BAEDEKER says that Pisa has a population of twenty-seven thousand two hundred people and that it is a quiet town. It is. I caught the spell of a score of places like this as I walked out into the open square facing the depot. The most amazing botch of a monument I ever saw in my life I saw here—a puffing, swelling, strutting representation of Umberto I, legs apart, whiskers rampant, an amazing cockade, all the details of a gaudy uniform, a breast like a pouter-pigeon—outrageous! It was about twelve or thirteen times as large as an ordinary man and not more than twelve or fifteen feet from the ground! He looked like a gorgon, a monster to eat babies, ready to leap upon you with loud cries. I thought, “In Heaven’s name! is this what Italy is coming to! How can it brook such an atrocity?”
With the spirit of adventure strong within me I decided to find the campanile and the cathedral for myself. I had seen it up the railroad track, and, ignoring appealing guides with urgent, melancholy eyes, I struck up walled streets of brown and gray and green with solid, tight-closed, wooden shutters, cobble pavements and noiseless, empty sidewalks. They were not exactly narrow, which astonished me a little, for I had not learned that only the older portions of growing Italian cities have narrow streets. All the newer sections which surround such modern things as depots are wide and supposedly up to date. There was a handsome trolley-car just leaving as I came out, a wide-windowed shiny thing which illustrated just how fine trolley-cars can be, even in Italy. I had learned from my Baedeker that Pisa was on the Arno. I wanted to see the Arno because of Florence and Dante. Coming from Ventimiglia I had read the short history of Pisa given in Baedeker—its wars with Genoa, the building of its cathedral. It was interesting to learn that the Pisans had expelled the Saracens from Sardinia in 1025, and destroyed their fleet in 1063 near Palermo, that once they were the most powerful adherents of the Ghibellines, and how terribly they were defeated by the Genoese near Leghorn in 1284. I pumped up a vast desire to read endless volumes concerning the history of Italy, now that I was here on the ground, and when it could not be done on the instant. My book told me that the great cathedral was erected after the naval victory of the Pisans at Palermo and that the ancient bronze gates were very wonderful. I knew of the Campo Santo with its sacred earth brought from Palestine, and of the residence here of Niccolò Pisano. His famous hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery is a commonplace—almost as much so as the Leaning Tower. I did not know that Galileo had availed himself of the oblique position of the tower to make his experiments regarding the laws of gravitation until I read it in my precious Baedeker, but it was a fact none the less delightful for encountering it there.
Let me here and now, once and for all, sing my praises of Baedeker and his books. When I first went abroad it was with a lofty air that I considered Barfleur’s references to the fact that Baedeker on occasion would be of use to me. He wanted me to go through Europe getting my impressions quite fresh and not disturbed by too much erudition such as could be gathered from books. He might have trusted me. My longing for erudition was constantly great, but my willingness to burn the midnight oil in order to get it was exceedingly small. It was only at the last moment, when I was confronted with some utterly magnificent object, that I thumbed feverishly through my one source of supply—the ever-to-be-praised and blessed Karl Baedeker—his books. I think the German temperament is at its best when it is gathering all the data about anything and putting it in apple-pie order before you. I defy the most sneering and supercilious scholars and savants to look at these marvelous volumes and not declare them wonderful. There is no color in Baedeker anywhere, no joke, no emotion, no artistic enthusiasm. It is a plain statement of delightful fact—fact so pointless without the object before you, so invaluable when you are standing open-mouthed wondering what it is all about! Trust the industrious, the laborious, the stupendous, the painstaking Baedeker to put his finger on the exact fact and tell you not what you might, but what you must, know to really enjoy it. Take this little gem from page 430 of his volume on northern Italy. It concerns the famous Baptistery which I was so eagerly seeking.
The interior (visitors knock at the principal entrance; adm. free) rests on eight columns and four piers, above which there is a single triforium. In the center is a marble octagonal Font by Guido Bigarelli of Como (1246) and near it the famous hexagonal PULPIT borne by seven columns, by Niccolò Pisano, 1260. The reliefs (comp. p.p. XXXIX, 432) on the pulpit are: (1) Annunciation and Nativity; (2) Adoration of the Magi; (3) Presentation in the Temple; (4) Crucifixion; (5) Last Judgment; in the spandrels, Prophets and Evangelists; above the columns, the Virtues.—Fine echo.
Dry as dried potatoes, say you. Exactly. But go to Italy without a Baedeker in your hand or precious knowledge stored up from other sources and see what happens. Karl Baedeker is one of the greatest geniuses Germany has ever produced. He knows how to give you what you want, and has spread the fame of German thoroughness broadcast. I count him a great human benefactor; and his native city ought to erect a monument to him. Its base ought to be a bronze library stand full of bronze Baedekers; and to this good purpose I will contribute freely and liberally according to my means.
When I reached the Arno, as I did by following this dull vacant street, I was delighted to stop and look at its simple stone bridges, its muddy yellow water not unlike that of the New River in West Virginia, the plain, still, yellow houses lining its banks as far as I could see. The one jarring note was the steel railroad bridge which the moderns have built over it. It was a little consoling to look at an old moss-covered fortress now occupied as a division headquarters by the Italian army, and at a charming old gate which was part of a fortified palace left over from Pisa’s warring days. The potential force of Italy was overcoming me by leaps and bounds, and my mind was full of the old and powerful Italian families of which the Middle Ages are so redolent. I could not help thinking of the fact that the Renaissance had, in a way, its beginning here in the personality of Niccolò Pisano, and of how wonderful the future of Italy may yet be. There was an air of fallow sufficiency about it that caused me to feel that, although it might be a dull, unworked field this year or this century, another might see it radiant with power and magnificence. It is a lordly and artistic land—and I felt it here at Pisa.
Wandering along the banks of the Arno, I came to a spot whence I could see the collection of sacred buildings, far more sacred to art than to religion. They were amazingly impressive, even from this distance, towering above the low houses. A little nearer, standing on a space of level grass, the boxing of yellow and brown and blue Italian houses about them like a frame, they set my mouth agape with wonder and delight. I walked into Pisa thinking it was too bad that any place so dignified should have fallen so low as to be a dull, poverty-stricken city; but I remained to think that if the Italians are wise (and they are wise and new-born also) they will once more have their tremendous cities and their great artistic inheritances in the bargain. I think now that perhaps of all the lovely things I saw abroad the cathedral and tower and baptistery and campo santo of Pisa grouped as they are in one lovely, spacious, green-sodded area, are the loveliest and most perfect of all. It does not matter to me that the cathedral at Pisa is not a true Gothic cathedral, as some have pointed out. It is better than that—it is Italian Gothic; with those amazing artistic conceptions, a bell-tower and a baptistery and a campo santo thrown in. Trust the Italians to do anything that they do grandly, with a princely lavishness.
As I stepped first into this open square with these exquisite jewels of cream-colored stone pulsating under the rays of an evening sun, it was a spectacle that evoked a rare thrill of emotion, such as great art must always evoke. There they stood—fretted, fluted, colonnaded, crowded with lovely traceries, studded with lovely marbles, and showing in every line and detail all that loving enthusiasm which is the first and greatest characteristic of artistic genius. I can see those noble old first citizens who wanted Pisa to be great, calling to their aid the genius of such men as Pisano and Bonannus of Pisa and William of Innsbruck and Diotisalvi and all the noble company of talent that followed to plan, to carve, to color and to decorate. To me it is a far more impressive and artistic thing than St. Peter’s in Rome. It has a reserve and an artistic subtlety which exceeds the finest Gothic cathedral in the world. Canterbury, Amiens and Rouen are bursts of imagination and emotion; but the collection of buildings at Pisa is the reserved, subtle, princely calculation of a great architect and a great artist. It does not matter if it represents the handiwork, the judgment and the taste of a hundred men of genius. It may be without the wildfire of a cathedral like that at Cologne, but it approximates the high classic reserve of a temple of Pallas Athene. It is Greek in its dignity and beauty, not Christian and Gothic in its fire and zeal. As I think of it, I would not give it for anything I have seen; I would not have missed it if I had been compelled to sacrifice almost everything else; and the Italian Government has done well to take it and all similar achievements under its protection and to declare that however religion may wax or wane this thing shall not be disturbed. It is a great, a noble, a beautiful thing; and as such should be preserved forever.
The interior of the basilica was to me a soothing dream of beauty. There are few interiors anywhere in this world that truly satisfy, but this is one of them. White marble turned yellow by age is gloriously satisfying. This interior, one hundred feet in diameter and one hundred and seventy-nine feet high, has all the smooth perfection of a blown bubble. Its curve recedes upward and inward so gracefully that the eye has no quarrel with any point. My mind was fascinated by the eight columns and four piers which seemingly support it all and by the graceful open gallery or arcade in the wall resting above the arches below. The octagonal baptismal font, so wide and so beautiful, and the graceful pulpit by Pisano, with its seven columns and three friendly-looking lions, is utterly charming. While I stood and stroked the heads of these amiable-looking beasts, a guide who had seen me enter came in, and without remark of any kind began slowly and clearly to articulate the scale, in order that I might hear the “fine echo” mentioned by Baedeker. Long practice had made him perfect, for by giving each note sufficient space to swell and redouble and quadruple itself he finally managed to fill the great chamber with a charming harmony, rich and full, not unlike that of a wind-harp.
If I fell instantly in love with the Baptistery, I was equally moved by the Leaning Tower—a perfect thing. If man is wise and thoughtful he can keep the wonders of great beauty by renewing them as they wear; but will he remain wise and thoughtful? So little is thought of true beauty. Think of the guns thundering on the Parthenon and of Napoleon carrying away the horses of St. Mark’s! I mounted the steps of the tower (one hundred and seventy-nine feet, the same height as the Baptistery), walking out on and around each of its six balustrades and surveying the surrounding landscape rich in lovely mountains showing across a plain. The tower tilts fourteen feet out of plumb, and as I walked its circular arcades at different heights I had the feeling that I might topple over and come floundering down to the grass below. As I rose higher the view increased in loveliness; and at the top I found an old bell-man who called my attention by signs to the fact that the heaviest of the seven bells was placed on the side opposite the overhanging wall of the tower to balance it. He also pointed in the different directions which presented lovely views, indicating to the west and southwest the mouth of the Arno, the Mediterranean, Leghorn and the Tuscan Islands, to the north the Alps and Mount Pisani where the Carrara quarries are, and to the south, Rome. Some Italian soldiers from the neighboring barracks came up as I went down and entered the cathedral, which interiorly was as beautiful as any which I saw abroad. The Italian Gothic is so much more perfectly spaced on the interior than the Northern Gothic and the great flat roof, coffered in gold, is so much richer and more soothing in its aspect. The whole church is of pure marble yellowed by age, relieved, however, by black and colored bands.
I came away after a time and entered the Campo Santo, the loveliest thing of its kind that I saw in Europe. I never knew, strange to relate, that graveyards were made, or could be made, into anything so impressively artistic. This particular ground was nothing more than an oblong piece of grass, set with several cypress trees and surrounded with a marble arcade, below the floor and against the walls of which are placed the marbles, tombs and sarcophagi. The outer walls are solid, windowless and decorated on the inside with those naïve, light-colored frescoes of the pupils of Giotto. The inner wall is full of arched, pierced windows with many delicate columns through which you look to the green grass and the cypress trees and the perfectly smooth, ornamented dome at one end. I have paid my tribute to the cypress trees, so I will only say that here, as always, wherever I saw them—one or many—I thrilled with delight. They are as fine artistically as any of the monuments or bronze doors or carved pulpits or perfect baptismal fonts. They belong where the great artistic impulse of Italy has always put them—side by side with perfect things. For me they added the one final, necessary touch to this realm of romantic memory. I see them now and I hear them sigh.
I walked back to my train through highly colored, winding, sidewalkless, quaint-angled streets crowded with houses, the façades of which we in America to-day attempt to imitate on our Fifth Avenues and Michigan Avenues and Rittenhouse Squares. The medieval Italians knew so well what to do with the door and the window and the cornice and the wall space. The size of their window is what they choose to make it, and the door is instinctively put where it will give the last touch of elegance. How often have I mentally applauded that selective artistic discrimination and reserve which will use one panel of colored stone or one niche or one lamp or one window, and no more. There is space—lots of it—unbroken until you have had just enough; and then it will be relieved just enough by a marble plaque framed in the walls, a coat-of-arms, a window, a niche. I would like to run on in my enthusiasm and describe that gem of a palace that is now the Palazzo Communale at Perugia, but I will refrain. Only these streets in Pisa were rich with angles and arcades and wonderful doorways and solid plain fronts which were at once substantial and elegant. Trust the Italian of an older day to do well whatever he did at all; and I for one do not think that this instinct is lost. It will burst into flame again in the future; or save greatly what it already possesses.