IT was love at first sight. Henry James was 26 when he crossed the border from Switzerland and made his way, on foot, down into Italy — “warm & living & palpable,” as he wrote ecstatically to his sister on Aug. 31, 1869. The romance kindled that day lasted nearly 40 years, and played a significant part in his career; he set some of his greatest works in Italy, including “Daisy Miller,” “The Aspern Papers” and “The Wings of the Dove.”
All three are excellent traveling companions, particularly if you’re en route to Rome and Venice — but a more direct (though of course inescapably Jamesian, and therefore at times convoluted) expression of his contagious passion for what he declared to be the “most beautiful country in the world” can be found in his travel writing.
Henry James as tour guide? He won’t lead you step by step, waving a pennant so you don’t get lost, but he does show the way. His fine, reverberating consciousness sets off a corresponding reverberation in the sympathetic reader, who can’t help but admire the way Italy liberates an appetite for sensual experience in this most cerebral of authors.
If you’re thinking of visiting Umbria and Tuscany, James has even thoughtfully planned out your route: in 1874, when his Italian romance was in its infancy (and the Kingdom of Italy was a newborn nation, having achieved unification only in 1861), James wrote for The Atlantic Monthly a travel essay called “A Chain of Cities,” in which he describes his springtime wanderings in Assisi, Perugia, Cortona and Arezzo, ancient hill towns well stocked with artistic treasures and expansive views — all neatly arranged within easy distance of one another. James, traveling by train, lounges and loafs along the way, examining and judging an artist’s work, or sitting on a sunny bench beneath the ramparts of a ruined fortress, or strolling aimlessly, merely savoring the flavor of “adorable Italy.” A 21st-century traveler whose schedule is fixed by the tyranny of airline reservations may be tempted to pick up the pace (certainly a possibility if you’ve rented a car), but accident and adventure, the kind of chance encounter that loitering invites, are just as important, in the search for the essence of a place, as methodical contemplation.
James’s principal interests are scenery and art, though he occasionally casts his eye — while holding his nose — on the unwashed populace (the Puritan in him was shocked by the Italian peasant’s indifference to soap). All four towns are perched high and blessed with stunning views, but of course the views were even more gorgeous in the 19th century, before the valleys were streaked with highways, dotted with factories and warehouses and veiled by smog.
In Assisi, James looks out over “the teeming softness of the great vale of Umbria,” and watches “the beautiful plain mellow into the tones of twilight.” Today the plain is still “teeming” (though with human activity rather than nature’s bounty), and the mellow haze in the distance looks suspiciously chemical. But if the views are less pristine, the art and the architectural monuments are far more accessible, preserved and curated with care and intelligence. Each of these towns is home to more masterpieces than you can comfortably absorb in one visit; this is an itinerary overflowing with artistic riches.
If James insists on a measured tempo (in Perugia he warns that a visitor’s “first care must be to ignore the very dream of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random”), at least part of the reason is that in these towns there’s little choice. Most of the streets, especially in Assisi, Perugia and Cortona, are steep, narrow and crooked; haste would soon leave you panting. Arezzo is gentler, but there, too, James is right: even if you’re fit enough to race along, a leisurely stroll is infinitely more rewarding when nearly every building has half a millennium of history attached to it.
In Assisi, James counsels, the visitor’s “first errand” is with the 13th-century basilica dedicated to St. Francis. The church, which houses the saint’s tomb — “one of the very sacred places of Italy” — is a magnet for religious pilgrims. James hits on a suggestive metaphor for the basilica’s astonishing structure: it consists of two churches, one piled on top of the other, and he imagines that they were perhaps intended as “an architectural image of the relation between heart and head.” The lower church, built in the Romanesque style, is somber, cave-like and complex, whereas the upper church, a fine example of Italian Gothic, is bright, spacious, rational. (Though he often favored head over heart, reason over emotion, James was a master at turning the tables.) Both churches are famously decorated with frescoes hugely important to the history of art, most of them traditionally ascribed to Giotto (c. 1267-1337). Studying them closely, James pays tribute to the artist’s expressive power: “Meager, primitive, undeveloped, he is yet immeasurably strong” — a judgment still valid today.
By ADAM BEGLEY
The 13th-century basilica dedicated to St. Francis as seen from the fortress above Assisi.
