Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 220, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1914 — The BY WAYS of TUSCANY [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The BY WAYS of TUSCANY

by CARL SCHURZ VROOMAN

a PUBLISHED BY COURTESY OF JHEMYA/T, I FftEffCH &f-CO.

OURISTS often make the mistake of taking conditions LJM which prevail Ih the viclnMjl /* ity of Na Pl es as the standof Italian thrift and honesty and tljus are apt to include all Italy and Ital*ans * n one Bwee Plng coni' LT demnation, after the matter of the Irish maid who pro-

tested she could not see why her mistress wanted to study Italian since “few spake it and them’s mostly dirty.” In our ignorance of Tuscany we had prepared ourselves for ,the worst in the matter of accommodations, expecting to have to put lip with unspeakable discomforts in out-of-the-way places on our route, not yet realizing that no matter into wha,t remote corner of Tuscany one may penetrate he can always be sure of courteous treatment, and good clean bed and wholesome, well-cooked food. In the course of several weeks we took our leisurely way over the hills and across the valleys, stopping at a number of Tuscan towns, which, after their tempestuous youth, have settled down to such a green old age that in their ruined watch-towers trees have sprung up for sentinels and wild flowers run riot over walls that rival armies used to scale. Although most of these places were fairly inlaid and overlaid with treasures of art, the bubble of our pleasure was constantly being pricked by the tantalizing thought that no matter what particular spot we happened to be in, just a little further down the valley or across the hills there was a Seemingly endless chain of equally interesting places which beckoned us, making us realize that, though our time was limited Italy’s treasures were not Of the towns we visited, two stand out now in memory as they do in reality, higher, older and rarer than any of the others: San Gimignano, with her musical name and her memories that reach back to Dante, and Volterra, whose somber bricks and stones softened by Time’s subtle touch, glow with colors that only the centuries give—cities set on a hill, yet hid from the worW, shrouded in mystery and oblivion. Our entrance into San, Gimignano late one afternoon, just as the sun was setting and the cathedral chimes were tolling the death of another day, seemed in keeping with the spirit of the place, whose day in the working world is done, and yet about whose winding streets and crumbling palaces there still linger a beauty and a pathos like the afterglow of her departed greatness. The whole place seems more like a medieval mirage than a present day reality. Nowhere else in Italy does one get so strongly the feeling of being transplanted bodily into the life of the middle ages. Like all small Italian towns, San Gimignano is richer in sacred edifices than in anything else, unless it be legends and relics. The Collegiata—one of its twelve places of worship — contains some characteristic examples of Benazzo Gozzoli and frescoes by Ghirlandaio, in which that highly academic artist for once forgets his technique and loses himself in the tender delineation of scenes from the life of the child saint of San Gimignano, Sajjf ta Fina, whose patience and serenity In suffering shed a strange halo of sanctity over the bloody annals of a crafty and warlike age. Legend has it that at her death all the bells -in San Gimignano, of their own accord, rang out together to celebrate her release, and that unearthly flowers blossomed about the poor little room where for five years she had lain on her narrow board. The Collegiata has yet another claim on our interest. Two hundred

years after the death of Santa Fina, during the lenten season of 1484, its walls rang with the fiery eloquence of the young Savonarola, as he denounced with prophetic power and passion the luxuries and vices of his beautiful and proudly pagan age. The Dominican monastery in which he was entertained has since been converted into a penitentiary, while the luxury of the San Gimiganaese, which he declared to be a stench in the nostrils of almighty God, has given way £o almost monastic poverty. The walls of our bedrooms at San Gimignano offered the only modern touch about the place, as they were elaborately frescoed in triumphant imitation of American wall-paper, which the enterprising little proprietor evidently coveted but could not afford. Here our party was reinforced by r Mr. X., who had spent the last few years studying comparative art in the different European galleries from Madrid to St. Petersburg. He was a type by himself—a broad-shouldered six-footer who lived the strenuous life in the superlative degree every minute of the day. He traveled everywhere, even oyer mountain passes, on his wheel, which he apparently rode or carried with equal ease arid to which was usually strapped a small library consisting of a dozen or more books varying in size from the huge volume of Crowe and Cavalsaselle’s “History of Painting in Italy” to a little pocket edition of Omar. In Volterra, the next place on our program, where in those days the arrival of a party of tourists was hailed as a public event, the entire population seemed to be lined up on the parapet to witness the approach of our strange cavalcade. Here we Spent four busy haunting tombs and ruins and mentally transplanting ourselves into the curious and ancient Etruscan civilization. In <the cathedral and baptistry we saw some superb examples of the early sculptors’ art and in other churches and palaces we found a wealth of pictures and frescoes that called vividly to mind those halcyon days when Volterra pressed into her service such men as Benozzo Gozzoli, Luca, Signorelli, Ghirlandaio and her own artist son, Daniele da Volterra,

whose vigorous talent, as someone has said, “lost its liberty to the conquering genius of Michael Angelo.” Musing over my memories of Volterra I find that, more vivid to me than any of her archaeological wonders or archaic and renaissance art treasures, are a few stray pictures that painted themselves on my mind, one afternoon toward sunset as wa took our farewell stroll up and down the streets of the old city. A Gothic doorway which we came upon at an abrupt turn in the road, the ivy-grown arch of a ruined cloister at the top of a winding flight of steps, and the old Etruscan entrance to the city, served each to frame a separate and enchanting bit of landscape, olive-crowned hills sloping down to the sea, with here and there some ruined castle; in the distance the snowy Carraras out of which Michael Angelo hewed the marble for his Moses; and, far off on the horizon, where ocean and sky seemed to lose themselves in mystical union, the island of Elba like a lost ship on a sea of gold. As our little company passed gayly through the gate I thought of other processions that had passed that way in all those changing centuries; of Florentine hosts forcing their way through to pillage the city in the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent; of Roman armies marching on Volterra when she was one of the original capitals of Etruria and held her own against the world; and. farther back in the dim recesses of history, of those solemn processions of Etruscans carrying bodies to the tombs outside the city walls, burying their dead with those mute symbols of belief in life beyond the grave, which today, after forty centuries, still witness to that inborn faith in immortality which links this vanished race in a common bond of hope with the people of every age and clime. Turning for an Instant to look back, I saw the ancient gateway was framing another picture—perhaps the fairest we had seen—for the last rays of the setting sun rested on-the heads of two young lovers, coming slowly down the winding streets of the old city, dreaming their dreams of the future, while we talked on the buried past