: The Story of Milan by Noyes Ella Noyes Dora Illustrator - Milan (Italy) History; Milan (Italy) Description and travel Mediæval Town Series

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PREFACE

Everybody has been in Milan, but who knows Milan? The traveller in search of the picturesque and mediaeval sees nothing to arrest him--except comfortable hotels--in a city which seems to tell only of yesterday. A glance at the Cathedral, at St. Ambrogio, at the most famous of the pictures, and he hurries on. Yet a little longer stay reveals a wealth of artistic interest in the many fine churches, in the rich galleries and museums, and much also that is worth learning even in the outward aspect of the city in the present day. The historic buildings have mostly fallen, the old crooked ways have given place to broad thoroughfares, the picturesque life of the past has been smothered by the sombre bustle of modern commercialism. But her heritage of beauty is to some extent inalienable. She remains always Italian. Colour and atmosphere lend an indestructible charm even to her modernity. The warm brick of the buildings against the limpid blue sky, the gold and grey of sunshine and shadow, the shining canals that border some of the further streets with a still and pensive melancholy, make a lovely and characteristic harmony still, as in the days of the Quattrocentist artists who painted them in the backgrounds of their Madonnas and San Roccos. And there are some old streets left, mostly in the heart of the city, such as the Via del Pesce and the Via Tre Alberghi, long cobbled alleys ribboned with triple lines of pavement, where the tall houses and bowed-out balconies of curious ironwork, rusted by age and weather, if they cannot remember the days of Milan's earlier glory, must have known at least something of the sad centuries of bondage which followed, before they shook to the roar of the Cinque Giornate sixty years ago.

The compass of this small volume has made it impossible to tell otherwise than summarily of the great past of this city and of her artistic riches to-day. I have had to pass over, or barely mention, many noteworthy things. I am especially sorry that I could not include the places of interest in the immediate neighbourhood. A visit to the Certosa of Pavia, which sums up all the aims and achievements of Lombard Renaissance art, is necessary for an appreciation of the Milanese sculptors and painters, while the associations of the famous building with Gian Galeazzo Visconte and with the Sforza princes, make it a part of Milanese story. The old Church of Chiaravalle, with its incomparable Lombard-Gothic tower and its trecento frescoes, and picturesque Monza, where that historic emblem and wonder of twelfth century goldsmiths' art, the Iron Crown of Lombardy, is preserved with other priceless treasures, ought not to be missed by the traveller.

E. N.

The Story of Milan

"Verenanda est Roma in Apostolo. Sed nec spernendum Mediolanum in Ambrosio."--ARNULPHUS.

Milan is to-day the most modern of Italian cities. Her Risorgimento in the last century, accomplished with the pouring out of blood and the efforts of a strenuous virtue, makes for her a mighty and sufficing past in the near background, and she seems to stand wholly on this side of it, triumphant and new-create. Neither Nature nor the further centuries have, you feel, any longer part in her. Who of the numberless travellers from the North, as they lose the vision of mountain, lake and green champaign, just traversed, in the bustle and confinement of the crowded streets, realises that this solid mass of brick and stone, this vast hive of human beings, is the slow product of that enchanting country, of its rivers and fertile soil, built up and moulded by human passion and labour during thousands of years amid the changes and chances of extraordinarily varied fortunes. Only when his eyes, lifted above the regular roof-lines of the modern streets, light upon the Gothic pinnacles of the Duomo, and a further acquaintance with the city discovers, wedged among the growths of yesterday, the many relics of her older past--the Castle of the fifteenth century Sforza, Renaissance palaces and churches, St. Ambrogio and its compeers of the era of liberty, a rare fragment of the older imperial civilisation--does he become conscious of the long and painful course of the centuries, and remember that he stands in the secular capital of Lombardy, on ground as storied almost as the sacred dust of Rome.

Yet through all the changes, a quiet, continuous labour was going on, restraining and directing the courses of the rivers, draining the marshes, taming the wild luxuriance of the land to fertile use and order, and slowly building up out of the confusion of conflicting elements the solid foundations of the present.

But at the end of this century the imperial era was rapidly declining and giving way to a new order of things. A fresh period of irruptions from the North was at hand, and within the ancient polity itself a new organisation, the Christian Church, had arisen and was usurping spiritual authority. Milan had been early conspicuous in the history of Christianity. Legend names S. Barnabas himself as the founder and first occupant of her See, and she had testified to the new faith in the days of persecution by the blood of many martyrs. SS. Gervasio and Protasio, the youthful warrior pair, SS. Nazaro and Celso, master and faithful disciple, SS. Felix and Nabor, S. Valeria, San Vittore, and many others, are recorded with picturesque and touching details in Milanese legends and art. And in Milan the triumph of Christianity was first proclaimed, since here Constantine subscribed his edict of toleration in 313. But Christianity, established soon after as the State religion, had yet to struggle with the difficulty of conflicting counsels and doctrines within its own body. The tenets promulgated by the Council of Nicoea in 532 were by no means universally accepted by Christians in the fourth century, and in North Italy the teachings of Arius were widely followed, especially by the Gothic subjects of the Empire. Under the Empress Regent Justina they were the religion of the imperial Court in Milan, and the whole population was divided into fiercely hostile parties by the doctrinal question.

It was at this critical point of her political and ecclesiastical destinies that there appeared in Milan one of those epoch-making characters who from time to time arise at moments of hesitation in the history of human communities, and apparently initiate and determine their subsequent course. The great figure of her Bishop Ambrose, Saint and Doctor of the Church, scourge of the Arians, subduer of emperors, stands for Milan at the opening of a new era, to which his dominant mind gives impress, direction and inspiration. From this time forward, Milan is no more the imperial, but the Ambrosian city. Throughout her mediaeval existence the consecrating memory of St. Ambrogio, her patron and protector, set like a spiritual jewel in a hundred exquisite and devoutly fantastic legends, is present in her government, her struggles for liberty, her art and peaceful industry, her daily life and the peculiar ritual of her religious worship.

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