History & Intimacy


	History and Intimacy
	Architecture In Umbria

Neil Moore

I first came to Umbria twenty years ago, travelling on a motorcycle, and was immediately and forcefully struck by the beauty of the landscape. It was an extraordinary and seamless combination of the natural and the artificial and it made me change my mind about those lovely backgrounds that so often appear in renaissance painting. I had, until then assumed them to be largely imaginary.

Umbria is of course sometimes seen by those who don't know it well as a poor sister to Tuscany and it is true that it doesn't have quite the range and concentration of art treasures that have attracted tourists to her northern neighbour for centuries. What Umbria does have, apart from a much lower density of tourists, is a fabric of vernacular architecture that seems to grow harmoniously out of the land itself. It is this, in combination with the generally smaller field size reflecting Umbria's long history of relative poverty, that gives it such a finely patterned and intimate landscape whose human scale is deeply satisfying.

It's not that Umbria doesn't have any great monuments, quite the contrary. The Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, decorated with the frescos of Giotto, Lorenzetti and Simone Martini and once again visitable after the earthquake damage of 1997, ranks with the very best, as does the Duomo of Orvieto, a magnificent combination of Romanesque and Italian Gothic that is one of Europe's greatest cathedrals. There is the extraordinary aqueduct that links Spoleto to the mountain behind it, the unforgettable etruscan gate at Perugia, Gubbio's Palazzo dei Consoli, Todi's cathedral of San Fortunato and many others.

But more than any list of single monuments, what really stays in the mind after travelling in Umbria is that extended, medieval vernacular style of simple yet elegant stonework that seems a natural geological extension of the ground itself. The countless hilltowns, monasteries and isolated castles that are dotted throughout Umbria's mountainous landscape have grown organically over centuries, house interlocking with house, Etruscan wall merging into medieval loggia, in a seamless unity whose subtle colour variations are those of nature itself. Every cobbled lane, every ancient doorway, at times it seems every stone that you see, carries with it a richness of historical reference that would have few equals in the world.

The town of Spoleto, sitting astride the Roman Via Flaminia as it enters the southern end of the Vale of Umbria, is an excellent example of this. Wandering around its winding streets whose layout has remained substantially unchanged since the time of Christ, one is constantly reminded of a past whose continuous flow has deposited layer after layer of cultural sediment. From the ancient Umbrians on to Roman times, to the barbarian invasions and the arrival of the Goths and Lombards, then through the dark ages and into the medieval period there are reminders at every corner.

A little known detour just near the Porta Fuga, famous for being where the Carthaginian general Hannibal was temporarily checked in 217 BC, brings you to a line of majestic linden trees flanking a stretch of the old city wall whose stratification is exemplary. From an extraordinary base in enormous, irregular but perfectly fitted limestone blocks constructed by the Umbrians in the fourth century BC as they braced themselves for the Roman assault, the wall goes up to equally massive but more rationally rectangular masonry of Roman times, and then to the higgledy-piggledy but well made work characteristic of the middle ages where no stone was too heavy for a single man to lift. It is a concise visual representation of two millennia of history.

Umbria is, in this respect, very much the expression of its long past. From the twelfth century on it participated fully in that great demographic and economic boom that signalled the end of the dark ages and was the real platform on which the Renaissance and subsequently much of the modern world were built. This was the golden age of the independent city-state and it was also the period in which the great majority of the architecture that one sees today in Umbria was built. During these two and a half centuries the inhabitants of central Italy picked up the never completely forgotten techniques of Roman building and constructed the basilicas and palazzi that give Umbria its distinctively Romanesque appearance.

That this long boom would come to a disastrous end with the Black Death of 1348 nobody could have predicted. There are in fact delightful garden areas within the walls of several Umbrian towns which owe their existence to the fact that when these communities were planning for the future in the early 1300s they anticipated steady population growth and placed the new wall line well beyond the existing houses. With some towns suffering a death rate during the plague of more than fifty percent it is not surprising that the vacant lots remained.

Umbria's political decline can in fact be traced to this period, as the independent city-states were one by one swallowed up by their bigger neighbours. Situated just a little too close to Rome, Umbria would eventually come under the not always benign control of the Papacy where it remained in effective stagnation until the arrival of Garibaldi in 1861. The lack of capacity to regenerate and compete with the ever-larger political units dominating Italy in the late middle ages was no doubt unfortunate for the Umbrians, but the centuries of relative economic decline that followed mean that for us today the region offers a uniquely clear view of what our world was like six hundred years ago, uncluttered by much of what came afterwards.

The beautiful and little known town of Bevagna, just down the hill from Montefalco with whom it still has an ancient rivalry, is an excellent example of this. It is picturesquely situated in rich farmland behind a set of defensive walls whose perimeter is exactly what it was in Roman times, when Mevania was famous for the milk-white oxen bred for temple sacrifice. That a town can stay the same size for two thousand years might be considered by some as a limitation, but in my view Bevagna is very much the right size for satisfying urban living. Sitting in its austerely beautiful central piazza with a view down the Via Flaminia to the lush countryside beyond the walls, one realises just how much a town like this is built on a human scale - "a misura d'uomo" as the Italians say.

It is this intimacy, I think, that is one of the secrets of Umbria's great appeal and the aspect that took me most by surprise. I had studied Fine Arts at university and I was familiar with the major monuments, though nothing of course adequately prepares you for standing in front of the real thing and seeing how natural, how unimposed it is in its own context. But one book that I came across in my studies had in a sense prepared me. It was a small volume called "Architecture without Architects" and it opened my eyes to a kind of building that to this day I find more profoundly satisfying than any other. It is the building of ordinary people in a pre-industrial society who over centuries construct their dwellings out of the materials that lie to hand. Perched on hilltops for defence, surrounded by walls and with houses clustered together for security but also for sociability, it was man's first and longest experience of town living, and in my opinion it speaks to our psyches on a very deep level.

Umbria is not, of course, the only place where you can still see this architecture but it does offer particularly good examples of it. By my third trip to the area I was seriously considering spending a long time there, and in 1987 I took the plunge and bought a rustic house in a little village on a hilltop with fourteen other houses, a church, a ruined castle and a communal oven. I had my own garden with twenty olive trees and some vines, and views across the Vale of Umbria to the Apennine mountains beyond.

I spent five years in this tiny village and one of the most surprising realisations it provoked was that it was possible to live in a thoroughly urban environment while at the same time being fully immersed in the real countryside. This had a lot to do with the way the three and four storey buildings were all built up to and over each other with tiny alley ways and a couple of "piazzette", all in a range of fifty metres. Thousands of years spent living in places like this is, I'm sure, is one of the reasons for the deep sociability of Italian people.

My progression from this haven to a slightly bigger village two hilltops away was undertaken for various reasons, one of which was the thought that we owed it to our growing children to have more contact with people their own age than was possible in a village whose youngest other inhabitant was nearly seventy. Another was the irresistible desire to live in a thirteenth century castle tower, because this in essence was the ruin that we optimistically thought could be turned into a home and whose previous owners seemed rather happy to sell to us. After two years in which I worked long hours rebuilding walls and maneuvering massive oak beams, I had become something of an expert in medieval building techniques and our new neighbours decided that if I was mad, then it was not in the way they had at first thought. More important, we had a beautiful place to live where we could experience on a daily basis that penetration of the past into the present that makes living in this central Italian region such a soul-nourishing experience.