Haec Est Italia Dis Sacra

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

The death of Sir Osbert Sitwell removes a very impressive specimen of the Englishman in Italy—a role which he inherited from his father, Sir George, who was the grand master of the Castello di Montegufoni. When I was at school many years ago, we were told that there was an early Renais- sance piece of proverbial wisdom running thus: Inglese italianato e diabolo incarnato. This, we were told, was either a snide attack on Tiptoft, an eminent Yorkist torturer or, a little later, on Thomas Cromwell, the hammer of the monks. And of course the Italy of the fifteenth and early sixteenth cen- turies provided an excellent training in all kinds of assassination, poisoning. etc. Yet despite this unkind description of the kind of Englishman who benefited most deeply from an Italian education, most of the Englishmen and Englishwomen in Italy have been more peaceful types, nearly all of them `culture vultures' of the most sophis- ticated and admirable school.

Of course, all northern Europe has had its long train of pilgrims going south over the Alps to das Land wo die Zitronen Mahn. and I suppose the most eminent of all pil- grims to Italy was, in fact. Goethe himself. Maurice Baring in one of his admirable Lost Letters called `Herr Muller' tells of the young English gentlemen on the Grand Tour who encounters, daily, a handsome German called Herr Muller with whom he talks more than once. He complains to Herr Muller. as newcomers to Rome always do— as I did over forty years ago--that Rome was being spoiled by new buildings, by other tourists, by the disappearance of its sacred patina of glory and artistic splen- dour. Herr Muller assured the young Englishman that he was wrong, that every generation had made the same mistake as he was making, that Rome was truly im- mortal and could not be spoiled even by the most outrageous innovators and im- provers. The young man was slightly com- forted, and he added a hastily written post- cript to his letter to his father. 'I have just learned that Herr Willer is the celebrated Herr von Goethe'.

But in numbers and, in many ways, in quality, the English tourists were the most remarkable group since the Anglo-Saxon children attracted the attention of Pope Gregory the Great. A good many Saxon kings went on pilgrimage to Rome. although

believe the pilgrimage of King Macbeth is less well authenticated: but then, he, after all, was a Scot.

One reason why the English tourist was extremely important to Italy was that he was very often rich. A great many not very good Italian portrait painters made a very handsome living by painting opulent squires or even opulent peers and their methods can be studied in a notable work of h'rtnrical research. Mr Osbert Lancaster's Drayne- floe Revisited. But there were pilgrims more important than peers, although one of the most important was in fact a peer: George Gordon, Lord Byron. Of course, Byron in

Italy was hardly a mere pilgrim or tourist. After all, he shacked up for a long period with La Guiccioli in Venice and took part in Italian conspiratorial politics in the Romagna. And it was in Italy that both Shelley and Keats died.

I can remember that when I first went to Rome my first pilgrimage was not to any of the great churches, but to the Protestant cemetery commemorated in the introduction to Adonais. For me. the grave of Keats was the most sacred site in Rome. I re- member going into the cemetery and the first thing I saw with horror was a vast hermaphroditic figure soaring up into the empyrean. For an awful moment. I thought that this had been erected over the grave of Keats, who had wanted simply the in- scription, `Here lies one whose name was writ in water'. I was relieved to find that it was a memorial to a great Boston female poet whose name I had never heard before and have totally forgotten since. One of the books which gives, to literarily minded people, the full charm of Rome is Thorn- ton Wilder's first novel. The Cabala. It is a brilliant pastiche, if not quite as brilliant as the pastiche of Madame de Sevigne in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and the most effective and moving chapter in it is the account of the dying Keats in the house on the Piazza di Spagna.

For it is poets who are the main link between Italy and England. There are other links, of course. The great architect Gibbs, of the Gibbs building in Cambridge and of St Martin-in-the-Fields, was, like Baron Corvo. for a time a student at the Scots College in Rome. But there were no British artists as eminent as Thorvaldsen. the northern Canova—now, alas, much more forgotten than Canova. perhaps because he did not carve a semi-nude portrait of Pauline Borghese. The French School has attracted more reasonably good artists than the British School, a much more modern institution. But it is writers in general, and especially poets, who have created the long chain of recollection between England and Italy: although one of the most important episodes in the history of the English know- ledge of Rome took place when Edward Gibbon listened to the friars chanting in what had been the temple of Capitoline Jove and decided on his great subject.

There have been other prose writers. I think some of the very best of Aldous Huxley's novels and short stories are set in an Italian frame. So we have the excellent pedantic joke in Huxley's best novel. Those Barren Leaves, of the man who was trying to get rid of an extremely tiresome wife and. relying on the famous line in the Pur-

gatorio. 'Siena me disfeeemi Maremma',

relied on the pestilent vapours of the marshes to remove his spouse. But, alas, the marshes had been drained and it was he.

if I remember right, who died I have more than once, when thinking of Aldous jitocjey in Hollywood living his mystic life with Gerald Heard and a good many of the cast

of The Loved One, wondered how far nos- talgia for Italy overcame him.

But the English prose writers have not sunk into my mind as much as the poets have. For one thing. none of the English writers seems to me a patch on Stendhal for giving the as our of Italy. I know that Stendhal cooked his guidebooks shamelessly and I know of the totally impossible his- torical setting of the Chartreuse de Patine. with Metternich transferred backwards into the Renaissance. But for a Beylist like me, all English prose writers on Italy seem more or less superior or inferior versions of Marion Crawford and he was a Florence- born American. Thus. in Bergamo I saw an almost unspoiled city of Napoleon's regna d'ltalia and Milan. a city I don't much like, has at least in its favour that Stendhal used to inscribe his name in hotel registers as 'Arrigo Beyle. Milanese'.

But when we come to poets it is a different matter. Keats dying before he could savour Rome or tell us what this new peak in Darien meant to him ought to have come sooner. Shelley and Byron and Brown- ing all wrote admirably about Italy. and I think Browning's 'Two in the Campagna• is one of his best poems. and one of the poems most evocative of Rome until it was spoiled and that happened after I first visited it and spent some months of the primavera of antra prima (1923) there before I went up to Oxford. I lived in a cheap pensione in the Via Bocca di Leone where the Brownings had lived, and I was pleased to find, quite recently, that it had not changed a great deal although Rome out- side the Aurelian Wall had now all the charm of an American industrial suburb. But when I was first there, there was a great deal of open space inside the great wall and papal Rome and risorginiento Rome seemed to be camping out in the vast imperial ruin. Florence was, of course, the Brownings• real home town. and Venice was the painters' town. But for me the greatest Italian pilgrim was Mozart.

There have been a great many English pilgrims whose claims to fame arc serious if not universally accepted. I prefer D. H. Lawrence's Italian travel books to his novels. T think that two of the very best accounts of English or British visitors to Italy are to be found in Norman Douglas's • South Wind, and in Comnton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women. For beside all the great and near-great figures who have gone on nilgrimage to Italy. there were the eccen- trics. and perhaps Osbert Lancaster has the last word. One can believe in his baffled British soldiers after the capture of Naples. finding an elderly English spinster painting away at Vesuvius and taking time off to tell them that the conouering Allies must do something about Italian cruelty to donkeys. This is as much a part of Englishwomen in Italy as any of the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

On the wall of the Italian consulate in Glasgow when I went to get my visa was a copy of the proclamation of victory by Marshal Diaz which seemed a little extrava- gant to British and French readers. (It is still inscribed in bron7e in the centre of Bologna. as I recently noticed.) But above the rather vainglorious account of the im- portance of the victory of Vittoria Veneto was a text which then--and now -many

English and even British visitors have been able to accept fully: HAEC EST ITALIA DIS SACRA. The Sitwell family were among those who would have most warmly con- firmed the validity of this claim.