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Italian Hill Towns 2010
The hill towns of Italy, in September, and my first trip with the Friends of the Holburne – a treat. We were 2 dozen stalwart art lovers, led by Tessa Hayward and our Chairman Sidney Blackmore with much grace, and attention to detail, and a good dollop of knowledge.
We assembled in Perugia, and were fascinated by the complex arrangement of escalators cleverly inserted into the nineteenth-century buildings at the base of the old town. Our guide showed us first the Roman gate, which incorporates some Etruscan elements, and then we were carried up via remnants of the Roman, the medieval, and the Renaissance, and some impressive 21st-century sculpture, to emerge in the busy streets. We walked the short distance to the Collegio di Cambio, the money-changers hall, spectacularly and densely frescoed in the mid fifteenth century by Perugino – he included a self-portrait, where he looks rather disapprovingly at his own work, classical and religious panels framed with the grottesche so fashionable at the time.
Next door the Palazzo dei Priori houses the National Gallery of Umbria; Antonella our guide picked out the masterpieces, explaining and illustrating the progression from Byzantine through Gothic to Renaissance. Here we saw amongst other treasures our first Piero della Francesca, an altarpiece topped by the Annunciation, the perspective of the arcaded building underlining the clarity of his vision.
In the afternoon we whizzed off on our bus (Dio grazie, Vincenzo handled the winding hill roads with entire aplomb) to Gubbio. Here huge barrel vaults were built in the 14th century to support a piazza high up on the hill (easier to defend); from this Piazza we explored the Palazzo dei Consoli which houses the Eugubian tablets (Umbria’s Rosetta stones), then went on up, via lifts (!) to the Palazzo Ducale. The inner courtyard is an elegant confection of brick and pietra serena, built by Luciano Laurana for Federico da Montefeltro. There were a few dark mutterings as we were shown the studiolo – the original intricately intaglio’d panels now live in New York, at the Met.
Day two took us on a longish bus journey through the beautiful green hills of Umbria, and on into le Marche to Urbino, Federico’s ideal city. Tucked away at the end of a narrow street, set high enough to give us lovely vews, we found the Oratorio di San Giovanni with its lively frescoes painted mostly by the Salimbeni brothers in the early fifteenth century. They remain an inspiring immersion in the life of the times, full of details like scratching dogs, squabbling children, and what must have been portraits of the local dignitaries, complete with an array of spectacular headgear.
We walked back down to the house of Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, also a painter. Now an academy for Raphael studies, its prize piece is a Madonna and Bambino fresco which is thought to be by a 14-year-old master-in-the-making.
In the afternoon we went to the Ducal Palace, huge (said to contain a room for each day of the year) but not intimidating, being so elegant in its proportions, and exceedingly fine in its decoration, every fireplace differing. The Palace houses the National Gallery of Le Marche; the collection includes Piero’s most famously enigmatic painting, the small ‘Flagellation of Christ’ with its mysterious trio of figures in the foreground, their backs turned to the eponymous event; ‘The Ideal City’ with its perfect perspectival rendering of an unpeopled cityscape; and more else than I have space to mention. Here the studiolo was left be, and we crammed in to admire the illusionistic detail created from many different woods, and to try to imagine the hawk-nosed soldier Duke at his humanistic studies.
Day three took us first to Spello, where in the Church of Sta Maria Maggiore is the Baglioni chapel decorated by Pinturicchio – understandably one of our chairman’s favourite works in Umbria. The chapel was very well restored in the late ‘70s, and although now barred by a glass wall, the scenes glow with great force, full of symbolic details. Pinturicchio, like Perugino in the Collegio di Cambio, included a fine self-portrait, in an illusionistic gold frame and topped by a trompe l’oeil shelf, from which a white cloth seems to hang, casting its own ‘shadow’.
Spello is a pretty town, built of the pink-and-white limestone that was quarried from Monte Subassio, behind Assisi, which was our next stop. We walked into the centre of the town, dominated by the façade of the Roman temple of Minerva, long since absorbed by the Christians, becoming the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, with a high baroque interior. After lunch in the sunshine we made our way to the great Basilica of St Francis. We were rigged up with a clever earphone system, with Antonella having a mike, as one is not allowed to talk out loud – this is a holy place, and a destination for pilgrims. It might be intimidating: there are always teeming crowds, and the walls are plastered floor to ceiling with more fabulous images than are easy to take in; yet the overall impression is warm, and surprisingly light, particularly in the upper church, where Giotto painted many scenes of the saint’s life.
Our last full day took us to Arezzo. Again we headed uphill into the heart of an ancient town, again there was much to see. Piero della Francesca painted the frescoes of the True Cross – a rarer subject, based on a story recounted in the 13th-century ‘Golden Legend’, which our guide explained with great clarity – in the Church of San Francesco. Vasari designed a great stone loggia in the Piazza Grande (the perfect spot for lunch); Piero, again, painted Mary Magdalene on the wall of the Duomo; and the film ‘Life is Beautiful’ was filmed here…
One last stop on the Piero trail, to see the ‘Madonna del Parto’ at Monterchi – she is in lovely condition now, but odd surroundings, in a featureless room in an old schoolhouse.
So we saw many and wonderful works of art, but also we enjoyed lots of warm sunshine, there were our daily trips up the Perugian escalators to find good dinners (it was the season for funghi, and fichi, yum), and there was much chat and laughter. I’m looking forward to the next trip…
