whitebeard

Monday, December 11, 2006

CHAPTER V

THE CASTLES OF THE WESTERN VALLEYS

"What I love best in all the world

15 a castle precipice encurled,

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine."

BORGO ALLA COLLINA, through which the high road from the Casentino over the Consuma passes, is delightfully situated on a low ridge between the plain of the Arno and the entrance to a deep valley which runs far back into the western hills and is watered by the Solano, a tributary of the Arno. Borgo was once a " castello" like its neighbours. The great vaulted portal which bestrides the road and gives beneath its black shadow a glimpse of the flagged street and porticoed houses beyond is a survival from medioeval days, and the weather-beaten old building above is still called the palace, though it has lost all its grandeur. The place was used by the Counts as a pleasure-house or hunting lodge, but it was the chief castle of the Contessa Elisabetta di Battifolle at the end of the fourteenth century, and underwent then some perilous vicissitudes, being besieged and taken by Count Roberto Novello of Poppi, who, as we have seen, carried his cousin a prisoner to' his castle. After she had been released and her castle restored to her by the intervention of Florence, she had still to be on her guard against her cruel kinsman, who now sought to kill her by subtlety, so that she hardly dared stir out of her stronghold. One day when she ventured forth to the chase in the forest which then spread all round Borgo she was assailed by a shower of arrows which actual1y pierced her garments, but thanks to the speed of her good horse she succeeded in escaping. This feud between these two dose neighbours and kinsfolk brought misery on the country round. Elisabetta's husband, Giovanni Gabrielli, a soldier of fortune, revenged her wrongs by sacking the Count of Poppi's lands and carrying off much spoil. But in the end Elisabetta was compelled by the continued persecutions of her cousin to abandon her castle to the care of Florence and retreat to the city, where she lived in a palace granted her by the Republic, in company with another refugee, the Contessa Caterina, widow of one of the later Counts of Romena. This lady and her children had been cruelly used by the Conti Guidi of Bagno, who had burnt their castle of Montegranelli in the Romagna and made them prisoners, and after they had been once rescued, had again tried to seize them, and had only been prevented by the intervention of Florence. There is a legend that this lady, after many 3.dventures, had been miraculously delivered out of their hands by the archangel Raphael. This throws light on an interesting old altar-piece, now hanging in the choir of the big new church at Borgo, whence it was removed from the old parish church near the gate.

The picture, which has been very badly used by a would-be restorer, depicts the marriage of St. Catherine, with saints grouped on either side; the figures, graceful and decorative in arrangement, are of the small-headed, long and slender type with which one is familiar in the works of some of the primitive Tuscans. Among the quaint representations in the predella beneath there is a little scene of an angel leading forth a cloaked figure from a gateway. This can be no other than the Contessa Caterina being delivered from captivity by the angel Raphael. The picture bears the inscription:

Domina Comitissa Elisabeth de Battifolle MCCCXXIII. die primo Augusti, and there can be little doubt I think that it was a thank-offering from Elisabetta for the safety of her friend and kinswoman. The date is an obvious mistake for 1423, at which time the donor was living, and not a hundred years earlier; the style of the work also shows it to belong to the later period. One of the numerals may perhaps have been dropped out at some restoration.

After Borgo had fallen into the possession of Florence, the palace was conferred upon one of the secretaries of the Republic, Cristoforo Landino, who had been a tutor of Lorenzo de' Medici, and was a member of the famous Medicean circle of humanists and philosophers. He is best known as the author of a commentary on the Divina Commedia. Cristoforo belonged to an ancient Casentinese family, and Borgo was his native place. His body, unconsumed by time, lies in the church. By a strange irony it was long regarded by the simple villagers with great reyerence as the miraculously preserved remains of a saint, till one day a learned tourist, the Frenchman Ampère, intent on the traces of Dante, came along and read the inscription upon the tomb, and joined the mummy once again to the memory of its rightful owner, the platonic philosopher. He tells the story in his Voyage Dantesque, adding that as he went away he could not help smiling at such an unexpected and symbolical meeting: “Everywhere, in the character of the places, in the memories, I had found the spirit of Dante living still, and here I found the corpse of his. commentator. "

Borgo alla Collina is a delightful place to stop in. There is a comfortable pension in the village, with rooms opening on to a terrace, commanding an incomparable view of the Valley.(1) (1) This house, belonging to Padre Fabbri, is very convenient for either a short or a long stay. The needs of English visitors are thoroughly understood. Italian is always spoken, but English is forthcoming for those who do not know the language of the country.

Here you may sit all day satisfied, while before your eyes the wonderful drama of sun and shadow is played out over the historic scenes around. You may see the diverse effects upon the spectral towers of. Romena to the left, arid upon gracious Poppi to the right; watch the day quicken and the night fall over the contemplative Rock in the east, and observe the swift changing moods of lofty Falterona to the north, and the great ranges that radiate from it. All day and all night the song of the Arno rises from the fields below. The hill upon which the village is set is bathed by both streams, the Arno on one side, the Solano on the other, and the pleasant slopes, clothed with vineyards, run down to idyllic green places beside the water, whither the children lead the sheep to pasture and the great white oxen come down to drink, stepping between the slender stems of the poplars on the bank. Here in the hot summer days the air is cooled by the breath of the rippling water which has issued so lately from the high ravines. On the opposite side of the Solano the chestnut woods begin, rising up to the little mountain chapel of Filetto and spreading away for miles, a shady wilderness in which to hide from what Petrarch calls "the celestial ardour of the Lion." Here indeed may be tested all those mountain delights which the poet long ago would fain have shared with Count Roberto of Battifolle.

Just beyond Borgo a tall wooden cross stands where four roads meet. Here, in an open space looking down on either valley, a fair is held twice a year. The road to the left plunges down into the valley of the Solano, which pierces like a gulf into the deep misty folds of the western hills. Below in its depths lies the little town of Strada, and upon the mountain side above hangs Castel San Niccolò with its gloomy tower and keep. This castle was in the fourteenth century the stronghold of the fierce Ghibellines Guglielmo Spadalunga and his son Galeotto Novello, who spent their energies in preying upon their kinsmen of the Guelf party. Galeotto made himself so odious to his people by his cruelty and licentiousness that they rebelled against him and drove him out of the castle and surrendered it to Florence. The Count was put under the ban of the Republic, which took possession of his domains and constituted them into a Commune called the Montagna Fiorentina, of which San Niccolò was the chief place. In 1440 the castle suffered a terrible siege from Count Francesco of Poppi and the Milanese, who, after it had resisted for thirty-two days, took it by storm, and revenged themselves cruelly on the defenders, crushing them to death with missiles hurled from catapults as they strove to escape, and hanging all that felt into their hands. Count Francesco slew with his own hand an old woman, the sole creature found still alive and still defiant in the innermost keep, when at last he and his soldiers broke in. When Florence reconquered the Valley and final1y swept away the Guidi, San Niccolò was dismantled, with the other mountain strongholds, which could now serve no purpose but to harbour rebels or robbers.

Strada, or Vado as the village below was sometimes called, there being a ford here, consisted once only of the church and a few poor dwellings of peasants. It is now a populous little town, extending some way along the left bank of the Solano. The old Pieve, like the church at Stia, is encrusted with the additions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and disfigured by side altars and tawdry ornamentation, but it has not been altered structurally, and the nave is complete with its seven bays and has a fine effect of length. The pillars are lower and smaller than those of Romena, and their loftiness is also lessened by the floor being raised and hiding the bases. They have the same kind of capitals as in the other churches, volutes and stiff flat acanthus leaves, ram's heads, and a marvellous assemblage of strange and monstrous figures, among which may be noted a rude representation of Christ and St. Thomas; on another column there is a hunting scene, showing a delightfully quaint little horseman on one face of the capital, and a lion on the next, symbolic of the soul warring against evil.

But interesting as are these fantastic symbols of faith and dogma carved upon the columns, the most devout decoration, if one may so call it, is lent by the living figures to be seen in all these churches, the bowed heads of old men or simple shawled forms of women that kneel motionless beside the great pillars, and in the perfect unconscious grace of their attitude are outward signs of that meek and suppliant spirit with out which no temple built with hands has its true significance.

The castle steep rises abruptly on the other side of the Solano, opposite the town.

You cross the swift-running stream by a picturesque bridge and ascend a zigzag mule path cut in the rock. No place in the Casentino gives a better impression o a feudal stronghold than San Niccolò. The arched gateway flanked by a bell tower, the steep flagged path, the primitive stone hovels with their dark and cavernous interiors, the little piazza, the ruined chapel with noble frescoed figures of saints fading on the walls inside, the old Palazzo di Ragione, or justice hall, plastered outside with mouldering stone shields, and used now as a stable far sheep, the Keep crowning the rock above with its walls and gateways and massive tower, all these things have suffered little change in five centuries, save the effects of time and weather. The ancient hags with eldritch locks, grasping distaffs, the children in many-coloured rags that swarm around the visitor differ hardly more from the serfs that peopled it in the days of the Guidi. Only a long sleep has fallen upon the place. Between the outer and inner ramparts of the castle vines now grow and make a border of delicate green beneath the rusted wall, and all down the steep which falls away on every side, where the fierce masnadieri once swarmed up with fire and sword, the grapes grow slowly purple undisturbed upon the scanty vines. Nothing comes to break the quiet except the storms which sweep down through the curtain of chestnut forest behind from the high ridges of the Pratomagno.

The castle is entered through a portal beneath lofty walls which show remains of noble Gothic windows, and a steep path leads up through another gateway into the courtyard. There is a picturesque fountain here, and beneath is the old cistern of the castle. Some stone escutcheons of the Florentine castellans who succeeded the Guidi are on the walls. The great tower rises on one side, and its ruined chambers may be reached and entered by a perilous ladder which the custodian of the castle sets up for the visitor. In one of the inhabited rooms below there is a fine sixteenth century chimney-piece. For the rest, the dwelling of the formidable William Longsword and the dissolute Galeotto is roofless, desolate and silent.

The road from Strada up the Valley follows the green poplar-edged banks of the Solano, passing through the adjacent village of Prato di Strada to the picturesque little hamlet of Rifiglio clustered beneath the hill. Here it divide s, and one branch follows up a side valley on the right beside the torrent of the Rifiglio, passing the idyl1ic mountain village of Caiano, where the women sit and spin on their doorsteps in the sunshine, and climbs up to the moory wastes of the Consuma, inhabited only by hawks and roamed over by scanty flocks of sheep, where it joins the solitary high road between the Casentino and Florence. The other branch of the road keeps on along the banks of the Solano and passes beneath a great mountain rampart which thrusts itself forward into the deep gorge of the stream. This is the hill of Battifolle, and upon its verge, suspended over the abyss, stood the castle of that name, which signifies literal1y a rampart. Nothing remains now of the mighty masonry with which the Guidi built up this natural stronghold, except a green mound entombing the ruins, upon which trees grow and sheep nibble. But it is well worth while to climb the winding path from below, or to take the longer way through the woods from Ponte a Caiano, if only for the sensation of standing on that great height and tasting the wonderful peace and aloofness of it in this quiet evening of its life. Moreover, one is perhaps following in the footsteps of San Francesco, who is said to have mounted up here once when journeying across the mountains from Florence to La Verna, and during his stay in the castle to have restored sight' to a blind man. I remember when we' were there how a full-voiced peasant .woman from the little homestead which stands, on the top of the hill led us to an ancient well of very pure water, which springs beneath a ruined stone vault, the only relic of the old castle. She told us that the spring is perennial, and never sinks below the same level even in the hottest summer. Bending down, she filled a great copper vessel which she had brought with her. We paused there Upon the verge of the hill and looked down into the depth, seeking the far-off glint of the stream. The afternoon was hot and dreamy, and shadow already filled the gorges. From the misty ridges of the Pratomagno on our right range upon range of hills coursed steeply down into the shadowy valley beneath us. Riding among their multitudinous waves yet another castle was in sight, Montemignaio, set still further back in the mountains. And far away in the south-east, where all the light from the western sky now fell, the distant hills beyond the main Valley appeared transfigured, like shapes of rosy flame. In their midst rose the Rock of La Verna, the most conspicuous point in the horizon still, as long ago for the ferocious Simone di Battifolle. Strange that there is hardly a fastness in the Casentino, set however far back in the mountains, to which that Eye does not pierce, hardly a cavern in which the rash and angry souls might hide themselves from that reminder of peace, of the Cross, of Heaven.

Upon the mountain side further up the gorge of the Solano lies Cetica, to be reached by climbing up from the picturesque village of Pagliericcio, past the quainter and still more primitive Pratoluttoli, with its narrow street of irregular, blackened dwellings, and proceeding onwards for miles through enchanting chestnut woods. Cetica, which was once a possession of the Guidi, has three churches and separate villages San Pancrazio, Sta. Maria and San Michele Archangelo. Sta. Maria contains an early Tuscan triptych, a Madonna and Saints upon a gold background, and San Michele has a real treasure in a small fifteenth century picture of the Madonna and Child, of a good school, but sadly damaged by the flames of the candles on the altar. The Virgin has a face of unusual type. Far above, upon the lofty side of the Pratomagno, just beyond the point where the chestnut trees, growing fewer and scantier, cease, and the slopes become rocky and sterile, is the Bagno di Cetica, whither the peasants come in the summer season from far and near for the sake of the healing virtue of its water. The properties of these springs were known in very remote times, but the simple folk attribute them to San Romolo, who is said to have bathed here when he was passing one day. Ascending still higher, the traveller reaches at last the top of the Pratomagno, and by a pass called the Varco della Madonna, may, if he will, emerge out of the Valley Enclosed and descend on the other side into the Val d'Arno.

Montemignaio, the most inaccessible of all the castles of the Casentino, is built upon a height over-hanging the Scheggia, a stream which comes down from the Consuma and joins the Solano at Pagliericcio, whence there is a mule path leading to it along the hillside above the Scheggia. There is also a road practicable for vehicles, but very roundabout. lt turns off from the high road over the Consuma about a mile before reaching the village of that name and follows a mountain stream across wild, moorlands, gradually descending into a narrow valley hung with chestnut woods. At the bottom a little torrent flows down from a rocky ravine on the right, and just where it falls into the larger stream there stands a lonely church, called the Madonna delle Calle.'1 Calle are the big white Madonna lilies.

In a sort of rockdwelling adjoining it there lives a hermit, who takes care of the church. Nothing could be more appropriate than to come across such a being in this solitude of forest and stream. The hermit is never seen, unless it be sometimes at dusk, when you may chance to see, creeping along the road, a strange black figure in garments of a shape belonging to some past age, stooping beneath a sack, and will be told that it is the romitino, who is going round gathering scraps from the pious. And occasionally it may happen that persons hiding from justice in the mountains will beat at the door of his cell and compel him to give them food. He had a celebrated predecessor here in the eighteenth century, a certain wealthy Count who abandoned family and possessions, and hid himself for forty-two years in this wilderness, living in the utmost austerity and revealing his identity to no one until the day of his death.

A little way beyond the church the clustered buildings and tall tower of Montemignaio suddenly appear above, against the sky, and mounting between the chestnut trees, you reach the castle hill and look down over sweeping woods into another valley, with several little hamlets hanging on the slopes and forming quite a community hidden away here in these Alpine recesses. The Pieve stands some little way down the hill, below the Castle. It has been well restored quite lately, and the exterior is almost entirely new. Within it is of the same simple and impressive

form as the other Matilda churches, but the pillars of the lower half are square, and are covered with fade_ frescoes of a much later date than the building,

charming enough in effect, but quite poor in themselves. The capitals of the round pillars are of the characteristic type, only less elaborate than in the sister churches, and if possible ruder and more grotesque. The High Altar is supported on little columns, which have capitals sculptured in low relief with devices characteristic of the Romanesque period, and there is an ancient semi-circular font against the wall, within a high niche bordered with sculptured designs. A rather poor terra-cotta piece of the late Della Robbia school -a Madonna and Child with SS. Anthony and Sebastian, and a predella showing the Entombment and St. Francis receiving the Stigmata- has lately been removed into the church from the wayside shrine which it originally occupied.

The Castle, which used to be called Castiglione, that is, Castle of the Lion, was part of the inheritance of Guido Novello and his fierce progeny Guglielmo Spadalunga and the rest. It was united to the Commune of the Montagna Fiorentina in 1440. The great tower and a lofty fragment of the old wall of the keep stand up still amid the huddle of rude stone houses around. What remains of the old cortile and palace is now inhabited by peasants and is scarcely recognisable. You may glance through a low portico and an open door into some dark-beamed, oak-panelled chamber, where an ancient hag will probably be preparing polenta of chestnut meal for the family, or catch a glimpse of another kitchen, in which a carved stone cinquecento chimneypiece frames the blackened cauldron and the poor fire of sticks. There is the usual cistern beneath the court, and another subterranean reservoir connected with the castle exists in perfect preservation under the recently built office of the Municipality. It is a vast vaulted stone chamber, with walls thirteen feet thick and supported by a great pillar in the midst. In the old days the moat could be supplied from it.

But now moat, ramparts and outworks are all gone. It is with idle menace that the broken stronghold stands out over the gorge above the tremendous plunge of the precipice and looks down over the great knees of the hills to the spur where Battifolle, once the lair of hated kinsmen, is marked now by a green mound only. And far away beyond the opening of the Valley, lifted upon those visionary mountains of the afternoon, La Verna appears again, couched in the eastern sky, as in those long past centuries when it lay waiting patiently, while the eagles preyed upon each other, for the appointed moment when it should send forth its voice into the valleys.