with a special force. He has an analogy in the change of nomenclature in his own land under Norman influences in the twelfth century. Publius Volumnius, son of Avle Felimna, is the exact parallel to Robert the son of Godwin, and a crowd of others in his days, Norman-named sons of English fathers.

We are not describing at length what may be found described at length elsewhere. But there is another point in these Etruscan sculptures which gives them a strange and special interest. This is their strangely Christian look. The genii are wonderfully like angels; but so are many Roman figures also, say those in the spandrils of the arch of Severus. But Roman art has nothing to set alongside of the Lucumo reclining on his tomb, not exactly like a strictly mediæval recumbent figure, but very like a tomb of the type not uncommon a little later, say in the time of Elizabeth and James the First. And in the sculptures on the chests, wherever, instead of familiar Greek legends, they give us living pictures of Etruscan life, we often see the sons of the Rasena clearly receiving a kind of baptism. There is no kind of ancient works which need a greater effort to believe in their antiquity. And nowhere do the sculptures look fresher – almost modern – than when seen in contrast with the walls and roof above and beside them, the sepulchre hewn in the rock, with the great stone rolled to its door.

Præ-Franciscan Assisi

There is a certain satisfaction, a satisfaction which has a spice of mischief in it, in dwelling on some feature in a place which is quite different from that which makes the place famous with the world in general. So to do is sometimes needful as a protest against serious error. When so many members of Parliament showed a few years back, and when the Times showed only a very little time back, that they believed that the University of Oxford was founded by somebody – Alfred will do as well as anybody else – and that the city of Oxford somehow grew up around the University, it became, and it remains, a duty to historic truth to point out the importance of Oxford, geographical and therefore political and military, for some ages before the University was heard of. When the Times thought that Oxford was left to the scholars, because "thanes and barons" did not think it worth struggling for, the Times clearly did not know that schools grew up at Oxford then, just as schools have grown up at Manchester since, because Oxford was already, according to the standard of the time, a great, flourishing, and central town, and therefore fittingly chosen as a seat of councils and parliaments. Here there is real error to fight against; in other cases there is simply a kind of pleasure in pointing out that, while the received object of attraction in a place is often perfectly worthy of its fame, the place contains other, and often older, objects which are worthy of some measure of fame also. It is quite possible that some people may think that the town of Assisi grew up round the church and monastery of Saint Francis. If anyone does think so, the error is of exactly the same kind as the error of thinking that the city of Oxford grew up around the University. It is Saint Francis and his church which have made Assisi a place of world-wide fame and world-wide pilgrimage, and Saint Francis and his church are fully worthy of their fame. Yet Assisi had been a city of men for ages on ages before Saint Francis was born, and Assisi would still be a place well worthy of a visit, though Saint Francis had never been born, and though his church had therefore never been built. It is perhaps a light matter that Assisi had eminent citizens besides Saint Francis and very unlike Saint Francis, that it was the birthplace of Propertius before him and of Metastasio after him. But before Assisi, as the birthplace of the seraphic doctor, had earned a right to be itself called "seraphica civitas," before one of its later churches came to rank with the patriarchal basilicas of Rome, Assisi had, as a Roman and an early mediæval city, covered its soil with monuments of which not a few still exist and which are well worthy of study. And in one way they have a kind of connexion with Saint Francis which his own church has not. The saint never saw his own monument; it would have vexed his soul could he have known that such a monument was to be. But in his youth he saw, and doubtless mused, as on the bleak mountain of Subasio and the yellow stream of Chiaschio, so also on the campanile and apse of the cathedral church of St. Rufino and on the columns of the converted temple of the Great Twin Brethren.

Assisi is one of the hill-cities; but the hill-cities supply endless varieties among themselves. Assisi does not, like the others which we have spoken of, occupy a hill which is wholly its own; the hill on which it stands, though very distinct, is still only a spur of a huge mountain. As at Mykênê, while the akropolis is high enough, there is something far higher rising immediately above it. And the akropolis of Assisi is a mere fortress; even if it was the primitive place of shelter, it cannot have been inhabited for many ages. The duomo stands, very far certainly from the top of the hill, but at the top of the really inhabited city with its continuous streets, and that is no small height from the lowest line of them. Above the church are the remains of the theatre, of the amphitheatre; the distant tower beyond it, and soaring over all, the fortress of Rocco Grande with no dwelling of man near it, or for some way below it. To go behind Assisi is almost more needful than in the case of any of the other hill-cities, not only for the mediæval walls, for the slight traces which seem to mark an outer and earlier wall; but yet more for the view over the narrow valley, the bleak hills scattered with houses, the winding river at their feet, soon to become yet more winding in the plain, and the glimpse far away of Perugia on its hill. But Assisi has a spot only less wild within the city walls, the ground namely over which we climb from the inhabited streets to the fortress. So it is at Cortona; but there the presence of the church and monastery of St. Margaret makes all the difference. The general view of Assisi, as seen from below, gives us the church of Saint Francis with the great arched substructure to the left, the mountain to the right; between them is a hill with a city running along it at about half its height, sending up a forest of bell-towers, some really good in themselves, all joining in the general effect. Above all this is the hill-top, partly grassy, partly rocky, crowned by the towers of the fortress which looks down on all, except the steep of the mountain itself.

Of particular objects older than the church of Saint Francis, a restriction which of course also cuts out the church of his friend, Saint Clara, there can be no doubt that the monument of greatest interest is the temple in the forum – now Piazza grande– with its Corinthian columns strangely hemmed in by a house on one side and on the other by the bell-tower which was added when the temple was turned into a church. But it is surely not, as it is locally called, a temple of Minerva, but rather of Castor and Pollux. Not the least interesting part of its belongings lies below ground; for the level of the forum at Assisi has risen as though it had been at Rome or at Trier. The temple must have risen on a bold flight of steps, of which some of the upper ones still remain. In front of it, below the steps, was a great altar, with the drains for the blood of the victims, just as we see them on the Athenian akropolis. Such drains always bring to our mind those comments of Dean Stanley on this repulsive feature of pagan and ancient Jewish worship, which has passed away alike from the church, from the synagogue, and from the mosque, save only at Mecca. In front again is the dedicatory inscription with the name of the founder of the temple, and the record of the dedication-feast which he made to the magistrates and people. His name can doubtless be turned to in Mommsen's great collection; we are not sure that in the underground gloom we took it down quite correctly, and it is better not to be wrong. Anyhow the dedication is not to Minerva but to the twin heroes. A great number of inscriptions are built up in the wall of the church. As usual, there are more freedmen than sons; and among the freedmen the one best worth notice is Publius Decimius Eros Merula, physician, surgeon, and oculist, who bought his freedom for so much, his magistracy as one of the Sexviri for so much, who spent so much on mending the roads, and left so much behind him. Here the state of things is vividly brought home to us in which a man could buy, not only his cook and his coachman, but also his architect and his medical adviser. And we are set thinking on the one hand how great must be the physical infusion of foreign blood, Greek and barbarian, in the actual people of Italy, and on the other hand how thoroughly and speedily all such foreign elements were practically Romanized. The son of the slave-born magistrate of Assisi would look on himself, and be looked on by others, as no less good a Roman than any Fabius or Cornelius who might still linger on.

The temple above ground and its appurtenances underground are the most memorable things in Præ-Franciscan Assisi; but there are other things besides, both Roman and mediæval. The lower church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, close by the bishop's palace, and which is said to have been the original cathedral, is a Romanesque building of rather a German look, with masses of wall instead of columns. The thought comes into the mind that it is the cella of a temple with arches cut through its walls. But it hardly can be; the arrangement seems to be a local fashion; it is found also in the later and larger church of St. Peter hard by. Besides, at Sta. Maria Maggiore there are the clear remains of a Roman building, seemingly a house, with columns and mosaic floors, underneath the present church of St. Rufino. The later cathedral has been sadly disfigured within; but it keeps its apse of the twelfth century, its west front of the thirteenth, using up older sculptures, and it has the best bell-tower in Assisi. And below it remains the crypt of the older church of 1028, with ancient Ionic columns used up, and Corinthian capitals imitated as they might be in 1028. Just above are scanty remains of the theatre; above again are still scantier remains of the amphitheatre; but its shape is impressed on the surrounding buildings, just as the four arms of the Roman chester abide unchanged in many an English town where every actual house is modern. A piece of Roman wall, and a wide arch in the Via San Paolo leading out of the forum, complete the remains of ancient Assisi above ground. It is doubtless altogether against rule, but among so many memorials of earlier gods and earlier saints, it is quite possible, in climbing the steep and narrow streets of Assisi, to forget for a while both Saint Francis and Saint Clara.

Spello

The Umbrian town which takes care to blazon over one of its many gates its full description as "Ispello Colonia Giulia, Citta Flavia Costante," is hardly of any great fame, either as ancient Hispellum or as modern Spello. It must have some visitors, drawn thither most likely by two or three pictures by famous masters which remain in one of its churches. Somebody must come to see them, or their keepers would not have learned the common, but shabby, trick of keeping them covered, in hopes of earning a lira by uncovering them. May we make the confession that we became aware – or, to speak more delicately, that we were reminded – of the existence of the colony at once Julian and Flavian by the description in the generally excellent German guide-book of Gsell-fels? And may we further add that, though we feel thoroughly thankful to its author for sending us to Spello at all, yet his description is not quite so orderly as is usual with him, and that, though he is perfectly accurate in his enumeration of the Roman monuments, yet his account led us to expect to find them in a more perfect state than they actually are? On the whole, except for the wonderful prospect which Spello shares with Perugia and Assisi, we should hardly send anybody to Spello except a very zealous antiquary; but a very zealous antiquary we certainly should send thither. There is no one object of first-rate importance of any date in the place; but there are the remains of a crowd of objects which have been of some importance. There is also the site; there is the general look of the place, which is akin to that of the other hill-towns, but which, as Spello is the smallest and least frequented of the group, is there less untouched and modernized in any way than even at Cortona or Assisi. We except of course the fashion of mercilessly spoiling the mediæval houses which has gone on as merrily at Spello as at Perugia and Assisi. But that is no fashion of yesterday. The general old-world air, strong in some parts of Perugia, stronger at Assisi, is strongest of all at Spello, while at Spello there seems less eagerness than at Cortona to seize the stranger and make a prey of him. The look-out is perhaps the finest of all; it takes in as prominent objects sharp-peaked mountains and ranges deep with snow, which barely come into the other views, and the long series of hill-towns is pleasantly broken by the towers and cupolas of Foligno in the plain. The mediæval walls and towers, at all events on the south-eastern side, form a line which is not easily surpassed; the walk outside Spello, though it lacks both the antiquity and the wildness of the walk outside Cortona, outdoes it in mere picturesque effect. The particular objects at Spello are perhaps a little disappointing: Spello itself, as a whole, is certainly not disappointing.

At Spello we have reached an Italian town which is not a bishop's see; even in Italy it was not likely to be so, with Assisi so close on one hand and Foligno on the other. There is therefore no duomo, nor is there any other church of much architectural importance. The best are two small forsaken Romanesque churches outside the walls, one on each side of the town. One of them, that of St. Claudius, forms one building of a group by which we pass on the road from Assisi to Spello, a group lying in the plain, with Spello on its height rising above them. There is a large modern villa which seems to be built on Roman foundations; by its side lies the little Romanesque church; nearly opposite is the amphitheatre of Hispellum, keeping some fragments of its walls and with its marked shape deeply impressed on the ground. Here the amphitheatre is down in the plain; at Assisi it stands in the higher part of the present city; in both it lies, according to rule, outside the original Roman enclosure. It shows the passionate love for these sports wherever the influence of Rome spread, that two amphitheatres could be needed with so small a distance between them as that which parts Assisi from Spello. More nearly opposite to the villa are other Roman fragments which are said to have been part of a theatre; but the form of the building is certainly not so clearly stamped on the ground as that of its bloodier neighbour. Indeed we are in a region of Roman remains; other fragments lie by the roadside between Assisi and Spello, and when we reach the latter town, we find that, next to its general effect, it is its Roman remains which form its chief attraction.