“Nel crudo sasso, intra Tevere ed Amo”

—­Casentino and its woods and streams, Val d’Arno, Val di Tevere, the hills of Perugia, the valleys of Umbria, the lean, wolfish country of the Marche, the rugged mountains of Romagna.  There, on the summit of La Verna, you look down on the broken fortresses of countless wars, the passes through which army after army, company upon company, has marched to victory or fled in defeat; every hill-top seems to bear some ruined Rocca, every valley to be a forgotten battlefield, every stream has run red with blood.  All is forgotten, all is over, all is done with.  The victories led to nothing; the defeats are out of mind.  In the midst of the battle the peasant went on ploughing his field; somewhere not far away the girls gathered the grapes.  All this violence was of no account; it achieved nothing, and every victory was but the tombstone of an idea.  Here, on La Verna, is the only fortress that is yet living in all Tuscany of that time so long ago.  It is a fortress of love.  The man who built it had flung away his dagger, and already his sword rusted in its scabbard in that little house in Assisi; he conquered the world by love.  His was the irresistible and lovely force, the immortal, indestructible confidence of the Idea, the Idea which cannot die.  If he prayed in Latin, he wrote the first verses of Italian poetry.  Out of his tomb grew the rose of the Renaissance, and filled the world with its sweetness.  He was the son of a burgess in Assisi, and is now the greatest saint in our heaven.  With the sun he loved his name has shone round the world, and there is no land so far off that it has not heard it.  And we, who loot upon the ruined castles of the Conti Guidi, are here because of him, and speak with his brothers as we gaze.

V. A RIVEDERLA

Slowly, as the summer waned, I made my way up through the Casentino, once more past the strongholds and the little towns.  Now and then on my way I met the herds, already setting out for the winter pastures of Maremma.  The grapes were plucking or gathered in, and everywhere there were songs.

    “Come volete faccia che non pianga,
      Sapendo che da voi devo partire? 
    E tu, bello, in Maremma, ed io ’n montagna! 
      Chesta partenza mi fara morire.”

So I came once more over Falterona, down to Castagno, that mountain village where Andrea del Castagno, the follower of Masaccio, was born, to S. Godenzo, between two streams, where Dante knew the castle of the Guidi, and where Conte Tegrimo of Porciano received Henry VII.  Here, at last, I was in the very footsteps of Dante; for in the church there, in the choir set high above the old crypt, he signed the deed of alliance between the Guidi and the Ubaldini on 8th June 1302, “Actum in choro Sancti Gaudentii de pede Alpium.”

Nothing remains of the place as it was in those days, I suppose, save the church, and that has been for the most part rebuilt; but the choir stands, so that we may say here, on 8th June 1302, Dante took quill and signed and spoke with his fellow-exiles.