UNDERCIIIADUATIg
Perugia
By ,DAVID WILSON (Brasenose College, Oxford) THERE had been a sleepless night spent in the Orient Express from Paris to Milan, a breathless 'race round platforms to scramble aboard an ultra-fast express from Milan to Florence—a train that sped over the Po Plain like an incensed monster over a sheet of flame; and then a rough shoulder-fight to board the afternoon direttissimo from Florence to Rome. And as the direttissimo devoured its way south- ward, the bottom of Italy seemed to be rushing up towards me like some marvellously firm ground after a jump to faith from the dark, self-entwirling clouds of northern skies. So that when the train eventually pulled up at the tiny drab station of Terontola, I stepped down on to the platform reluctantly, with the feeling of a sulking child whose mother had taken him off the switchback before he'd had enough. Already, 1 felt rebel- lious against my destination; and I began to regret that I had
to break off my ride round Italy to go and attend lectures at the Italian University for Foreigners at Perugia.
But I soon discovered I had the wrong idea about my destination. Within a mere couple of hours—after sitting in a worm-slow diesel train and catching sight of a Perugia perched high on top of an isolated hill lording over the surrounding countryside, and then finding myself, at the end of a spiralling ride in a groaning trolley-bus, wandering around its strange streets and looking out from its precipitous edge over the dark plain of Umbria hundreds of feet below, as though I were looking over an endless ocean from the cliff-face of some mountainous island—within a couple of hours, the precon- ceived impression of Perugia, culled from the notice-boards in the Taylorian Institution at Oxford, as a town dominated by a university, melted like butter and Perugia proper fell into perspective.
And almost from then onwards, the fadt that Perugia was a University town receded into the background. . . . The University itself is housed in a large eighteenth-century palazzo —a spacious, baroque building with airy marble corridors. richly painted ceilings and fastidious arabesques—and it stands just outside the pugnacious walls of the city as though they didn't think enough of its character to let it enter.
It is the town that really matters. It has a calm, self-con- tained atmosphere that permeates through your pores almost insidiously—so that you hardly know it's doing so until you suddenly realise how completely it's satisfying your thirst. It is as though it has reached a peace of its own after all the internal upheavals of its stormy passage through history have quietened down, and is now content just to communicate that Peace to you. Again, it rests on the firm foundation of an Italy that still makes sense . . . for although it dates back to the Etruscan fourth century B.C.—and it has a fine massive Etruscan Gate--its real character is medixval. . . .
During the long blazing afternoons it sleeps. Its streets are almost deserted, the tables outside its cafés almost empty. The fruit sellers are asleep over their carts, vagabonds and loungers are curled up on.the steps of public buildings, inside their houses the Perugians are taking their siesta, and the shutters are drawn down over shop windows like great heavy eyelids. Only the rumbling of the long blue post-bus on its way back from Assisi disturbs the silence. The primitive un- finished stonework of San Lorenzo in the main square blazes barbaric and infinitely remote in the sun. Beyond the main square, the rest of the town lies cool in its own shadows, dreaming, resting on its spoils and riches from the past—the motionless chains hanging from the sculptures of the Guelf lion: the Perugian gryphon above the entrance to its stately medimval Palazzo Publico symbolising its far-away victories of Siena and Assisi in the fourteenth century; the magic blues and golds and the placid stylisation of its own school of painters --Perugino, Luca Signorelli, Caporali; the glittering painted insig:Aa of its former counciltors shining down from the low curd ceiling of the Hall of Notaries into the musty darkness beneath.
But, at night, Perugia slowly awakens and becomes alive. in a way of its own, though. The bead doorways of its shops begin to rustle; its main streets become slowly populated from nowhere; the cafés become full; cars appear. But it is never noisy or hurried. Instead, it seems to become infused with a strange, silent tenseness that suggests activity and excitement. For its activity is felt rather than seen. It is as though, in fact, at night the whole of Perugia draws its life from its cata- combs. . . . On every side, Perugia's few main streets are surrounded by a vast network of tiny alleyways, like an unfathomable network of veins in an old body. They twist and turn, run under high graceful arches, reach through dark tunnels beneath the floors of houses like subterranean passage- ways penetrating into the bowels of the earth, and cross and intersect each other with narrow bridges. Occasional lights cast uncanny shadows across their stone, they are usually deathly silent; and when a solitary figure emerges from around
one corner and disappears round another he appears to do so stealthily. In fact, when you see a deserted stone stairway appearing from the darkness to sweep down under a lofty illuminated arch, or some strange play of lamplight, or the view from a narrow bridge on to a street below where shawled figures in a group are sitting motionless at the base of a wall in the shadows—when you come across these, you could swear you'd arrived on a theatre set in an empty opera house, or that you were watching a bizarre film shot of an ingenious cameraman. You begin to feel like an actor, resigned to accepting impossible settings without ever questioning their unreality.
But the main event of the evening always takes place in the main street of the town, the Corso Vanucci. Here the walls of the old buildings, reflecting the light of the street lamps far below them, turn into amazingly soft browns and oranges and appear warm and mellow and domestic. And here, every night, between the first hint of sunset and nightfall, this small broad street becomes packed to capacity with a slowly-moving crowd of people; all you can hear is a muffled shuffling of feet and a low, almost imperceptible murmuring of voices. It is like watching a crowd scene in a slow-motion film with the sound-track not functioning properly. And this is Perugia's nightly social occasion. Every night the same people—the women in elegant summer dresses and the men in their smart suits and black and white shoes—circulate and parade there as if by instinctive habit, by the pull of a deeply-rooted tradition, and their very lack of ostentation makes it impos- sible to laugh at them. Just the opposite happens. Within days, the same slow movement of the crowd, the same sensa- tion of its strange shimmering ceiling of murmuring, the continuous, hypnotic movement of the ritual become weirdly impelling... so that now, each evening, r find myself mingling and circulating with the procession too. I feel as though I've been doing it all my life—as though, dangerously, I've drunk my fill.
Previous page
