Freeman Edward Augustus
Studies of Travel: Italy
IV. From Alatri to Capua
We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the special necessities of an iter ad Brundisium carry us to quite other parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their lowest slopes. For a while the mountains still soar above us, while our work is in the plains. Presently we lose the mountains even as distant companions; but before long we have the blue waves of Hadria as their substitute. At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy, beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters to the heights of another peninsula. Without seeking for more than a chance likeness between the names – a name that ranges from the Euxine to the Hudson – without seeking in any sort to identify the Ἀλβανοί of Dionysios and the Ἀλβανοί of imperial Anna, it is still with a curious feeling of coincidence that the eyes which not many days before were looking up to the mount of Alba, now look across the sea to the wilder mountains of Albania.
Some of those who now looked across had already learned something of those heights from earlier and nearer experiences. Still it is a new feeling to look out on them from Italian ground, above all to look out on them from the spot where the Turk made his entrance into the western world, and where the signs of his short presence have stamped themselves deep on local memory. Standing at Otranto, looking on the Albanian heights, the foremost thought is how near Otranto came to being to the West of Europe all that the Thracian Kallipolis was to the East. But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch glimpses of the Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. This time we have no call either to Naples itself or to the far more attractive range of objects of which Naples is the centre. Our errand is to pass from the primæval cities of the Latin and the Volscian to the cities of south-eastern Italy. Their chief present attraction lies in the series of churches raised in the days of the Norman and Angevin kings; but their memories carry us back through a long series of stirring ages, not indeed to the hoary antiquity of Cori and Alatri, but to the days when Southern Italy, the earliest Italy, was counted for a part of Hellas. It is not for nothing that we look out from thence on those eastern lands which then perhaps were the less Hellenic of the two.
Greek influence indeed begins – some say that it historically began – on the western, not the eastern, shore of Italy, in lands which, in the present journey, we leave to the west of us and see only in glimpses. We hurry on, passing by much that we might well stop and study, from Frosinone to Caserta. And we are luxurious enough to rejoice at finding ourselves there. We have proved that a few days and nights may be passed among Volscians and Hernicans without damage or even serious discomfort; but we trust that it is not an avowal to be ashamed of that it is a pleasing exchange to find ourselves in thoroughly civilized quarters in the plains of Campania. We have found our Capua; not, however, at Capua itself, but under the shadow of the royal palace a few miles off. But we desert Capua only because Capuan comforts – we will not talk of luxuries – have fled from Capua and have found their new home at Caserta. Those who have tried a night at Capua itself, Santa Maria di vetere Capua, not the newer Capua on the site of Casilinum, report that, if Hannibal's army could be quartered there again, they would certainly not be corrupted by anything excessive in the way of creature comforts. Anagni and Frosinone are said to be far in advance of the city which long was to Rome what Paris long was to London. The excuse doubtless would be that Capua is Capua no longer. The name of Capua, and with it the stirring history of early mediæval Capua, has wandered from the true Capua to Casilinum. It is not at the town now called Capua, but at the village – it is hardly more – of Santa Maria, that we must look for what is left of Etruscan Vulturnum, of Samnite, Campanian, and Roman Capua, the special city of pleasure, the city where, before all others, pleasure was sought for in scenes of blood.
On our present course we have no special call to either Capua, old or new. We have in times past seen both the amphitheatre of the elder Capua and the cathedral portico of the newer. But, when Caserta has been chosen as a convenient halting-place, it would be a shame for the historic traveller to pass by two such famous spots without a glance at either, while in their neighbourhood lies a third object, of no small value in its own line, which will have the further charm of novelty. It is well, while still fresh from the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome, to look again on the amphitheatre of Capua – Capua, the mistress of Rome in the sports of slaughter. There is a certain special lore of amphitheatres, the mastery of which does not fall to the lot of all, even of those who look on the monuments either of Rome or Capua with a general historical eye. But it is easy to see that in the Capuan amphitheatre the underground arrangements can be studied as they hardly can be studied anywhere else. The walls, the seats, are far less perfect than at Rome; much more then are they less perfect than at Verona. But the substructure seems wholly untouched. In the Roman Coliseum the underground work is only partially brought to light, while of what has been brought to light it is not always clear how much is the work of the Flavian Emperors, and how much of the mediæval barons who turned the amphitheatre into a fortress. Here, better than at Rome, we may study what really happened when the lions came up from underground to be slaughtered by the imperial hands of Commodus. If any question is raised as to the date of the building, one who is not a special Capuan topographer may be satisfied with the fact, that the inscription of Hadrian claims for that prince only a renovation and enrichment of the building with columns and statues. This seems to imply that the shell is older; it may be far older. In idea at least, the amphitheatre of Capua is far older than that of Rome. It illustrates a strange but well-known law of human nature, that the taste for luxury and the taste for blood should find a common home.
Besides the modernized basilica, besides the tombs of various sizes and designs which line the road – one of which is indeed singularly like a model of an amphitheatre – the true Capua has little to show besides the amphitheatre itself. It is strange to see so great a city, one which for some ages must have been far greater, far more splendid than Rome, so utterly gone – or rather to see the little that is left of it translated to another site. But great as Capua undoubtedly was, we begin to doubt its extreme antiquity. Capua, once Etruscan Vulturnum, remained Etruscan Vulturnum till the fourth century of Rome. It was the last remnant of the great Etruscan dominion in that region of Italy. As such, it represents a state of things far older than Rome. But the city itself may well be of later date than Rome. At all events, we may be sure that it is of far later date than Cori and Alatri. The city by the Vulturnus, down in the plain, taking its name from its guardian river, marks an advance not only on the mountain strongholds of Segni and Norba, but on Veii, on Rome itself. It must be far older than Florence; but it is the fellow of Florence; it marks an equal forsaking of the oldest type of a city. It is hard to see where the arx of Capua could have stood, if we are to understand by an arx something set upon a hill. But what a position that of Capua was, according to later ideas, is shown by its revival after the Hannibalian war. The Samnite settlement, parted away from their kinsfolk of the mountains, had become Campanians, and, to seek shelter against their kinsfolk of the mountains, they had been fain in some sort to become Romans.
"Cives Romani tunc facti sunt Campani,"
says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as simply worded as it could be in a mediæval chronicle, which gives us a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons, who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum, and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the arx of Capua, are not to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan arx, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain which rises above its massy tower.
V. A Church by the Camp of Hannibal
We reach Tifata, the very centre of the marching and counter-marching of Hannibal, the spot from which we may best call up a picture of beleaguered Capua, of Fulvius waiting for his prey, of the stout fighting on either side of the enclosing lines, of Hannibal, as his last hope, turning aside to threaten Rome, in the chance that the danger of Rome might lead to the relief of Capua. The name Tifata, in some tongue, most likely in the old Oscan, describes the evergreen oaks which doubtless formed the sacred grove of Diana. The goddess had no lake here, as she had at Aricia, nor do we hear of any such grim legend on Tifata as grew round —
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
Yet beside the rites of Canaan, the rites of the gods who had sent forth him whose name proclaimed him as the Grace of Baal, the darkest forms into which any kind of Italian or Hellenic worship strayed might well seem mild. In tracking the career of Hannibal, we are ever disappointed at the utter lack of means to call up a picture of the man himself apart from his public acts. He had human weaknesses, for he found a mistress at Salapia. He had his sallies of merriment, for he could raise a laugh at the grave Gisgo. But the course of his inner life is hidden from us. Still we can at least see that he was, in his own belief, charged with a mission from the gods of his own city. And it needs an effort to bear in mind that the gods of Hannibal were Baal and Moloch. The goddess to whom he would have reared a temple would have been, not a Diana, but an Ashtoreth. Yet, among the many, and mostly false, charges of cruelty brought against the great Phœnician by Roman writers, we do not hear, as we do in the case of some other Carthaginian commanders, of captives being made to pass through the fire to the gods of Carthage. Hannibal, the friend of Capua, would at Capua honour Diana of Tifata; but it was not Diana that had sent him. With what thanks did he honour his own gods, when Capua, second city of all Italy, welcomed the victor of Trebia, Trasimenus, and Cannæ? Is it too bold a flight to fancy the mount of Tifata the scene of the same form of Baal-worship as the mount of Carmel?
But the gods of Italy lived on, undisturbed by the momentary presence of Semitic rivals. Diana was not the only power worshipped on Tifata; Jupiter also had his holy place. And it may be that the venerable church which now forms the chief attraction of the hill-side represents the holy place of Jupiter rather than the holy place of Diana. It is curious to see how a kind of appropriateness was often sought after in the nomenclature of Pagan temples when turned into Christian churches. Thus, at Athens, the Parthenôn remained the Parthenôn, while the temple of the warrior Thêseus or Hêraklês became the church of the warrior George. We should look for a Santa Maria or a Santa Lucia at the least, on the site of the sanctuary of Diana. Had we here a San Pietro, we should have very little doubt in setting down the prince of the Apostles as having supplanted the father of gods and men. But at Sant' Angelo in Formis we feel somewhat less certain; St. Michael suggests the Norman, and the Norman has been there. It may well be that the name is no older than his day.
But St. Michael on the slope of Tifata did carry us back in thought to a church of St. Peter seen some months before under a widely different state of outward things. We then made a somewhat difficult journey to a great and solitary Tuscan basilica in time of snow. The outward aspect of nature had certainly changed a good deal between the bleak day in January when it was found a hard task to follow the way from Pisa to the basilica of the prince of the Apostles in Grado and the sunny day in May when the same travellers found their way without difficulties of any kind to the basilica of the prince of the archangels in Formis. And there certainly can be no likeness of position, even if both were seen in January or both in May, between the basilica standing low in the flats by the mouth of Arno and the basilica which nestles against the mountains which form a wall to the rich plain of Vulturnus. But in seeing any one of these great churches, left, not ruined, like our Cistercian abbeys, but still living on a kind of life in places forsaken or nearly so, something always brings up the memory of some other of its fellows. Aquileia is perhaps the greatest case of all; but Aquileia, with its special position in the history of the world, stands by itself. If Aquileia itself is dead, it has lived on a wonderful after-life in the shape of its Venetian colony. We go to see Aquileia, because it is Aquileia; but even a well-informed traveller may know nothing of San Pietro in Grado and Sant' Angelo in Formis, till either his guide-book or some earlier visitor points them out to him as places which he ought not to pass by. Aquileia again has other things to show besides the great basilica and its surroundings. St. Apollinaris in Classe is as nearly forsaken as a church that is still kept up can be; but the basilica of Classis does not stand by itself; it forms part of the wonders of Ravenna, as St. Paul without-the-Walls forms part of the wonders of Rome. St. Peter in Grado might be looked on as standing in the same relation to Pisa; but it hardly enters into our general conception of Pisa, as the church of Classis – papal havoc hinders us from adding the church of Cæsarea – certainly enters into our general conception of Ravenna. S. Angelo in Formis at all events does not enter into our general conception of old Capua, because there is not enough of old Capua left to form any general conception of it at all. The church and the small surrounding village do form a kind of distant arx to the greater collection of houses which surrounds the amphitheatre; but among the nearer objects which catch the eye from the height, the most prominent is not old Capua with its amphitheatre, but new Capua, Casilinum that once was, with its towers and cupolas, mediæval and modern. We look on many things from the terrace in front of the portico of the archangel, but that which among artificial objects chiefly draws the eye towards it, is not the elder Capua of Hannibal and Marcellus, but the Capua which succeeded Aversa as the seat of the elder but the less famous of the Norman powers in Southern Italy. As we mark the advance of national union, no less than as we mark the advance of mere dynastic aggression, we have sometimes to think, for a moment perhaps to mourn, that "kingdoms have shrunk to provinces," though in this form of advance and incorporation, we have no longer to add that "chains clank over sceptred cities." Capua, on both its sites, once the head of an Etruscan, once of a Norman dominion, passed, in one age, under the universal rule of Rome. In another age it again sank from its separate headship to become a member of that greater Norman dominion in Apulia and Sicily which, after more shiftings, unions, divisions, transfers to distant rulers, than any other part of Europe, has in our days been merged in the realm of united Italy, with Rome as its head, but not its mistress.
We reach then the height which, whether that of Jupiter or Diana of old, is now the height of the warrior archangel. The whole history of the church belongs to the independent days of the second Capua; in its present shape it belongs to the days of independent Norman rule in the second Capua. But the days of independent Norman rule were days when the arts of the earlier rulers of the land still lived on. We see signs of the art of Byzantium, so long mistress of Southern Italy, and of the art of the Saracen, in Italy only a visitor or an invader, while in Sicily an abiding master. The portico in front of the church is Roman in its general idea; but, instead of the colonnade and entablature of the Laurentian basilica, we see an arcade whose pointed arches at once call up memories of Sicily. They have indeed little of Sicilian grace. Nowhere at Palermo or Monreale do we see such massive columns bearing such massive stilts. Columns indeed we should hardly say, as some of them are plainly mere fragments. But here, just as in Sicily, just as in Aquitaine, the pointed arch is no sign of coming Gothic; the style is still wholly Romanesque, and somewhat rude Romanesque too. And in this region of Italy we can hardly doubt as to attributing the almost accidental shape of the arches to the influence of Saracen models, perhaps to the workmanship of Saracen craftsmen. Hard by, but not joining the building, by an arrangement unlike Sicily, unlike Apulia, but the common rule of Northern Italy, rises a bell-tower, or rather the beginning of a bell-tower, which raises our wonder as to what it would have been if it had ever grown to its full height. Two stages only are finished, the lower of hewn stone, the upper of brick; but their bulk is so great that the tower, if it had ever been finished, would surely have ranked among the highest of its class, utterly overpowering even the great basilica at its side, except so far as it would have been itself overpowered by the natural heights above it. As in some other cases, the thought suggests itself, were not those who left off building the tower wiser than those who began it? The tall bell-towers of Italy look well as they rise from the Lombard plain, as they crown the hill of Fiesole, as they skirt the shores of the lake of Como. But we are not sure that a gigantic tower, which, if it was to have any kind of proportion, ought to have been carried up to a height as great as that of Venice, was in its right place when set a little way up a mountain-side, as if simply to show how small man's biggest works look in the midst of the works of nature. But the technical eye is thankful for the fragment that has been built, though mainly on a very technical ground. Professor Willis is gone, but his happy phrase of mid-wall shafts has not died with him. The custom of the elder Romanesque towers, the abiding fashion of Germany and Northern Italy, was to set the little columns which divided the coupled windows in the very middle of the wall; the latter Norman fashion, whether in Normandy, in England, or in Apulia, was to set them nearly flush with the outer wall. In this tower, Italian by geography, Norman by allegiance, two sides conform to the Italian and two to the Norman fashion. Nothing can show more clearly that even such small matters of detail as the use of a mid-wall shaft were made matters of serious thought, and that it was sometimes thought well to come to a compromise between two rival forms of taste.
The outside of this church, except so far as it forms an object in the general landscape, is perhaps chiefly attractive to the technical observer; the inside will surely appeal to every visitor, though the visitor who is technically informed in matters of painting may possibly look upon it with more of curiosity than of positive admiration. But the eye of the more general inquirer will give something like positive admiration to a basilica of eight arches, resting on ancient columns of various marbles, with its original design far less damaged than is common in Italian churches, and with every inch of available space covered with elaborate paintings of the date of the building. Like St. Peter by Pisa, the archangel by Capua trusted to painting for his enrichment and not to mosaics; and though the Campanian pictures are by far the better preserved of the two, though nearly all the subjects can be made out with the greatest ease, yet Ravenna and Venice rise to the mind to make us think that at least if endurance be the object, there is a more excellent way.
The walls of this church form almost a pictorial Bible, with a few legendary and local subjects thrown in. The Abbot Desiderius, holding, after the usual symbolical fashion, the church in his hand, is to be seen at the east end along with the archangels and evangelists. At the west end is what connoisseurs tell us is one of the very earliest pictures of the Last Judgment. On the two sides a crowd of scenes and figures from the Old and New Testament cover the whole space. The style of the painting is said to show Greek workmanship; we look toward the west end and mark, hardly above the ground, a single small shaft with a capital of strictly Byzantine character. The ruling Norman seems on this spot to have pressed into his service the artistic powers of all the inhabitants of the peninsula. Italian, Greek, Saracen, all give their help to adorn the house of the archangel. The Norman himself contributes nothing but the position of two small columns in the tower windows. We cannot even attribute to him the position of the house of the archangel, set Norman-fashion in a high place; for the first church was built before the Norman came. It is not so further east, where a distinctively Norman element is to be seen in the great churches of Apulia. But the gathering together of the best skill of the time from all quarters is a thoroughly Norman function, whether in Italy or in England.
The basilica should be compassed, so far at least as to climb the hill a little way to look at its east end. Its surrounding buildings supply an arch or two to catch the eye on the way up or down. But the essential features of Sant' Angelo are the grand display of painting and the union of elements of so many kinds. It is the first of a great series of churches at which our course will bid us to stop here and there. But before we reach them we shall pass by one point where our musings will again be mainly secular and largely pagan. A short journey will lead us from Campania into Samnium, and the valiant men of the Samnite land will claim a tribute on a spot which is Samnite beyond all others.
