THE STORY OF LUCCA.* FEW books have hitherto been written
about the town of Lucca. Poets, statesmen, actors, novelists have crowded to the Bagni di Lucca—who can forget Heine's passage on it in his Reisebilder or the accounts in Montaigne's letters ?—but of Lucca itself little has been said. In spite of Ruskin, who, after his first walk round her bastions, exclaimed, "And I never needed lessoning more in the principles of the three great arts," she has always been regarded as one of the minor lights amongst Italian cities. Now, thanks to the intelligent and energetic research of Mrs. Janet Ross and Miss Nellie Erichsen, a complete history—we will not call it a guide-book, for it is much more than that—has been given to us. Within the limited compass of a short review it is not possible to do justice to so full a record as this of all the intricate achievements in war, politics, art, and industry of this little republic. Though often hard pressed and sometimes absorbed by Florence, Pisa, and Pistoja, she usually held her own. To get any hold of the tale of Lucca as told by Mrs. Ross in the first five chapters of this book, is something like taking one's seat on a giddy-go-round where popes and kings, saints and emperors, imperious ladies (and women play a large part in the history of Lucca) and mercenary soldiers serve as alternate horses. One tempestuous page succeeds another. Now and again the personality of some saint or individual ruler triumphs for a season (the record of the arrival of the Volto Santo, so admirably translated from an old missal by Mrs. Ross, pp. 5-13, is one of the most miraculous in mystic history); the plague intervenes or the Penitenti. But then on comes the clash and clang again, till at last the whole thing quiets down after the tale of the final, and perhaps most amazing of her despots, Elise Bacciocchi, Napoleon's sister, has been told, and Lucca is amalgamated, with others of the small republics, in a united Italy.
And out of all this human strife and struggle what remains There remains one of the most exquisite monuments of man's mind we know of : a city the colour of a milky opal tightly set within its circle of grass-grown ramparts, on which tall forest trees are planted. Her domes and campaniles, her pillared facades and her brown-tiled roofs rise with a sort of hallowed dignity against the background of hills and cultivated plains which stretch for miles around her. Within her Duomo and her old basilicas many pieces of delicate sculpture and of painting are to be found. Quercia's Ilaria! who has seen her and not loved herP And Civitalis' beautiful, somewhat feminine, shrines and tombs and friezes ; the little gold dome which serves as shrine to Lucca's chief possession— the Volta Santo ; and the wonderful rows of arabesques and figures on facades and church doors ! All these things are described with penetrating sympathy by Miss Erichsen, whose taste for art, nature, and man's history can be wholly trusted, and who has studied her city on the spot with a feeling of love and reverence.
Previous page
