AREZZO
We came to Arezzo in the cool of the evening. It had been a breathless day. Even at Genoa the air hung heavy with the sirocco. We found Pisa in a mirage, and the white hills of Carrara glistening like the lime rocks of a desert.
It was good to be in Tuscany again—Tuscany with her grey farms and lichened roofs, her towered horizons, her blue hills, her vineyards, and her olive-gardens. We could hear the song of the cicalas vibrating in the sunshine above the jar of the train; near at hand the hills swelled up, clothed with the tender mist of olives or linked with vines; stone-pines floated darkly against the sky, and cypress spires climbed the hillsides in a long procession like souls on pilgrimage.
Perhaps it is because Arezzo, little Arezzo, with her ancient history and her tale of great men, was the earliest of our hill-cities that we loved her at first sight. Coming from London and Genoa, with the noise and dust and heat of long train journeys still hanging about us, she seemed very cool and sweet among her vineyards and olive-gardens. She has left her hill-top now that she needs no more the walls which Sangallo built in the fighting days of the Popes, and has trailed down to the railway in the valley, leaving behind her wide piazzas which she has filled with shady trees, and benches, and statues of her great ones. Her paved streets, steep and clean, climb up the hillside between grey palaces, green-shuttered, with wide Tuscan eaves, whose fantastic outlines, seen in échelon against the sky, bring back a score of memories of other clean-swept Tuscan towns.
Now that we were threading her byways, Arezzo, though she had looked imposing from the valley, dwindled to a little brown city, full of memories, and frescoed churches, and ancient houses in which the labourer dwells in his poverty to-day where the rich citizens of Arezzo once held great state. Capers and all manner of pensive creepers grew out of the rough walls; fig-trees, roses, wistarias, and oleanders in full blossom poured over them, so that the air was full of fragrance. And there were flowers in the upper windows of thirteenth-century houses, for your Tuscan is fond of flowers, and will have his garofani upon his window-ledge. Through the low-browed gateways we could see women spinning in arcaded courtyards; and the shoemakers and basket-weavers worked at their humble trades as they sat on the steps of weather-beaten Gothic houses.
And often as we wandered through her narrow streets we paused to look down upon the calm beauty of the Tuscan plain, which stretched from the vineyards below her walls to the blue mountains of Chianti. Nor did it require any effort of imagination, while we were walking in those mediaeval byways between the Borgunto and the Via di Pellicceria, to people the rich valley with the pageant which Dante witnessed while he was staying in Arezzo with the elder Petrarch, both exiles from Florence.
'It hath been heretofore my chance to see
Horsemen with martial order shifting camp,
To onset sallying, or in muster rang'd,
Or in retreat sometimes outstretch'd for flight;
Light-armed squadrons and fleet foragers
Scouring thy plains, Arezzo! have I seen,
And clashing tournaments, and tilting jousts,
Now with the sound of trumpets, now of bells,
Tabors, or signals
