The earth was Mediterranean—a piece of the Riviera completely surrounded by water. In a word, Elba. The hills dived down into a handsomely curved bay, full of bright, staring blue sea. On the headland at one end of the bay Portoferraio was piled up in tiers of painted stucco. At its feet lay a little harbour bristling with masts. A smell of fish and the memory of Napoleon haunted the atmosphere inveterately. Conscience and Baron Baedeker had told us that we ought to visit Napoleon’s house—now, very suitably, a natural history museum. But we had hardened our hearts and would not go. It is very unpleasant not to have done one’s duty. ‘How tedious is a guilty conscience,’ says the Cardinal in the Duchess of Malfi. He was quite right. We had walked the blazing streets groaning under conviction of sin.
And then, passing through a gateway in the walls of the old town, we found ourselves confronted by a scene that entirely relieved us of all our sense of guilt. For we were looking at something compared with which a house full of Napoleonic souvenirs was so obviously second-rate and dull that our rebellion against Baedeker ceased to be criminal and became positively meritorious.
Below us, on the further side of a blue inlet of the sea, and with the mountains behind it, lay a little piece of the Black Country. In the midst stood a group of blast furnaces with three huge chimneys rising from beside them like the bell towers of a cathedral. To the right of them were five or six more chimneys. Three huge cranes were perched at the water’s edge, and an iron bridge led from the wharves inland to the furnaces. The chimneys, the cranes, the furnaces and buildings, the heap of rubbish, the very ground in this little area between the Mediterranean and the mountains—all were soot-black. Black against the sky, black against the golden-glaucous hills, blackly reflected in the shining blue water.
I should have painted the scene if I had known how. It was exceedingly beautiful. Beautiful and dramatic too. The mind delights in violent contrasts. Birmingham is frightful enough where it is, its body in Warwickshire and its sooty tentacles stretching out across the undulating land into Stafford. But set it down in Sicily or on the shores of Lago Maggiore and its frightfulness becomes at once more painfully apparent. In Warwickshire it is a full-length sermon on civilization, but one sleeps through sermons. Beside the Mediterranean it becomes the most bitingly memorable of epigrams.
Moreover, the actual Birmingham of Warwickshire is too large to be taken in as a whole. This single piece of blackness between the blue sky and the blue sea was compactly symbolic. And because the sky and the grass were still visible all round it, the contest between industrialism and the natural beauties of the earth was much more vividly realized than where, as in the great towns of the north, industrialism has completely triumphed and one is not even aware of the existence of what has been conquered.
We stood for a long time, watching the smoke from the chimneys as it mounted into the still air. White gauze; white satin, glossy or shadowed; feathery grey—Tiepolo’s angels hovered; and the blue sky was the Madonna’s silken robe; and the tall pink house on our right was the colour of one of those very handsome velvets to which, in the paradise of the last of the Venetians, the blest are so excusably partial.
THE PALIO AT SIENA
Our rooms were in a tower. From the windows one looked across the brown tiled roofs to where, on its hill, stood the cathedral. A hundred feet below was the street, a narrow canyon between high walls, perennially sunless; the voices of the passers-by came up, reverberating, as out of a chasm. Down there they walked always in shadow; but in our tower we were the last to lose the sunlight. On the hot days it was cooler, no doubt, down in the street; but we at least had the winds. The waves of the air broke against our tower and flowed past it on either side. And at evening, when only the belfries and the domes and the highest roofs were still flushed by the declining sun, our windows were level with the flight of the swifts and swallows. Sunset after sunset all through the long summer, they wheeled and darted round our tower.
There was always a swarm of them intricately manœuvring just outside the window. They swerved this way and that, they dipped and rose, they checked their headlong flight with a flutter of their long pointed wings and turned about within their own length. Compact, smooth and tapering, they seemed the incarnation of airy speed. And their thin, sharp, arrowy cry was speed made audible. I have sat at my window watching them tracing their intricate arabesques until I grew dizzy; till their shrill crying sounded as though from within my ears and their flying seemed a motion, incessant, swift and bewilderingly multitudinous, behind my eyes. And all the while the sun declined, the shadows climbed higher up the houses and towers, and the light with which they were tipped became more rosy. And at last the shadow had climbed to the very top and the city lay in a grey and violet twilight beneath the pale sky.
One evening, towards the end of June, as I was sitting at the window looking at the wheeling birds, I heard through the crying of the swifts the sound of a drum. I looked down into the shadowy street, but could see nothing. Rub-a-dub, dub, dub, dub—the sound grew louder and louder, and suddenly there appeared round the corner where our street bent out of sight, three personages out of a Pinturicchio fresco.
They were dressed in liveries of green and yellow—yellow doublets slashed and tagged with green, parti-coloured hose and shoes, with feathered caps of the same colours. Their leader played the drum. The two who followed carried green and yellow banners. Immediately below our tower the street opens out a little into a tiny piazza. In this clear space the three Pinturicchio figures came to a halt and the crowd of little boys and loafers who followed at their heels grouped themselves round to watch. The drummer quickened his beat and the two banner-bearers stepped forward into the middle of the little square.
They stood there for a moment quite still, the right foot a little in advance of the other, the left fist on the hip and the lowered banners drooping from the right. Then, together, they lifted the banners and began to wave them round their heads. In the wind of their motion the flags opened out. They were the same size and both of them green and yellow, but the colours were arranged in a different pattern on each. And what patterns! Nothing more ‘modern’ was ever seen. They might have been designed by Picasso for the Russian Ballet. Had they been by Picasso, the graver critics would have called them futuristic, the sprightlier (I must apologize for both these expressions) jazz. But the flags were not Picasso’s; they were designed some four hundred years ago by the nameless genius who dressed the Sienese for their yearly pageant. This being the case, the critics can only take off their hats. The flags are classical, they are High Art; there is nothing more to be said.
The drum beat on. The bannermen waved their flags, so artfully that the whole expanse of patterned stuff was always unfurled and tremulously stretched along the air. They passed the flags from one hand to the other, behind their backs, under a lifted leg. Then, at last, drawing themselves together to make a supreme effort, they tossed their banners into the air. High they rose, turning slowly, over and over, hung for an instant at the height of their trajectory, then dropped back, the weighted stave foremost, towards their throwers, who caught them as they fell. A final wave, then the drum returned to its march rhythm, the bannermen shouldered their flags, and followed by the anachronistic children and idlers from the twentieth century, Pinturicchio’s three young bravos swaggered off up the dark street out of sight and at length, the drum taps coming faintlier and ever faintlier, out of hearing.
Every evening after that, while the swallows were in full cry and flight about the tower, we heard the beating of the drum. Every evening, in the little piazza below us, a fragment of Pinturicchio came to life. Sometimes it was our friends in green and yellow who returned to wave their flags beneath our windows. Sometimes it was men from the other contrade or districts of the town, in blue and white, red and white, black, white and orange, white, green and red, yellow and scarlet. Their bright pied doublets and parti-coloured hose shone out from among the drabs and funereal blacks of the twentieth-century crowd that surrounded them. Their spread flags waved in the street below, like the painted wings of enormous butterflies. The drummer quickened his beat, and to the accompaniment of a long-drawn rattle, the banners leapt up, furled and fluttering, into the air.
To the stranger who has never seen a Palio these little dress rehearsals are richly promising and exciting.
