Too few have sung the splendour and beauty of Spoleto, the proud white city whose towers breathe a message of peace to-day, where they once blazoned war down the wide green valley to Perugia. For Spoleto, like Perugia, has been a queen among cities. Like Perugia she has kept ward through the ages upon the valleys of Umbria, gazing down from her sacred ilex groves on lesser cities riding the encircling hills—towered Montefalco upon the ridge which shuts off the valley of the Tiber; Trevi on its steep olive-girt mount; Foligno and Bevagna down in the plain; little Spello; Assisi, very beautiful as she kneels before the mighty temple she has raised to San Francesco on the slopes of Monte Subasio; Santa Maria degli Angeli and Ponte San Giovanni. And in one proud memory at least she is greater even than Perugia, for she alone withstood the tidal wave of Hannibal in the second Punic War, so that he turned from her walls dismayed, nor dared to march on Rome, seeing that this small colony could hold his force in check.

If she had faded out of history after that, her name would have been heroic among the Umbrian towns. But though she suffered in the civil war of Marius and Sulla, we know that she continued to flourish even in the dark years between the fall of Rome and the growth of mediaevalism. Totila destroyed her as Frederick Barbarossa was to destroy her in the middle of the twelfth century; but Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and after him Narses, the Exarch, built her up. Under the Longobards she became an independent duchy; after the fall of the Carlovingians her Dukes were for a short time Emperors of Italy.

Ah! Spoleto, it is little wonder that you are proud to-day, that your bells ring so joyously down the valleys, that you hold high festival to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of United Italy. What does it profit Perugia that her name was splendid in the Middle Ages, and that she is still the Queen of Umbria, 'the Empress of hill-set cities'? Yours was the greatness of a more heroic day. Her lords were savage beasts, her people slaves, her streets were noisome with slaughter, her name a proverb for ferocity, while the Baglioni spread their pestilence across the valleys, seeking ignoble victories, and fighting unending little wars for self-aggrandisement. Because the Barbarossa laid you low the star of Perugia rose clear upon your horizon. Already in 1198, when you with all the other Umbrian towns paid tribute to Innocent III., she was the capital of Umbria. But you, the champion of Rome, the Knight-errant of the Papacy, had nobler ambitions. Your Dukes were heroes before the lords of Perugia were even robbers. Were they not Emperors too? Guido, with his pretentious claim to the kingship of France, and poor young Lambert, the chivalrous and beautiful Knight of Spoleto, with whose ill-timed death, on the very spot where the great battle of Marengo was fought nearly a thousand years after, perished the hope of a united and independent kingdom within the Italian[25] frontier.

Spoleto was truly in a jubilant mood when we climbed up her winding streets, past the beautiful but ruined apse of San NiccolÒ, and the magnificent prehistoric wall below its convent. An Industrial Exhibition was being held in the Piazza Bernardino Campello, and the Merry Widow—'nuovissima per Spoleto'—was to be played that night in the Teatro Nuovo, 'con richissima messa in scena!'

But at all times we found the quality of joy in Spoleto. Long long ago she wept perhaps when she waited, as Elaine for Lancelot, while her lover, the beautiful and splendid Lambert, was in the toils of his insatiable mistress, Rome. Widowed, she trimmed a lamp before his shrine and turned her eyes towards the Papacy, seeking to build up an Italian Empire, through the temporal kingdom of the Pope. But now she has opened her gates to welcome the new era, and, having doffed her mourning garments, sits enthroned at the head of her magnificent valley, welcoming the world with the gracious dignity of one who for a few short years was the mother of United Italy.

Spoleto does not clamber up the hillside like rosy little Spello. She is tall and stately, pale as a lily, silent as a girl who dreams of love. More than any other of the hill-set cities of Umbria she bears the stamp of Rome, in arches and half-buried houses, in walls and ancient temples long since turned to the worship of other gods, and most of all in the inspiration of the great aqueduct which spans the ravine between her Rocca and the ilex-woods of Monte Luco.

In Spoleto Rome and modernity walk hand in hand. Spoleto is not mediaeval in character like other Umbrian towns. Her hill is crowned by the imposing Castello which Cardinal Albornoz and Nicholas v. built on the site of the Rocca of Theodoric, and she has many gracious churches which flowered from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, like the cathedral and San Gregorio Maggiore; or, more ancient still, San Salvatore, that exquisite relic of the fourth century, which contains the nucleus of a Roman temple; and San Pietro, on the lower slopes of Monte Luco, which was built in the fifth century and restored in 1320, after it had been practically destroyed by the Ghibellines. It is true that the splendid roofless apse of San NiccolÒ soars above the main street with broken lancet windows framing the heavens, like the windows of Tintern, but it is built over the ancient circuit of the city walls; and though its slender Gothic grace beautifies the hillside, it was the rugged stones of Spoleto's prehistoric fortifications which claimed our eyes. For it was against these walls, which the Unknown People, and later the Pelasgians and the Romans, built round the foot of their city, that Hannibal threw his Punic troops in vain before he retired to the rich territory of Picenum, where he fortified his soldiers after the rigors of their journey through Northern Italy and the Alps.

It is the same all through Spoleto. Here and there we wandered into steep, narrow lanes, where the strip of sky above our heads was cut by bridges leading from one tall mediaeval mansion to another, where there were shrines in the walls and Gothic doorways leading to dark and mysterious courtyards, and Doors of the Dead, and, to speak truth, unsavoury odours, which are the least pleasing reminiscences of the Middle Ages. But for the most part Spoleto is clean and modern, with wide streets and piazzas graced by hanging gardens, in which her Roman fragments are stranded like the skeletons of giants, where they are not buried beneath the soil, like the wonderful subterranean bridge outside the Porta San Gregorio; and the lower church of Sant'Ansano, on the foundations of a Temple of the Sun; and the mosaiced house which is said to have been the home of the mother of the Emperor Vespasian.

Among her treasures Spoleto holds the dust of Brother Philip in a beautifully wrought casket of lapis lazuli and gold, for that was how the faÇade of Santa Maria Assunta appeared to us as we rounded the corner of the Episcopal Palace, and came upon it suddenly, bathed in the yellow sunlight of late afternoon.

The Cathedral of Spoleto is set humbly on the hillside in the shadow of the great Rocca of Nicholas V. So that we stood, as it were, above the jewelled faÇade, and saw it rising in all its glory at the bottom of a wide steep slope which opened out into a green piazza between the sloping gardens of the Rocca and the little Renaissance Chiesa della Manna d'Oro. Like the Cathedral of Assisi, which its faÇade resembles, having the same triangular tympanum enclosing grand Gothic arches corresponding to the naves of the older building, it is externally one of the most gracious churches in Umbria. The fifteenth century loggia of its portico supports a Renaissance arabesque, and above it the central arch of the tympanum is filled with gold and blue mosaics which glow like jewels in their rich setting of mellowing stones. The glass in the beautiful rose windows is the colour of lapis lazuli; two little stone pulpits are built into the wall on either side of the portico, and in its shadow is the frescoed chapel of Francesco Eroli, Bishop of Spoleto.

But why attempt to reproduce with pen and ink and dull description a picture more fitted to the golden brush of Fra Filippo Lippi, and which indeed owes much of its charm to the beauty of the Umbrian hills billowing away to the horizon, and the alchemy of sunlight changing ancient stones to gold—the complete and lovely unity of Art and Nature.

I hope the sun sometimes shines in upon the tomb of Lippo Lippi, for I know he loved it, and the marble cenotaph which Lorenzo the Magnificent raised in his honour, when the Spoletani refused to let him carry away the body of the painter, because 'they were badly provided with things of note,' is rather bald in spite of its florid epitaph. But the tomb itself did not detain us long, for in the apse we had caught sight of some of Brother Philip's loveliest frescoes telling the story of the life of the Virgin, in four great chapters—the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, her Death, and in the vault above, her Coronation in the Courts of Heaven.

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According to Vasari, Fra Filippo, engaged as usual in a love affair, was poisoned by the family of the lady whom he had seduced while he was at work on the Cathedral. It is likely that the people of Spoleto were not so complaisant as the Florentines, who had long ago ceased even to shrug their shoulders at the amours of this son of the Renaissance, although he had refused the offer of Pius II. to legitimise his marriage with the beautiful nun Lucrezia. But later writers have dismissed the idea as one of Vasari's ill-founded scandals. In any case there were few men less worthy of painting the sacred story of Madonna Mary, and few who could have told it with such purity and tenderness, and intuition. For not even the damp which has caused them to peel and discolour in places, or the uninspired work of Fra Diamante who finished them, when Lippo Lippi, 'that vagabond and joyous mortal,' had been laid to rest, can rob these pale and sad Madonnas of their beauty, or take away the spiritual loveliness of the angels, who with the sun and the moon and all the constellations do homage to the Queen of Heaven.

But these things are as nothing compared with the real glories of Spoleto—the peculiar beauty of her landscape, and the magnificence of the Ponte delle Torri, the great aqueduct of the Longobard Dukes, which links the city to the sacred ilex groves of Monte Luco.

Nature has endowed Spoleto richly. She is built on the slopes of an isolated bastion of the Appennines, which closes as it were the Central Plain of Umbria. Behind her towers the broad shoulder of Monte Luco, veiled in ilex woods. To the south the wild valley of the Tessino opens a vista of rolling hills, mounting fold on fold to the horizon. And from the windows of our inn, the picturesque old Albergo Lucini, whose palatial rooms, sparsely furnished with ancient grandeur, are such a luxury in the hot summer months, we looked over the roofs of the lower town, and across the tranquil country to Perugia, more than forty miles away.

Was it perhaps because we knew this soft and gracious valley, sanctified by the footsteps of many saints, so well, that we loved it even more dearly than we had loved it as we gazed from the bulwarks of Perugia? Then these little towns sown along the hillsides or crowning their miniature peaks, like Trevi, and Montefalco, were nothing but names and points of beauty. But now after many weeks spent on the eastern coast of Italy or among the rugged Appennines, we had come back again to gentle Umbria, to find that every little town was full of smiling memories, and all the winding roads were pathways to romance. Who could forget the classic grace of Clitumnus, when he saw the clustered poplars soaring from the plain? Or the capers and the flowering rosemary, which made a garden of the ancient walls of Trevi? Or the sweetness of the olive woods below Assisi, where we wandered in the footsteps of St. Francis gathering an imperishable bouquet of holy memories? Or the subtle beauty of the Tiber, as it washed the skirts of Perugia's hill?

Nor had long association lessened the miracle of the soft radiance of the heavens, or made commonplace the clarity of atmosphere, or dimmed the strange light which seems to float like an eternal benediction between the mountains of this Mystic Land.

Early next morning we climbed up the hillside, past the Piazza Mercato, where a blackbird, always singing in a wicker cage, in the shadow of a Roman arch, is the personification of the joyous spirit of Spoleto. A few steps from the Rocca, through a gate in the ancient line of fortification, brought us into a small bastioned piazza overlooking the deep ravine of the Tessino, and the aqueduct which spans it.

In my notes, I have said nothing of the Ponte delle Torri except to cry the wonder of it! Which is not surprising, for there are no words to fit it, no words large, or grand, or ambitious, or vigorous enough to describe this bridge of towers and colossal arches, which bestrides the valley between Monte Luco and the hill of Spoleto. It is the work of giants. It would be a worthy testimony to the grandeur that was Rome's; to the energy and the indomitable courage of the men who moulded an empire out of a handful of earth, and ruled the world from seven little hills. But the Ponte delle Torri is not the work of Rome. A mystery surrounds its origin. Theodelapius, third Duke of Spoleto, is said to have built it early in the seventh century, but it is at least reasonable to suppose that the foundations were Roman—indeed the local Guida di Spoleto claims that the actual conduits in use to-day are Roman. And it is obvious that the pointed arches are of mediaeval structure, probably contemporary with the ancient fortress, now a water-mill, which guards the head of the aqueduct on the slopes of Monte Luco. It is in fact a mosaic to which the Spoletans of all ages have contributed their stones.

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But it was not only the grandeur of this Leviathan which held us spell-bound on the edge of the ravine; we were captivated by the lavish beauty of its mise en scÈne. For the ilex groves of Monte Luco, sacred to the ancients for their primeval forests, and to a younger world for the mediaeval saints who dwelt therein, were full of morning mists. Here and there some treetops illumined by the rays of the sun, lately risen above the shoulder of the mountain, stood out in clear relief against the dark hillside. The rest was held in shadow. Little blue columns of smoke ascended on the windless air from the bosky depths where charcoal-burners made their fires; the far-away bells of the Franciscan Convent on its crest were like the music of wind-bells under the roof-trees of the Gods. Every now and then the chimney of a cottage, sunk in the hillside below the level of the road on which we stood, wove a transparent veil of fragrant wood-smoke between our profane eyes and the sacred mount.

We came again in the evening when the aqueduct was bathed in the declining sunlight, which threaded its great arches with slanting bars of gold. And then we crossed that magic Bridge of the Giants and plunged into the enchanted ilex woods of Monte Luco. The stony way was sown with cyclamens, and the rocks were broidered with bronze and emerald mosses. At our feet the hill sloped sharply down the ravine and the slanting sunshine wove a web of light between the trees. Above us a sea of sunlit ilexes rose to the blue heavens. As we went deeper, the cool, scented breath of oak trees came out to greet us. And across the valley we could see Spoleto and her crested Rocca, with her ancient walls striding down the hillside through her vineyards. From this point she seemed to be a city of towers and loggie and hanging gardens.

Presently we reached the beautiful and ancient church of San Pietro, and found the strange Mediaeval carvings on its faÇade gilded by the last rays of the setting sun. While we were spelling out its fanciful devices the glow faded from its face, leaving it old and grey at the head of its long flight of steps, as though it had seen fear. And indeed time has dealt harshly with this shrine since it was founded in the fifth century on the fragments of a pagan building. Even the fading light sufficed to show us that it held no treasures, beyond the twelfth-century fragments from Byzantine Bestiaries on its faÇade, and the later reliefs dating from its restoration in the fourteenth century, after it had been wantonly destroyed by the Ghibelline wolf, seeking in vain to force an entrance to the fold of Spoleto.