THE MAGNANIMITY OF ITALY.
IF we were asked to give the distinctive quality of the Italian nation, we should give magnanitnity—that is, greatness, or rather magnificence, of soul and mind. The Italian always aspires not only to do great things, but to do them in the great way, whether it be to build a church, a hospital, or a railway station, paint a picture, or write an ode. Picturesqueness and the refinement of miniature work—these appeal to him very little. He wants the big brush, the big canvas. What Sir Thomas Browne so well called " the wild enormities of ancient magnanimity" inspire no fears in his mind. The grandiose does not alarm him, but only the mean and the petty. This great-heartedness is shown very clearly not only in Italian manners, which have always been the most stately and full-sweeping in the world, but in the Italian titles and the Italian language. For example, the great officials of Venice were content with no less a title than " Magnifico," and it is from the Italian lingua franca of the Levant that we get such titles as the Grand Seigneur and the Sublime Porte. It is, however, in architecture, which is so essentially the Italian art, that the magnanimity of the Italian is most clearly seen. In every age it has been the same. Nothing is too big or bold or splendid for the Italians to attempt in stone or in brick. Where ordinary mortals build a shed, the Italians rear a palace. The sightseer who wanders to the back of St. Peter's in order to get a side-view of how Michael Angelo hung the Pantheon in heaven will realize what we mean provided lie looks down into the tinge foundations of St. Peter's displayed there in a sort of dry ditch or giant's version of a London area. The foundations
seize the earth in a kind of Titanic grasp which makes one feel, to quote . Sir Thomas Browne once more, that " man is a noble animal." Rome, indeed, is full of Italian magnanimity in stone. St. Peter's and the Vatican are no exceptions, but simply examples. The Coliseum and the Pantheon stand to show that the ancient Roman was never content unless he could "lick creation." The modern Italian is quite as determined to do his bit greatly. Take this as an example. When the Italians entered Rome in 1870 they were as a nation exceedingly hard-up. They had the biggest Debt per head in Europe, they had a greatly depreciated paper currency, and the Italian people were groaning under the heaviest load of taxation in Europe. All this, one might suppose, would have made the Government keep off expensive bricks and mortar in a city already filled with glorious buildings, a city which needed no adornment from modern hands. Not a bit of it! The first thing that the Italian overnment did was to build the biggest Treasury in the woRd—to match, said cynical critics, the biggest national indebtedness. It is true that they only built in brick and stucco, and in a style of architecture which can hardly be called satisfactory—that of the Third Empire. Nevertheless, up went a building which by a foot or two beats the Vatican itself for size, and must be admitted to be a potent and sound piece of work in spite of its obvious faults.
Perhaps one of the most complete examples of the passion for great-hearted buildings in Italy is afforded by the little city of Parma. Parma was never a great State, nor had it ever great rulers or great artists, except Correggio. Yet the people of Parma were always at it with the trowel and chisel. The present writer can well remember how the great brick arcades of Parma's sixteenth-century palace made him uncover his head and bend his knee to the shades of their great creators. The brickwork here can only be described as glorious. But Parma (like every other Italian town) in some one special point strives to reach the architectural limit. In this case it is the theatre—a theatre built for a Royal marriage, but a theatre which holds four thousand people. It is true that a great many of the adorn- ments are pasteboard. You see huge statues which look very well from the pit or stalls or their equivalents, but which, when you get up close, are only a quarter of an inch thick. Half the balustrades and architectural features, indeed, are either pasteboard or painted in chiaieseuro on lath and plaster backgrounds. For all that, the building is in concep- tion magnificent. When Marie Louise went to live in Parma one would have thotfght the authorities would have had no difficulty in housing her in the old palace. But that would not do at all. They built for her the very coquettish, but also very large, "NCio-Grec " palazzo—now, if we remember
rightly, the home of the Prefect. Near this palace is a church of about 1730 or so, which, though it has no particular architectural raison d'être, is quite splendid in its proportions. Outside Parma also there happens to be a large fort, but without any special history or importance. Yet we venture to say that any historian whose mind is attuned to understand bricks and mortar might deduce from it the whole spirit of the Italian people. The gates and ditches, ravelins, curtains, and horn-works, as Uncle Toby would say, all breathe forth magnanimity.
But perhaps it may be urged that we are overdoing our point, and that the small towns of Italy have grandiose buildings only because Italy was broken up into small States. Our answer is that you can take plenty of minute towns in Italy which were never anything but provincial towns (towns which were never independent communities or owned a tyrant of their own) in which great-heartedness is just as apparent in their buildings as in the local capitals. Take Novara. Novara is a town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Its name is knoWn to the world outside Italy only because of the battle of 1849, in which the Piedmontese were defeated by the Austrians. Baedeker tells us that "it abounds in monuments." It certainly does. The church of San Gaudenzio, erected in 1577, has a dome only short by thirty-six inches of four hundred feet. St. Paul's is four hundred and four feet high from the ground to the top of the cross. The Cathedral, which was rebuilt in 1831, is a piece of portentous academic N6o-Grec which literally takes away the ordinary traveller's breath, so appalling is it in size, clammy magnificence, and pedantic dulness. Looking back upon a hasty visit, the present writer wonders whether, after all,
it really exists, and whether what he thinks he saw was not an architectural nightmare inspired by some dim remem- brance of Martin's illustrations to Paradise Lost. It would indeed be something in the nature of a relief if readers of the Spectator who know Novara were to write and say that there is no such building. Everything in Novara, however, is on a colossal scale, and yet the town has, as we have said, only twenty-five thousand inhabitants, and never had more. Think of it. Let any Englishman recall the English towns he knows of twenty-five thousand inhabitants and the kind of architec- ture they possess! We are not now talking, remember, of beauties of architecture, but of magnanimity and greatness, size and grandeur of conception, even if grandiose. While the people of an Italian town of twenty-five thousand inhabitants would never be content to build except on the grand scale, an English town of the same size revels in a kind of architectural squalor, or at best produces some tiny little "refinement" in stone or brick.
Amazing as is the example of Novara, that of Chiavari is even more soul-shaking. Chiavari is a tiny Ligurian port of twelve thousand inhabitants. The streets, old and new, are arcaded in the most delightfully picturesque manner, often with pointed arches. But that is not the wonder of the place. The principal church, Santa Madonna del Orto (1613), now a Cathedral, is a spacious and dull classical building on a large scale. But that, again, is not what concerns us. What does concern us in this context is the huge portico of Carrara marble Corinthian columns, as big as those in the Parthenon, which was clapped on to the church in a sort of constructional frenzy, without any particular idea or architectural fitness, in the year 1835. Remember what Italy was, or rather the little State of Piedmont, to which Chiavari then belonged, in the "thirties." Italy, socially, politically, and economically, touched bottom in those years. Yet lo and behold! a group of pious and, we must suppose, well-to-do gentlemen in this little coast town, with about a mile of foreshore and a valley a quarter of a mile broad for three miles, and then the mountains rising literally like a stone wall, agreed that they would like to have a white marble portico to their church with mono- lithic marble columns forty feet high. Why should not Chiavari do herself as well as Athens in the way of porticoes? Why not ? What in those days would have dumbfounded a city like London or Liverpool or Manchester does not seem to have made the Chiavari people turn a hair. The church appeared to them to want a portico, or rather they wanted an architectural " jolly " in good, hard, bright marble and sound mortar, and so great and stout of heart were they that it did not occur to them to have anything less than a portico equal to the greatest in the world. If it did not quite fit the church, so much the worse for the church. The portico was not going to suffer, said the good men and true of 1835, because of an inadequate Duonio. We picture them rushing at the design like mad bulls. "Down with the craven who said forty-five feet was too high or six columns too many! We are not out to build a pigsty." Accordingly up went the columns, and there stands the portico glued on to the church, just as a child might glue a new toy on to an old one. No doubt the townsmen of Chiavari intended some day or other to bring their already big Cathedral up to date, and case its brick and stucco walls in Carrara marbles to match the portico. Instead, however, they have deviated into materialism, and built Frew:lifted boulevards with enormous colonnades, very ugly, but very grandiose. The portico therefore still sticks out, with a ragged edge, about ten feet beyond the Cathedral walls. No matter; Chiavari has got a portico which will warm the heart of any archi- tectural enthusiast, and make him feel what noble creatures were the burgesses of 1835. Once more remember what 1835 was in Europe, and the kind of stuff that was put up in England, or even in France, at that epoch, and then look and wonder at the portico at Chiavari. "The large portico added in 1835 " is all that the bewildered Baedeker can say of it. He had to leave it at that. You want to know some- thing of the soul of Italy and her blood-stirring devotion to stone and brick, and construction for the sake of construction, to understand "the large portico added in 1835." It contains the secret of Italy, old and ever young. But what German
ever really understood the heart of anything P The German mind moves on the surface, and is simply puzzled by the things unseen.
Let no one imagine from what we have written above that we think Italy is only magnanimous in stone and great- hearted in bricks and mortar. In the things of the spirit, as she has just shown us, she is of royal mood. That, however, was not our subject to-day. We wanted for ourselves and our readers, out off by the war from the yearly draught of the healing waters of Italy, an excuse for recalling old loves and old delights in the pleasant cities of the South. Do Italians realize how starved are thousands of English men and women because they cannot this year seek inspiration at the fountain- head P
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