The Mediterranean: Its Storied Cities and Venerable Ruins

South of this headland the Maremma proper begins. Follonica, the only place for some distance which can be called a town, is blackened with smoke to an extent unusual in Italy, for here much of the iron ore from Elba is smelted. But the views in the neighborhood, notwithstanding the flatness of the marshy or scrub-covered plain, are not without a charm. The inland hills are often attractive; to the north lie the headland of Piombino and sea-girt Elba, to the south the promontory of Castiglione, which ends in a lower line of bluff capped by a tower, and the irregular little island of Formica. At Castiglione della Pescaia is a little harbor, once fortified, which exports wool and charcoal, the products of the neighboring hills. The promontory of Castiglione must once have been an island, for it is parted from the inland range by the level plain of the Maremma. Presently Grosseto, the picturesque capital of the Maremma, appears, perched on steeply rising ground above the enclosing plain, its sky-line relieved by a couple of low towers and a dome; it has been protected with defenses, which date probably from late in the seventeenth century. Then, after the Omborne has been crossed, one of the rivers, which issue from the Apennines, the promontory of Talamone comes down to the sea, protecting the village of the same name. It is a picturesque little place, overlooked by an old castle, and the anchorage is sheltered by the island of S. Giglio, quiet enough now, but the guide-book tells us that here, two hundred and twenty-five years before the Christian era, the Roman troops disembarked and scattered an invading Gaulish army. But to the south lies another promontory on a larger scale than Tlamone; this is the Monte Argentario, the steep slopes of which are a mass of forests. The views on this part of the coast are exceptionally attractive. Indeed, it would be difficult to find anything more striking than the situation of Orbitello. The town lies at the foot of the mountain, for Argentario, since it rises full two thousand feet above the sea, and is bold in outline, deserves the name. It is almost separated from the mainland by a great salt-water lagoon, which is bounded on each side by two low and narrow strips of land. The best view is from the south, where we look across a curve of the sea to the town and to Monte Argentario with its double summit, which, as the border of the lagoon is so low, seems to be completely insulated.

Orbitello is clearly proved to have been an Etruscan town; perhaps, according to Mr. Dennis, founded by the Pelasgi, “for the foundations of the sea-wall which surrounds it on three sides are of vast polygonal blocks, just such as are seen in many ancient sites of central Italy (Norba, Segni, Palæstrina, to wit), and such as compose the walls of the neighboring Cosa.” Tombs of Etruscan construction have also been found in the immediate neighborhood of the city, on the isthmus of sand which connects it with the mainland. Others also have been found within the circuit of the walls. The tombs have been unusually productive; in part, no doubt, because they appear to have escaped earlier plunderers. Vases, numerous articles in bronze, and gold ornaments of great beauty have been found. Of the town itself, which from the distance has a very picturesque aspect, Mr. Dennis says: “It is a place of some size, having nearly six thousand inhabitants, and among Maremma towns is second only to Grosseto. It is a proof how much population tends to salubrity in the Maremma that Orbitello, though in the midst of a stagnant lagoon ten square miles in extent, is comparatively healthy, and has more than doubled its population in thirty years, while Telamona and other small places along the coast are almost deserted in summer, and the few people that remain become bloated like wine-skins or yellow as lizards.” But the inland district is full of ruins and remnants of towns which in many cases were strongholds long before Romulus traced out the lines of the walls of Rome with his plough, if indeed that ever happened. Ansedonia, the ancient Cosa, is a very few miles away, Rusellæ, Saturnia, Sovana at a considerably greater distance; farther to the south rises another of these forest-clad ridges which, whether insulated by sea or by fen, are so characteristic of this portion of the Italian coast. Here the old walls of Corno, another Etruscan town, may be seen to rise above the olive-trees and the holm-oaks.

Beyond this the lowland becomes more undulating, and the foreground scenery a little less monotonous. Corneto now appears, crowning a gently shelving plateau at the end of a spur from the inland hills, which is guarded at last by a line of cliffs. Enclosed by a ring of old walls, like Cortona, it “lifts to heaven a diadem of towers.” In site and in aspect it is a typical example of one of the old cities of Etruria. Three hundred feet and more above the plain which parts it from the sea, with the gleaming water full in view on one side and the forest-clad ranges on the other, the outlook is a charming one, and the attractions within its walls are by no means slight. There are several old churches, and numerous Etruscan and Roman antiquities are preserved in the municipal museum. The town itself, however, is not of Etruscan origin, its foundation dates only from the Middle Ages; but on an opposite and yet more insulated hill the ruins of Tarquinii, one of the great cities of the Etrurian League, can still be traced; hardly less important than Veii, one of the most active cities in the endeavor to restore the dynasty of the Tarquins, it continued to flourish after it had submitted to Rome, but it declined in the dark days which followed the fall of the Empire, and never held up its head after it had been sacked by the Saracens, till at last it was deserted for Corneto, and met the usual fate of becoming a quarry for the new town. Only the remnants of buildings and of its defenses are now visible; but the great necropolis which lies to the southeast of the Corneto, and on the same spur with it, has yielded numerous antiquities. A romantic tale of its discovery, so late as 1823, is related in the guide-books. A native of Corneto in digging accidentally broke into a tomb. Through the hole he beheld the figure of a warrior extended at length, accoutred in full armour. For a few minutes he gazed astonished, then the form of the dead man vanished almost like a ghost, for it crumbled into dust under the influence of the fresh air. Numerous subterranean chambers have since been opened; the contents, vases, bronzes, gems and ornaments, have been removed to museums or scattered among the cabinets of collectors, but the mural paintings still remain. They are the works of various periods from the sixth to the second or third century before the Christian era, and are indicative of the influence exercised by Greek art on the earlier inhabitants of Italy.

As the headland, crowned by the walls of Corneto, recedes into the distance a little river is crossed, which, unimportant as it seems, has a place in ecclesiastical legend, for we are informed that at the Torre Bertaldo, near its mouth, an angel dispelled St. Augustine’s doubts on the subject of the Trinity. Then the road approaches the largest port on the coast since Leghorn was left. Civita Vecchia, as the name implies, is an old town, which, after the decline of Ostia, served for centuries as the port of Rome. It was founded by Trajan, and sometimes bore his name in olden time, but there is little or nothing within the walls to indicate so great an antiquity. It was harried, like so many other places near the coast, by the Saracens, and for some years was entirely deserted, but about the middle of the ninth century the inhabitants returned to it, and the town, which then acquired its present name, by degrees grew into importance as the temporal power of the Papacy increased. If there is little to induce the traveller to halt, there is not much more to tempt the artist. Civita Vecchia occupies a very low and faintly defined headland. Its houses are whitish in color, square in outline, and rather flat-topped. There are no conspicuous towers or domes. It was once enclosed by fortifications, built at various dates about the seventeenth century. These, however, have been removed on the land side, but still remain fairly perfect in the neighborhood of the harbor, the entrance to which is protected by a small island, from which rises a low massive tower and a high circular pharos. There is neither animation nor commerce left in the place; what little there was disappeared when the railway was opened. It is living up to its name, and its old age cannot be called vigorous.

South of Civita Vecchia the coast region, though often monotonous enough, becomes for a time slightly more diversified. There is still some marshy ground, still some level plain, but the low and gently rolling hills which border the main mass of the Apennines extend at times down to the sea, and even diversify its coast-line, broken by a low headland. This now and again, as at Santa Marinella, is crowned by an old castle. All around much evergreen scrub is seen, here growing in tufts among tracts of coarse herbage, there expanding into actual thickets of considerable extent, and the views sometimes become more varied, and even pretty. Santa Severa, a large castle built of grey stone, with its keep-like group of higher towers on its low crag overlooking the sea, reminds us of some old fortress on the Fifeshire coast. Near this headland, so antiquarians say, was Pyrgos, once the port of the Etruscan town of Cære, which lies away among the hills at a distance of some half-dozen miles. Here and there also a lonely old tower may be noticed along this part of the coast. These recall to mind in their situation, though they are more picturesque in their aspect, the Martello Towers on the southern coast of England. Like them, they are a memorial of troublous times, when the invader was dreaded. They were erected to protect the Tuscan coast from the descents of the Moors, who for centuries were the dread of the Mediterranean. Again and again these corsairs swooped down; now a small flotilla would attack some weakly defended town; now a single ship would land its boatload of pirates on some unguarded beach to plunder a neighboring village or a few scattered farms, and would retreat from the raid with a little spoil and a small band of captives, doomed to slavery, leaving behind smoking ruins and bleeding corpses. It is strange to think how long it was before perfect immunity was secured from these curses of the Mediterranean. England, whatever her enemies may say, has done a few good deeds in her time, and one of the best was when her fleet, under the command of Admiral Pellew, shattered the forts of Algiers and burnt every vessel of the pirate fleet.

The scenery for a time continues to improve. The oak woods become higher, the inland hills are more varied in outline and are forest-clad. Here peeps out a crag, there a village or a castle. At Palo a large, unattractive villa and a picturesque old castle overlook a fine line of sea-beach, where the less wealthy classes in Rome come down for a breath of fresh air in the hot days of summer. It also marks the site of Alsium, where, in Roman times, one or two personages of note, of whom Pompey was the most important, had country residences. For a time there is no more level plain; the land everywhere shelves gently to the sea, covered with wood or with coarse herbage. But before long there is another change, and the great plain of the Tiber opens out before our eyes, extending on one hand to the not distant sea, on the other to the hills of Rome. It is flat, dreary, and unattractive, at any rate in the winter season, as is the valley of the Nen below Peterborough, or of the Witham beyond the Lincolnshire wolds. It is cut up by dykes, which are bordered by low banks. Here and there herds of mouse-colored oxen with long horns are feeding, and hay-ricks, round with low conical tops, are features more conspicuous than cottages. The Tiber winds on its serpentine course through this fenland plain, a muddy stream, which it was complimentary for the Romans to designate flavus, unless that word meant a color anything but attractive. One low tower in the distance marks the site of Porto, another that of Ostia and near the latter a long grove of pines is a welcome variation to the monotony of the landscape.

These two towns have had their day of greatness. The former, as its name implies, was once the port of Rome, and in the early days of Christianity was a place of note. It was founded by Trajan, in the neighborhood of a harbor constructed by Claudius; for this, like that of Ostia, which it was designed to replace, was already becoming choked up. But though emperors may propose, a river disposes, especially when its mud is in question. The port of Trajan has long since met with the same fate; it is now only a shallow basin two miles from the sea. Of late years considerable excavations have been made at Porto on the estate of Prince Tortonia, to whom the whole site belongs. The port constructed by Trajan was hexagonal in form; it was surrounded by warehouses and communicated with the sea by a canal. Between it and the outer or Claudian port a palace was built for the emperor, and the remains of the wall erected by Constantine to protect the harbor on the side of the land can still be seen. The only mediæval antiquities which Porto contains are the old castle, which serves as the episcopal palace, and the flower of the church of Santa Rufina, which is at least as old as the tenth century.

Ostia, which is a place of much greater antiquity than Porto, is not so deserted, though its star declined as that of the other rose. Founded, as some say, by Ancus Martius, it was the port of Rome until the first century of the present era. Then the silting up of its communication with the sea caused the transference of the commerce to Porto, but “the fame of the temple of Castor and Pollux, the numerous villas of the Roman patricians abundantly scattered along the coast, and the crowds of people who frequented its shores for the benefit of sea bathing, sustained the prosperity of the city for some time after the destruction of its harbor.” But at last it went down hill, and then invaders came. Once it had contained eighty thousand inhabitants; in the days of the Medici it was a poor village, and the people eked out their miserable existences by making lime of the marbles of the ruined temples! So here the vandalism of peasants, even more than of patricians, has swept away many a choice relic of classic days. Villas and temples alike have been destroyed; the sea is now at a distance; Ostia is but a small village, “one of the most picturesque though melancholy sites near Rome,” but during the greater part of the present century careful excavations have been made, many valuable art treasures have been unearthed, and a considerable portion of the ancient city has been laid bare. Shops and dwellings, temples and baths, the theater and the forum, with many a remnant of the ancient town, can now be examined, and numerous antiquities of smaller size are preserved in the museum at the old castle. This, with its strong bastions, its lofty circular tower and huge machicolations, is a very striking object as it rises above the plain “massive and gray against the sky-line.” It has been drawn by artists not a few, from Raffaelle, who saw it when it had not very long been completed, down to the present time.

X

VENICE

Its early days – The Grand Canal and its palaces – Piazza of St. Mark – A Venetian funeral – The long line of islands – Venetian glass – Torcello, the ancient Altinum – Its two unique churches.

So long as Venice is unvisited a new sensation is among the possibilities of life. There is no town like it in Europe. Amsterdam has its canals, but Venice is all canals; Genoa has its palaces, but in Venice they are more numerous and more beautiful. Its situation is unique, on a group of islands in the calm lagoon. But the Venice of to-day is not the Venice of thirty years ago. Even then a little of the old romance had gone, for a long railway viaduct had linked it to the mainland. In earlier days it could be reached only by a boat, for a couple of miles of salt water lay between the city and the marshy border of the Paduan delta. Now Venice is still more changed, and for the worse. The people seem more poverty-stricken and pauperized. Its buildings generally, especially the ordinary houses, look more dingy and dilapidated. The paint seems more chipped, the plaster more peeled, the brickwork more rotten; everything seems to tell of decadence, commercial and moral, rather than of regeneration. In the case of the more important structures, indeed, the effects of time have often been more than repaired. Here a restoration, not seldom needless and ill-judged, has marred some venerable relic of olden days with crude patches of color, due to modern reproductions of the ancient and original work: the building has suffered, as it must be admitted not a few of our own most precious heirlooms have suffered, from the results of zeal untempered by discretion, and the destroyer has worked his will under the guise of the restorer.

The mosquito flourishes still in Venice as it did of yore. It would be too much to expect that the winged representative of the genus should thrive less in Italian freedom than under Austrian bondage, but something might have been done to extirpate the two-legged species. He is present in force in most towns south of the Alps, but he is nowhere so abundant or so exasperating as in Venice. If there is one place in one town in Europe where the visitor might fairly desire to possess his soul in peace and to gaze in thoughtful wonder, it is in the great piazza, in front of the façade, strange and beautiful as a dream, of the duomo of St. Mark. Halt there and try to feast on its marvels, to worship in silence and in peace. Vain illusion. There is no crowd of hurrying vehicles or throng of hurrying men to interfere of necessity with your visions (there are often more pigeons than people in the piazza), but up crawls a beggar, in garments vermin-haunted, whining for “charity”; down swoop would-be guides, volunteering useless suggestions in broken and barely intelligible English; from this side and from that throng vendors of rubbish, shell-ornaments, lace, paltry trinkets, and long ribands of photographic “souvenirs,” appalling in their ugliness. He who can stand five minutes before San Marco and retain a catholic love of mankind must indeed be blessed with a temper of much more than average amiability.

The death of Rome was indirectly the birth of Venice. Here in the great days of the Empire there was not, so far as we know, even a village. Invaders came, the Adriatic littoral was wrecked; its salvage is to be found among the islands of the lagoons. Aquileia went up in flames, the cities of the Paduan delta trembled before the hordes of savage Huns, but the islands of its coast held out a hope of safety. What in those days these camps of refuge must have been can be inferred from the islands which now border the mainland, low, marshy, overgrown by thickets, and fringed by reeds; they were unhealthy, but only accessible by intricate and difficult channels, and with little to tempt the spoiler. It was better to risk fever in the lagoons than to be murdered or driven off into slavery on the mainland. It was some time before Venice took the lead among these scattered settlements. It became the center of government in the year 810, but it was well-nigh two centuries before the Venetian State attained to any real eminence. Towards this, the first and perhaps the most important step was crushing the Istrian and Dalmatian pirates. This enabled the Republic to become a great “Adriatic and Oriental Company,” and to get into their hands the carrying trade to the East. The men of Venice were both brave and shrewd, something like our Elizabethan forefathers, mighty on sea and land, but men of understanding also in the arts of peace. She did battle with Genoa for commercial supremacy, with the Turk for existence. She was too strong for the former, but the latter at last wore her out, and Lepanto was one of her latest and least fruitful triumphs. Still, it was not till the end of the sixteenth century that a watchful eye could detect the symptoms of senile decay. Then Venice tottered gradually to its grave. Its slow disintegration occupied more than a century and a half; but the French Revolution indirectly caused the collapse of Venice, for its last doge abdicated, and the city was occupied by Napoleon in 1797. After his downfall Venetia was handed over to Austria, and found in the Hapsburg a harsh and unsympathetic master. It made a vain struggle for freedom in 1848, but was at last ceded to Italy after the Austro-Prussian war in 1866.

The city is built upon a group of islands; its houses are founded on piles, for there is no really solid ground. How far the present canals correspond with the original channels between small islands, how far they are artificial, it is difficult to say; but whether the original islets were few or many, there can be no doubt that they were formerly divided by the largest, or the Grand Canal, the Rio Alto or Deep Stream. This takes an S-like course, and parts the city roughly into two halves. The side canals, which are very numerous, for the town is said to occupy one hundred and fourteen islands, are seldom wider, often rather narrower than a by-street in the City of London. In Venice, as has often been remarked, not a cart or a carriage, not even a coster’s donkey-cart, can be used. Streets enough there are, but they are narrow and twisting, very like the courts in the heart of London. The carriage, the cab, and the omnibus are replaced by the gondolas. These it is needless to describe, for who does not know them? One consequence of this substitution of canals for streets is that the youthful Venetian takes to the water like a young duck to a pond, and does not stand much on ceremony, in the matter of taking off his clothes. Turn into a side canal on a summer’s day, and one may see the younger members of a family all bathing from their own doorstep, the smallest one, perhaps, to prevent accidents, being tied by a cord to a convenient ring; nay, sometimes as we are wandering through one of the narrow calle (alleys) we hear a soft patter of feet, something damp brushes past, and a little Venetian lad, lithe and black-eyed, bare-legged, bare-backed, and all but bare-breeched, shoots past as he makes a short cut to his clothes across a block of buildings, round which he cannot yet manage to swim.

In such a city as Venice it is hard to praise one view above another. There is the noble sweep of the Grand Canal, with its palaces; there are many groups of buildings on a less imposing scale, but yet more picturesque, on the smaller canals, often almost every turn brings some fresh surprise; but there are two views which always rise up in my mind before all others whenever my thoughts turn to Venice, more especially as it used to be. One is the view of the façade of San Marco from the Piazza. I shall make no apology for quoting words which describe more perfectly than my powers permit the impressions awakened by this dream-like architectural conception. “Beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away: a multitude of pillars and white domes clustered into a long, low pyramid of colored light, a treasure-heap, as it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic and beset with sculptures of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory; sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm-leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes, and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptered and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their features indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine, spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, ‘their bluest veins to kiss,’ the shadow as it steals back from them revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand: their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs all beginning and ending in the Cross: and above them in the broad archivolts a continuous chain of language and of life, angels and the signs of heaven and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and above them another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, a confusion of delight, among which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark’s lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst.”4