'For bodiless dreams through double gateways go
Of horn and ivory, from night's realm forlorn;
And those that through the ivory gate are borne
Deceive, and what they tell is unfulfilled;
But those that issue through the polished horn
Fulfil themselves for mortals to whose sight
They issue.'

J. W. Mackail's Translation of the Odyssey,
xix. 562.

'Look!' said the chronicler, 'there is Perugia. Perugia, whom I have loved so long for her name alone.'

The poet sighed.

'I could almost envy you because you do not know her. See how her loggia'd towers frame the heavens, and how she stretches out her lovely arms to welcome us!'

We came to Perugia from Cortona. In an hour we slipped from that austere Tuscan citadel into the heart of an enchanted land—Umbria Mystica—the home of saints, where Beauty and Romance walk in the valleys with the gentle Gods of Arcady; where brooding peace hangs in the luminous air, and on whose aerial hills great memories dwell in the little cities full of dreams that men have built for them. We skirted the enchanted shores of Thrasymene, the spell-bound lake which lies like an opal in the bosom of the Umbrian Hills, and found ourselves among vineyards and olive-gardens, where the Madonnas of Perugino and Raphael are living their beautiful and simple lives in the fields, and the great-eyed oxen draw Virgilian ploughs below the olives, or roll along the dusty roads with scarlet fillets on their milk-white heads.

Perugia is the queen of this enchanted land, the crown of Umbria. Think of her name—Perusia Augusta the Romans called her; was there ever a more lovely name, or one which History enriched with more poetic legends? For Felice Ciatti, that brilliant scholar of the seventeenth century, in summing up the Greco-Trojan tradition and the popular belief that Noah, the Patriarch, was the founder of the city, thought nothing of addressing the Perugians, in one of his Lenten sermons, in these stirring words—'No marvel is it if, to-day, ye Perugians possess the justice of the Armenians, the wisdom of the Greeks, the prosperity of Augustus, and the sanctity of Noah, for ye are descended from them all.'

And if these legends leave you cold, think of the Carlovingian tradition in which such great names as Oliver the Paladin, and the puissant knight, Count Roland, 'the Falcon of Christendom,' and the tyrant Orgoglioso, play their parts with the lovely lady Prossimana. Or, if this does not stir you, would you rather learn romance from the nomenclature of her ancient gates? Here, long since vanished, was the Portal of the Sun, the gate through which blind Homer thought that dreams entered into a city from the east. It still gives its name to a whole quarter of Perugia—the Rione della Porta Sole—and though no man can point to the actual Porta Sole, when the wind blows coolly through any of Perugia's eastern gates, and you look across the valley at Assisi, it will be strange if you do not think of Dante's words:

'There hangs

Rich slope of mountain high, whence heat and cold
Are wafted through Perugia's eastern gate:
And Nocera with Gualdo, in its rear
Mourn for their heavy yoke. Upon that side,
Where it doth break its steepness most, arose
A sun upon this world, as duly this
From Ganges doth; therefore let none, who speak
Of that place, say Ascesi; for its name
Were lamely so delivered; but the East,
To call things rightly, be it henceforth styled.'[2]

Here, at the end of a winding street of mediaeval houses, is the Porta Eburnea, the Ivory Gate through which Homer thought that False Dreams were expelled from a city; and close to Sant'Ercolano is the Porta Cornea, the Gate of Horn, whence issued all True Dreams. The Porta Eburnea was, indeed, the gate of False Dreams, for it was by that way, so Matarazzo tells us, that the Baglioni, that strange and beautiful and ungodly race who lived and died by violence, always passed out to battle. Of the others the Porta Augusta, the greatest of the Etruscan gates, once bore the proud name Porta Pulchra, because of its beauty even in a beautiful city; and another was named, and is still named, after the God of War. Is it not irony that all the rest should bear the names of saints, for Perugia, a city of turbulent desires, has ever bred more warriors than saints? Even to-day there are few monks or nuns in Perugia; it is the military who are in evidence, and not a few churches and cloisters have been despoiled to house them. In fact Perugia, notwithstanding her mediaeval monuments, is a gay and much begarrisoned city, not provincial like Siena, but really the capital of a state. I have never seen so many smart and pretty women in any Italian town of the size as I found at Perugia in high summer, nor so many soldiers. The Corso is full of them, both morning and evening. They promenade up and down, 'wearing out the pavements,' in the phrase of the immortal and energetic Fortebraccio; or they sit at cafÉs gossiping after their siestas. At night they become an army. It seems as though the entire population congregated then in the Corso and the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where there is a band and a mushroom growth of tables and chairs. On Sundays they promenade in the cathedral in just the same gay and careless fashion, except that the boys doff their hats, and that here you see shaggy-haired and devout peasants kneeling among the beautifully-dressed Perugian ladies.

53

Perugia is not a religious city. It is true that she furnished the most ardent disciples of the thirteenth-century Flagellants;[3] and that Fra Bernadino of Siena, preaching to her from the little pulpit outside the cathedral of San Lorenzo, brought her to such a passion of repentance that not only did she burn her vanities in the piazza before this ardent Flame of God, as the Florentines were to do later for Savonarola, but she built in his memory that exquisite oratory covered with reliefs in terra-cotta by Agostino Duccio, under the shadow of San Francesco. Yet for the rest it seems as though she has not forgiven the papacy for grinding her under its heel in the stormy sixteenth century, when Paul III. built his fortress on the ruined palaces of the Baglioni; although, on the Feast of the Ring of the Virgin, which, for all her air of cynicism, she still counts as one of her treasures, we saw the peasants who had climbed her hillside in the dawn worshipping with the simple faith of the Middle Ages.

Matarazzo has told the story of this Ring, and how it was stolen from Chiusi, where it was held in great veneration, in the thirteenth century by a German priest, and brought by the intervention of the Holy Virgin to Perugia. It is shown in San Lorenzo in a finely-wrought casket thrice a year; otherwise it is kept in an iron chest, whose seven keys are in the custody of different citizens. We arrived early enough to go into the loft, where the chest is lodged, above the Altar of the Sacrament, and see the Ring being put sans cÉrÉmonie into its place in the gold casket before the red silk curtains were drawn back and the holy relic lowered to the altar. A short mass was said, and the casket was placed on a table in the centre of the chapel for the people to pass one by one in front of it.

It was a sacrament, a holy and beautiful thing, to watch them as they passed, these peasants with their broken dusty hats and rugged faces, who had come up from the valleys with their Madonna-like wives. They pressed their lips to the glass, and held up their rosaries and rings to touch the shrine. All had some special sign of love and reverence.

57

I watched them till my eyes were filled with tears because of the beauty and the pathos and the blessedness of it all. One by one they passed. First, an old woman, her white hair hidden beneath a gold kerchief, and a smile of rare peace on her gnarled face, pressed her lips to the casket and handed up her rosary that it might touch the shrine. She passed down with bent head. Next came a girl of the splendid Umbrian type, deep-chested and straight-limbed, her head carried high. She kissed the glass and lifted up her ring, maybe her wedding ring, then crossed herself, and passed on with trembling lips. Old men there were who touched the shrine with shaking fingers, and stumbled away into the cathedral to pray. Children were lifted up to kiss it. And there were others besides the kerchiefed women and their peasant husbands—people of the town, complacent burghers and their stout wives, and the dainty white-robed girls of Perugia. And nearly all passed out with uncertain lips as if they had been strangely moved.

Across the nave is the Miraculous Madonna which Giovanni Manni painted on a column. She is in a gilt frame, set about with silver hearts, which gleam in the darkness of the aisle like the smiles of those who have found joy in her. I do not wonder that the people of Perugia love this Madonna, for she is very beautiful. Her hands are raised in blessing, but to me her tender eyes are full of wonder, as though having no belief herself she marvelled at these worshippers for their faith, and loved them exceedingly because of it. We always found some poor, rough-headed peasants kneeling in the great ugly church before her, and ever she blessed them, and wondered at them, and seemed to give them peace.

Perugia is a mediaeval paradox. When you stand upon her ramparts in the clear shining of the morning, and look across the hills and vales of Umbria, you wonder that the hot breath of war and the scent of blood should have reached her. For she stands at the head of two wide plains full of enchanted silence—the Valley of Spoleto with its many little cities starring the green hills, and the Valley of the Tiber which sweeps from the gates of Perugia southwards to Rome. The mountains, which close them in, are clothed with vines and olives, and swell softly like the many bosoms of Diana of the Ephesians. The valleys are a garden, and the hills roll softly to the horizon till they grow aerial in the distance and hang upon the heavens like fantastic clouds. Little white cities crown them or clamber up their slopes, and rivers wind down the valleys, with sunlight glinting on their waters, between the tall poplars swaying on their banks like girls who gather flowers by a stream. The high brown shoulder of Subasio, made sacred by its memories of Umbria's greatest saint, shuts off the bleak and hungry Appennines which clasp Gubbio and Gualdo and a hundred other little cities to their barren breasts. But here you have the landscape of the Quattrocento artists with the clear pale light and blue aerial hills which are the hall-mark of the Umbrian masters. Nor can you ever tire of watching it, for every day and every hour some subtle change sweeps over the face of this immortal loveliness; and it is always beautiful, whether you look across the sunlit mists at Assisi in a blue veil of cloud-shadow or see her smiling and rosy in the sunset, or whether you stand at night under the scented laurels of Perugia's passeggiata, and see the lights of distant hill-cities riding like ships upon the dim horizon of a soundless sea. It became a custom, almost an act of worship, to congregate upon the bulwarks of Perugia before the sun slipped behind the western hills, to watch the light pouring into the plain like liquid gold into a bowl of translucent glass, tinted all the colours of the prism. Even when night had drained this ancient chalice of the golden wine of the sun, and the lights of lonely farmsteads were twinkling on the hillsides, we were loth to leave it.

Yet these fair valleys have been drenched with blood and scorched by fire; Hannibal and his Gauls and Africans gave battle to Flaminius, the maker of roads, by the lake of Thrasymene; they have been devastated by Goths and Lombards; the German Kings of Rome have harried them, and the history of Perugia itself has been one long tale of battle and murder. It is as though the Griffin of Perugia, the strange Etruscan beast which is to this day the device of the city, has never sheathed its talons in anything but human flesh.

From the beginning Perugia fought fiercely for her freedom. Octavius wrestled for seven months outside her gates, and when he entered them was cheated of everything but honour; because a citizen, rather than yield his city to the first emperor, set fire to it, and stabbed himself in the holocaust which followed. Totila would not rest until he possessed her, and all through the Middle Ages she fought like a termagant with her neighbours; and the name of that griffin's brood, the Baglioni, was a terror throughout the Umbrian vales.[4]

It was Paul III. who brought her to her knees, and forced her to build his great fortress upon the palaces of her princes, and not long since she turned and rent it stone from stone, seeking to wipe out the old insult.

But it is not only in the marvellous and peaceful beauty of her setting that Perugia is a paradox, for how is it possible to reconcile the pictures of Perugino and his great pupils—Raphael, Lo Spagna, Pinturicchio, and Eusebio di San Giorgio—with the awful deeds of the Oddi and the Baglioni; or the wailing of the Flagellants with the great soldiers who ruled this turbulent city—Biordo Michelotto, foully done to death by the wicked Abbot of Mommaggiore, and Braccio Fortebraccio, the idol of the people? Paradox again! For the bones of Braccio Fortebraccio, which, to satisfy the vengeance of Martin V., were buried in unconsecrated ground, lie in a wooden box in the museum, and sigh to posterity through their melancholy inscription:

Hospes lege et luge.

Perusiae natum Montonium me exulem excepit,
Mars patriam Umbriam et Capuam mihi subegit.
Roma paruit; Italia theatrum; spectator orbis fuit.
At Aquila cadentem risit quem patria lugens brevi hac urna tegit.
Eheu! Mars extulit, Mors substulit.

Abi.

In the days when Perugino and his pupils were painting their calm-eyed Madonnas and saints with the blue Umbrian hills as the background to a world of ineffable peace, Perugia was drenched with blood daily, and every man carried his life in his hand. Yet hardly any of the artists of Perugia painted war, though here and there in their blue distances you see a little band of knights pricking out on the plain. Bonfigli, the master of Perugino, was the only one who cared to speak the truth; dear Bonfigli, who loved Perugia so well, and painted her with such naÏve joy upon the walls of the Palazzo Comunale!

Trace Perugia in his frescoes, and you will wonder that it should be so little changed to-day. There is the slender minaret of San Pietro de' Cassinensi, and the great Gothic window of San Domenico, whose cloisters are to-day a barrack, and Sant'Ercolano soaring up beneath the city walls beside the ancient Porta Marzia. Here you see the Palazzo Comunale, one of the most sublime Gothic palaces in Italy, with its curving front and delicate fourteenth-century windows and majestic portal, and the loggia which Fortebraccio built by the cathedral. It is all much the same to-day as it was when Bonfigli painted his primitive wars, except that the citizens no longer dress in scarlet and fur, and that there are fewer towers in the city, and none at all on the circuit of the walls.

San Pietro de' Cassinensi is still the gracious church Bonfigli loved. We walked there one evening towards the hour of sunset. A little rainstorm, like a petulant burst of weeping, overtook us as we drew near, and we saw the yellow sunset and the cloud-shadows in the valley through a web of silver threads woven by the rain under the acacias. Inside, it was too dark to see the pictures with which the walls are covered, but we gathered an impression of space and dignity and richness. In the dim light we marvelled at the beauty of the choir-stalls, the intarsia, and the carving in which Stefano of Bergamo, and some say Raphael himself, gave free rein to fancy, and dreamed of delightful mythical beasts, and sphinxes with lovely faces, and a wealth of flowers and fruit and joyful little children. A mad world!

Then the old monk, glad that we loved his treasures, opened the doors of the choir, so that we might see their exquisite workmanship in the fading light; and we looked down upon the incomparable Valley of Spoleto, with Assisi and her sister city, little Spello, on the skirts of Monte Subasio, and Foligno and Trevi rising out of rosy sunset mists. There is a small round hill below San Pietro, just such a little hill as Pinturicchio loved, encircled by a winding white road, and shadowed with slender trees. We almost looked to see his gay horsemen in red and blue and shining steel pricking down into the plain. There were still storms abroad, and the clouds drifted like great birds across the heavens, casting their shadows on the valley.

'This is the work of a great artist,' said the philosopher, with a little sigh of complete content. And indeed it was a worthy picture to be framed in those exquisite doors.

Night overtook us before we reached Sant'Ercolano, which looked more like a mosque than ever with its soaring arches in the twilight. We climbed up the steps beside it, and passed into the city through the Gate of True Dreams. At night Perugia of the Middle Ages awakes. As we wandered in her dark and silent streets, ill-lit and bridged with gloomy arches, our ears were tuned to catch the voices of the past.

We divided our evenings. Sometimes we took our coffee and vermouth in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where there was a band or music of sorts. At other times the poet had his way, and we visited a humble cafÉ opposite the Palazzo Comunale, and afterwards plunged into the dark and mysterious alleys of the mediaeval city. These were the evenings that I loved the most. In the distance we could hear the faint beat of music, and up and down the Corso flowed the gay tide of promenaders, which always turned before it reached us. Above us loomed the great Palazzo, which is justly Perugia's pride. In the gloom its brown and bulging walls would have been as forbidding as a fortress's but for the delicate tracery of its windows and its fantastic Gothic door, with the Griffin of the City gazing down hungrily into the night. The lovely fountain on which the Pisani and Arnolfo di Cambio lavished their genius was nothing but a beautiful silhouette against the loggia which Braccio Fortebraccio put up to shield his beloved citizens from the sun; and on the steps of the gaunt cathedral the statue of Papa Giulio III., with raised hand, blessed his careless people.

For Perugia is careless, beautifully and graciously careless. She has forgotten her woes, she has almost forgotten her old enemies; she has certainly forgotten to finish her cathedral. And yet when we sat at night in this romantic spot, where the art of four hundred years is garnered, we noticed a little yellow lamp flickering unsteadily above the cathedral door, no brighter than a glow-worm in comparison with the flare of electric light close at hand. The passers-by told us its history: how the people of Perugia, feeling the iron hand of the Farnese Pope, turned for help to Ridolfo, the last of the great Baglioni Princes. How Ridolfo failed them, and how in their extremity they turned to Christ, and besought Him with cries and sobs, tearing their garments and beating themselves like the Flagellants of the thirteenth century, to defend them against the terrible Paul III. They placed the crucifix above the door of San Lorenzo, where the light shines every night, and laid the keys of the city below the tortured feet of the Saviour. We know that their prayers were of no avail, yet every night in Perugia, that city of beautiful and romantic memories, they still light the little lantern over the cathedral door, where the crucifix was placed, when they crept with fear and trembling to the feet of Christ to ask for help against his Vicar, because Ridolfo Baglione, forsooth! had failed them in their necessity.

69

A step from here and we found ourselves in the dark and memory-laden streets of the old town, with their vaulted passages and their blocked-up Doors of the Dead—those pitiful defences against the Common Enemy, in which Japan as well as Italy put faith.[5] Of them all I loved the Via Vecchia best, with its air of mystery and its many arches linking the grim old palaces together. At night it was so gloomy there that we could barely find our way past the ancient Canonica in which so many of the Popes snatched a holiday from Rome; and as we went down the hill, always between great palaces, the darkness closed round us. Here and there a feeble light illuminated the steep path, but for the rest there was only the starlight to guide us until we came to the great Porta Augusta, which spanned the road majestically, full of the dignity of dead Etruria. Seen thus against the stars, with its graceful fifteenth-century loggia faintly illumined by a yellow light within, it was as impressive as the pylon of an Egyptian Temple.

Or, if our steps took us another way, we passed the grim towers of mediaeval mansions, and presently found ourselves at the Baglioni's Gate of Dreams, or the Porta Mandola, as the Etruscan gate is called. Here, of a certainty, we would hear music, for whenever I have passed through that ancient gate at night, the silence has been broken by gay songs. Sometimes I have sat there far into the night, dreaming of the Baglioni and listening to the careless music of I knew not what laughter-loving house. For no one can live long in Perugia without being fired by the memory of those strange men whose strength and beauty was famous throughout Italy, and whose lovely names alone fit them to be the heroes of romance—Grifonetto, Astorre, Gismondo, Sermonetto, Morgante. If we believe their adoring chronicler, who though he traced their downfall could not speak of them without the stately prefix 'High and Mighty Lords,' their beauty was the beauty of the ancient Gods of Greece, and their courage was the courage of the Heroes. And who of us but has wept over the Great Betrayal, and the passing of the beautiful Grifonetto, forgiven at the last by Atalanta? And who has not loved the young Astorre in his Cloth of Gold bringing his fair young bride back to his home; and thrilled to read of the Homeric death of Sermonetto, 'so strong and gallant while he lived that tongue of man cannot tell the worth of him. One, in very truth, who never in all his days knew what fear was, and till the last word died on his lips ever showed himself the greater-hearted, as though he were not vanquished, but victor of his foe.'

73

Early one hot and cloudless August morning, while the farmers with many cries of 'per la Madonna!' were urging their oxen up the hill to market in the shadow of the old grey University of Perugia, we drove down into the Valley of the Tiber to see the wonderful Etruscan tomb close to Ponte San Giovanni, which was the burial-place of the Volumnii. It is of special interest not only for its excellent preservation, but because it belongs to the Roman-Etruscan period, and forms the connecting link between the old Etruscan tombs and the famous Roman sepulchres a mile or two outside Rome on the Latin Way.

A short descent took us into the subterranean vault at whose portal, cut out of the tufa rock, lay the ancient stone door, set aside now for a modern gate of iron. As we passed into the dark antechamber the chill damp air was cold as death after the cicala-haunted sunshine of the fields above. But while we strained our eyes to pierce the gloom the custode turned on an electric light hidden behind the cornice, and straightway we forgot everything in the wonder of the scene before us. In an inner chamber, resting upon their carved sarcophagi, we saw the inmates of the tomb grouped round the urn on which reposed the head of the house above two finely sculptured furies. On the coffered ceiling a gorgon's head, very terrible, with knotted snakes on its temples and horror in its face, stared down upon the dead. And as our eyes became accustomed to the dim light we discovered the strange symbolism of Etruria all round us. From the ceiling of the ante-chamber, on whose benches the relatives of the deceased reclined, to feast or watch beside their dead, little genii, exquisitely beautiful and light as butterflies, were hanging by the leaden chains by which they were suspended more than two thousand years ago. Over the doorway was a sun-disk, springing from the waves—fit emblem of the immortality of these Etruscans, springing from the waves of oblivion which for so many centuries washed over them. But there was none of the colour which makes beautiful the Tombs of Egypt, and there was hardly the same air of eternity. In the long corridors of the Royal Tombs of the Pharaohs there is an archaic defiance as of a life long since forgotten and lost in the dust of centuries. Here the life is of yesterday; we could almost hear the heart of Greece and Rome beating gaily in a young world, and the languid tread of the effete Etruscans, whose curious symbolism at once repels and mystifies, with its red lascivious serpents, its demons and furies, its beautiful and reluctant Medusas, and its solemn mockery of the feasting dead.

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