Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

Yet this town, as well as most Italian paesi, would reward a more lengthened stay, and, unlike many of them, a refined life is possible here. A person at once studiously and economically inclined might do much worse than commit himself to spend several months in the city of St. Francis. We did so last year, on the same principle that made us in childhood prefer the cherries that the birds had pecked, finding them the sweetest. We had heard Asisi abused: it was out of the world, it was desperately dull and there was nothing to eat. We therefore sent and engaged an apartment for the summer, and our confidence was not betrayed.

Perhaps the hotels are not good: we have never tried them. But the market is excellent for a mountain-city, and in the autumn figs and grapes are cheap and abundant. There are apartments to be let, and servants to be had who, with a little instruction, soon learn to cook in a civilized manner.

We have a fancy that there is a different moral atmosphere in a town surrounded by olive trees and one set in vineyards, the former being more sober and reserved, the latter more joyous and expansive. The latter may, indeed, carry its spirit too far—like the little city of Zagorolo near Rome, where the inhabitants are noted at the same time for the strength and excellence of their wines and for the quarrelsomeness of their dispositions. Palestrina, a little way off on the hillside, with a flowing skirt of vines all about it, breathes laughter in its very air. One may sit in Bernardini's—known to all visitors to the city of Fortune—and hear the travellers who come there laugh over mishaps which they would have growled over anywhere else. The comparison might be made of many other towns.

Asisi is set in a world of olives. They swing like smoke from a censer all through the corn and grain of the plain; they roll up the hills and mountains, climbing the almost perpendicular heights like goats; they crawl through the ravines; they cover the tiny plateaus set between the crowded hills; and plantations of slim young trees are set through the city, bending like long feathers and turning a soft silver as the wind passes over them. It is delightful to walk under the olive trees in early summer, when they hang full of strings of tiny cream-colored blossoms. In winter these blossoms will have changed to a small black fruit. The trees are as rugged as the roughest old apple trees, and many of them are supported only on a hollow half-circle of trunk or on two or three mere sticks. One wonders how these slender fragments of trunk can support that spreading weight above, especially in wind and tempest, and how that wealth of blossom and fruit can draw sufficient sustenance through such narrow and splintered channels; but the olive is tough, and the oil that runs in its veins for blood keeps it ever vigorous.

True to my fancy—which, indeed, it helped to nourish—Asisi is a serious town. It has even an air of gentle melancholy, which is not, however, depressing, but which inclines to thoughtfulness and study. Travellers are familiar with its aspect—the crowning citadel with the ring of green turf between it and the city, which stretches across the shoulders of the mountain, row above row of gray houses, with the magnificent pile of the church and convent of St. Francis at its western extremity, clasped to the steep rock with a hold that an earthquake could scarcely loosen. Three long streets stretch from east to west, the central one a very respectable street, clean, well-paved, and delightfully quiet. You may sit in a window there and hear nothing the livelong day but the drip of a fountain and the screaming of clouds of swallows, which are, without exception, the most impudent birds that can be imagined. Annoyed one day by the persistent "peeping" of a swallow that had perched in a nook just outside my window, I leaned out and frightened him away with my handkerchief. He darted down to a little olive-plantation below, and a minute after up came a score or two of swallows and began flying round in a circle directly before my window, screaming like little demons. Now and then one would dart out of the circle and make a vicious dip toward my face, with the evident wish to peck my eyes out, so that I was glad to draw back. It reminded me of the famous circular battery which attacked one of the Confederate forts during our civil war, and it was quite as well managed.

The vetturino whom we took from the station up to the town on our arrival told me, when I gave my address, that the Sor Filomena had gone away from Asisi, and I had better go to the hotel Leone. I insisted on being taken to the Sor Filomena's house. He replied that the house was closed, and renewed his recommendations of the Leone. After the inevitable combat we succeeded in having ourselves set down at our lodgings, where Sor Filomena's rosy face appeared at the open door.

"Why did you tell such a lie?" I asked of the unblushing vetturino, using the rough word bugia.

He looked insulted: "I have not told a bugia."

With a philosophical desire for information I repeated the question, using the milder word mensogna. He drew himself up, looked virtuous and declared that he had not told a mensogna.

"Why, then," I asked, "have you said one thing for another?"

It was just what he wanted. He immediately began a profuse verbal explanation of why one thing was sometimes better to say than another, why one was truer than another, and so mixed up his una cosa and un' altra cosa as to put me quite hors de combat, and send me into the house with the impression that I ought to be ashamed of myself for having told somebody a lie. It brought to my mind one of my father's favorite quotations: "Some things can be done as well as some other things."

I was shown to my room, which was rough, as all rooms in Asisi are, but large and high. As Sor Filomena said, it had un' aria signorile in spite of the coarse brick floor and the ugly doors and lumpy walls. Some large dauby old paintings gave a color to the dimness, there were a fine old oak secretary black with age, a real bishop's carved stool with a red cushion laid on it, and a long window opening on to a view of the wide plain with its circling mountains and its many cities and paesetti—Perugia shining white from the neighboring hill; Spello and Spoleto standing out in bold profile in the opposite direction; Montefalco lying like a gray pile of rocks on a southern hilltop; the village and church of Santa Maria degli Angeli nestled like a flock of cloves in the plain; and half a dozen others.

I ordered writing-table and chair to be set before the window, and enthroned upon the bishop's tabouret an unabridged Worcester—this being probably his first visit to Asisi—and I was immediately at home.

The servant, Maria, whose maternal grandmother was a countess, was making some last arrangements in the room.

"Come and see what a beautiful new moon there is," I said to her.

She came to the window and looked toward the west. "That isn't the moon: it is a star," she said, fixing her eyes upon Venus.

It was quite characteristic of her class. They all think forestieri do not know the moon from a star.

I pointed lower down, to where an ecstatic crescent was melting in the sunset gold.

She gazed at it a moment, then said: "It is beautiful: I never noticed it before. I never look at the sky except to see what the weather is to be. It is for you signori to look at beautiful things, not for us poveretti.—Do you see the sky in America?" she asked presently.

I assured her that we do, and that the sun, moon and stars shine in it just as here in Italy.

She was greatly puzzled. "I thought that America was under ground," she said.

I remembered Galileo and held my peace. Besides, in these days of universal knowledge, when we hear scientific terms lisped by infant lips, it is refreshing to see an example of fine old-fashioned ignorance. Yet this woman had better manners than are to be found in most drawing-rooms, a sweet, courteous dignity, and in matters which came within her personal knowledge great good sense and judgment. Only she had never learned that from the centre of the earth all directions are up.

Of course a stranger's first visit in Asisi is to the basilica of San Francesco, and, though I had seen it before, I lost no time in renewing my acquaintance with it. This church is not only the jewel of Asisi, but one of the most precious of Italy. It is among churches what a person of genius is in a crowd. The rich marbles one sees elsewhere suggest the mechanic in their arrangement, and one grows almost tired of them; but here the soul of Art and Faith has poured itself out, covering all the wide walls, the ceilings, the sides of arches, the ribs of groinings—every foot of space, in short—with life and color; and how much more precious is one of those solemn pearly faces than a panel of alabaster or the most cunning mosaic of marbles! In the upper church alone there are twenty-two large frescoes of Cimabue and thirty of Giotto. Over these pours the light from fourteen large colored windows, unimpeded by side-aisles. When the sun beats upon these windows the church seems to be filled with a transparent mist softly tinted with a thousand rich hues. The deep-blue, star-sown vault sparkles and the figures on the walls become a vision.

The upper church has been in danger of losing its beautiful choir, a marvel of carving and intarsio, which Cavalcasella, inspector of fine arts in Italy, removed for the odd reason that it was a work of the fourteenth century, while the church was of the thirteenth, and to be in perfect keeping should have a stone choir. I have not learned whether this hyper-purist will require of the congregation a thirteenth-century costume when the church is again open for service.

These beautiful stalls, one hundred and two in number, are now placed for safe-keeping in what was the infirmary of the adjoining college. Possibly, when the work going on pian piano in the church is completed, they may be restored to their original place. Their sombre richness would show well in that radiant atmosphere.

The work in the church is, however, well done, and was greatly needed, for those precious frescoes were gradually going to decay. No touch of pencil is allowed: the work is one of preservation merely, and is being conducted with the greatest care. The loosened intonaco is found by tapping lightly on the wall: plaster is then slipped underneath and the painting firmly pressed to its place. At first gesso was used, but it was found not to answer the purpose. Every smallest fragment of painting is saved, and the blank spaces are filled in with plaster which is painted a light gray. This freshens and throws out the adjoining colors.

It is customary to call the lower church "devotional." With many, a dark church is always devotional. I should rather call it sympathetic. Every sort of mood may here find itself reflected, and the sinner be as much at home as the saint. Anger and hate may hide as well as devotion: the artist may dream, the weary may rest, the stupid doze. The only objects which ever seemed to me utterly incongruous there were a brisk company of hurried tourists, red-covered guidebook in hand, clattering with sharp-sounding boot-heels up the dim nave and talking with sharp, loud voices at the very steps of the altar where people were kneeling at the most solemn moment of the mass. But even these invariably soften their tones and their movements after a while.

This church has always some pleasant surprise for the frequent visitor. The morning light shows one picture, the evening light another: the sunrise adorns this window, the sunset that. There is no hour from dawn to dark in which some gem of ancient painting does not look its best, while little noticed, if seen at all, at other hours. Some are seen by a reflected light; others, when the church is so dark that one may stumble against a person in the nave, gather to themselves the dim and scattered rays like an aureole, from which they look out with soft distinctness; and there are others, again, upon which a sun-ray, finding a narrow passage through arch after arch, alights with a sudden momentary glory that is almost startling.

It is a fascinating place, that middle church—never light, but always traversed by some varying illumination which is ever lost in shadows. And in those shadows how much may lurk of present material beauty and of beautiful memory! Here, before the chapel of St. Louis, Raphael lingered, learning the frescoed Sibyls of its vault so by heart that he almost reproduced them afterward in the Pace at Rome—that dear Raphael who did not fear being called a plagiarist, his soul was so full of beauty, and he so transfigured whatever he touched with that suave pencil of his that seemed to have been clipped in light for a color. And where did the feet of Michael Angelo rest when he stood in the transept and praised that Crucifixion painted on the wall? One might expect that the stones would have been conscious of the Orpheus they supported.

In the college adjoining the church there were a year ago but fifteen monks, and no others are admitted. When these fifteen shall be dead the convent—Sacro Collegio they call it—will pass entirely into the hands of the government, which now uses the greater part of it for a school for the sons of poor teachers, who are sent here from all parts of Italy.

Accompanied by a professor of the college, we went over that part of the building not appropriated to the monks. It is a little town in itself, and has something of the variety and contrasts of a town. To go from the vast refectory to that upper part of the building called the Ghetto, with its interminable low and narrow corridor and lines of little chambers, is to see the two extremes of which building is capable.

Without intending to write a statistical article, I may give a few of the dimensions we took note of. The refectory is one hundred and ninety feet long and forty wide, and is capable of seating at table five hundred persons. The tables run around the room, with a single row of seats against the wall, and are served from the centre of the hall. Quite across one end extends a painting of the Last Supper. At one side is a tiny pulpit, from which in the old time one would read aloud while the monks ate.

The infirmary and rooms used for storing articles in ordinary use occupy twenty large chambers. The five elementary school-rooms are each fifty feet square, the kitchen is eighty-three feet square, and the fencing-hall and garden adjoining contain together over sixty-six hundred square feet. The cistern under the cloister is of nearly the same size.

There is water in profusion—in the court, the kitchen, the boys' wash-rooms, wherever it can be needed. In the entry from the principal court is an odd fourteenth-century fountain which is a perfect calendar. It is set against the wall, and is in twelve compartments, answering to the twelve months of the year. In the frieze above are carved roses, red stone on a white ground—in some compartments thirty, in others thirty-one, answering to the days of the month. All the fountains are made of the crimson-and-white stone of Asisi, which is seen everywhere about the city—in vases for holy water, in pavements, in garden-walls, in the foundations of houses. The stone, a red sandstone, is found in plenty in the adjoining mountains, and has a rich, soft crimson hue with irregular lines of white. But it is very hard to work, and could scarcely be made to pay the expense of the necessary machinery.

"For what I should have to pay for a bath of red marble, about one hundred lire (twenty dollars)," said the Count B– to me, "I could buy a bath of Carrara."

"Baths of crimson marble and of Carrara!" I thought, and remembered with an involuntary shudder my dear native zinc.

But to return to the Sacro Collegio. In one of the immense labyrinthine cellars is a botte for wine capable of containing five thousand litri. There, it is said—I know not how truly—once a year, when the botte was emptied, came four of the spiritual fathers of the college above, with a table and chairs, and played a certain game of cards, which was one of their simple amusements. Whether this meeting was intended as an exorcism of any evil influences which might threaten the new must about to be put in, or a mild bacchanalian tribute to the empty space from which they had drawn so much comfort and cheerfulness during the year, or whether the wine left some fine perfume behind it which they wished to inhale, tradition saith not. Maybe the fathers never went there, and the story is merely ben trovato.

In the school of design we admired a copy of some of the carving of the choir of the cathedral of Asisi. The leaves were remarkably crisp and all the lines full of life. My guide told me that this choir and the famous one of St. Peter's in Perugia were designed by the same artist, but that of Perugia was executed by another and more timid hand, while this of Asisi was carved by the artist himself.

Our last visit in the college was to the grand loggia—finer than anything of the kind I have seen in Italy except the Loggia del Paradiso of Monte Casino, which is open, while this of San Francesco is closed. The grandeur of this loggia, with its lofty arches and long perspective, is in harmony with the magnificence of the view to be seen from it. Seated there, on the stone divan that runs the whole length of the colonnade, I listened a while to the very interesting talk of my companion. This gentleman, Professor Cristofani, is said to be one of the most learned men in Umbria, and has studied so thoroughly his native province as to be an authority on all that concerns its history and antiquities. A native of Asisi, he has devoted himself especially to that city, and his Storia di Asisi and Guida di Asisi are monuments of learned and patient research. He has written also a history of San Damiano which has lately been translated in England.

The government took possession of this church and convent of San Damiano, the first home of St. Clara and her companions, and proposed establishing there a school of arts and trades; but Lord Ripon persuaded them to sell the property to him, and in his turn presented it to the frati from whom it had been taken. It is a rough place, but interesting in memories.

"I have a book in petto," the professor said, "which will, I think, be more valuable and interesting than the others. I have collected material for a history of the church and convent of St. Francis, and shall write it as soon as I have time. I should be glad if it could be illustrated."

While he spoke my imagination was already turning over the leaves of a history of that stately monument, around which clusters so much of Middle-Age story, and looking at copies of forms and faces which to remember is a dream of rainbows and angels. There should be that quaint Madonna who points her thumb over her shoulder at St. Francis while she asks her Son to bless him, and the three saints and the Madonna of the north transept, and the pictures at the entrance of the chapel of San Martino, and the vault of the chapel of St. Louis, and a thousand other lovely things.

And, "Signor Professore," I said eagerly, "how I should like to translate that work, pictures and all, into English!"

He cordially consented, with many compliments.

As we left the loggia he pointed to the arch opposite the entrance-door. "That is the arch of suicides," he said: "more than one man has thrown himself down that precipice."

We were joined by a Benedictine monk as we went but, who proposed that we should go up the campanile. It is pleasant to visit the bells of a famous or favorite church. It is like seeing a poet whose songs we have heard, and pleasanter in some respects; for while the poet may mantle himself in commonplace at our approach, like Olympus in clouds, one can always waken the spirit of song in these airy singers.

The way up this campanile is very rough, a mere gravelly path, and one can only maintain his footing by holding a rope that runs all the way up, following the four sides. Reaching the large chamber at the top, we paid our respects to the seven bells, whose intricate changes I had so many times tried to follow. Their ringing is a puzzle. In the middle hung the melancholy campanone, with a silvery soprano by its side—a very Dante and Beatrice among bells.

We stayed to hear the noon Angelus strike, and while the last stroke was still booming around the great bell I took a step toward it and stretched my hand out.

I was instantly snatched backward, with a profusion of excuses.

"It is said," the professor explained, "that if a bell be touched, even with the finger-tip, while ringing, it will instantly break. I do not know if it be true, but it is worth guarding against."

It was indeed! A fine appetite I should have had for my breakfast, at that moment awaiting me, if I had had to reflect over it that the great bell of the great basilica of St. Francis of Asisi had that very morning been cracked into pieces by my fore finger! What visions of horrified crowds of Asisinati, of black storms of newspaper items, of censuring gossip the world over, would have come between me and that purple pigeon smothered in rice which Maria had promised me! The pope himself would have known me individually out of the cloud of his subjects, and have frowned upon my image. And how it would have been whispered behind me to the end of my days, "That is the lady who broke the great bell of St. Francis"! But I had not broken it, and it still hangs sound and strong, to send its melancholy sweet music out to meet the centuries as they roll in storm and sunshine over the eastern mountains. Let us be thankful for the evils which might have happened and did not.

I cannot resist the temptation to relate a little incident concerning this same learned Professor Cristofani, it struck me as so quaint. He is a poor man—literature, and even teaching, do not pay very well in Italian paesi—and he has a family. Cheaply as servants may be employed, he could not afford one, and his wife was not very well. Last summer the Alpinisti visited Asisi, and some of the principal members, having an introduction to him, wished to visit him. Their stay in Asisi was short, and, being sunrise-and-mountain-top people, they made their call at six o'clock in the morning on their way to the top of Mount Asio, from which Asisi takes its name, and, I may here add, the correct spelling of its name, which I have followed. A servant from the Leone Hotel showed the visitors to the house, and very stupidly knocked at the kitchen-door. A loud "Avanti!" from within answered the knock. The door was opened by the guide, revealing a tableau. The professor, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and an apron tied on, was earnestly kneading a mass of dough preparatory to sending it to the baker's oven, where everybody bakes their bread, and his pretty blonde young daughter was making coffee at the kitchen fire.

"Well, I am a poor man, and my wife was sick," he said afterward, in telling the story, with a sad smile in his eyes, which are as blue and almost as blind as violets.

These stories awaken a laugh only at the time, but gain a certain sublimity when years have gilded them—like that one of St. Bonaventura, which this reminds us of: When the two legates sent by the pope of that time to carry the scarlet beretta of a cardinal to St. Bonaventura set out in search of him, they were obliged to follow him to a little Franciscan convent at a short distance from Florence, where he had retired for devotion and to practise for a while the humble rules of his order. As these two dignified prelates came solemnly around an angle of the building they glanced through the open kitchen-window, and were astonished to see the personage they sought engaged in washing the supper-dishes. He accosted them with perfect calmness, and, learning their errand, requested them to hang the hat in a tree near by till he should have finished washing the dishes. They complied, and the pots and pans and plates having been attended to, the whole community adjourned to the chapel and the saint received the dignity of prince of the Church.

The eight days' festa of Corpus Domini opened in Asisi with one of the most exquisite sights I have ever seen, the procession of the cathedral as it passed from San Francesco through Via Superba on its return to the cathedral. We took our places in a window reserved for us, and waited. There all was quiet and deserted. The air was perfumed by sprigs of green which each one had strewn before his own house. One living creature alone was visible—a little boy who knelt in the middle of the street and carefully placed small yellow flowers in the form of an immense sunflower chalked out on the pavement. Here and there, in some stairway-window, a shrine had been prepared, with its Madonna, lamp and flowers. It was near noon of a bright June day, but the houses were so high that the sun struck only on the upper stories of the north side of the street. All below was in that transparent shadow wherein objects look like pictures of themselves or like reflections in clear water. The whole street was indeed a picture, with its gray houses set in irregular lines, and as distinct in character as a line of men and women would have been. On the building opposite our window was an inscription telling that Metastasio had lived there—on another a date, 1419.