Vallo di Nera, between Franciscan frescoes and movements of ancient popular devotion

Sunday morning of a cold and strange December, and the alleys of Black Wall are empty. There is no travel guidebook that forgets to mention this sandstone village in the lists of must-see places in the Valnerina. Orange flag, Borghi più belli d’Italia, quality marks various and any, stacks of books for travelers ch’esaltano the myriad merits of this diadem of stone that crowns a knoll hidden by groves along the meandering Nera River. No vehicles, pedestrian-only internal circulation, the thirteenth-century fortified core, the narrow streets that have remained intact since the Middle Ages or so, the arches, the towers, the three Romanesque churches, the House of Tales, the enhancement of the narrative heritage of the Valnerina, the cheeses, the views, the atmospheres. It is surprising then that the alleys of Black Wall are empty. There is a scornful sun that dyes the houses and towers gold and pink and reveals from above all the colors of the woods that cover the hilltops and dot the valley. A mosaic comes to mind, a symphony comes to mind, all artificial things come to mind, those lines about the aesthetics of landscape read somewhere (Gombrich, Rosario Assunto or whoever remembers anymore) about the idea that our perception of nature has a historical character, in the sense that it is conditioned by a sensibility that was formed within culture. Landscapes as paintings. The Bottai Law of 1939 also mandated the protection of “scenic beauty considered as natural paintings.” It was the first organic discipline on landscape protection that was written in Italy. But then what experience does anyone who has never seen a painting have of the landscape?

Perhaps, on days like these, the tourists are right: the remnants of the tramontana sweeping Black Wall extinguish the temptation to wander outdoors; most will have stayed in their hotels, or holed up in some museum or shopping mall along the Flaminia waiting for the time to go scrambling to Sunday lunch. But they don’t know what they are missing. Black Wall is a dream slowly unfolding in the blue air. The sudden gusts of wind are like caresses coming from an icy hand. And so sweet is the idea of sheltering for a few minutes in some less exposed ravine or inside some indoor place that one ends up longing for this dry, biting, importunate cold.

In the village, the only indoor place that on winter mornings can offer a slightly less harsh temperature is the church of Santa Maria, an austere parallelepiped of white, gray and pink stones that hides in the lower part of the village, at the bottom of a flight of steps that descends down from the old Town Hall. The church is first mentioned in 1176, and outside it retains its severe Romanesque appearance intact: a square façade, enlivened only by a splayed, pointed-arched portal, a rose window and a spire that moves the straight line of the roof a little, though it may be a later addition. Behind, above the chancel, rises a bell tower with three bells, and the inhabitants are proud to say that those bells are among the few, fragments of a remote time, that are still rung by hand.

Those who want to visit St. Mary’s Church in winter have two options. The first is to know someone who can open it for them. An alderman, or maybe even the mayor who, except for a two-term interlude, has been administering Black Wall for years: the first time she was elected there was still the Soviet Union, those who wanted to go to France had to stop at the customs, to make a phone call needed a two-hundred-lira token, Maradona played for Napoli, and Andreotti was in government. Black Wall, on the other hand, was the same as it is today, and perhaps as it was three, four, five hundred years ago. The inhabitants evidently like stability. The second option is to inquire about Mass times: the choice grants some extra freedom, but obliges participation in the liturgy, in the hope that the priest will be lenient and leave, before Mass begins or after it is over, time to look around. Meanwhile, from one’s pew, one can still linger over the frescoes that decorate the church’s only nave.

The present building dates from the 13th century: it was the Franciscans who built it in place of the older little church, and it was also they who pulled up the convent, at a time when the order of Friars Minor had begun to settle in all the towns of the Valnerina. The church, which the friars naturally dedicated to St. Francis, reflected the structure of the buildings that the Franciscans built in the most peripheral settlements: a simple, sober construction, in accordance with the principles of poverty preached by the saint of Assisi. It is known from documents that the construction of the church of St. Mary’s began in 1273, a time when the minister general of the Franciscan order was still Bonaventure of Bagnoregio: in the Narbonne Constitutions of 1260, the statutes that were to regulate the life of the friars, Bonaventure had also given the directions for the construction of the churches, which were to be bare, since too rich a decoration would contradict the principle of poverty. The Constitutions then ordered the construction of churches that would avoid attracting public curiosity through paintings, ornaments, painted stained-glass windows and various ammenities. They were to be small, functional, measured, unadorned, and rigorous. Few would have listened to Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Even in Black Wall.

Of course, to see the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, one would think that was the exception to the rule. But in fact, even in smaller and more distant churches the custom of covering the walls with frescoes would soon spread. Even in the church of Black Wall, which perhaps for some time actually remained bare, though it would be for a short time, because by the end of the fourteenth century Franciscan austerity must have been a memory: in 1383, Nicola di Pietro da Camerino and his helper Francesco di Antonio d’Ancona left signatures and date in the painted cycle covering all the walls of the apse. Nicola di Pietro, known as Cola di Pietro, as he signs himself on another wall, is the author of almost all the frescoes in the church, or at least the main ones, and he alternated with Francesco di Antonio, to whom some scenes can be attributed with a good margin of certainty, because of stylistic dissimilarities.

The scheme of the cycle decorating the main chapel, behind the altar, is easy to read, the iconographic program rather elementary, with the scenes enclosed within framed panels, a typical solution for Franciscan churches: on the central walls the story of the life of Christ unfolds. Annunciation, Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, Escape to Egypt, Flagellation, all the way to the Crucifixion. On either side of the Crucifixion are six saints-John the Baptist, Christina, and Lawrence on one side, and James, Catherine of Alexandria, and Bartholomew on the other. They are turned toward the Crucifixion: the saints are witnesses to Christ’s sacrifice. The side walls are dedicated to the Virgin and St. Francis. St. Francis is more than a witness: he is the saint who most resembles Christ. He is the saint who, by receiving the stigmata, depicted in the scene above, made himself a sharer in his sufferings. And then, here we see him speaking to the birds: the episode is meant to present the saint to us as a propagator of the word of Christ. It is as if the Franciscans of Black Wall wanted to tell us, through St. Francis, that Christ’s example reaches out to everyone. On the left, however, the Dormitio and the Assumption of Mary: the Franciscans were ardent supporters of the thesis of Mary’s bodily assumption, a subject that habitually entered the programs of their decorative cycles at least since Pope Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pontiff in history. Her body could not be corrupted, destroyed by death. St. Francis, too, was devoted to the Virgin of the Assumption, the “Virgin made Church,” as the saint had called her in one of his prayers. The Virgin is thus the one who welcomes with the grace of her blessedness all those who, following St. Francis, have accepted the word of Christ.

Major Chapel

A kind of bare but powerful, eloquent, effective biblia pauperum . Images that speak. Political images, if you will. The main chapel gives shape to the Franciscans’ auspices. The walls of the nave give shape to the auspices of the community. It should also be read in this sense the most interesting fresco in the church, although fragmentary, the one with the Procession of the Whites, which is always the work of Cola di Pietro, from 1401: it is he who, again, signs and dates the work. The subject is very rare: it is a depiction of a topical event, we might say. It is one of the processions of the Devotion of the Whites, a large movement of fervent popular devotion, perhaps even with some hints of fanaticism, which arose spontaneously in the first months of 1399, and was known above all for organizing imposing processions of penance, which could even last several days: the penitents wore a long white habit marked with a red cross, like those seen in the fresco, and then in the processions they did everything. Some would flog themselves and beat themselves: one of them is depicted scourging himself. Others read prayers, praised Christ, Our Lady and the saints, sang songs: it is likely, as the fresco suggests, that religious people were leading the praises. Or they carried devotional objects in procession, such as candles held by the group on the left, or the image of the Virgin and Child carried by the group on the right. The processions of the Whites could reach considerable size: there were also attempts to stem the movement or hinder it, essentially for reasons of public order, but also because of the potential subversive character the processions could have taken on. In just a few months, the Whites went around Italy praying for the remission of sins, praising concord and mercy. Peace, indeed, was a fundamental element of the Whites’ Devotion. And not only because the Whites continuously shouted “peace!” as they walked in procession.

Chronicles of the time report that the Whites’ Devotion encouraged conflict resolution among those taking part in the processions. And the church of Black Wall, which is perhaps the one seen on the right in the fresco, must probably have been the scene of the ratification of a peace, a peace so important that the commissioner of the painting, a certain Giovannuccio di Vallo, wished to keep a painted record of it. A peace, perhaps, between the leaders of two rival factions, sanctioned in the presence of three witnesses, and sealed by theosculum pacis, the kiss of peace, under the auspices of the archangel Michael, a gesture that is also observed between two other, more ruined, figures on the right. On the wall of the church of Black Wall we witness a medieval civil rite, which at the time was rigidly codified: the names of the two parties were recorded, oaths were taken by both, sanctions were read out in case the peace agreement was broken, and at the end the disputants exchanged a kiss, which had the function of a seal, because it marked the reconciliation that had taken place: the ceremony closed with the notary present drawing up theinstrumentum pacis, a kind of record, by the notary present. Whenever the Whites arrived in a city, they immediately set about promoting the settlement of disputes among the citizens. The chronicles of those years are filled with attestations of these peacemaking operations, we would say today. One scholar, Katherine Jensen, has written that the Whites were “peace activists.” The definition seems apt.

With the procession scene begins the space in the church reserved for the laity. And the walls become a collage of votive frescoes with the most disparate images, added at different times, erased and repainted, then covered, then rediscovered again. So many images, so many as to be disorienting. Six saints above the Procession of the Whites, also the work of Cola di Pietro, also painted in the simple language of the Camerte painter, a provincial giottismo, a “prosaic idiom” as Mauro Minardi called it, used for “weak things,” as Federico Zeri more directly branded his paintings. Then the four piglets, the typical animals of the area. And then two saints also by Cola di Pietro. Then an altar with a 17th-century canvas. Then a Madonna Enthroned from the mid-15th century, angular and empirical. Then a whole theory of saints, all indicated one by one with vernacular inscriptions, all dated 1486, all on backgrounds decorated with patterns reminiscent of those on brocades, all inside frames imitating inlaid marble of all colors. There is also a tricephalic trinity, an iconographic motif that would be condemned during the Council of Trent: the Church did not want the Father, Son and Holy Spirit painted with that monstrous image, with those three pagan cerberus heads.

On the other side, on the opposite wall, a martyrdom of St. Lucy, variously attributed to Cola di Pietro or the Master of the Dormitio of Terni: more than the torture of the saint, dragged by two oxen that try in vain to take her to the brothel to which she had been assigned, however, what attracts attention is the colorful crowd behind her, crowded around the magistrate who, relaxed, legs crossed, points to the saint. We step for a moment into the street of a late 14th-century Umbrian village. Instead, the panels with the Annunciation and Our Lady of Mercy that follow are fifteenth-century. Then three more fourteenth-century saints before the altar with frescoes dated 1602. Then comes a particularly tangled, messy patchwork , jumbled by the centuries: at the top a piece of Madonna Enthroned, then no less than two depictions of St. Bernardine of Siena from 1452, then another Madonna Enthroned, dated 1447. Below, what remains of a Madonna of Milk and another Madonna Enthroned to which in the seventeenth century was superimposed the fresco with the other Madonna of Milk in the midst of St. Gregory the Great and St. Jerome, and next to it a Franciscan praying. After the window, five more panes: two more enthroned Madonnas, a St. Michael, a St. Bernardine, a St. Christine, and a St. Catherine with St. Barbara. At the bottom, more fragments: one can distinguish what remains of a Trinity painted according to a more orthodox iconography, and at the bottom a very sweet Madonna and Child. Federico Zeri assigned these two paintings, as well as the Madonna dated 1447, to the elusive Master of Eggi, an artist who, in the late fifteenth century, was “reviving the most intimate features and data of the greatest Umbrian and Spoleto artists of a hundred and more years before,” Zeri wrote. The Gothic tenderness of his Madonnas seated on improbable, unreal, angular, excessive, empirical marble thrones, painted while around this master the world had by then changed, almost moves. In Black Wall, however, they had not noticed.

The village tried to change its world in the sixteenth century, when it rebelled against the authority of the municipality of Spoleto, on which all the castles of the Valnerina depended. History became confused with legend. A bandit, Petrone da Vallo, set himself at the head of a revolt that brought together several villages in the area: it seems that they could take no more of the rigid tax impositions and intolerable conscription obligations that ended up sending the men of the valley to slaughter. The chronicles portray Petrone as a violent and ignorant rebel; for some, however, he was a kind of Robin Hood of the Valnerina, only for him the revolt ended badly: he died in the fire of the cottage in which he had taken refuge while fighting against the Spoleto authorities sent to Vallo to quell the revolt. After that, everything would go back to the way it was before. Black Wall would again have plunged into its stone dormancy.

In the church, however, no, the church throughout the seventeenth century was a building site. Ex-votos continued to be added to the walls, new altars were built to cover the medieval images. After 1653, when the minors left the convent in Black Wall, the church had undergone heavy remodeling, although by the beginning of the century some of the ancient paintings had already ended up under the new altars, and the rest of the frescoes, which were removed in more recent times, probably covered. On the arch of the main chapel can be seen a largely beaten-up St. Anthony Abbot: the frescoes were pierced when they were covered, to make the new plaster adhere better. The Procession of the Whites was also covered in ancient times: fragments of a saint can be seen obscuring the central part of the fresco. Then, in the twentieth century, when the dulling was removed, what the centuries had concealed re-emerged. And which we risked losing in 2016, during the central Italian earthquake: the church of Santa Maria was damaged, for three years it was a building site. It was reopened for worship in 2019, because after all, the damage was not that bad. A miracle, the inhabitants must have thought. Like when, in 1944, the men of Black Wall were rounded up from their homes and locked up in here. They, too, managed to save themselves.

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