Letters from Italy/Chapter 4

On the last occasion I wrote to you amid rain and fog from the only and therefore the best hotel in San Marino. And lo, the sky was more favourable in the morning, the mists ascended a storey higher, and one could see the country round to a great extent: the sea about thirty kilometers away, mountains, rocks, a measureless mass of mountain and rock, and beyond it the whole of Emilia, and on each mountain some castle or watch-tower or human nest set as on the palm of a hand, and at one’s feet a precipice whence rises the vertical rock of San Marino. From below it is a wonderful dentated crest, and I gazed back upon it from beyond Faenza, and after that I arrived at Bologna.

If Padua is a town of arcades and arboured walks I do not know how to designate Bologna. Here each arcade is as high as a two-storey house; in the midst a portal leads to a hall of columns which can accommodate a good-sized railway station, and from the hall through another portico you reach the courtyard. It is a regular frenzy of columns and arches; house after house is a palace of columns; the whole street, practically the whole town, consists simply of palaces, ​and even in the poorest quarters there are still arcades leading to streets and courtyards, arboured walks, porticos, all in heavy Renaissance. It is a pompous city, a trifle cold; its glory is not in art but in erudition and wealth. Every city in Italy has a kind of Romanesque church and Gothic castellated palace of the podestà (mayor); Bologna has in addition two oblique towers which resemble two misshapen square factory chimneys.

I shall not talk with you of art at Florence. There is far too much, so that the head spins round; finally one stares in stupefaction at a corner-stone in the belief that it is a fresco. After this tremendous flood of immortal beauty one clings firmly again to Giotto and Donatello, Masaccio and the blessed little Brother Angelicus di San Marco. Giotto, Master Jottus, has here in the cathedral a memorial tablet of the year 1490 on which is written: Hoc nomen longi carminis instar erat (this name has the value of a long poem). That is true, indeed: I have written down this name as though it were a poem, and am delighted that I shall meet with it again at Assisi.

For the rest, Florence is frightfully overflooded with foreigners. The native inhabitants for the most part ride bicycles, and here less than elsewhere is viva il fascio scrawled on the walls. As regards the Fascisti their yell is ejaejaeja, and their salute is such a violent sweep of the ​arm through the air that one is scared. But thank goodness I am no politician, and can now return to the foreigners. I am most sorry for those whom a hired guide urges along through churches and museums. If the guide declaims his explanation in Italian then the foreigners cannot understand him, and then if he yells in their ears something which he considers is French or English then they simply do not understand him at all. Besides, he is in the most unaccountable hurry, as though an addition to his family had just arrived; he runs along with his hat at the back of his neck, skips three-fourths of the objects, and has a special predilection for Canova. A second group of foreigners grip Baedeker as a drowning man clutches a straw, or a treasure-seeker grasps a divining-rod. They carry it unweariedly in front; and when they approach a masterpiece Baedeker visibly trembles in their hands, as they cast a rapid glance upwards, hastily contemplate the masterpiece, and then in half-tones read what Baedeker quotes about it from Crowe and Cavalcaselle. A third group are newly-married folks, whom at Venice I determined to ignore. A fourth group are “highlife,” who incessantly tear round in motor-cars, in which direction I know not since in ten minutes you can rush through Florence in different directions. A fifth group are copyists. They sit in the Pitti or Uffizi galleries and copy the most showy pieces; in their sense of private ​ownership they are unpleasantly affected if anyone begins to gaze immodestly at “their” master. They make miniatures after Fra Bartolommeo and picture-postcards after Botticelli; they have a marvellous ability for never matching a single colour, and make the picture so greasy that it gleams like an Easter-cake. They are mostly old gentlemen and ugly girls. Not a single copy, heaven knows, nor a single lady copyist is the least pretty. To-day at Fiesole three of them painted the promenade round the monastery and the cypresses; a few steps away was a child rolling on the grass with a dog, and that was so charming that I forgot to glance at these fanciful promenades and the “magnificent view of Florence and the valley of the Arno” (thus Baedeker describes it): but the three lady copyists continued solemnly to smear their fanciful promenades and cypresses, and not one removed her spectacles to regard the child with the dog or averted her eyes.