Italian Backgrounds - free ebook by Edith Wharton

ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS

ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS BY EDITH WHARTON ILLUSTRATED BY E. C. PEIXOTTO NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS MCMV Copyright, 1905, by Charles Scribner’s Sons Published April, 1905 THE DE VINNE PRESS...

14 minute read

Read Chapter

AN ALPINE POSTING-INN

To the mind curious in contrasts—surely one of the chief pleasures of travel—there can be no better preparation for a descent into Italy than a sojourn among the upper Swiss valleys. To pass from the region of the obviously picturesque—the country contrived, it would seem, for the delectation of the cœur à poésie facile —to that sophisticated landscape where the face of nature seems moulded by the passions and imaginings of man, is one of the most suggestive transitions in the rapidly diminishin

10 minute read

Read Chapter

I

For ten days we had not known what ailed us. We had fled from the August heat and crowd of the Vorderrheinthal to the posting-inn below the Splügen pass; and here fortune had given us all the midsummer tourist can hope for—solitude, cool air and fine scenery. A dozen times a day we counted our mercies, but still privately felt them to be insufficient. As we walked through the larch-groves beside the Rhine, or climbed the grassy heights above the valley, we were oppressed by the didactic quality

8 minute read

Read Chapter

II

The return to secular life was made two days later, when we left our monastery and set out to drive across the Aprica pass to Edolo. Retracing for a mile or two the way toward Sondrio, we took a turn to the left and began to mount the hills through forests of beech and chestnut. With each bend of the road the views down the Valtelline toward Sondrio and Como grew wider and more beautiful. No one who has not looked out on such a prospect in the early light of an August morning can appreciate the

1 minute read

Read Chapter

III

The Val Camonica, which extends from the Adamello group to the head of the lake of Iseo, is a smaller and more picturesque reproduction of the Valtelline. Vines and maize again fringed our way; but the mountains were closer, the villages more frequent and more picturesque. We had read in the invaluable guide-book of Gsell-Fels a vague allusion to an interesting church among these mountains, but we could learn nothing of it at Edolo, and only by persistent enquiries along the road did we finally

6 minute read

Read Chapter

IV

The sun lay heavy on Iseo; and the railway journey thence to Brescia left in our brains a golden dazzle of heat. It was refreshing, on reaching Brescia, to enter the streets of the old town, where the roofs almost meet and there is always a blessed strip of shade to walk in. The cities in Italy are much cooler than the country. It is in August that one understands the wisdom of the old builders, who made the streets so narrow, and built dim draughty arcades around the open squares. In Brescia th

2 minute read

Read Chapter

V

It was on the last day of our journey that the most imperturbable member of the party, looking up from a prolonged study of the guide-books, announced that we had not seen the Bergamasque Alps after all. In the excited argument that followed, proof seemed to preponderate first on one side and then on the other; but a closer scrutiny of the map confirmed the fear that we had not actually penetrated beyond the borders of the promised land. It must be owned that at first the discovery was somewhat

40 minute read

Read Chapter

THE SANCTUARIES OF THE PENNINE ALPS

When June is hot on the long yellow streets of Turin, it is pleasant to take train for the Biellese, that romantic hill-country where the last slopes of the Pennine Alps melt into the Piedmontese plain. The line, crossing the lowland with its red-tiled farm-houses and mulberry orchards, rises gradually to a region of rustling verdure. Mountain streams flow down between alder-fringed banks, white oxen doze under the acacia-hedges, and in the almond and cherry orchards the vine hangs its Virgilian

19 minute read

Read Chapter

WHAT THE HERMITS SAW

In almost every gallery of Italy there hangs, among the pictures of the earlier period, one which represents, with loving minuteness of topographical detail, a rocky mountain-side honeycombed with caves and inhabited by hermits. As a rule, the landscape is comprehensive enough to include the whole Thebaid, with the river at the base of the cliff, the selva oscura “fledging the wild-ridged mountain steep by steep,” and the various little edifices—huts, chapels and bridges—with which the colony of

15 minute read

Read Chapter

A TUSCAN SHRINE

One of the rarest and most delicate pleasures of the continental tourist is to circumvent the compiler of his guide-book. The red volumes which accompany the traveller through Italy have so completely anticipated the most whimsical impulses of their readers that it is now almost impossible to plan a tour of exploration without finding, on reference to them, that their author has already been over the ground, has tested the inns, measured the kilometres, and distilled from the massive tomes of Ku

19 minute read

Read Chapter

SUB UMBRA LILIORUM AN IMPRESSION OF PARMA

Parma, at first sight, lacks the engaging individuality of some of the smaller Italian towns. Of the romantic group of ducal cities extending from Milan to the Adriatic—Parma, Modena, Ferrara, Urbino—it is the least easy to hit off in a few strokes, to sum up in a sentence. Its component features, however interesting in themselves, fail to blend in one of those memorable wholes which take instant hold of the traveller’s imagination. The “sights” of Parma must be sought for; they remain separate

14 minute read

Read Chapter

I

March is in some respects the most exquisite month of the Italian year. It is the month of transitions and surprises, of vehement circling showers with a golden heart of sunlight, of bare fields suffused overnight with fruit-blossoms, and hedgerows budding as suddenly as the staff of Tannhäuser. It is the month in which the northern traveller, grown distrustful of the promised clemency of Italian skies, and with the winter bitterness still in his bones, lighting on a patch of primroses under a l

1 minute read

Read Chapter

II

It was, for instance, on such a March day that we rowed across the harbour of Syracuse to the mouth of the Anapus. Our brown rowers, leaping overboard, pushed the flat-bottomed boat through the line of foam where bay and river meet, and we passed over to the smooth current which slips seaward between flat banks fringed with arundo donax and bamboo. The bamboo grows in vast feathery thickets along these Sicilian waters, and the slightly angular precision of its stem and foliage allies itself well

6 minute read

Read Chapter

III

At noon of such another day we set out from Rome for Caprarola. The still air had a pearly quality and a mauve haze hung upon the hills. Our way lay north-westward, toward the Ciminian mountains. Once free of the gates, our motor started on its steady rush along the white highway, first past the walls of vineyard and garden, and then across the grey waste spaces of the Campagna. The Roman champaign is the type of variety in monotony. Seen from the heights of the city, it reaches in silvery samen

4 minute read

Read Chapter

IV

The drive from Viterbo to Montefiascone lies across the high plateau between the Monte Cimino and the lake of Bolsena. For the best part of the way, the landscape is pastoral and agricultural, with patches of oak-wood to which in March the leaves still cling; and on this fitful March morning, with rain in the shifting clouds, the ploughmen move behind their white oxen under umbrellas as vividly green as the young wheat. Here are none of the great bursts of splendour which mark the way from Rome

4 minute read

Read Chapter

V

Our friends and counsellors had for many years warned us against visiting Vallombrosa in March—the month which oftenest finds us in Tuscany. “Wait till June,” they advised—and knowing the complexity of influences which go to make up an Italian “sensation,” and how, for lack of one ingredient, the whole mixture may lose its savour, we had obediently waited for June. But June in Florence never seemed to come—“the time and the place” were no more to meet in our horoscope than in the poet’s; and so,

5 minute read

Read Chapter

I

It is hard to say whether the stock phrase of the stock tourist—“there is so little to see in Milan”—redounds most to the derision of the speaker or to the glory of Italy. That such a judgment should be possible, even to the least instructed traveller, implies a surfeit of impressions procurable in no other land; since, to the hastiest observation, Milan could hardly seem lacking in interest when compared to any but Italian cities. From comparison with the latter, even, it suffers only on a supe

1 minute read

Read Chapter

II

But, it may be asked, though Milan will seem more interesting to the emancipated judgment, will it appear more picturesque? Picturesqueness is, after all, what the Italian pilgrim chiefly seeks; and the current notion of the picturesque is a purely Germanic one, connoting Gothic steeples, pepper-pot turrets, and the huddled steepness of the northern burgh. Italy offers little, and Milan least of all, to satisfy these requirements. The Latin ideal demanded space, order, and nobility of compositio

5 minute read

Read Chapter

III

Yet Milan is not dependent on the seasons for this midsummer magic of light and colour. For dark days it keeps its store of warmth and brightness hidden behind palace walls and in the cold dusk of church and cloister. Summer in all its throbbing heat has been imprisoned by Tiepolo in the great ceiling of the Palazzo Clerici: that revel of gods and demi-gods, and mortals of all lands and races, who advance with linked hands out of the rosy vapours of dawn. Nor are loftier colour-harmonies wanting

2 minute read

Read Chapter

IV

The picturesqueness of Milan has overflowed on its environs, and there are several directions in which one may prolong the enjoyment of its characteristic art. The great Certosa of Pavia can, alas, no longer be included in a category of the picturesque. Secularized, catalogued, railed off from the sight-seer, who is hurried through its endless corridors on the heels of a government custodian, it still ministers to the sense of beauty, but no longer excites those subtler sensations which dwell in

2 minute read

Read Chapter

V

The reader who has followed these desultory wanderings through Milan has but touched the hem of her garment. In the Brera, the Ambrosiana, the Poldi-Pezzoli gallery, and the magnificent new Archæological Museum, now fittingly housed in the old castle of the Sforzas, are treasures second only to those of Rome and Florence. But these are among the catalogued riches of the city. The guide-books point to them, they lie in the beaten track of sight-seeing, and it is rather in the intervals between su

33 minute read

Read Chapter

I

In the Italian devotional pictures of the early Renaissance there are usually two quite unrelated parts: the foreground and the background. The foreground is conventional. Its personages—saints, angels and Holy Family—are the direct descendants of a long line of similar figures. Every detail of dress and attitude has been settled beforehand by laws which the artist accepts as passively as the fact that his models have two eyes apiece, and noses in the middle of their faces. Though now and then s

3 minute read

Read Chapter

II

As with the study of Italian pictures, so it is with Italy herself. The country is divided, not in partes tres , but in two: a foreground and a background. The foreground is the property of the guide-book and of its product, the mechanical sight-seer; the background, that of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy. This distinction does not imply any depreciation of the foreground. It must be known thoroughly before the middle distance can be enjoyed: there is no short cut to a

2 minute read

Read Chapter

III

As Italy is divided into foreground and background, so each city has its perspective; its premier plan asterisked for the hasty traveller, its middle distance for the “happy few” who remain more than three days, and its boundless horizon for the idler who refuses to measure art by time. In some cases the background is the continuation, the amplification, of the central “subject”; in others, its direct antithesis. Thus in Umbria, and in some parts of Tuscany and the Marches, art, architecture, hi

1 minute read

Read Chapter

IV

Perhaps Rome is, of all Italian cities, the one in which this one-sidedness of æsthetic interest is most oddly exemplified. In the Tuscan and Umbrian cities, as has been said, the art and architecture which form the sight-seer’s accepted “curriculum,” are still the distinctive features of the streets through which he walks to his gallery or his museum. In Florence, for instance, he may go forth from the Riccardi chapel, and see the castle of Vincigliata towering on its cypress-clad hill precisel

7 minute read

Read Chapter

V

In Venice the foreground is Byzantine-Gothic, with an admixture of early Renaissance. It extends from the church of Torcello to the canvases of Tintoretto. This foreground has been celebrated in literature with a vehemence and profusion which have projected it still farther into the public consciousness, and more completely obscured the fact that there is another Venice, a background Venice, the Venice of the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century Venice was not always thus relegated to the back

5 minute read

Read Chapter

VI

It is quite true, however, that Tiepolo was not primarily a devotional painter. He was first of all a great decorative artist, a master of emotion in motion, and it probably mattered little to him whether he was called on to express the passion of Saint Theresa or of Cleopatra. This does not imply that he executed his task indifferently. Whatever it was, he threw into it the whole force of his vehement imagination and incomparable maestria ; but what he saw in it, whether it was religious or wor

3 minute read

Read Chapter

VII

It is perhaps no longer accurate to describe Tiepolo as forming a part of the Venetian background. Recent criticism has advanced him to the middle distance, and if there are still comparatively few who know his work, his name is familiar to the cultivated minority of travellers. Far behind him, however, still on the vanishing-point of the tourist’s horizon, are the other figures of the Venetian background: Longhi, Guardi, Canaletto, and their humbler understudies. Of these, Canaletto alone emerg

6 minute read

Read Chapter

VIII

On a quiet canal not far from the church of the Frari there stands an old palace where, in a series of undisturbed rooms, may be seen the very setting in which the personages of Goldoni and Longhi played out their social comedy. The Palazzo Querini-Stampaglia was bequeathed to the city of Venice some fifty years since by the last Count Querini, and with its gallery, its library and its private apartments has since then stood open to a public which never visits it. Yet here the student of Venetia

5 minute read

Read Chapter

IX

But it is, after all, not in Nievo or Scudo, nor even in Longhi and Goldoni, that one comes closest to the vanished Venice of the eighteenth century. In the Museo Correr, on the Grand Canal, there has recently been opened a room containing an assemblage of life-sized mannikins dressed in the various costumes of the sette cento . Here are the red-robed Senator, the proud Procuratessa in brocade and Murano lace, the Abatino in his plum coloured taffeta coat and black small-clothes, the fashionable

1 minute read

Read Chapter