Perugino's home town

Among the many casualties of a chaotic two-day flying visit to the Incontri in Terra di Siena festival was quality time in one of the loveliest and most pleasant hill towns I've ever seen in Italy (and I've seen a lot now), Città della Pieve in Umbria, just over the 'border' from our base in Tuscany. Still, a glimpse was enough to whet the appetite. I blush to say I'd never heard the name, but quite apart from the fact that in a country less overwhelmed by treasures it would be a major destination for tourists - not so many come here - it also has the honour of being the place where Pietro Vannucci, detto il Perugino (1446-1523), was born and died (Peruginesque view over the Tuscan hills from the town above).

Our somewhat loose-limbed little band arrived early in the evening for a reception and a concert in the exquisite Teatro degli Avvaloranti, to be met where we parked by the local youth practising their drumming routines for an imminent festivity along the lines of Siena's Palio. Cicerona couldn't find reception venue; after much milling around outside the theatre, my touristic hunger took over and, gathering up the polymathic and equally keen Harry Eyres of Horatian and FT fame (read his Slow Lane take on the festival here), I decided to hunt out the Peruginos in the Duomo. Sniffing our way uphill did the trick within minutes. We came at it from the side street with the big Romanesque-Gothic bell tower before us, picturesquely counterpointed by one of the Renaissance palaces ahead in the main drag.

The bulk of the building on the site now was begun in 1600, when cathedral status was granted, with models including Rome's Gesù and Sala Clementina. So the two towers are in very different styles, though the mixture of brick and sandstone is typical of the town as a whole.

With no guidebook or leaflet anywhere in the church, and my Tuscany Blue Guide quite useless, of course, for Umbria, we had to make informed guesses about the Peruginos before moving towards the information plaques. Both paintings date from the 1510s. The altarpiece with its town flags glowing from a distance, and the rich colours suggesting recent restoration, seemed a likely candidate, though another painting on the apse's south wall seemed even more Peruginesque; it turned out to be by another imitator of Raphael. Harry proved sharper than me in hunches, rightly pointing out that the apse fresco, a rare survival from an earthquake, must be at least half a century later (it's by another local boy, Antonio Circignani).

So it's the Virgin enthroned with Saints Gervasio and Protasio (the cathedral's own pair), Peter and Paul, which is Perugino's work

as is the Baptism of Christ in a chapel to the left near the entrance, with a copy of Perugino's self-portrait on the wall to the right. The original of that is now in Milan (featured in a Wiki shot way below).

Perugino's Baptism took on a mysterious hue in what filtered through of the early evening light - seemed to me as fine as Perugino's several other versions of the scene.

What do we know about the man? Vasari can't be trusted. Vannucci was born in Città della Pieve, not Perugia; his father was a wealthy man, and he grew up in anything but 'misery and want'. This much in Vasari is probably true:

He was apprenticed to a painter of Perugia, who, though he was not very good at his trade, held in great veneration art and the men who excelled in it. He did nothing but impress upon Pietro what an honour and advantage painting was to those who practised it well, relating the glory of ancient and modern painters, by which he kindled in Pietro the desire to become one of them. So he used to be always asking where men could prepare themselves for the trade best, and his master always answered in the same way, that it was in Florence more than anywhere else that men grew perfect in all the arts, especially painting. 

For in that city men are spurred by three things: First there are many there ready to find fault, the air of the place making men independent in mind and not easily contented with mediocre works. Secondly, if a man wished to live there he must be industrious, for Florence, not having a large and fertile country, could not provide for the wants of those who dwelt there at little expense. And thirdly, there is the desire of glory and honour, which the air excites to a high degree in men of every profession, so that no man who has any spirit will consent to be only like others, much less be left behind. 

The biggest commission came in the 1480s to fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel; only several scenes remain. The east wall was painted over by Michelangelo, of course, with his Last Judgment. That querulous genius called Perugino a 'bungler in art' (goffo nell' arte) - which he was not, but he did paint stereotypically in later years - so Perugino sued for defamation, and lost.  Later decades were spent in Perugia and Città della Pieve.

Perugino's real gem here is the Adoration of the Magi in the tiny Oratorio di Santa Maria dei Bianchi, worth picturing in another Wikimedia image but closed by the time we arrived; the ITS students had been taken there as part of their education, following a lecture by Maxim Vengerov's art-historian wife Olga Gringolts. Lucky them, but no matter: will return with J, possibly staying in town.

We did at least get the most moving concert possible in the wonderful civic theatre named after the local Accademia degli Avvaloranti (not a word I knew: it means 'corroborators', but in what apart from the arts I'm not sure). It seats 300 max, at a guess, though I'm terribly bad at estimating these things). Lingerers after the concert pictured below.

The handsome restoration of the 1834 neoclassical interior was begun in 2003; the exterior gives no hint of its splendours. If I understand correctly, the ceiling dates from 1870 and was restored even more recently. Perugino is somewhere up there, alongside Raphael.

I know from our friends the Principesse Giulia and Stefania Pignatelli (good namedropping, huh?) in the Marche what a wealth of beautiful small theatres that region especially boasts, and the situation here seems similar. Not least in the failure of departments to meet: the restoration work is done by architectural organisations, but then the musical ones don't co-ordinate to fill the gems with worthy events (we heard a local band rehearsing in Ascoli Piceno, which is fine so long as that's not it, and it was).

We got the ball rolling around Ascoli by contacting Martin Randall Travel to bring over Ian Page's splendid Classical Opera Company and attendant British audience, but the initiative needs to come from Italy. At least our treasurable La Foce musicians made sure there was something more than worthy of the place that magical night. A final shot, then, of the young musicians from Nazareth and Los Angeles in the square outside the theatre after the concert. On the left, cellist Yedidya Shaliv is shown his portrait in action by Larisa Pilinsky, vivacious artist wife of my very humorous Los Angelene colleague on the trip Laurence Vittes.

The Origos' villa with a view

This captures, I hope, the big moment in the garden of the Villa La Foce where the travertine path through the fountain and lemon tree gardens comes to an end at a balcony and the formal garden of scallop-shaped box hedges below opens out for the first time. In the distance are the rather less verdant fields on the other side of the Val d'Orcia below the highest peak in Tuscany, the extinct volcano of Monte Amiata. It gave me the requisite goosebumps, of course. I was being led on an extremely privileged tour by the current chatelaine, Benedetta Origo, whose marriage to the Menuhin protege Alberto Lysy has turned an Origo strain to the most musicianly imaginable: their son Antonio Lysy, a superb cellist, has been running the Incontri in Terra di Siena Festival since 1989, bringing with him students from the University of California, Los Angeles where he teaches.

One thing led to another, and this year's festival, to which I was invited, featured an even more significant augmentation of youth and mentoring. But details of all that are to be found in the two TAD articles in which I sang for several suppers: an interview with the wonderful Ashkar brothers of Nazareth, and a piece on the festival itself with a bit in passing about the superb Tuscan and Umbrian locations.

What I didn't have time to expand on was the garden tour given exclusively to lucky me by Benedetta, pictured above heading down the first of many travertine paths. The first building we passed on our way out from the main wing was the osteria built in 1498 for pilgrims and merchants travelling the Via Francigena, a branch of the road from northern Europe to Rome. It's thought - though never verified - that Sansovino had a hand in the project, commissioned by the wealthiest landowner, Siena's Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. Coats of arms of families like the Piccolomini and Chigi on the side of the building reveal sources of its riches.

Chastening to think that, just as Goths had wiped out the Roman farms and settlements long before the osteria's foundation, devastation came to the Val d'Orcia again shortly after its construction as Cosimo de' Medici lay waste the area in Florence's war with Siena. Iris and Antonio Origo came here in 1924, just after their wedding; less than two decades later, death and destruction returned, as Iris describes in her most famous book, War in Val d'Orcia.

Back in the 1920s, it was a kind of love at first sight. 'We only knew at once,' wrote Iris in her very selective autobiography Images and Shadows, 'that this vast, lonely and uncompromising landscape fascinated and compelled us. To live in the shadow of that mysterious mountain [Amiata], to arrest the erosion of those steep ridges, to turn this bare clay into wheatfields, to rebuild these farms and see prosperity return to its inhabitants, to restore the greenness of these mutilated woods...that, we were sure, was the life we wanted'.

Benedetta is no great fan of the main English-language biography of Iris, by Caroline Moorehead; she feels that Antonio is too shadowy a figure in it, just as Iris seemed to ensure - possibly out of respect for her husband's privacy - and that if another book were to be written, it should be about him. Certainly there are problems about telling the story of the early years at La Foce, though I think Moorehead does it even-handedly and clearly; it seems like an admirable piece of work to me, though very poorly proofed.

Having promised a progressive social reform which would favour the poor, Mussolini gave huge subsidies to the gentlemen landowners to maintain the status quo in the country; the Origos were among the most enlightened, building a school and a hospital among other amenities which still survive in one form or another, but theirs remained a patriarchal society for all that. And while Iris and Antonio gave courageous, dangerous support to partisans and escaped soldiers throughout the Second World War, he remained a conservative aristocrat the evolution of whose views on Mussolini still remain unclear.

Iris, on the other hand, moved from a 'blank vagueness' about politics to a very late realisation of the horrors Mussolini had inflicted on her adoptive country. It does seem rather surprising to us that throughout the late 1920s and much of the 1930s she ignored the murders and exiles of opponents, the suppression of a free press, the annexation of Abyssinia (to which the United Nations reacted with sanctions much as we do with Putin today; astonishing how all of Mussolini's moves seem to be echoed in everything that other would-be totalitarian leader does). In effect, while Antonio managed the estate, she cultivated her garden with the help of the English architect Cecil Ross Pinsent, whose work Iris knew well from the Berensons' Villa I Tatti and his landscaping of her mother's nearby garden at the Villa Medici in Fiesole.

He carried out his work over 12 years, from the garden near the new wing in 1927 to the stupendous lower garden pictured up top in 1939. Slowly Iris came to understand what would and wouldn't work in this climate: English style borders could be only selectively planted, roses did briefly flourish but no longer. The wisteria arbour must be a glory of the late-ish spring; lavender flourishes in abundance.

But the formality remains; it is not a 'deep' garden, planting wise. The chief virtue is the setting, of course, and the way that Pinsent's longest travertine path runs round the edge of the hill and out from formality into the woods: the Renaissance ideal of balancing manicured perfection with wilderness beyond.

The Villa La Foce is more of a hive of creativity now than it was before, despite the distinguished visitors. Two of them were Diana and Yehudi Menuhin, introducing the Origos to a brilliant violinist protege, Alberto Lysy, who became Benedetta's husband, in spite of Iris's disapproval. Here's the gracious and very natural Benedetta, somewhat in shadow, on the travertine path overlooking the lower garden.

One of her daughters, Giovanna Lysy, is a remarkable sculptor who has a studio and a wonderful exhibition space among the olive presses.

She works in travertine - remembering its heat on her bare feet as she walked the paths of La Foce as a child - as well as iron and glass.

The light is everything, and it works perfectly in this space.

I especially admired this image of an explosion - at its centre an instrument of war Giovanna found in the grounds.

A quick whizz round the dreamspace, and then Giovanna drove me to the station at Chieti - so often a changing-point, but never yet visited, an omission we must remedy next time - in the company of her daughter Allegra, off to Japan very shortly. And my festival taster was serendipitously rounded off by meeting on the train that most enthusiastic of communicators as violinist and musicologist Nicholas Kitchen of the Borromeo Quartet, his wife Yeesun Kim who's the cellist in the quartet, and their son Christopher, who was fascinated by the Proust wordrose on my watch. Nicholas gave me a taste of his interest in the detailed dynamic markings of Beethoven's manuscripts - he has four categories below piano, for instance - and we exchanged ideas. I think they had a good day out in Florence: they'd not been able to pinpoint the Masaccios they'd seen in a book, so I told them how to get to the Brancacci Chapel, my favourite spot in the city.

But perhaps I ought to finish with the man they all left out - Antonio Origo. The Tuscan scene most often reproduced on postcards is the one of a zigzagging road up a hill dotted with cypress trees.

It was, in fact, one of Antonio's constructions, part of the 10-point plan he read out to the Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence in 1936. Perhaps this shadowy figure should have the last word, as eloquent as his wife's measured, sometimes (to me) slightly chilly prose. I conflate two passages from different contexts:

It is a vast and solemn landscape, where precipitous crete [Senesi, the low clay hillocks resembling craters of the moon] alternate with fertile oases and stretches of barren land, and in its silent immensity the spirit lays itself down and rests. The powerful spirit of a lost mythology hovers in the air above the valley, and an eternal sense of expectation reigns...I am not a specialist, nor a scholar. I am simply a keen amateur farmer, who at a given point in his life - perhaps the most romantic one, coinciding as it did with marriage - felt...the eternal fascination of the country and decided to make it, and the people who cling to it for their livelihood, the main purpose of my life.

A Bach sermon on the mount

Any priest would be glad of the Utopian congregation - young and old, citizens of many nations and thence of the world - who attended Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Bach lecture in the courtyard of Montepulciano's Palazzo Ricci, home to the altruistic-sounding, Cologne-born European Academy of Music and Arts. This has been the main home for the various young musicians whose training and concert-giving have been at the heart of the festival Incontri in Terra di Siena: the International Menuhin Music Academy, students from the University of California, Los Angeles and - the ones I caught, and to whom my heart went out unreservedly - the Arab and Hebrew Israelis of the Polyphony Foundation based in Nazareth.

It's not my intention to write much about the festival here, except to point out that it owes its existence to that fine cellist Antonio Lysy, grandson of Antonio and Iris Origo whose Villa La Foce is the other centre of operations. My interview with the inspirational Ashkar brothers, violinist Nabeel Abboud  and master pianist Saleem, will appear as an Arts Desk Q&A next Sunday, and a report of my festival slice around La Foce the following Saturday.

JEG's special appearance was a surprise to me. It seemed to be there not so much as a successful attempt to flog the paperback edition of his Bach book - more on that below, pictured above in the second of three  pictures by resident ITS photographer Paul Flanagan - as an education to the young musicians. They  listened intently and afterwards asked lots of intelligent questions about vibrato and pedalling as well as staging Bach: an unwanted extra dimension, said JEG, once you bring in the alien apparatus of the opera house, it takes away from the experience. I'd agree with that, and I'd add that the director's imagination stops you exercising your own in a non-operatic drama. Pictured below, kids and adults (including the hugely entertaining Laurence Vittes from Los Angeles in the hat) along the colonnade from where I was sitting on the steps.

Bach's current earthly representative is indeed an inspirational speaker, because he not only has the most profound performing experience of what he's talking about, but also the highest enthusiasm and love. All this was apparent in a documentary which marked a vital staging post on the road back to intelligent television arts coverage. I possess in handsome, beautifully produced hardback the book of which he was signing copies afterwards, Music in the Castle of Heaven, and though I've not done any more than dipped into it yet, my good friend Stephen Johnson has recently been inspired by it and made me move it near the top of the list.

Both book and talk fulfil that essential function of making you either go to or immediately listen to key passages in the cantatas. I began my big Bach Sunday pilgrimage the January before this one, only getting up to Easter before my resolve to absorb and blog bit the dust, Even had I continued, I'd still not have heard all the masterpieces. JEG added more to my enthusiasm in his illustrations of Bach's astonishingly vivid musical-theatre instincts. I knew the splendid depiction of the calm at the eye of storm-tossed billows in the tenor aria from BWV 81, 'Die schäumenden Wellen von Belials Bächen', but not the last excerpt JEG played, from BWV 105.

It instantly brought tears to my eyes - rather ready after being able to grieve for the world horrors of the last two weeks at the previous evening's concert given by the young Arab-Hebrew partnership in Citta della Pieve - with a wavering between major and minor anticipating Schubert. JEG writes in his preface: 'we want to know what kind of a person was capable of composing music so complex that it leaves us completely mystified, then at other moments so irresistibly rhythmic that we want to get up and dance to it, and then at others still so full of poignant emotion that we are moved to the very core of our being'.

That last sums up for me the aria in question, 'Wie zittern und wanken, die Sünder Gedanken', oboe as soul, soprano as human, with only light string accompaniment. How could I have lived so long and never heard it? In that self-indulgent but not I think mawkish habit I have of choosing what music I'd like at my funeral, I decided on the spot that this would have to go in. If they outlive me, Debbie York and Lysander Tennant can conduct the dialogue; three solo strings will do for the support. But then, of course, I went to hear the whole cantata on YouTube, reeling at the rich, chromatic opening chorus, the distinctive bass recitative and the tenor's aria with rushing second violins, and decided that nothing less than the whole thing will do. Here's Herreweghe's performance, lovingly put up with printed music to follow and translation of the text. The soprano/oboe aria is at 6'17 but do listen to all of it.

And since I mentioned Schubert again, let's have my current craze, a disc I can't stop playing: Sviatoslav Richter effortlessly emanating pure summer/country happiness in the A major Sonata, D664.

This warmly recorded Tokyo 1979 performance is now on the bargain Alto label. Yes, I'm still buying CDs - though mostly Schubert and JEG's Bach cantata pilgrimage series.

So much for hardly clouded skies. Just as JEG's homily came to an end, a roll of thunder announced God's judgment, as he jokingly put it. The table of paperbacks was moved under the arcade, the heavens opened and while the author was signing copies for his enthusiastic audience including prizewinning Palestinian Israeli violinist Feras Machour in the red and white shirt (third of Paul's photos here),

I was trapped not too unwillingly in the Duomo a few yards up the hill with Taddeo di Bartolo's lovely altarpiece.

Umbrellaless, three of us made it through a relative break in the torrents to a cavernous ristorante where we sat down to bowls of piping hot home-made pasta in a cavernous ristorante , but lingered there rather impatiently as the downpour increased and rivers ran down the cobbled streets, flushing out some extraordinary large beetles which made our cicerona Nicky shriek but which I found fascinatingly beautiful. The storm lasted about four hours, after which we made our way to the Castelluccio Bifolchi near Villa La Foce for the Borromeo Quartet's evening Bartok epic, which isn't my concern here except to say that the spectators to the right of JEG in the first of my own three photos below are first violinist Nicholas Kitchen and cellist Yeesun Kim, his wife and a very radiant, calm-seeming personage, much like the present chatelaine of La Foce, Benedetta Origo.

Yeesun is listening to music with eyes shut in the photo, not sleeping, in case you wondered. I had the serendipitous pleasure of this wonderful  couple's company on the train to Florence, and a masterclass into the bargain, but that's another story.

Let me just leave you with this Castelluccio - not to be confused with our beloved village of the same name at the head of the Piano Grande in the Sibillini mountains - in the evening mists at altitude after the rain. Locals said they'd never seen the like in July. The stupendous garden at La Foce to follow in time.