14th April 2008
This morning I am determined to find the "real" Arezzo. I'm now armed with a map of the historic centre, a guide book, and some good advice from the waiter in my hotel.
Last night I got bored waiting for a taxi to get me back to the hotel and I walked back. I surprised myself with my orienteering skills. I'd noticed a lot of landmarks on my circuitous route to the station and internet point. (I'd failed to find my way into the historic centre). Going back, I kept the domes and steeples on my left and it got me to the Zona d'Affari where the hotel lies. Once I entered the zone, however, I thought I was in trouble - trade outlets and car showrooms on every side -but somehow I made it. The receptionist who told me it was an easy 1km walk to the station deserves a special mention for lying in her teeth.
I had dinner in the hotel, rather late. The waiter looked put out when I arrived - he was hoping that his evening's work was done, I suspect. He softened up when I asked him if he was French - he'd spoken to me in French, apparently thinking I came from France. He is Italian and he told me he'd worked in the best hotel in Capri before this. I think he was missing that hotel.
When I asked him how to get to the historic centre he became helpfulness itself and we pored over the map he fetched me. He advised driving to a car park just outside the city wall.
So I set off this morning in the car, found a carpark (where I wrestled briefly with the ticket machine but finally got in) and walked up the via Porta Buia, near where I was last night.
Quite quickly I come across the Chiesa SS Annunziata, a sturdy four-square church founded in 1490 after the local people witnessed a miraculous weeping Madonna incident during a terrible storm, on this spot. There was already an Oratory there, built in 1349, and a painting by Spinello Aretino (1350-1411) of the Annunciation.
I go in and am surprised and impressed by the richness of the interior. I go round snapping pictures and that's when I realise my camera battery is flat. I resignmyself to drawing for the rest of the day - I'll recharge the battery tonight.
The sun is shining as I stand for almost two hours on the corner of the quiet street (Via Garibaldi I think) opposite the church and the shrine with Aretino's fresco above a rectangular doorway decorated with Romanesque reliefs. I recognise the four creatures of the Aplocalypse over the lintel.
I make an ink sketch. No-one bothers me, though there are some passers-by. (Most of them are on the phone anyway.) As usual I can hear men at work behind me - banging and cheerful whistling and shouting - and when they pack up for lunch one of them comes and checks out what I'd been drawing, in a very friendly way, before they drive off and I get on with the drawing.
It's twelve thirty and I've only drawn one church. Time to go on and find the Cathedral.
I take back anything nasty I said yesterday about Arezzo. Its historic centre is as interesting as any other centre I've visited in this region. The building material seems to be mainly a kind of greenish yellow sandstone. It must be quite soft and there's often damage to the surfaces of reliefs and walls. I notice that the shrine next to SS Annunziata has lost its reliefs up to a height of about a metre where animls and perhaps the faithful had rubbed up against them. Perhaps children and vehices have played a part too.
I pass on to the Piazza San Domenico and stop to draw the church, as there's a vacant bench. This church is undergoing restoration as I find when I go inside. There's a forest of scaffolding on a par with Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. From the outside it looks like an eighteenth century folly - one of those decorative ruins that English landscapers erected in estate gardens. The scaffolding is less noticeable from the outside.
But it seems to be "business as usual" - notices of masses are on display and the bells are hanging in the tower. I spend a pleasant hour drawing the exterior. I'm harassed only briefly by an educational group of Italian teenagers who practise conjugating Engish verbs at me after their politely enthusiastic "Complimenti" on my work. In their usual high-spirited way the boys are ready to tease me but one of the girls kindly warns them that though I'm English, I do seem to understand Italian - I'm grateful to her for that!
At the top of the hill, in the oldest part of the ancient settlement of Arezzo, I arrive in the piazza where the town hall and the cathedral stand.
I find the Cathedral closed for lunch. I sit on the steps admiring the facade, the main entrance a simpler, sandstone version of the Duomo in Florence, erected at the beginning of the twentieth century. Here the Cathedral is raised on a high plinth and reached via two flights of steps leading up from the piazza on all sides. It's very grey and cold, and rain is in the wind.
This is a much older door on the south side of the cathedral. The relief over it is 14th century and it has two porphyry pillars outside, taken from a Roman site.
I try to draw the main doors but instead settle for details of the intricate carvings of flowers, leaves and snakes that run round the barley-sugar sticks of the pillars. I'm there until two o'clock, then hunger sets in at about the same time as it begins to rain properly.
I go down to the Bar Il Duomo, just off the Piazza, and find it's rather like the Tardis, much bigger inside than it looked from the street. The staff - two rather handsome men and a lively pink-lipped lady who is teasing them shamelessly - are very friendly and I discover I can actually speak Italian to them unselfconsciously. I have a delicious plate of penne with tomatoes and basil and a custard tart and a capuccino and sit on, unharassed, writing this blog until the Cathedral opens.
It's later, when I read my guidebook, that I realize that though the Cathedral is interesting in its own right, it's the church of San Francesco that has the great cycle of frescos by Piero della Francesca, one of my favourite Renaissance artists.
I spend the afternoon in Arezzo Cathedral, drawing the great carved Choir Gallery by Vasari and the curious, archaic wooden Madonna and Child in the niche of the chapel below it. The statue is from the 13th century and has the stiff formality of Byzantine art. The Madonna's face is modern in its gaunt angularity and the Child seems a little old man in comparison with the chubby two-year-od infants that Renaissance artists depict in Nativity scenes.
There is a fresco by Piero della Francesca of Mary Magdalene on the left wall of the nave, near the main altar. Her hair, by tradition flowing loose, is spread in fine strands over her shoulders, as delicate as cobweb silk, and her gentle face is very beautiful. The Catholic Church's acceptance of this Mary, with all her apparent faults, is for me one of the most sympathetic aspects of this otherwise alien faith.
There's art from every century from the 13th to the 19th in the Cathedral and I browse happily there. A service begins at 5.30 which adds much to my experience though I can't understand many of the words. I don't leave myself time to see anything else - drawing is a long process.
At last I make my way down to the modern town. It's pouring with rain at nearly nine when I come out of the internet point near the station in Arezzo.
The Scenic has been parked for nearly eleven hours in the Parcheggio Balduccini and is in danger of being locked in for the night.
The Scenic and I have come to a working partnership. Hiring a car sight unseen is rather like entering into an arranged marriage - you can be lucky, or you have to work at it. The Scenic takes me smoothly and comfortably round Umbria and Tuscany. I have to trust it to leave itself locked, as long as I can check the boot. If I try to check the doors, it unlocks everything if the flat plastic "key" is anywhere within 10 metres, it seems. This has been a difficult adjustment for me, and so has the absence of a handbrake, but we have shaken down together. I wouldn't like to lose the Scenic at this stage.
When I get back to my hotel after a few circuits of the Industrial Zone to find it, I book in for another night, my last before I have to go back to Florence to catch my early flight to Gatwick on Thursday morning.
15th April 2008
I put my camera on charge, and this morning, in the rain, I set out to see the church of San Francesco, where Piero Della Francesca's cycle of paintings on the Miracle of the True Cross waits.
Here I am at the end of the penultimate day of my holiday, back in the Internet Centre in Arezzo to post what might be my last blog of this series. It's been raining on and off all day and now it's settled ino a solid downpour. I've come in to dry my feet out a bit. Luckily I didn't take the watery sunshine this morning at all seriously and I put on my big winter coat - with the boots and my cheekbones (what you can see of them after all this pasta) I'm definitely in Russian mode today.
This morning I find the third and probably most "real" Arezzo - the shopping centre. As soon as I see Upim I know I'm there. I pop in and buy a scarf I coveted in Ravenna's branch. I'm glad I did because it's turned very cold here. The commercial centre of Arezzo is very pleasant, with wide piazzas and civic sculptures.
I make my way up to the historic centre again and find I've missed the Basilica of San Francesco - it's shut for lunch till 2.30. Nearby is the Museum Home of Ivan Bruschi, an antique dealer and antiquarian who lived here for most of his life and left his whole collection to the municipality when he died in 1996. He also founded the Antiques Fair which takes place monthly in Arezzo. The Banco Etrusco was made trustee of the collection and the money to maintain it. (You can find information about Bruschi at this website
It's dry and peaceful in the Museum and I feel at home there. Bruschi was a proific collector of objects from distant times and places. It's one of those collections that is not labelled - you are just presented with the artefacts, from Etruscan times, from Africa, from the Renaissance - all intrinsically and aesthetically interesting, set out beautifully so that you can let your imagination and eyes roam among them. This is the only photograph I manage before I'm told off for getting my camera out.
In revenge I sit on the staircase and draw the view of an antique statue and the pillared windows of the Church next door, Santa Maria di Pieve. As usual a group of Italian schoolboys turns up after a while, and then my pens run out of ink, so I go back to the Basilica of San Francesco with my camera.
It's expensive to get a close-up view - 6 euros that would have bought lunch - but I'm not hungry because I've eaten really a big hotel breakfast.
It's still shut for lunch, but the sun is shining (short-lived as it turns out) and I sit in one of the cafes opposite the church of San Francesco and enjoy a fresh orange juice. Almost everyone else there is English like me, mainly teachers because it's school holiday time in England. I try hard to look Italian, or at least French.
It's certainly worth getting up close to the frescos of the Legend of the True Cross that Piero Della Francesca painted in the apse behind the high altar. They've had to be restored, in common with most of the historic buildings in Arezzo, because the town was devastated by Allied bombing on December 2nd 1943. The colours are absolutely beautiful. I look at prints and photos in the gift shop but none of them comes close to the right colours so I don't buy one.
There are pictures and information about Piero and the Legend of the true Cross cycle of frescoes on this site.
The frescos tell a story that appears nowhere in the Bible that I know but that spans the Old and New Testaments. It traces the story of the wood that was used to make the cross on which Jesus was executed, going all the way back to Adam's death, when it seems that the branch of the Tree of Life that would have saved him from death arrived too late. Then it was passed down the ages to become the Cross. It's a story full of miraculous pronouncements by angels. King Solomon makes an appearance, and there's a battle in which the wood is taken back from infidels. After the Crucifixion it's hidden to protect it but Judas knows where it is and he gives the information away under torture (there's a scene where Judas is pulled by his hair from a dry well where he's been thrown, by a callous man)
The Annunciation is there, of course. There's a beautifully stark noose hanging from a bracket outside a black window above the pretty space where the pregnant Mary is receiving the news from the Angel. That noose could be three dimensional, so carefully has the perspective and light been depicted. It's ready for Judas.
The figures are expressive and classically beautiful and the story is told with many subtle biblical references, such as the straining workmen carrying the plank of wood that is to become the Cross, in poses prefiguuring Jesus and the two thieves.
Having paid 6 euros, I am determined to get my money's worth. My drawing pens have run out of ink and I'm not allowed to take photos. But I have the hotel biro with me. So I stand through at least two repetitions of the guided tour going round the chapel and sketch the chapel's great window, flanked by the marvellous frescos. It will serve me as a reminder and perhaps form the basis for a coloured work later. I'm starting to get the gist of the lecture in the end, because I already know the story from the guide book.
I take a few more photos but the rain is getting really serious so I make my way back towards the station, my reference point in Arezzo. I have the good luck to pass a shop selling art materals on the way and buy two new drawing pens.
I've booked my last hotel, in the centre of Florence. It's extremely cheap but since I have to leave it at about 4.30 am on Thursday morning, to catch the plane that leaves at 8, I'm not too worried.
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