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Freeman Edward Augustus
Studies of Travel: Italy

Segni

The visitor to Segni will find difficulties in studying the history on the spot second only to those which he finds at Norba. It is quite certain that he will find no books at Norba, save such as he may take with him, which are not likely to be many. It is possible that there may be books at Segni; there may lurk in some odd corner either a hidden scholar with his treasured library, or a bookseller of that class, sometimes to be found in old-fashioned places, who dislikes nothing so much as parting with his books. But, if such there be, they do not force themselves on the eye on one's entrance into Segni. A natural and important question is sure to present itself, and – without wings to fly at once to the libraries of Rome – there is no immediate means of answering it. Is the name of Signia – now by a very slight change Segni– to be found in any of the lists of the Thirty Cities of Latium? The lists are many, and the traveller is not likely to carry them all in his head. He may perhaps be able to repeat the lines in which Macaulay draws the picture of many of them; and, if so, every step that he takes among the Latin cities will make him more fully admire the fitness and force of the points and epithets picked out in each case. But at Segni the Lay of Regillus fails him; he has his quotations for Cora and Norba; he has no quotations for Signia. Still Macaulay's verses are not a full or formal list of the cities; while, if he argues that Signia lies too much in the heart of the Volscian and Hernican land to have belonged to the Latin name, he is met by the fact that "Ferentinum of the rock," yet further on, has its place in them alongside of "Gabia of the pool." He turns to his guide-book – and the guide-book of Gsell-fels, though it sometimes leaves things out, is almost always to be trusted for what it puts in; he there finds only the entry of the alleged Roman colony of the days of the Tarquins, with the remark that the existing walls seem to point to an earlier origin. And again a thought may occur to him, if not at Segni itself, yet in the later course of the journey of which Segni forms a part – Were the people of ancient Signia specially skilful in the making of mosaic pavements? There is a kind of work called opus Signinum, a pattern of black spots on a white ground, of which there is a good deal at Pompeii, and of which the visitor to Segni will most likely see an example a few days later at Anagni. The question is hardly so exciting as the question as to the position of Signia in the days of the Latin League. But it is one which may suggest itself, and it is one which it will be hard to answer with only the resources which are to be had at Segni itself. The visitor to Segni is thus likely to find himself a little uncomfortable as to more than one point in the history of the place where he stands. And he will feel most uncomfortable of all as to the great point of all with regard to its earliest history. Still, he may for the moment comfort himself by thinking that there are those who might be unkind enough to hint that he would still be equally uncertain if he had a hundred quotations on the tip of his tongue, or if he were in a library with thousands of volumes to turn to.

But whether Signia was ever a Thirty-city or not – we may be allowed to follow the local usage of Canterbury, which speaks of "a Six-preacher" – there is no doubt as to its geographical position; there is no doubt as to the grandeur of its remains. In starting from Velletri, with Algidus and its holm-oaks and its memories of Æquian encampments on our left hand, on the right we turn the corner of the Volscian mountains, and the railway carries us along the valley between them and their Hernican rivals. We reach the station of Segni; we mark more than one town perched on the opposite heights; we have close by us, in the low ground – reminding us of Ninfa on a smaller scale – the walls of a forsaken fortress, with a shattered tower of wonderful height and slenderness; but the walls of Signia still keep themselves hidden among the mountains. It is not from the side of Velletri, but, as we afterwards learn, from the side of Anagni, that Segni on its mountain height, and its satellite of Gavignano, perched on a smaller detached hill in front, form striking features in the landscape.

Segni belongs to the same class of hill-fortress as Norba, not the same class as Cori. It occupies, not the top of a conical hill, but a table-land, if we may apply that name to so narrow a space, on the mountain itself. The distinction is well marked by comparing it with Gavignano just below, which is one of the chief objects in the immediate view from the height of Segni. The difference is just the same as the difference between Norba and Sermoneta, though Gavignano has more the air of being an outpost of Segni than Sermoneta has of being an outpost of Norba. The hill-top which Segni crowns is long and narrow, at some points very narrow indeed, so as to give to the space within the walls nearly the shape of a figure of eight. The space within is neither wholly forsaken, as at Norba, nor all crowded with dwellings, as at Cori. The modern town has withdrawn into one quarter of the old enclosure; but it has not, as in so many other cases, withdrawn into the ancient citadel. The site of the arx of Signia, rising but little above the general level of the hill-top, but placed well so as to command what we may call the isthmus between the two parts of the town, forms no part of the dwelling-place of the modern Signians; but under the name of Passegiata it does form part of their pleasure-ground. The modern town has retreated into the other loop of the figure of eight, that which lies furthest from the traveller as he draws near from Velletri, but to which the course of the road will necessarily take him first. He may enter by a gateway of Roman date, and if he so does his eye will soon be struck by the great number of graceful fragments of mediæval work to be found within the narrow streets of Segni. The town has most likely been for ages too poor to follow the example of its richer neighbours in replacing beauty by ugliness. But he will do better to keep for a while from entering the inhabited part of the town. Let him first make the circuit of the ancient walls. And he can hardly doubt whether to turn to the right hand or to the left. The claims of the left are in this case overwhelming. Long before he has reached the town, he must have seen far away on the hill the most precious of the remains of Signia, the gateway which stands, forsaken but still untouched, beckoning him, as it were, to make his way first of all to the most instructive thing which the primæval city has to show him.

But before he can reach either the Roman or the primæval gate he will have begun to notice the character of the wall. The construction is hardly so rude as the rudest parts of the wall at Cori, but a great deal of it belongs to the same general stage of engineering progress. The huge polygonal stones are heaped together; but one might note perhaps two stages, yet often intermingled – one, where the sides only of the stones are cut so as to fit their neighbours; another, where the outer faces are also smoothed of what is called "rustication" in late Renaissance work. In the first they are not left so utterly in a state of nature as they are at Cori. Their sides have been cut to the shape which was thought best for the work of piling them together. In a later stage, also seen at Cori, the outer sides, those which stand free from the scarped wall, are also cut; but it is not always easy to say how much of the change of the surface is due to art and how much to weather. At Segni the peculiar shape of the enclosure makes it somewhat hard to follow the line of the walls without a ground-plan, and a ground-plan is not to be had at Segni merely by asking for it. But it is plain that, in many parts at least, on the whole side of the hill which lies exposed to the open valley, and on the head of the whole promontory, there was, whenever the ground allowed and required it, a double wall, one on the edge of the hill, the other at some distance down its side. The most famous of the gates of Segni, locally known as Porta Saracenesca, leads from the outside world into the outer enclosure, at a point well chosen for military purposes, close to the edge, and commanding the path by which the traveller will most likely make his way to it. And a mighty gate it is, and one that holds no small place in the history of the art of construction. It is one of those instances which show that their builders were still ignorant of the principle of the arch, but that they were, so to speak, in search of it. They had not yet learned how to make the top of an opening out of stones really so arranged as to stand by mutual support; but they were striving after something beyond the mere horizontal lintel resting on two vertical supports. The builders of Segni had not got so far as those of Veii or Tusculum; as they had no idea of the true principle of the arch, so they had no idea of its form; all they could do was to place two horizontal stones with sides sloping inwards immediately under the lintel. In truth, the construction is still purely that of the lintel, and nothing else; but the form chosen shows a certain vain striving after something different. As such, it is no small lesson which it teaches; and the effect of the great stones thus piled together to form the entrance is striking and solemn. It carries us back from days which on our side of the Alps we deem ancient, but when the arts of construction were as well known as they are now, to days when men were making the first rude attempts towards the greatest of constructive inventions. Attempts of this kind, simply because they are mere attempts, failures and not successes, have a more ancient look than those examples where the builders were fully satisfied with the lintel construction and attempted no other. In point of fact, whatever their relative date, they are later in idea, as showing a desire to innovate on the received form, some instances of which were at last crowned with success.

It is not easy to see how this gate came by its local name. One can understand the process of thought by which the roofing at Tusculum, which has the outward shape of the pointed arch, came to be called arco Gotico; it is harder to guess why the great primæval gate of Segni should be attributed to Saracens. It is far from being the only primæval gateway in the whole circuit. No less than five have been counted between the outer and inner walls, and two more in the part of the enclosure occupied by the modern town, where the two lines of wall coincide. Hard by Porta Saracenesca itself is a small sally-port; of the others, the larger ones, like Porta Saracenesca itself, stand at right angles to the wall. Some of them at least show the same strivings after the arch as their greater neighbour. The nature of the ground forbids the arx from reaching any great height above the rest of the city; but its place is easily marked. It contains a singular large cistern of Roman work, and close by is one of those junctions of different ages which always preach to us a living historic lesson. Here is the terrace of a temple wrought with stones of the primitive construction. On this primitive work rise the remains of the cella in Roman masonry, and the Roman wall of the cella is now carried up to form a church. Now, at least the church is of no architectural value, but it is none the less a witness to the greatest of all the changes which the hoary walls of Signia have looked upon.

Landed, then, in Christian Segni, we may, perhaps, remember that one of the greatest of the Popes was born either in the town itself or in its satellite of Gavignano. But which was the actual spot? Our one guide available at the moment seems to doubt between the two. In either case we see, if we do not tread, the place which gave birth to the third and greatest of the Innocents. We find, too, that a Papal palace of Segni was swept away by the Duke of Alva in that strange war which the Catholic King Philip waged, not, of course, against the Vicar of St. Peter, but against the temporal Sovereign of the Roman States.

We are thus, even at Segni, plunged among Papal memories; we look over the valley of the Trerus across to Anagni, and they press upon us with double force. We hasten to the spot where a lesser Pope than Innocent, but still a mighty one, died like a dog after his fox-like entrance and his lion-like reign.

Iter ad Brundisium

I. Anagni

He who goes steadily from Rome to Brindisi, seeing what comes in his way by the easiest manner of going, will not come very much oftener on the track of Horace and his friends than he to whom Brindisi is the haven for Egypt or India, and who rushes thither as fast as he can along the Italian side of the Hadriatic. The three routes will of necessity coincide at Bari. To Bari the traveller who starts from Rome must add Benevento, and he may, without much trouble, add Aricia. But the sites that lie around the Alban mount, the Alban lake, and its lesser fellow – the relics in short of so many volcanoes, wet and dry, the possible place of Alba, the more certain relics of its child Albano, the path by which the chariot of Marcellus climbed to the temple of which the last Stewart swept away what time had left – all these seem naturally to form a group and a subject by themselves. So may the objects for which Velletri supplies the best centre, – the hill, the walls, the temples of Cori, "Norba's ancient wall," with neither an inhabitant nor an habitation within it – Ninfa's more modern wall, equally without an inhabitant, but with ruined habitations, ruined churches, in abundance – all these may be connected with an iter ad Brundisium, but they hardly form an actual part of it. Let our traveller design to start in modern fashion by railway – we were going to say in prosaic modern fashion, only no way of going could well be more prosaic than that followed by Horace; let him study his time-tables, and he will find that he can, if so minded, visit Segni and go back to Rome in a single day; he can hardly do so by Anagni. Not that we should counsel such a way of dealing with the walks, the gates, the temple-foundations, that crown the height of Signia. It would most likely be found possible to sleep at Segni. Gsell-fels, prince of guidebook-makers, recommends the locanda there as "reinlich und eidlich," and the second adjective does not mean that the traveller will be in any danger of being sworn at. Still some may be more inclined to go to Segni and back again from Velletri, where there is no doubt as to living quite happily at the sign of the Cock. Anagni, Anagnia of the Hernicans, is the beginning of something new. It is the first point distinctly beyond the neighbourhood of Rome. It is not unlikely then that such a traveller as we have supposed may make Anagni his first halting-place. And at Anagni he may certainly rest for the night, though his quarters may be a comedown not only from Rome but from Velletri. But if, by any chance, he takes the earlier points in some other course; above all, if he visits Segni by any course, he will be all the more open to visit Anagni. The city of Boniface VIII., almost beckons to him to cross the valley and the stream. For it is as the city of Boniface VIII., the place where he so strangely met his end, the prisoner – not the last Pope who was fated so to be – of a French ruler, that Anagni will most likely present itself to the mind. In mediæval history Anagni is a thoroughly Papal city, and to this day it keeps a Papal impress on its buildings, a Papal impress meaning something different at Anagni from what it means at Rome. Anagni did not remain a favourite Papal dwelling-place; it therefore did not suffer at the hands of Renaissance Popes as Rome lived to suffer. But, even in the first glimpse of the hill-city, we may well go back to much earlier times. We may remember that first Pyrrhos, then Hannibal, halted thither, each on his vain march towards the Rome which neither was to conquer. And when we have reached Hannibal and Pyrrhos, we may go back to earlier ages. There is a point of view in which Anagnia is, before all things, the head of the confederation of the Hernicans. There is no people of ancient Italy of whom it is harder to get any distinct idea than this stout hill folk. In treading Old-Latin or Volscian ground we can, even without book, call up a few personal names, a few personal figures, of particular Volscians or Old-Latins; we cannot call up the name of a single Hernican, historical or legendary. All that we know of them is their geographical position, and the one great event in their political history; and those tell us a great deal. They must have been a people of no small account whom Spurius Cassius thought worthy to fill the third place in the great Triple League along with Rome and Latium. And this, though, as having neither one great city like Rome, nor a crowd of cities like Latium, they hardly seem to form a power on the level with their two comrades. But their geographical position gave them a special importance. Thrust in as they were between Æquians and Volscians, no alliance could be more precious than theirs to Rome and Latium. They were the most exposed member of the League, the outpost of Latium, as Latium itself was the outpost of Rome. Of all the three, the brunt of the struggle must have fallen most fiercely upon them; the hills of Anagni must have looked down on many a fierce struggle with the invading occupants of the opposite range of mountains. The walls of Anagni must have endured or yielded to many a fierce attack of their ever-threatening neighbours. As we look out from one of the heights of this region to another, we better understand the political relations of the endless little communities which thus lived on in one another's sight. The ally or the enemy was close at the door; there was not even any need to climb up an akropolis to see what was coming in the way of attack or deliverance. Rome and Veii could not see one another; between them therefore there could be long periods of simple peace, without warfare and without alliance. Rome and Tusculum could see one another; but they were not, so to speak, ostentatiously thrust into one another's sight. But look out from Segni, and your chief business is to look at Anagni; look out from Anagni, and your chief business is to look either at Segni or at Ferentino, according to which way you are looking. If in some lights the long circuit of Segni on its mountain-top is less clearly seen, the lesser hill of Gavignano shows itself in front as its symbol or substitute. Cities standing in this relation to one another could not fail to be either bitter enemies or close allies. They must be always doing something to one another in the way either of friendship or of enmity. It was then no small stroke of policy when Spurius Cassius, of whom it has been so truly said that he was the first Roman whose greatness is really historical, won the Hernican land and its head Anagnia to the alliance of Rome and Latium. He did indeed put a bit in the mouth of the advancing Volscian.

We come then to Hernican Anagnia, Papal Anagni, to a hill-city girded in by mighty walls. The hill of Anagni is not, like the hills of Segni and Norba, an actual piece of the mountain itself; it is a hill, an isolated hill, a hill so large that, no less than at Segni and Norba, the city is wholly on the height; the walls merely fence in the hill-top. That hill-top is in some parts wonderfully narrow; in the middle of the town there is hardly more than the width of the chief street between the slopes on either side. And at its eastern end the hill rises to form a truer akropolis, with a steeper path up to it, than can be seen at Segni or Norba. Round the whole of this space, allowing for some late patchings, run the ancient walls of Anagnia, and a mighty and wonderful work they are. But who built them? We must confess that we walked round about them and, as we thought, marked well their bulwarks, in the full belief that we were studying the works of the ancient Hernicans. Let no one fancy that we did not mark the difference between the walls of Anagnia and the strange and mysterious forms which may be seen at Cori and Segni. The walls of Anagni bring us back within the ordinary range of wall-building as practised by ordinary mortals. Hernican Anagnia did not come within either Lord Macaulay's Latin or his Etruscan catalogue; but, had it done so, there would have been no temptation to speak of its bulwarks as "no work of earthly men," or as —

 
Reared by the hands of giants
For godlike kings of old.
 

The walls of Anagni are wonderful only as the great works of Rome are wonderful. They are built by men to whom it was more natural to put together rectangular stones with some kind of regularity than it was to pile together huge polygons anyhow. They were built by men who thoroughly understood the principle of the arch, and knew how to use it with all boldness. They remain, in various degrees of preservation, round the greater part of the circuit of the town. In some parts they are broken down altogether; in some they are supplanted, in others merely patched, by walls of later date; in short, they have gone through all the casualties which a wall is likely to go through in the course of two millenniums or so; but the wall of modern Anagni, as a whole, is still the old wall of Anagnia. The construction differs a good deal in different parts as to the size of the stones and as to their nature, and as to the degree of rudeness or finish in the work. In some parts the wall stands single; in others it is strengthened by further defences, buttresses rather than towers – defences, by-the-way, which must be carefully distinguished from the additions of later times. But one general character reigns throughout. The stones, greater and smaller, smoother and rougher, are always rectangular, and always laid with some measure of regularity. In some cases ranges of larger and smaller stones alternate; in one part of the wall stones of two natures and colours almost alternate. The chief material is a light-coloured stone exactly like the puff-stone of Gloucestershire, the material of Berkeley Castle and of not a few other buildings in that neighbourhood. This is eked out here and there by the dark volcanic peperino, which, towards the south-eastern part of the wall, is used much more freely. The general effect, wherever the wall is at all perfect, is stately and striking in the extreme, both in form and colour.

Now was it only a dream when we tracked out these walls, and took a certain pleasure in speaking of them as Hernican walls? We come back to our library; we take down the Dictionary of Geography; we turn to the article "Anagnia," and we find that by far the best contributor to the series, Mr. E. H. Bunbury, has another tale to tell. Our feelings are damped when he says, "The only remains extant there are of Roman date and of little interest." As to the "little interest," we venture to have our own opinion in any case; we should hold that so great an extent of ancient wall still bounding an inhabited town was an object of high interest, even if it could be shown to belong to the latest days which could come under the definition of "Roman date." But what is Roman date? Mr. Bunbury sends us to the correspondence of the Emperor Marcus with Cornelius Fronto. We hope he does not ask us to believe that the walls are later than the days of the philosophic Emperor. For, if he will allow them to be as old as that, we can call the Emperor himself to witness that they must be a good deal older. For Marcus himself read an inscription over one of the gates, "Flamen sume samentum." He did not know what "samentum" meant, and we cannot find the word in our Latin dictionary. But a native explained to him its meaning in the Hernican language; it meant the skin of the victim which the flamen put on his head when he entered the town. We do not want to be unreasonable in our dates, if only we can let in our Hernicans at some corner. When we looked at the walls, we saw at once that they had no fellowship with the primæval works at Cori and at Segni; they did seem to us to have fellowship with the works of the Tarquins at Rome. We shall be quite happy if Mr. Bunbury will allow us to put the walls as early as the year B.C. 307. The next year Anagnia sank from a Hernican city, a free ally of Rome, into a town whose people were burthened with Roman citizenship without the Roman franchise. If we may carry back walls over whose gates Hernican inscriptions could be read between four and five hundred years later, to a date as nearly as that, we shall have done all that we could wish. They will be walls of the days of Hernican independence, walls on which Hannibal and Pyrrhos have looked.

One thing is plain, that the builders of the walls of Anagnia, like the builders of the cloaca at Rome, but most unlike the elder builders of Cora and Signia, knew as well as any men how to turn arches. On the highest point of the town, by the modern gate which looks out towards Ferentino, within the circuit of the ancient arx, we may still see, blocked, partly hidden by the modern gate, disguised by the arrangements of the mediæval castle, the double gate of the ancient wall. It is perfectly plain, but with arches thoroughly well turned, with a double range of voussoirs. A smaller arch of the same workmanship beside them looks almost as if it had been blocked from the beginning. The arx itself, it should be remembered, had its separate wall within that of the city, a noble fragment of which, of exactly the same character as the town wall, is still to be seen in a narrow street a little lower down.

When we actually reach Anagni, there can be no doubt that the character in which it chiefly strikes us is that of the city of the Hernican walls, if Hernican walls we may call them. But historically Anagni is so far more famous as the city of mediæval Popes that it is fitting that it should have something to show in that character also. The town is rich in mediæval fragments. The main street, in its winding courses, displays long ranges of blocked arcades, round and pointed, which, when open, must have given it, narrow and often dim as it is, no small measure of stateliness. Not a few buildings stand out with arches of vast height and boldness, suggesting, as it is fit that one papal city should suggest to another, the mighty works of Rome's absent Bishops at Avignon. Not remarkable for height, but most remarkable for their span, are the exceedingly bold arches which support the communal palace, once, it is said, the dwelling of the Popes, a building which, on its northern side, shows a range of windows which savour of France or England rather than of Italy. The houses with their staircases often present highly picturesque shapes, which in one house in the main street, where the outside staircase is sheltered by two arches resting on a graceful column, grow into a form of genuine beauty. And an elegant form of double window, two round arches divided by a slender shaft, is characteristic of the architecture of Anagni. It is needless to add that at Anagni, as everywhere else in Italy, most of these relics of the skill of former times have been mercilessly disfigured and mutilated.

In the ecclesiastical line the other churches supply a few good fragments of the same character as those in the domestic building; but the cathedral church within the arx is the only one which has the least claim to be looked on as a striking whole. It stands boldly on the edge of the hill with its east end – that is, what would be east according to northern rules, for it is in truth nearly west – rising up nobly with its three apses in good Romanesque style, while a stately bell-tower of the more massive sort, though sadly marred on two sides, stands near the east end which should be west. The crypt is in a somewhat ruder form of the same style. The whole outside of the church is worth study; the inside is of an early and massive type of the Italian Gothic, always, unless in the case of some unusual merit, less satisfactory than Italian Romanesque. The sacristy contains the vestments of Innocent III. and Boniface VIII., and a good many other curious objects. The church is just now suffering restoration; let us hope that nothing very dreadful will happen to it. There, at least, seems no disposition to pull down the apse, after the pattern of the church which Popes and Emperors alike have decreed to be the mother-church of Rome and of the world.