AREZZO THE CITY OF MANY LIVES

Arezzo, the ancient Arretium, still conceals under a rural modesty the voice of her many lives.

Etruscan Arezzo long defended her rights against Rome, but when conquered, she became Rome's faithful ally. Of the beautiful walls with which the Etruscans fortified the town, little remains today but a few vague traces on the hill of St. Cornelius.

Victorious Rome battered the strong walls of Arezzo and spread the white colonnades of her basilicas, her sumptuous baths, amphitheaters and superb aqueducts, over the rugged necropolis. But from the bosom of mother earth and from the secret of the tombs, Arezzo revived in the course of ages, her hereditary art.

The affluence and strength, to which Etruscan Arezzo had attained, did not diminish in its Roman days. Travelers from the Romagna and Tuscany by way of Cascia (an important military station) found Arezzo a center of civil culture.

From her, Maecenas inherited the ancient magnificence of her "Lucumoni" — the cream of artistic intellect — and his name and fame still cling to the hill and wide acred garden which were once his.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, the golden galleons that used to carry to Rome the tribute of Arezzo, the confederate, vanished from the waters of the Chiana. The rich and flowering valleys were burned and destroyed by order of the barbarians, the beautiful basilicas, the arras and the bronzes were demolished. Of the Roman Arezzo nothing remains today but the skeleton of the amphitheater, clothed in ivy with tendrils of vine; only vestiges of the theater and the baths give a glimpse of its past glories. As a child, Francis Petrarca the poet, must have imbibed some of the sombre fascination of the place.

According to tradition, it was St. Barnabas who first brought the Gospel to Arezzo, and he was followed by St. Timothy, St. Paul's disciple. Even towards the middle of the third century there were a great many converts to Christianity.

Towards the tenth century Arezzo rose to be one of the most powerful cities of Tuscany. Today she emerges small but strong and armed, rather like one of those legendary steel castles we read of in fairy tales. The Appennines of the Casentino, which protect the town, offered even in those days seclusion and safety to the contemplatives.

At the beginning of the eleventh century Maldolo, feudatory of Arezzo, gave one of his properties in the Casentino, called "Campus Amabilis", to St. Romuald, and there the great mystic founded the hermitage of Camaldoli.

In the spring of 1213, St. Francis of Assisi, a pilgrim on his travels, received as a gift from Count Orlando, Lord of the Castle of Chiusi in the Casentino, the mount of La Verna, which he later sanctified as a temple of prayer and love to the Crucified.

These were times when the early poets sang of love in the vulgar tongue, and the Latin and Greek sculptors delighted our eyes with the delicate contours of their beautiful vases which, through our much later excavations, have reached us only in fragments, preserved by the kindness of mother earth, who had guarded them as precious relics.

Meanwhile, down in the plain, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines were warring and fighting, bathing their fertile country in blood. And on the heights that seem almost to touch the skies, and where the pines make melody in their branches and sing a hymn of praise which is supplemented by the pure toned voice of the larks, rising higher and higher towards heaven, first St. Romuald, then St. Francis prayed for peace in the land.

Historically, the individuality of Arezzo was spent after the sack of Arezzo by Concy and her ensuing sale to the Florentine Republic in 1384. But she, nevertheless, continued to show that singleness of purpose, that made her the mother of the great men who had so much influence on Italian life during the Renaissance.

Not strong enough to hold and develop the arts she had created, she was constrained to cede her great fame to her abhorred rival. In the fourteenth century she gave birth to Petrarca, Leonard Bruni, Charles Marsupini and Anthony Roselli. The first two, historian and poet, became secretaries to the Florentine Republic and their bodies repose in the Church of Santa Croce. The third, orator of world-wide fame, died at Padua, where he had been teaching for 28 years.

Out of Arezzo came a cultivated people, highest among whom ranks Bernard Accolti, the shining light of Arezzo, the "one and only Accolti". In this springing up of masters of Art, who left young and died in other climes, lies the greatness and the sadness of Arezzo.

At first sight of Arezzo, an abundant use of stucco gives us a false impression of light-hearted youth and cleanliness, but, discovering here and there a stone facade which has survived from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, we realize that under her modernity she thinly disguises her hereditary capabilities and all the pride of her native land.

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