WE returned at between seven and eight that night. After a bath I sat out on the large balcony, or veranda, commanding the valley, and enjoyed the moonlight. The burnished surface of the olive trees, and brown fields already being plowed with white oxen and wooden shares, gave back a soft glow that was somehow like the patina on bronze. There was a faint odor of flowers in the wind and here and there lights gleaming. From some street in the town I heard singing and the sound of a mandolin. I slept soundly.
At breakfast,—coffee, honey, rolls and butter,—my Abbé gave me his card. He was going to Florence. He asked the hotel man to say to me that he had had a charming time and would I not come to France and visit him? “When I learn to speak French,” I replied, smiling at him. He smiled and nodded. We shook hands and parted.
After breakfast I called a little open carriage such as they use in Paris and Monte Carlo and was off for Spello; and he took an early omnibus and caught his train.
On this trip which Barfleur had recommended as offering a splendid view of cypresses I was not disappointed: about some villa there was an imposing architectural arrangement of them and an old Roman amphitheater nearby—the ruins of it—bespoke the prosperous Roman life which had long since disappeared. Spello, like Assisi, and beyond it Perugia, (all these towns in this central valley in fact) was set on top of a high ridge, and on some peak of it at that. As seen from the valley below it was most impressive. Close at hand, in its narrow winding streets it was simply strange, outre, almost bizarre, and yet a lovely little place after its kind. Like Assisi it was very poor—only more so. A little shrine to some old Greek divinity was preserved here and at the very top of all, on the extreme upper round of the hill was a Franciscan monastery which I invaded without a by your leave and walked in its idyllic garden. There and then I decided that if ever fortune should permit I would surely return to Spello and write a book, and that this garden and monastery should be my home. It was so eerie here—so sweet. The atmosphere was so wine-like. I wandered about under green trees and beside well-kept flower beds enjoying the spectacle until suddenly peering over a wall I beheld a small garden on a slightly lower terrace and a brown-cowled monk gathering vegetables. He had a basket on his arm, his hood back over his shoulders—a busy and silent anchorite. After a time as I gazed he looked and smiled, apparently not startled by my presence and then went on with his work. “When I come again,” I said, “I shall surely live here and I’ll get him to cook for me.” Lovely thought! I leaned over other walls and saw in the narrow, winding streets below natives bringing home bundles of fagots on the backs of long-eared donkeys, and women carrying water. Very soon, I suppose, a car line will be built and the uniformed Italian conductors will call “Assisi!” “Perugia!” and even “The Tomb of St. Francis!”
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Of all the hill-cities I saw in Italy certainly Perugia was the most remarkable, the most sparkling, the most forward in all things commercial. It stands high, very high, above the plain as you come in at the depot and a wide-windowed trolley-car carries you up to the principal square, the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, stopping in front of the modern hotels which command the wide sea-like views which the valley presents below. Never was a city so beautifully located. Wonderful ridges of mountains fade into amazing lavenders, purples, scarlets, and blues, as the evening falls or the dawn brightens. If I were trying to explain where some of the painters of the Umbrian school, particularly Perugino, secured their wonderful sky touches, their dawn and evening effects, I should say that they had once lived at Perugia. Perugino did. It seemed to me as I wandered about it the two days that I was there that it was the most human and industrious little city I had ever walked into. Every living being seemed to have so much to do. You could hear, as you went up and down the streets—streets that ascend and descend in long, winding stairways, step by step, for blocks—pianos playing, anvils ringing, machinery humming, saws droning, and, near the great abattoir where cattle were evidently slaughtered all day long, the piercing squeals of pigs in their death throes. There was a busy market-place crowded from dawn until noon with the good citizens of Perugia buying everything from cabbages and dress-goods to picture post-cards and hardware. Long rows of fat Perugian old ladies, sitting with baskets of wares in front of them, all gossiped genially as they awaited purchasers. In the public square facing the great hotels, nightly between seven and ten, the whole spirited city seemed to be walking, a whole world of gay, enthusiastic life that would remind you of an American manufacturing town on a Saturday night—only this happens every night in Perugia.
When I arrived there I went directly to my hotel, which faces the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. It was excellent, charmingly built, beautifully located, with a wide view of the Umbrian plain which is so wonderful in its array of distant mountains and so rich in orchards, monasteries, convents and churches. I think I never saw a place with so much variety of scenery, such curious twists of streets and lanes, such heights and depths of levels and platforms on which houses, the five- and six-story tenement of the older order of life in Italy, are built. The streets are all narrow, in some places not more than ten or fifteen feet wide, arched completely over for considerable distances, and twisting and turning, ascending or descending as they go, but they give into such adorable squares and open places, such magnificent views at every turn!
I do not know whether what I am going to say will have the force and significance that I wish to convey, but a city like Perugia, taken as a whole, all its gates, all its towers, all its upward-sweeping details, is like a cathedral in itself, a Gothic cathedral. You would have to think of the ridge on which it stands as providing the nave and the transepts and the apse and then the quaint little winding streets of the town itself with their climbing houses and towers would suggest the pinnacles, spandrels, flying buttresses, airy statues and crosses of a cathedral like Amiens. I know of no other simile that quite suggests Perugia,—that is really so true to it.
No one save an historical zealot could extract much pleasure from the complicated political and religious history of this city. However once upon a time there was a guild of money-changers and bankers which built a hall, called the Hall of the Cambio, which is very charming; and at another time (or nearly the same time) there was a dominant Guelph party which, in conjunction with some wealthy townsmen known as the “Raspanti,” built what is now known as the Palazzo Publico or Palazzo Communale, in what is now known as the Piazza del Municipio, which I think is perfect. It is not a fortress like the Bargello or the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, but it is a perfect architectural thing, the charm of which remains with me fresh and keen. It is a beautiful structure—one that serves charmingly the uses to which it is put—that of a public center for officials and a picture-gallery. It was in one of these rooms, devoted to a collection of Umbrian art, that I found a pretentious collection of the work of Perugino, the one really important painter who ever lived or worked in Perugia—and the little city now makes much of him.
If I felt like ignoring the long-winded art discussions of comparatively trivial things, the charm and variety of the town and its present-day life was in no wise lost upon me.
The unheralded things, the things which the guide-books do not talk about, are sometimes so charming. I found it entrancing to descend of a morning by lovely, cool, stone passages from the Piazza of Vittorio Emanuele to the Piazza of the Army, and watch the soldiers, principally cavalry, drill. Their ground was a space about five acres in extent, as flat as a table, set high above the plain, with deep ravines descending on either hand, and the quaint houses and public institutions of Perugia looking down from above. To the left, as you looked out over the plain, across the intervening ravine, was another spur of the town, built also on a flat ridge with the graceful church of St. Peter and its beautiful Italian-Gothic tower, and the whole road that swept along the edge of the cliff, making a delightful way for carriages and automobiles. I took delight in seeing how wonderfully the deep green ravines separate one section of the town from another, and in watching the soldiers, Italy then being at war with Tripoli.
You could stand, your arms resting upon some old brownish-green wall, and look out over intervening fields to distant ranges of mountains, or tower-like Assisi and Spoleto. The variety of the coloring of the plain below was never wearying.
This Italian valley was so beautiful that I should like to say one more word about the skies and the wonderful landscape effects. North of here, in Florence, Venice and Milan, they do not occur so persistently and with such glorious warmth at this season of the year. At this height the nights were not cold, but cool, and the mornings burst with such a blaze of color as to defy the art of all save the greatest painters. They were not so much lurid as richly spiritualized, being shot through with a strange electric radiance. This did not mean, as it would so often in America, that a cloudy day was to follow. Rather the radiance slowly gave place to a glittering field of light that brought out every slope and olive orchard and distant cypress and pine with amazing clearness. The bells of the churches in Perugia and in the valley below were like muezzins calling to each other from their praying-towers. As the day closed the features of the landscape seemed to be set in crystal, and the greens and browns and grays to have at times a metallic quality. Outside the walls in the distance were churches, shrines, and monasteries, always with a cypress or two, sometimes with many, which stood out with great distinctness, and from distant hillsides you would hear laborers singing in the bright sun. Well might they sing, for I know of no place where life would present to them a fairer aspect.