Loggia

“ The loggia was a red-tiled portico, enclosed in glass during the winter, in the center of which was a fountain surrounded by a circular marble bench, all filched from an old Etruscan villa. To-night it was unlighted except by the glow from the bronze Japanese lamps in the conservatory; an ideal spot for a tryst, so far removed from the main body of the house and so cool in winter that it was seldom used except as a promenade or as a haven by those purposely belated. Gallatin, the scrap of paper in his fingers, strolled through the deserted halls, smoking thoughtfully. ”

“ When Maleotti had gone, Messer Simone slowly ascended the staircase that conducted to the loggia, and concealed himself very effectually behind a pillar in a dark corner hard by the door of Beatrice's rooms.
I have stood upon that loggia in later years, and looked out upon Florence when all the colors of summer were gay about the city. I know that the prospect is as fair as man could desire to behold, and I know that there was one exiled heart which ached to be denied that prospect and who died in exile denied it forever. ”

“ In the loggia, Fra Pacifico, when at leisure, would sit and rest and read his breviary; sometimes smoke a solitary pipe—stretching out his shapely legs in the luxury of doing nothing. Behind the loggia were the priest's four rooms, bare even for the bareness of that squalid place. He kept no servant, but it was counted an honor to serve him, and the mothers of Corellia came by turns to cook and wash for him.
Fra Pacifico, as I have said, had risen at daybreak. Now he is searching to find a messenger to send to Lucca, as the marchesa had desired, to summon Cavaliere Trenta. ”

“ II FROM the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue barred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-colored lichen had sheeted the balustrade as with fine laminæ of gold, vineyards stooped to the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white villages like stars spangling a summer dusk ”

“ The “feature” is the contents of the loggia: a vaulted roof and walls decorated by Giulio Romano; exquisite stucco-work and still brilliant frescoes; arabesques and figurini, nymphs and fauns, animals and flowers—gracefully lavish designs of every sort. Much of the colour—especially the blues—still almost vivid, and all the work wonderfully ingenious, elegant and charming. Apartments so decorated can have been meant only for the recreation of people greater than any we know, people for whom life was impudent ease and success. ”

“ To this beautiful and most convenient corridor, or, as it is called here, loggia, we must now return. I have said that it is four hundred feet in length, and lighted by five-and-twenty arched windows,—which, by the way, command a splendid prospect, bounded by the far-off mountains of the Tyrol. ”

“ The simple yet sumptuous villa lies so dexterously disposed below its cypress hill, that it seems almost to consist of the loggia alone as we climb up the garden slope from the road, through the judicious mingling of smooth lawn and scythe-cut grass full of scabious and delicate Alpine flowers. ”

“ If we secretly trembled lest our first impression were destined to suffer the common lot of first impressions, we proved that we had been right after all. We began to know it as soon as we clattered under the archway of the podere, passed out of the picturesque white court into an olive yard, skirted an old garden that had gone all to birds and bushes, and looked down from the terrace into the delicious morning freshness of the cypress avenue. But what really clinched us was the loggia. This was nothing less than a great marble room, opening out of the upper hall of the villa. ”

“ I went to it, and found its special feature a spacious loggia or verandah, sheltered by the overhanging upper story. Up to the first floor, the exterior is of stone in rough-hewn blocks with a distinct batter, while extra protection from weather is afforded by green slating above. The roofs, of low pitch, are also covered with green slates, and a feeling of strength and repose is heightened by the very long horizontal lines. At one end of the loggia is a hexagonal turret, opening upon the loggia, containing a study or nook. ”

“ The strikingly long front of the building, which makes so magnificent a show from the further side of the valley, resolves itself into elements which have very little of the magnificent about them when seen close at hand. One very large portion of the frontage consisted of an open loggia. The loggia at Bella Luce occupied one end of the façade of the building, and consisted of a space enclosed by three solid brick walls, and in front by a range of five arches resting on red-brick pilasters. ”

“ Men and women fell to arguing, to surmising, whom the thief might be. The story on reaching the most remote house of Sant’ Agostina, was huge in proportions; it no longer told of a single spoon, but of all the silver of the Lamonica house.
Now, as the weather was beautiful and the roses in the loggia had commenced to bloom, and two canaries were singing in their cages, the neighbours detained one another at the windows for the sheer pleasure of chattering about the season with its soothing warmth. ”

“ The bridges and traghetti must be closely watched.—Ah—the gastaldo grande!
"Hath one yet been named Condottiere for this frontier service?" questioned one of the older senators, among a group of the more important men who had detached themselves from the others and strolled out into the great loggia on the sea façade for a reviving breath of the morning air. "For such an employ there is none like Piero Salin for daring and intrigue; and the assassins may linger long in hiding on the route to Rome." ”

“ But when we looked out from the loggia on the wide view beneath us, it was not color that was wanting. There lay Naples, with its motley buildings, backed by purple Vesuvius, and the rose-colored cliffs of Sorrento beyond. Nature had used all the pigments of her pallet when she painted that lovely scene.
We paid another visit to a suppressed monastery—that of the Camaldoli—before leaving Naples. There is nothing very remarkable in the building itself or in the chapel. ”

“ Maria Novella. The background there, however, is altogether decorative; but in the fresco of the [Page 175] corridor of St. Mark's, the concomitant circumstances are of exceeding loveliness. The Virgin sits in an open loggia, resembling that of the Florentine church of L'Annunziata. Before her is a meadow of rich herbage, covered with daisies. Behind her is seen through the door at the end of the loggia, her chamber with its single grated window, through which a star-like beam of light falls into the silence. All is exquisite in feeling, but not inventive nor imaginative. ”

“ It seems to have been in a sort of recognition of the splendour and beauty of Orcagna's work that the Signoria, between 1355 and 1359, removed the corn-market elsewhere, and thus gave up the whole loggia to the shrine of Madonna. Thus the loggia became a church, the great popular church of Florence, built by the people for their own use, in what had once been the corn-market of the city. The architect of this strange and secular building, more like a palace than a church, is unknown. Vasari, as I have said, speaks of Taddeo Gaddi; others again have thought it the work of Orcagna himself ”

“ Only vestiges of their towers, and of their once famous loggia, can still be traced at the corner of Via de’ Cerchi and Via de’ Cimatori. Piero Monaldi writes in his manuscript history of the ancient family of the Cerchi that they came from Acone, “of which place they were lords and also of Ripozzano. In Florence they owned towers, a loggia and sumptuous palaces, which were destroyed during the civil strife and discord. A noble race they were, rich and powerful in the city, with many retainers, munificent and lordly in the country side. ”

“ As she lay with her consciousness turned inwards, the deadened fibres of her began to stir; pain moved in its swoon, and, waking, took the keenest form of all—remembrance. Quite suddenly there flashed before her mental vision the loggia at the top of the old palace in Florence where she and Richard had said good-bye. She, who was to see the cords of passion grow slack, had there seen them stretched at their tensest, and the memory of it clutched at her heart with that pity for him which had kept her calm for his comfort. ”

“ And because this part, gradually narrowing, forms an angle, that angle, to the end that it might be made flat, was to be blunted by the breadth of a loggia, from which, after climbing some steps, might be seen in front the palace, the gardens, the fountains, and all the plain below and about them, as far as the Ducal Villa of Poggio a Caiano, Florence, Prato, Siena, and all that is around for many miles. ”

“ This corridor has lost its frescoes, but preserves a line of niches decorated in coloured pebbles and stucco-work, with gaily painted stucco caryatids supporting the arches; and as each niche contains a semicircular fountain, the whole length of the corridor must once have rippled with running water.
The central room opens on the great two-storied portico or loggia, whence one descends by an outer stairway to a terrace running the length of the building, and terminated at one end by an ornamental wall, at the other by an open loggia overlooking the Campagna. ”

“ Why should we aliens intrude upon so private a gathering? In any case, we have grown weary of standing in the close sickly atmosphere, wherein the fragrance of the crushed bay-leaves, the fumes of incense and the strange smell of garlic-eating humanity blend in an oppressive manner. We push our way through the eager and intent congregation, and gaining the door-way step with a sigh of relief into the sunshine that is flooding the loggia. But it is too hot to remain here, and we descend the great stair-case in order to take up a post of vantage in the shade on the opposite side of the piazza ”

“ The piazza by the harbour is triangular in shape, the narrow streets, with many picturesque houses in them, climb the hillside from the water, [Pg 186] and the ancient walls remain on the land side. The loggia is a simple seventeenth-century building supported on six stone piers; in the back wall are encrusted two inscriptions—one Roman, one mediæval. The cathedral was burnt in 1827, but the west door still remains, very closely resembling that of Ossero. A picture by Alvise Vivarini is preserved in the priest's house—a Madonna with SS. Sebastian and Catherine, and SS. Christopher and Cosmas. ”

“ The door is finely sculptured, and the delicate chiselling of the capitals of the pillars of the loggia mark it as a work of the fourteenth century. Not far from the Chiesa dei Pellegrini, but to the left, stands one of the oldest Assisan houses which does not seem to have suffered much alteration since it was built. It was the lodge of the Comacine guild of workers, who have left their sign of the rose between the compass over the entrance, and two pieces of sculpture, showing that those to whom the house belonged were people who worked at some trade. ”

“ His Loggia, in its general structure and its provisions against injury from wet and decay, is a model of strength no less than symmetry and elegance; the junction of the marbles in the tabernacle of Or San Michele, and the exquisite manual workmanship of the bas-reliefs, have been the theme of praise for five centuries; his colors in the Campo Santo have maintained a freshness unrivaled by those of any of his successors there;—nay, even had his mosaics been preserved at Orvieto, I am confident the commettitura would be found more compact and polished than any previous to the sixteenth century. ”

“ It is a wrinkled old woman you see trudging down the hillside to fill her copper bucket at the stream; but in yonder corner loggia is a sparkling-eyed young contadina, some pretty Tessa, who as she spins her flax is thinking of [24] a handsome and dashing young Florentine who often finds his way to the farm-house, which belongs to his uncle's country villa hard by. A bit farther on we reach the pretty double-arched bridge Ponte d'Elsa, the very one, our driver says, where Cimabue met the shepherd boy Giotto ”

“ I don't vouch for its being Orcagna's, nor do I vouch for the Campo Santo frescoes being his. I have never specially studied him; nor do I know what men of might there were to work with or after him. But I know the Loggia to be mighty architecture of Orcagna's style and time, and the Last Judgment and Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo to be the sternest lessons written on the walls of Tuscany, and worth more study alone than English travelers usually give to Pisa, Lucca, Pistoja, and Florence altogether."
(14) P. 468. "The Gothic style for churches never took root in Venice." ”

“ The last remains of Aurdian's Temple of the Sun were presented by Prince Colonna to the Pope and went into the fabric of the villa, and a great collection of portrait busts of the Emperors, found in the villa of Hadrian, helped to adorn the loggias and niches. The villa was filled with rare marbles, tables, statues, and vases, and the marble colunms of the central loggia were so lustrous that Amannati says they mirrored every one who entered there. As the villa is constructed on the hillside, various levels are the natural result, and this feature has been used with diverse and happy effects. ”