From our trip to Northern Italy in 2001, based on the travel writings of H.V. Morton and Edith Templeton and following their route through Renaissance architecture and culture.
Two travellers in Italy part 2
Pavia, Mantova and Sabbioneta by Meg Gain
We took a bus from Milan on a dark November afternoon to the small town of Pavia, then another bus, before a 10 minute walk to reach the Charterhouse of Pavia or Certosa. HVM tells his readers that the church was intended as the family mausoleum for the Visconti and was created by the 15th century architect Amadeo, amongst others. The monastery is profusely decorated with statues and carvings, possibly the most sumptuous and expensive ever built. Like HVM, we were the only visitors and wandered freely through the cloisters. We visited one of the two-storey monks’ cells. Each has its own small garden and a hatch beside each door permits the delivery of food, without the need for verbal communication. In the church is the tomb of Ludovico il Moro and Beatrice D’Este which provides a realistic portrait in marble of the couple, although begun 11 years before Ludovico actually died. We had a long wait for a bus back to Milan and we made for the welcoming lights of a small shop/café where we enjoyed a delicious “cioccolata”- actually a dense molten chocolate drink, a far cry from the sweet ‘hot chocolate’ we know in Britain.
HVM describes Mantova (Mantua) on a night of the full moon which transformed the city into ‘the backcloth of an opera’. Indeed its history is one of operatic plots, most of them perpetuated by the Gonzaga family. Mantova was one of my favourite places on our tour. Aldous Huxley called it ‘the most romantic city in the world” which is quite a claim when Venice lies not far away! The central core is magical although the streets of its outskirts are lined with grim buildings from the Fascist era and the paper, chemical and plastics works do nothing to add to its magic. In the centre are four interlinked squares, one of which, the Piazza dell’Erbe, is the most characterful with cafes and restaurants sheltering under the arcades below the 13th century Palazzo della Ragione. Edith ate at “Vesuvio” where the waiter was called Virgilio (appropriate for a Mantua man working in the birthplace of the poet Virgil). Edith stayed in the Hotel Romagna but was less than impressed. She had to stand on a chair to hang up her clothes! HVM is adept at describing the clothes of the people he comes across and thereby summing up their characters. Outside the Palace of the Gonzaga in Mantua, he waits for opening time alongside ‘ a bearded man in flannel trousers and sandals, wearing a beach shirt decorated with prismatic fish; a middle aged woman who might have dismayed even Rubens (I have a wonderful mental picture of her!) and a bland little man in yellow shorts with the chubby knees of a Mantegna cherub, who wore a Tyrolean hat and had three cameras slung about him.”
How I envy HVM when we travel in this age of conformity where tourists all look the same. Edith gives names to people she meets, like “ the Pal” (a paleontologist) , “the Owl” (a bespectacled librarian) and, my favourite, the ‘Tired Ones’ (middle aged single men who still live at home and think a foreign woman someone to seduce).
Twenty miles outside Mantua is the strange little town of Sabbioneta. It was designed as an experiment in the theory of Renaissance architecture by Vespasiano Gonzaga in the 16th century. The ‘Rough Guide to Italy’ describes it as having the “air of an abandoned film-set” and, on the day, we visited, taking the 50 minute bus ride from Mantua, we found it a ghost town. The bus driver forgot to tell us where to get off so we had to walk back a couple of miles along a dusty country road to the hexagonal walls and impressive gateway. HVM also went by bus, managed to get off at the right stop and he also found ‘not a soul to be seen”. “The silence was profound” he remarked. Edith also travels by bus but warns her readers to go by car as “ the bus service is bad. Once you are put down in Sabbioneta you must wait six hours for the bus back to Mantua”. Her initiative takes her into a café. There someone is dispatched to the Town Hall and returns with the news that the official guide and key holder has gone to Mantua for the day!! The young girl behind the counter throws down her dishcloth, removes her apron and sets off with Edith to the Town Hall to knock up the caretaker’s wife who joins them in apron and slippers! Both HVM and ET visit the Teatro Olimpico by Scamozzi. HVM finds that the builders are busy reconstructing the stage and proscenium but ‘the glorious little auditorium is more or less intact”. He compares this theatre with the other Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza where he says the ‘interest is entirely on the stage with its astonishing perspectives. Here, (in Sabbioneta ), the interest is in the auditorium and I wondered whether a private ducal theatre of this period is to be seen anywhere else”. Again I wonder whether ET’s path crossed that of HVM as her description of the Scamozzi theatre goes: “ …The auditorium is still fairly intact but the stage and wings have gone to the devil. The theatre is being re-built and the place is filled with planks and the air heavy with the dust of wood shavings.”
Nearer to Mantua is the summer palace of the Gonzaga (as though their palace in the centre of the city were not large enough!). The Palazzo del Te has nothing to do with tea and HVM didn’t know why it has such a strange name. He devotes just one brief paragraph to it although I found it much more interesting than that. He only comments on the fresco of horses, life size, in memory of the Gonzaga stud. Edith walks the ten minutes from the end of the corso to the Palazzo and is met by an old woman, the gatekeeper, who laments on the theft of the bronze statues that once lined the grand avenue in the garden as though it were only yesterday. The theft took place in the 18th century when Mantua was besieged and taken by the French. Edith waxes lyrical about the frescos by Guilio Romano which cover every surface, walls and ceilings. She is more scathing about the most famous room in the palace ‘The Hall of the Giants’. “It is overwhelming in a nasty way. It shows a battle between the Gods and the Titans,….the Titans are red-nosed, clumsy, crafty old dodderers…they seem to be the models from which Walt Disney created his dwarfs in the abominable version of ‘Snow White’.. Edith admired the pretty little pavilion in the garden which has stuck in my memory of our visit. “Its whole purpose was to provide a bathroom of suitable proportions for the Gonzaga.The floors are inlaid with coloured pebbles and pierced with holes. In the old days the space below the floors was flooded with perfume and when the baths were used the scent would rise from the floor and fill the steam-warmed air.”
Sources
“A Traveller in Italy” by H.V. Morton, published by Methuen, 1964
“The Surprise of Cremona” by Edith Templeton, published by Methuen, 1954 (paperback edition 1985)
“Hill Towns of Italy” by Lucy Lilian Notestein, illustrated by David Gentleman, published by Hutchinson of London, 1963
“Eyewitness Guide to Italy” published by Dorling Kindersley, 1996
Abbreviations
HVM = Henry Canova Vollam Morton (1892-1979)
ET = Edith Templeton (1916-2006)
