The arts of peace, such as the manufacture of wool and silken stuffs, were known in the middle ages in spite of the want of water (the hand and foot looms of Perugia are almost prehistoric in their simplicity), and in 1297 we hear of the magistrates of Perugia sending an embassy into Lombardy to fetch two friars thence who should teach their townsfolk the secrets of weaving. This art was zealously kept up for many years, but finally it fell into decay. A branch of it has lately been revived by a Milanese lady, and thanks to her efforts we are again able to buy the strange flame-patterned carpets which we find on the altars of so many of the older Umbrian churches.

Except in the Corso, life seems very quiet in Perugia. Yet though there is poverty, there is none of that feeling of decayed splendour, of arrested magnificence and luxury which we feel in so many cities of Italy. The Perugians were probably never very luxurious. There are one or two beautiful old palaces, but they are plain to look at, and the palaces of the nobles had a bad time of it and were constantly pulled to bits as their different owners were driven into the country. The town is a town of a strong people; it is dignified and peaceful. When the wind is not battering about its roofs and howling through its narrow streets one becomes aware of an extraordinary silence.

And in that silence the questions rise—one cannot stifle them: Where are the Beccherini and where are the Raspanti? Are the Baglioni really dead, and the Oddi, where are they? And the Flagellants and the Penitenti—have even their ghosts departed? Will not a pope ride in at the gates with his nephews and his cardinals and take up peaceful quarters in the grim Canonica? Will not some warlike Abbot come and batter down the church towers to build himself a palace? Will no procession pass us with a banner of Bonfigli, and women wailing that the plague should be removed?...

The snow falls silently upon the roads in winter. No blood of nobles stains it. In May all Umbria is green with crops. No condottiere comes to trample down the corn. But high upon her hill-top Perugia stands as she stood then, and in her silence seems to wait for something yet to come.

*   *  *  *  *  *   *  *  

Before closing this chapter we would once again repeat that no one with a few hours’ leisure should forbear to wander round the outer walls of the town before leaving Perugia. With only one break: that which is formed by the deep ravine (or bulagnjo in the local dialect) between Porta Sant Antonio and Porta S. Angelo, one can walk on quite good paths and roads under the outer walls of the entire city. The Via della Cuparella is a pleasant lane reached by passing out through Porta Eburnea. It skirts under the mediæval and Etruscan walls to the west of the town and re-enters the city again a little below Porta Susanna. This lane is one of the most sheltered corners in Perugia, and we have wandered up and down it in the early days of January, and found the sleepy lizards basking on its banks and yellow aconites in all the furrows. The trees bud early there; their young green shimmers like a vision of immortal youth against the grim walls of the mediæval and Etruscan city up beyond.

Another charming walk is that along the eastern side of the town, passing out through Porta S. Ercolano and through the Corso away along the broad high-road to the convent of Monte Luce, which is quite one of the most fascinating buildings of Perugia, with its front of white and rosy marble, its court-yard and rose window, and the splendid block of its nunnery walls covering the crest of the hill behind the church. The convent was built early in the thirteenth century on the site, some say, of an Etruscan temple dedicated to the Goddess Feronia, but more probably in the sacred wood or lucus from which it derived its name. It was one of the most prosperous convents of the country, and Mariotti gives a delightful account of a visit paid by the great Farnese Pope, Paul III., to its Abbess. The Pope, it seems, gave himself the permission to visit the nuns, who received him, “marvelling,” as the most learned nun of her day relates, “that the Vicar of God on earth should so far humiliate himself as to visit such vile servants, as we were.” The Pope came into the church and took the seat prepared for him in the choir, “all of his own accord, without being helped by anybody, and like a meek and gentle lamb ... and being seated, he said to the sisters, ‘Come everyone of you and kiss my foot.’ ” Then the Abbess and the sisters kissed the feet of the Pope. A long conversation and exchange of compliments followed, and finally at sundown the Pope departed, “very greatly edified.”

CONVENT OF MONTE LUCE
CONVENT OF MONTE LUCE

From Monte Luce one road winds down to the Tiber, passing under the charming villa of Count Rossi Scotti, and another back into the city, first through a strange row of wooden booths which are opened on the feast day of Monte Luce (August 15th), and then on through the walls of Mommaggiore’s fortress and back into the town through Porta S. Antonio.

But it is not possible to describe all the details of a place which, like all fair things, should be explored to be enjoyed. The discovery of its hidden lanes, its little wayside villas, and its churches must be left as it was left to the present writers, who never will forget the tramps they took in the brown winter twilight, the drives on warm spring afternoons when honeysuckle scented all the hedges, and the strange excited feelings which possessed them when they found the hidden wayside house or chapel, which had no written record to tell them who had built it, and nothing but its own Perugian charm to endear it to them, and to give it history.

CHAPTER V

Palazzo Pubblico, The Fountain, and the Duomo

The whole atmosphere of the square is unique and impressive: individual as are the piazzas of the largest and the smallest towns in Italy which have battled for their independence throughout the course of centuries. The buildings have been changed about, burnt, battered and rebuilt, but the spirit of the middle ages has never really left them. Sitting on the steps of the Duomo we seem to feel it creep up round our feet telling us stories of a past which is immortal. It was here that the people of Perugia fought and judged, preached and repented, loved maybe, and most certainly hated. It was in this little pulpit above our heads that S. Bernardino preached, and saw the books of necromancy and the false hair of the ladies burned; here that the Podestà and the people received ambassadors with deeds of submission from terrified neighbour towns. On the spikes of the railing round the fountain one set of nobles stuck the heads of others whom they hated, whom they slaughtered; and down those steps of the palazzo opposite, the great procession of the Priori came on days of solemn ceremony, and up through the dark gateway of the Canonica the Pope and all his cardinals passed in when they arrived from Rome. Truly the spirit of the past history is not dead. It is painfully and supremely living. The Piazza di S. Lorenzo on a December night with windstorms hurrying the sleet across its great grim walls is more absolutely filled with the terribilità of humanity than anything we ever realised.

One strange fact to trace in the square is the splendid preservation of the municipal buildings as compared to the almost ruinous condition of those of the church. The strife between the people and the papacy is carved as it were upon the very hearts of the monuments, and whereas the palace of the people has remained comparatively perfect—a beautiful finished building which delights the eye—the palace of the popes has been battered and abused almost to destruction at the hand of man, of fires and of time. Almost the only lovely detail which still clings to the face of the cathedral is the small pulpit whence the saint of Siena preached to the people; and this in itself is a symbolical fact, for it was the power of a single human soul which, for an instant tamed, if it could not quell, the passion of the Perugians. The power of the church, as church, never really mastered them. Paul III. mastered them, but he did so in the character of a warrior and tyrant.

As far as position goes the cathedral entirely dominates the municipal palace. It stands so high that in any distant view of the city it seems to soar above the other buildings. As we have seen before, the Perugians had but little patience with architectural or æsthetic matters. “They always preferred Mars to the Muse,” says Bonazzi. Some grim and enduring respect kept their hands off their municipal palace when once it had been completed to their satisfaction, they

PIAZZA DI S. LORENZO, SEEN FROM UNDER THE ARCHES OF THE PALAZZO PUBBLICO
PIAZZA DI S. LORENZO, SEEN FROM UNDER THE ARCHES OF THE PALAZZO PUBBLICO

took the precaution of putting a large iron fence round their fountain, but their cathedral suffered. They were zealous during the time of their prosperity to have a large and splendid church, but they never found time to finish or adorn it. They left the brickwork naked, hoping for some chance fight to furnish them with marbles for it, and in 1385 they were able to secure those which had been prepared for the cathedral of Arezzo. But they did not keep them. Pellini gives a weird account of the bringing of these marbles. “These things being accomplished,” he says, referring to a very inhuman siege and conquest over the unfortunate Arezzo, “some outward sign of the acknowledged victory was necessary; so many marble stones were brought back to Perugia with some paintings upon them which had been formerly in the cathedral of the city; and the oxen and carts which brought them hither, with all the men who worked to bring them, were dressed out by our city with red cloth; but of those said stones, although they were certainly put up outside the walls of our cathedral, no sign at all remains.” A little later Pellini explains their loss, for the people of Arezzo got back their marbles. “They started on their journey back to Arezzo,” says the faithful historian, who will acknowledge no possible conquest of his own city, “and were put up on a part of their church where they may now be seen, white and red in colour, and very lovely to behold.”

Throughout the history of Perugia, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we hear of fights and skirmishes in the square, but it was always the cathedral and not the palace which was turned into a fortress. In 1489 one of the endless fights between the Baglioni and the Oddi occurred, and the cathedral became a castle. Guido Baglioni arrived in hot haste from Spello, and proceeded to turn the Oddi out of Perugia. “Girolamo della Penna,” says Villani, “deserted his brother Agamemnon and joined the Signori Baglioni, taking with him Silvio del Abate and others, and, together with the Baglioni, they took possession of S. Lorenzo, placed artillery there, and fortified the church, its loggia, and its roof in every way they knew of.” The Duomo, on this occasion, proved such an excellent stronghold, that the Oddi outside were entirely discomfited, and had to abandon the siege and retire once more to the country. Another remarkable instance of fighting between the two pugnacious families is given by Fabretti, which illustrates, moreover, the slight power possessed by the Pope at that period. “At the end of October 1488 there was a great fight in the Piazza degli Aratri, and then the Baglioni collected in the piazza, and an ever-increasing throng of supporters assembled round them. And on that same day the brother of the Pope (Innocent VIII.) arrived, and as he passed by the piazza the people called out, ‘Chiesa, chiesa.’ He was accompanied to the steps of the Palazzo Pubblico by Guido and Grifonetto Baglioni, who hoped that he might manage to arrange matters. But the Priori looked out of the windows above them, and seeing the Baglioni in the street below, they began to throw down large and heavy stones in the hopes of wounding Guido Baglioni. The hubbub continued with renewed force, and only at dusk did stillness fall upon the city.”

Palazzo Pubblico.

Having glanced thus rapidly over the general historical interest of the piazza, it may be well to describe the buildings separately, taking the Palazzo Pubblico first. Anyone who comes to Perugia, even for a single afternoon, will naturally hurry to this point and spend an hour or two in the Cambio and Pinacoteca; but if a little time remains he should wander further through its public corridors and halls and archives, its council chambers, library, and prisons. All these are gathered together with a certain indifference to the first lines of architecture in the shell of the massive old buildings, and by penetrating these mysterious regions one seems better able to understand the spirit of historical Perugia. The iron force of the

REMAINS OF THE FIRST PALAZZO DEI PRIORI IN THE VIA DEL VERZARO
REMAINS OF THE FIRST PALAZZO DEI PRIORI IN THE VIA DEL VERZARO

people’s law—that force which alone kept head above the breakers of foreign wars and civil discord in the past—slumbers, but is not dead, in the halls where it once reigned. A hum of modern life, a host of modern busts and portraits now clash with, now mellow, the sombre walls and passages. At the other end of the Corso there is a grand new Prefettura, where the Prefect of all Umbria manages Umbrian matters, but the pulse of the old city beats on in its old veins. The Priori, with their golden chains and crimson gowns, have vanished, but the men and women of the land are pretty much the same. They wear big collars of foxes’ fur on their long winter cloaks, just as they did in mediæval times, and they bring their claims of business into their first house of business, they swarm and hum within the corridors, and trample up and down the wide stone staircase with dignified determination stamped upon their features. In the rooms to which they go the clerks sit writing steadily amidst their piles of archives and of blue-books. Few probably of all these people know, and fewer care, about the Peruginos and Bonfiglis in the rooms above; for the natural man or woman desires to pray before his saints and not to pay to stare at them.

We hear that the present palace was finished in the middle of the fourteenth century. Long before that date there had been a public hall where the rulers of the city met to discuss and settle its affairs.[51] But this building was comparatively small and cramped, and the new meeting-house was undertaken with superb disregard to expense. A rough calculation from the many bills shows us that upwards of 14,041 libre was spent on the building of it, but it took nearly one hundred and thirty years to build, and the fact that it was finished at different periods—a bit being added at intervals down the Corso—may account for the waving and irregular line of the east front, which is one of its most marked features.

The first architects employed were natives of Perugia: Fra Bevignate and Messers Giacomo di Servadio and Giovanello di Benvenuto. The original plan of the building was probably a perfect square, reaching from its present north front down to where the great door now stands. One should examine the building from the back in order to understand it fully. At one time we hear that Lombard workmen were called in to assist in the “very heavy labour,” which, perhaps, gives a certain Lombard look to parts of the brickwork round the windows.

The citizens took a vast interest in the erection of their public palace, and allowed many private houses and even churches to be pulled down in order to make room for it. As for the decoration of the cathedral, so also for that of the palace, a neighbouring town was ransacked to furnish ornaments, and the unhappy Bettona was stripped of marbles to supply the magnificent Priori with their pillars and their friezes. Different portions of the huge edifice were given to the principal city guilds to decorate, and it was probably a spirit of emulation in these societies which produced the costly beauties of the separate parts. The chapel was decorated by the Merchants’ Guild, and also the principal door, which was dedicated to St Louis of Toulouse. It is a beautiful piece of work, rich and lovely in its smallest detail, and carved in the grey stone called pietra serena, which always looks a little cold and dusty, like the fur on a grey mole’s back, but which lends itself to a certain attractive style of polished carving peculiar to old doorways in Perugia.[52] Through it one passes into an immense hall, from which a staircase leads into the rooms of the palace above. In former times there were no steps, and persons of distinction and of wealth rode up on horseback to the council chambers.

A splendid open-air staircase leads up to the north entrance of the palace, which is, perhaps, the most impressive architectural point in all Perugia. Some years ago this fine outer staircase was pulled down; but it has been rebuilt with extreme care and taste, and probably exactly on the original lines. One can fancy the great procession of the Podestà and the Priori proceeding up and down these steps on days of solemn ceremony. “Four mace-bearers went before them,” we are told, “bearing in their hands a silver staff richly covered with beautifully wrought figures, with the griffin on the top in enamelled relief. Without these mace-bearers it was not lawful for magistrates to go out.” Each of the ten Priori wore round his neck “a heavy golden chain, the emblem of his office; and on solemn occasions the magistrate was preceded by six trumpeters to herald his approach with silver trumpets, which same were about four metres in length, beautifully enamelled, and with streamers of red satin on which the white griffin of the city was depicted.”

The principal door, from which the Priori probably emerged, is guarded by great brazen beasts: a griffin and a lion, emblems of the city and the Guelphs. These creatures are very typical creations from the brain of some Perugian artist, and among the most impressive objects of their sort in Italy. They were originally made for a fountain in the square by a certain Maestro Ugolino, who received the modest sum of ten pounds for making them. In 1308 the fountain was destroyed, and a little later they were hoisted up to their present position. Long chains and keys hung from their claws in early days. “At the feet of these beasts,” says Rossi, “the bars and keys of the doors of Assisi were hung as glorious trophies in 1321; and in 1358 the keys of the Justice Hall of Siena. The undisciplined militia which entered Perugia on the 3rd August 1799 pulled them down secretly, (‘in the silence of the night’ Mariotti says,) and thus took from the citizens of the present day the satisfaction of restoring to their rightful owners these disgraceful mementos of patriarchal warfare with cities, who to-day are their best friends. The fragments which remain have not the slightest historical interest; they are merely the bars from which the above-mentioned articles once hung.”

The door with the brazen beasts above it leads straight into the Sala dei Notari—a splendid vaulted hall, its ceiling covered with frescoes, surrounded by high wooden stalls and steps of walnut. This big hall was given over to the lawyers of Perugia in 1583. They bought it, and their Collegio down below, from the city for the sum of 1000 scudi; and they at once decorated their fine new quarters, and settled comfortably into them, doing all their business there till early in the century. By the code of Napoleon they were, however, deprived of their privileges, and during the imperial French rule the hall was used as a criminal court. The lawyers seem to have been utterly unhinged in their arrangements. They never returned to the pleasant haunts from which the Emperor ousted them, and the big hall is now used for public concerts and lectures.

The room which corresponds with this one on the upper storey is now the Public Library, with a magnificent collection of over 50,000 volumes, some valuable manuscripts and beautiful painted missals.

Leaving the Sala dei Notari one crosses the main staircase of the palace, and passes into the living heart of the building, into a network of separate rooms and offices which it is not necessary to describe at length. The Sala del Consiglio Comunitativo, or d’Udienza, is beautifully decorated with crimson damask, and delicate arabesques, and has a fine open fire-place carved in pietra serena. Adone Doni’s picture of Julius III. (see page 181) is hung in this room, and from it one can gain a pretty accurate knowledge of what the Priori and the potentates of Perugia looked like in their gala clothes. In the Sala degli Archivi there is a fresco of Parnassus by Baroccio. The colour is very fresh still, and the nymphs seem hopelessly out of place above the piles of dusty archives.

There is a curious history connected with the Sala del Malconsiglio—that room with the exquisite fresco by Fiorenzo di Lorenzo over its main entrance door.[53] It was here that the celebrated debate took place concerning the English prisoners (Hawkwood’s men) whom the Perugians succeeded in capturing during the great fight down by the Tiber. The prisoners concocted a letter as they lay in their cells, and in the most pathetic terms they appealed to their capturers; “We too are Christians,” they urged, “but we die of thirst. Have mercy upon us, have mercy on your poor captives, your English vassals.” The Perugians, moved, or more probably flattered by the cringing words, in a moment of ill-timed leniency, let their captives free. They lived to regret the action. A short time later Hawkwood and his men attacked them in another battle on the bridge of S. Giovanni. The English gained an easy victory, 1500 of the Perugians fell, and the Podestà and the German captain of their troops were taken prisoners together with a host of other men. Thus it came about that the room in which the council met to decide the release of the English was thenceforth called the Sala del Malconsiglio in memory of the lamentable decision witnessed by its walls.

Hawkwood’s men were not confined, as it happens, in the prisons of the Palazzo Pubblico, but no pity can be too great for those who were, for the Perugians were by no means dainty in their treatment of prisoners in mediæval times. The street which runs from the Piazza down into the Via dei Priori is still called the Via della Gabbia because of the large iron cage which used to hang above it from the upper windows of the palace. In this cage the Perugians were wont to imprison thieves and other malefactors, and not even the clergy escaped the horrid degradation. In 1442 we read of a priest, Angelo di Marino, who robbed Roberto di Ser Francesco di Ferolo of some of his possessions: “the missing articles,” says Fabretti, “were found concealed in the campanile and under the altars, and, together with Angelo, the brothers of the priest were discovered to be accomplices, also a friar of S. Fiorenzo and many other priests and excellent citizens. On the 29th the said Angelo was put into a round cage, and with a cord he was dragged up into the corner wall of the Palace of the Podestà and there he remained for two days, and in the night he was put into prison and in the

OLDEST PART OF THE PALAZZO PUBBLICO
OLDEST PART OF THE PALAZZO PUBBLICO

loggia of that palace twelve sacks of stolen goods were stored and round that cage there was a garland of false keys ... and on the 28th of January the said Angelo was once again put back into the cage at midday, and it was very cold and there was much snow, and he remained there till the first day of February, both night and day, and that same day he was brought out dead and laid upon his bier in the piazza, and he was buried in the passage of S. Lorenzo which leads into the cloister.”

A big “open-air” prison looked into the Via della Gabbia: a sort of large cavern in the fathomless walls of the old building, and here no doubt the wretched prisoners sat huddled in chains together, a prey to all the pigs and passers-by. A corkscrew staircase leads up from the lower prisons to the higher storeys of the palace, and into this, merely in the thickness of the wall, separate cells are built, windowless, undrained, airless places, where other unfortunate persons were put by the “men of warlike spirit.”

There were even rougher modes than these of dealing with malefactors. On one occasion we hear of the most barbarous butchery of some gentlemen whose offences were purely political. Some were “thrown from the windows of the Palazzo Pubblico, and others were hanged from the lumiere, or long spikes which project from its lower walls.” The lumiere were intended for the heads of Perugia’s enemies, and one can fancy the faces of the butchered men looking down on the unforgiving citizens, whilst their blood dripped into the street. All through Perugia’s history we find references to the lumiere: “On the 3rd of July 1541, the head of Ciancio de Burelio was borne along by one of the twenty-five rebels of the Pope, a student killed him: his head was put on a lumiere outside the Palace of the Podestà” (Fabretti, iii. 22).

There were strange ways of catching prisoners in Perugia. We find one statute which shows us that every artizan was obliged to hang certain hooks and gaffs to his house walls “ready to help in the capture of a criminal, and all were expected to help in this said capture.”[54]

But if there was rude cruelty shown to prisoners it is fair to say there was also an occasional rude mercy. No doubt the latter was excited in the Perugians by their extreme religious superstition. We hear of an old custom of liberating prisoners “pro amore Dei.” “Every six months, two buon’ uomini (or good men) were chosen to elect certain officials who were given full power to let out five condemned prisoners on Holy Friday, two at Christmas, two on the feast of S. Ercolano, and two on Corpus Domini. Also two women on every feast of the Virgin Mary. In the choice of women, only those condemned for minor offences must be liberated. The men let out must have suffered six months’ imprisonment, and the women one month, and neither must have been liberated in this manner (pro amore Dei) on previous occasions.” Also there was to be strict silence on the nature of the offence. The Podestà published the names of the freed prisoners in three parts of the town so that the citizens might protest if they happened to be so minded. Three days later the prisoners were free and went to render thanks in the Church of S. Ercolano, after which they presented themselves before the civil authorities at the Palazzo Pubblico. These scarcerati pro amore dei, as they were called, were excluded from all public offices, “it not being decent,” says the statute, “that they should be on the same level as the rest of the Perugians.”

The Fountain.

There is one remarkable object in the Piazza of S. Lorenzo which has little or nothing to do with individual factions or with the affairs of Church and State, and this is the famous fountain which we are told was ever “dear as the apple of their eye to the people of Perugia.” Indeed the citizens were in the habit of declaring that their fountain was “unique not only in Italy but in the entire world.”

This beautiful bit of early Renaissance sculpture needs but a slight description here, for its form is familiar to most people either through engravings or through photographs. It is, however, a rather common error to suppose, as Vasari himself did, that the Pisani were the sole architects of the fountain. The only certain work which they did for it was the ornamentation of the panels and probably the statues. The whole plan of the fountain was supplied by the Perugian architect, Fra Bevignate, and it was he who called in other sculptors to help in the building.[55] In 1277 he applied to Charles of Anjou for permission to employ the Florentine, Arnolfo di Lapo, to help with the sculptures on the second basin, and in the same year a certain Rosso designed and made the third bronze basin with its pillar and its ornaments of Nereids and of griffins on the top.[56]

The fountain rises from the square—a broad pile of marble now almost black with age, upon a circle of stone steps. The second basin is supported on a forest of slender columns which give an airiness and a necessary lightness to the whole. The designs upon its panels, which are infinite in their variety, were made by Niccola Pisano and carried out by his son Giovanni. These two big marble basins are crowned by a third in bronze with the figures of three Nereids rising from it, and bearing on their heads the eternal griffin of Perugia, without which fascinating beast no single house or building in the city would ever seem complete.

Niccola Pisano and his son must have studied the tastes of the Perugians with exquisite care and tact, combining these with the more general artistic taste of the age in which they worked. The panels on the first large basin are a fascinating study: the months of the year, and Æsop’s fables, scenes of domestic life and Roman legend, the griffin and tales from the Old Testament, the Umbrian saints, the sciences and arts, all wonderfully intermingled upon the separate panels. Even the old joke about the fishes is gracefully treated by the Florentine sculptor, for Lake Trasimene, as a beautiful woman, clasps three large lasche in her rounded arms. S. Ercolano, too, is here in all his glory, together with S. Louis of Toulouse and S. Costanzo.

One cannot help wondering how Perugia got her drinking water in early days. We may imagine that it

THE REAPER. DETAIL IN PANEL ON THE FOUNTAIN
THE REAPER. DETAIL IN PANEL ON THE FOUNTAIN

was entirely through wells, and wells on the top of a hill are apt to run dry. Thirst, therefore, was probably a far stronger factor in times of siege than the cowardice of her inhabitants, and the city must often have been driven to capitulate through the terrible need of water, rather than through the fear of foreign arms. As the city grew, a sense of inadequacy on this particular point grew too, and people began to wonder how water could be procured from some fresh running spring upon the neighbouring hills; yet to bring it up to such a height seemed to the Perugians an almost insuperable difficulty. An early genius nearly solved it for them, but like other early geniuses he failed. In 1254 Frate Plenario, an obscure preaching friar, wandering through the woods and hills around Perugia, conceived, what in those days seemed the most hazardous scheme, of bringing water into the piazza of the city by means of a large aqueduct from the hill of Monte Pacciano, which lies three miles or so to the north of the town. Plenario urged his scheme upon the magistrates, they approved it, and after certain difficulties as to the necessary funds they determined to embark on the adventurous undertaking. Frate Plenario was put at the head of the works, and Messer Bonomi chosen as architect. But the plan was large, the execution very difficult. The arches were built too small and fragile, and carried at too low a level. They fell to ruin in the woods, and the poor little priest and his friend Bonomi vanished with the desolation of their works. Their plans, however, never died, they merely remained to be carried out by stronger if not subtler minds.

In 1274 the question of a fountain again became paramount in Perugia. More solid channels were built across the hills and the ambitious magistrates called in the most skilled sculptors of the day to decorate a receptacle for the precious water when it should arrive. It came for the first time on the 15th of February 1280, and we can fancy the joyful pride of the citizens as they saw it running over the lovely marble and brass basins which had been so carefully prepared for it.

The most elaborate and stringent laws were made for the guardianship of the fountain and the use of its waters. It was enclosed, as it is to-day, with iron railings, and was, as the ever sarcastic Bonazzi rightly says, “the subject of most grave solicitude.” We hear that there were seven troughs which gathered the water outside the railing, but “beasts, barrels, unwashed pots, and unclean hands were forbidden the use of the water, and indeed this was guarded with such jealous care that it seemed as though the people of Perugia had built their fountain for the sake of beauty only.... Yet,” adds Bonazzi, “the five hundred florins which were annually given over to its maintenance, without counting extra expenses and the wages of its special porters and superior officers, would have been ill-spent indeed if beauty had been missing in the monument.”

But if it was difficult to bring the water it was equally difficult to keep it always running. The elegant pile of marbles, the thing that the Podestà, the priests and the people all combined in literally doting on, was for ever running dry, and growing lifeless. In this nineteenth century the Prefect of Perugia is about to send some forty miles instead of three to fetch his people water, but the great fountain will be there to hold it when it comes, and the first aqueduct will remain to break with exquisite lines the little copses and the fields away to the north of the city.

We know of few lovelier points about Perugia than the place where its water is stored on the lower hills of Monte Pacciano—low wooded hills where the

GEOMETRY. DETAIL IN A PANEL OF THE FOUNTAIN
GEOMETRY. DETAIL IN A PANEL OF THE FOUNTAIN

white heath grows in spring-time amongst the copses of crimson-stemmed arbutus, and where one can lie for hours on the turf looking away to Trasimene, and all the waving hills and smaller hill-set cities of the Umbrian country. Here the Perugians catch and store their drinking water in three great reservoirs. The first of these was built some time at the end of the thirteenth century. The masonry is rough and massive, and the water seems more green and more mysterious in the mediæval basin than in those of this practical nineteenth century. We went there late one April afternoon, and lingered long in the cool and cavernous places where the water is gathered together. As we came home we traced the course of the old aqueducts which have long since been abandoned. The springs to-day are carried underground in a sort of switch-back fashion over the sloping hillsides. But the ruins of the earlier conduit remain in their old places. Seeing them, we thought of the times in which they had supplied the men and horses crawling home from some hot skirmish on the plain, and of how the water had washed the blood of nobles from the steps of the Duomo and quenched the thirst of preaching friars and painters. How dead, how gone, that passionate past, how hum-drum, and how dreary seemed the clatter of the table d’hôte when we got back that evening.

But in describing the water supply of the city, we have wandered rather far afield from the subject of the piazza. A great flight of steps leads from the back of the fountain up to the cathedral.

Cathedral of S. Lorenzo.

As we have pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the Church has suffered terribly, both from

ON THE STEPS OF THE CATHEDRAL
ON THE STEPS OF THE CATHEDRAL

neglect and warfare. The outer walls look very brown and bruised and naked too, without their marbles, but as such they form a monument of history which few would wish to alter. The first old church was pulled down in 1200 in order to make room for a superb new cathedral which was to take the place of the old one down outside the city walls at Porta S. Pietro, and the citizens met in solemn conclave to talk their project out, they even appointed their architect, Fra Bevignate, to make their plans for them. But the Perugians were full of wars, and other business and buildings at that period, and they soon found that their funds were far too low to allow of a new cathedral. They therefore let the matter drop, and some years passed before they made another effort. In 1345 the Bishop laid the foundation stone of S. Lorenzo. It was a solemn occasion, and all the clergy were present at the ceremony; but the stone, when laid, remained in solitary state for the rest of the century, and the people of Perugia were forced to pray and sing, to marry and baptise elsewhere, for another hundred years went by before the building was completed. Other catastrophes awaited it when finished, for the inexorable French Abbot Mommaggiore was at that time building his fortress at Porta Sole, and in doing this he found it necessary to knock down a great part of the new cathedral. Finally, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Bishop Baglioni, whose beautiful tomb stands to the right as one enters the cathedral, put the place in comparative order again, and it only remained for his descendants to use it as their fortress in the years to come!

There is a feeling of great warmth about the interior of S. Lorenzo, which is built in the form of a Latin cross with three naves. The ceiling is badly painted, much of the glass is poor, the twelve tall columns covered with a sort of stucco which imitates a stone no one has ever seen and only the artist dreamed of; but with all these faults the church has charm, and none of that desolate chill which the outside walls suggest. The clergy are rich at Perugia; the people have never lost their strong religious sense, which the advance of civilisation has turned from a wild fanaticism to a tone of more sober devotion, and the services are always impressive in S. Lorenzo—the whole body of the choir filled with choristers, the priests forming themselves into splendid coloured groups around the bishop’s chair, and up against the woodwork and red damasks on the stalls.

Something of the life of the city, and much of the lives of the popes, has crept into the inner walls of the cathedral. The chapel of S. Bernardino stands to the right as one enters. This belonged to the Merchants’ Guild of Perugia, and by them it was magnificently decorated. The merchants purchased their rights to the chapel in 1515, and they at once began to adorn it with splendid woodwork. They were naturally anxious to get a really good picture for their altar, but they took their time to select a suitable artist. Finally, they decided on Federigo Baroccio, of whose skill they had heard great things, and they sent their captain to Urbino where Baroccio lived, begging him to come and paint their altar. The subject chosen was the “Descent from the Cross.” Federigo came and finished his picture between 1567 and 1568. Tradition says that he was suffering from the effects of poison which a jealous person had administered to him in Rome, as he painted. Be this as it may, his picture gave the utmost satisfaction not only to the Merchants’ Guild but also to “the whole city of Perugia,” and it scarcely looks like the work of a man who was sickening from the effects of fatal drugs, but rather like that of one with all his health and wits about him. The figures are full of action, and although the colour is so warm and glowing, the atmosphere is one of storm and tempest. To the left of the cross the Magdalen strains her white arms to the unconscious Virgin whose figure is supported by a radiant woman in a yellow gown. To the right S. John stretches forward to catch the body of the falling Christ, whilst a young man, leaning backwards in a hurricane of wind, supports Him to the left. The only quiet points in this over-dramatic composition are the fainting figure of our Lady and that of her dead Son. Looking at it one is reminded of Tintoretto’s work in its extravagant sense of action, but the touch of sentimentality throughout is foreign to the Venetian painter.[57]

Baroccio was a native of Urbino, born there in 1528. He studied painting with the Zuccheri and also with Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael, and he had in his day a great reputation for his treatment of sacred subjects. It seems that he fell in love with the city of Perugia, for he stayed on painting there long after his work was finished, and he would often come again like the popes and other tired persons of distinction. He adopted a child of Perugia, Felice Pelegrin, and took him back to Urbino, where he educated him as a painter. Felice became distinguished in his way, and his success encouraged the generous Federigo to adopt another child, Felice’s brother. But the second experiment was not so happy. The boy grew into an astonishingly beautiful young man; women idolised him and he was murdered by some jealous rival when still comparatively young.

To the left of Baroccio’s picture there is a fine glass window designed by Arrigo Fiammingo in 1565. The window has been restored, but is beautiful in parts, both in colour and design, and Perugia is not rich in coloured glass. The subject represented is S. Bernardino of Siena preaching to the people of Perugia in the church of S. Maria del Popolo. The Saint is in the background—he, and the people and the architecture round him, are brown and quiet in colour. The figures in the foreground are far more brightly coloured, notably that of the old merchant in a blue cloak. The small naked boy who is leading him is perhaps the most charming point of the whole composition. The child’s figure is like a little S. John, but he is probably meant to represent the Spirit of the Merchants’ Guild, for he has a bundle bound about his shoulders, over which his yellow curls fall down, and a bundle or “pacco” is the sign of the Merchants’ Guild.

The stalls in the chapel are very fine work of the sixteenth century. A whole book might easily be written about the stalls of the Perugian churches. Their wealth of beauty and of real excellency is inexhaustible, but it would be hopeless in so short a space to attempt any full description of the individual ones. The choir of the cathedral is in itself a fine example and worthy of a very careful study.

Immediately opposite the chapel of S. Bernardino is that of the Virgin’s Ring. To the mere lover of art the interest of this chapel is dead indeed. Perugino’s “Sposalizio”: that wonderful design which Pietro created for his Duomo, and which Raphael a few years later copied, went, as so many of the very best Perugian paintings went, to swell the galleries of Napoleon. The poor picture has never travelled back across the Alps as many of its contemporaries have done. It hangs on the walls of the Gallery at Caen, and an inferior copy fills the frame which first was made to hold it.

To the pious, a treasure of infinitely greater price than Perugino’s altar-piece is still shut safe and sure within the railings of the chapel, and this is the wedding-ring of the blessed Virgin Mary. It was brought to Perugia by a certain Winterio di Magonza, who “piously stole it” from Chiusi in 1472. The Ring is kept in a wonderful and exquisitely worked silver casket,[58] but so extraordinary is its value, that it can only be seen five times a year, and during the rest of the time a monstrous silver cloud covers the spot where it is stowed away.

We were privileged to see the Ring on one of Mary’s greatest feast days (December 8th), and to examine it closely, even to handle it. We shall not ever forget the sight, which was impressive, and savoured almost of a pagan rite. The Ring was exposed from 7 A.M. to 6 P.M. We went to see it in the evening. In the square outside it was dark and pouring with cold rain, the great church too was dark and cold, a candle or two in the organ loft, and the organ sending a stream of mysterious music across the aisle, for the benediction. In the chapel of the Relic there was light—a blaze of innumerable candles, and underneath, the priests and an immense throng of people at their prayers. A staircase hung with crimson damask had been built for the day up the side of the wall to the little platform where the Ring is kept. We climbed the stairs to the platform and entered the chapel up above. There were only a few of the privileged Perugians there: some ladies, two smiths with the bolt and keys, the custodian, one or two members of the municipality, and the Ring which, in the light of all its candles, had an extraordinary, nay an even uncanny effect, and seemed cut out of some large opal.[59] When the service below was ended, the priest of the Ring arrived up the ladder. He took the relic out of its shrine, and a strange, half hysterical prayer went up from the tiny crowd. With the excessive courtesy peculiar to the Perugians we were asked to come forward: “You people of Perugia can always see your Ring, and these ladies are strangers,” said the priest, who bade us examine it closely. Then the locking up began, and it was a mighty business. The relic is kept in a wonderful variety of cases. It is first locked into a little leathern case with a golden key kept by the bishop. Fifteen other different locks, their keys kept by fifteen different persons of importance in the city, follow. The weight of the last iron chest which covers the other boxes is stupendous. Two locksmiths and a custodian could scarcely manage to close it. As the locking up proceeded the candles went gradually out in the cathedral, and only one or two small tapers remained to light the mysterious burial. We passed from the chapel into the rain-swept square, and some of Ciatti’s strange, unlikely fables ran in our head as we splashed through the desolate wind-swept streets. He tells us of the marvellous properties of the Ring—how the power possessed by it was so potent that people’s ills were cured by merely looking at it, and how when a Tuscan lady had the audacity to wear it, her hand became withered, even as a dead leaf in autumn. And then he gives the story of the finding of the Ring:—