hastily sketched herein, show considerable graceful restraint for their epoch.
Viterbo’s sloping market place glitters with one of the most famous fountains in Italy, the Grande Fontana, a beautiful bit of proportion and blending of circular and rectangular motifs. It is far more individual than the little lithograph suggests. Here again the surrounding buildings are busy with escutcheons, scraps of rustication and rescued slabs of detail. The market is a riot of wagons and disorder. A barbecued pig is being sold piecemeal, between gestures, by a tremendous man with bushy hair and a battered straw hat, who never ceases his
stentorian monologue. There is the bedlam and clatter of competing vegetable barons, the hoarse bickering of octopus dealers and the gutteral exhortations of salami salesmen. Street singers warble melodiously to a circle of gaping listeners, and wine dealers keep time to their ditties by clinking bottles of musty spumante. It was not the ideal setting for a quiet little sketch.
In contrast to this, there is a little opera-set piazza, sun-drenched and deserted, which is a perfect subject. It might be a movie set when all the actors had gone out for lunch. The fountain is built up entirely of cylindrical forms. Its superb silhouette is stained black by the overflow of water. On a brilliant sunny day, this is probably the sunniest spot in Viterbo. In the background is a baby
basilica, brightened by two crouching beasts; a string of simple old houses completes the picture, et comment.
Viterbo is built on an undulating, U-shaped plateau, not unlike Sienna, from whose banks run steep cobbled streets. Tortuous streets they are, dipping precipitously into the ravine and finally degenerating into mere foot paths. Grass grown remnants of an ancient arch bridge them here and there. Balconies and exterior stairways jut into their already hectic narrowness. The principal arteries of Viterbo are more navigable, however. One of these leads to a far fringe of the plateau
where the cathedral spreads its insipid, almost oppressive facade. The glorious capitals on the columns of the nave do their best to atone for the unloveliness of the exterior. The piazza before the cathedral is unexceptional enough until one gazes to the North, where the fantastic old Papal palace places a screen of Gothic richness across the vista of a populous ravine. A delightful and unprecedented building this is, particularly the richly detailed loggia, now moss-grown and seedy, which must have been a scene of much splendor at one time. The loggia rests on a wide, vault-supported area, in the center of which blossoms the agreeable old fountain illustrated in these pages. Water has not played in it for many a generation. Apparently the spread of the vault alarmed the builders, for
FONTANA GRANDE, VITERBO
FROM THE ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH BY SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN
Viterbo’s sloping market place glitters with one of the most famous fountains in Italy, the Grande Fontana, a beautiful bit of proportion and blending of circular and rectangular motifs. It is far more individual than the little lithograph suggests. Here again the surrounding buildings are busy with escutcheons, scraps of rustication and rescued slabs of detail. The market is a riot of wagons and disorder. A barbecued pig is being sold piecemeal, between gestures, by a tremendous man with bushy hair and a battered straw hat, who never ceases his
stentorian monologue. There is the bedlam and clatter of competing vegetable barons, the hoarse bickering of octopus dealers and the gutteral exhortations of salami salesmen. Street singers warble melodiously to a circle of gaping listeners, and wine dealers keep time to their ditties by clinking bottles of musty spumante. It was not the ideal setting for a quiet little sketch.
In contrast to this, there is a little opera-set piazza, sun-drenched and deserted, which is a perfect subject. It might be a movie set when all the actors had gone out for lunch. The fountain is built up entirely of cylindrical forms. Its superb silhouette is stained black by the overflow of water. On a brilliant sunny day, this is probably the sunniest spot in Viterbo. In the background is a baby
basilica, brightened by two crouching beasts; a string of simple old houses completes the picture, et comment.
Viterbo is built on an undulating, U-shaped plateau, not unlike Sienna, from whose banks run steep cobbled streets. Tortuous streets they are, dipping precipitously into the ravine and finally degenerating into mere foot paths. Grass grown remnants of an ancient arch bridge them here and there. Balconies and exterior stairways jut into their already hectic narrowness. The principal arteries of Viterbo are more navigable, however. One of these leads to a far fringe of the plateau
where the cathedral spreads its insipid, almost oppressive facade. The glorious capitals on the columns of the nave do their best to atone for the unloveliness of the exterior. The piazza before the cathedral is unexceptional enough until one gazes to the North, where the fantastic old Papal palace places a screen of Gothic richness across the vista of a populous ravine. A delightful and unprecedented building this is, particularly the richly detailed loggia, now moss-grown and seedy, which must have been a scene of much splendor at one time. The loggia rests on a wide, vault-supported area, in the center of which blossoms the agreeable old fountain illustrated in these pages. Water has not played in it for many a generation. Apparently the spread of the vault alarmed the builders, for
FONTANA GRANDE, VITERBO
FROM THE ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPH BY SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN