Filled as our culture is with the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how deeply the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 18731
Pliny once visited a lake filled with floating islands, ‘all of them grassy with reeds and sedge and whatever else fertile marsh at the edge of a lake puts forth’.2 Lake Vadimon (Lago di Bassano), situated some eighty kilometres north of Rome, captivated him with its rare beauty. It is small and round, ‘very like a wheel lying on its side’; its water was said to be so healing that it could mend fractured bones.
Pliny stooped to smell it: sulphuric. And to taste it: medicinal. While the lake had no boats, for it was ‘sacred’, the sight of the islands passing over its surface called to mind a busy harbour. When the smaller islands weren’t attaching themselves to the larger ones, ‘like skiffs to merchant ships’, they were brushing past each other and knocking pieces out of each other’s sides. If not entirely unlike the pumice islands which formed on the waters off Pompeii in the early stages of the eruption, the floating masses of Vadimon delighted Pliny as they raced one another over the ‘whiter than sky blue’ water.
The most extraordinary spectacle of all was of cattle inadvertently stepping onto the islands while they grazed. It was only when the poor cows were some distance from the mainland that they realised that the ground was moving. Though terrified to be surrounded by water, they seemed to Pliny to be oblivious to disembarking onto terra firma once the wind had blown their islands back to the banks. ‘There are very many things in our city and near our city which we know neither with our eyes nor with our ears,’ Pliny wrote soon after visiting the lake for the first time. He left convinced that people were too quick to go abroad in search of new sights when there were so many wonders ‘under their eyes’. He asked himself why this was and considered that it was not necessarily through desire for exoticism, or even avarice, as Pliny the Elder had often supposed, but simply because we put off going to see what we know we can visit at any time.
Pliny could never have been accused of overlooking the places nearest him. Even in his home town of Comum he was forever going in search of new sights. Lake Larius may have lacked the symmetry and cows of Lake Vadimon, but it had its own quirks which he was only too keen to explore. From the mysterious spring where he placed his ring he would wander down to the coast and boat up the lake. Once he was far enough out, he enjoyed looking at the villas on the shoreline and trying to spot the private terraces and gardens which were ordinarily hidden from view.
He was not far now from the main town. Novum Comum, as it was formerly known, was founded by Julius Caesar in 59 BC within a neat, rectangular grid of roads to the south of the lake. Going some way towards compensating for the Romans’ defeat of the local tribes in 196 BC, Caesar had conferred first Latin rights then Roman citizenship upon the people of the new town, which entitled them to vote in Rome’s elections.3 A vibrant centre with high walls and low horizons, Comum was accessible from both water and road. Visitors from nearby Mediolanum (Milan) and its environs came by the latter, filing into the town via a large gate flanked by two octagonal towers. There was one entrance for pedestrians and two for horses and carriages; their heavy wheels left grooves in the stone, much of which was quarried from Moltrasio, just across the lake from Torno and its spring.
Limestone from the same quarry was used in the construction of a large set of baths nearby. A maze of rooms – rectangular, octagonal, crescent-shaped – was laid out between barrel-vaulted corridors adorned with richly decorated red walls and rounded archways.4 Every year during the festivals of Neptune, the bathers and exercisers of Comum would receive free perfumed oil at the bequest of one Lucius Caecilius Cilo, a local magistrate who set aside a generous 40,000 sesterces for this purpose in his will.5 He has been identified variously as Pliny’s father, paternal grandfather, and great-uncle, but could equally have been a more distant relation.6 Pliny provided in his own will for the construction and decoration of baths in the town. Perhaps his funds went towards developing the existing set, which were expanded and refurbished in the century he died.7 (Their foundations survive today in the basement of a car park.)
Buildings were being erected in such numbers both within and beyond Comum’s town walls that Pliny could only ‘rejoice, because my patria is going from strength to strength’.8 There were temples to Jupiter and Mercury, and one to Rome and her emperors which was built by a local magistrate and military engineer named Lucius Caecilius Secundus, another contender for being Pliny’s father, and dedicated by his son.9 A magnificent sculpture of Augustus in the guise of Pontifex Maximus presided over what was probably the forum, at Piazza San Fedele.10 There was also a theatre and, just beyond the walls, on the very outskirts of the town, a meticulously designed brothel. A labyrinth of small rooms, each with their own heating system, was arranged around a central courtyard and large communal kitchen.11 The complex extended to perhaps 6,000 square metres. Business must have been thriving.
Pliny never tired of coming back to Comum. It was his deliciae, his ‘delight’, a word he might sooner have used to describe a lover or a pet than a town.12 Whenever he was away he longed for its fishing (the lake is particularly rich in trout, pike and perch) and hunting ‘as an ill man desires wine and baths and springs’.13 Though never the most dexterous of sportsmen, Pliny boasted of being able to fish and hunt and read while he was here – all at the same time. You appreciate how far he was exaggerating when you see how steeply the mountains rise from the lake. The people of Comum appear to have had rather a habit of magnifying the opportunities of their landscapes. A large relief sculpture exhibited in their town celebrated their prowess at hunting with horses, dogs and spears.14 One bold hunter is shown grappling with an enormous lion.
Comum was a hunter’s paradise but also an Arcadia. Pliny had a friend, a fellow equestrian named Caninius Rufus, who transformed his corner of the town into something out of Virgil’s Eclogues. His villa had a colonnade where it was ‘always spring’ with views over a shady grove of plane trees, sun-soaked, open-air baths, and a sparkling green stream that flowed into the lake.15 Italian archaeologists have been eager to locate it on Via Zezio on the lower slopes of the Colle di Brunate mountain.16 Built in the late first century AD, possibly over three storeys, the villa they excavated had a long paved walkway, black and white mosaic floors, and extravagantly adorned walls.17 Some had frescoes inspired by the waves of the sea or lake. Others featured niches mosaicked in blue, turquoise, green, yellow, brown and white glass – a ‘new invention’ when Pliny the Elder was alive.18 Pliny made no hesitation in crowning Caninius Rufus’ house suburbanum amoenissimum after the locus amoenus or idealised countryside setting of pastoral poetry. Amorous shepherds may not have been reclining beneath its porch, but the goddess of love was not far away; an exquisite bronze and gilt statuette of the Venus Pudica was discovered in a charred wooden box at the site.19
In the sixteenth century, the Como scholar Benedetto Giovio stumbled upon some tesserae of an ancient mosaic which he believed to have come from the villa of Caninius Rufus. The remains lay at Borgo Vico, at the south of the lake, some distance from the town and the Colle di Brunate. When Benedetto’s brother Paolo saw this stretch of coast he felt it was so evocative of the plane trees and ancient baths and springtime walks which Pliny had described at Caninius Rufus’ villa in his letter, that he determined to establish a villa-museum on top of it.20
It was in the brothers’ interests to highlight as many Como sites as possible in Pliny’s letters to counter the claims of the Veronese. In constructing his museum on the supposed grounds of Caninius Rufus’ former estate, Paolo Giovio established a new Plinian landmark. When the building was finished in 1543 its walls were hung with hundreds of portraits of famous poets, scholars, politicians and artists. The portraits of the artists were a particular attraction. Paolo Giovio had read an early draft of Vasari’s (ultimately illustrated) Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects and urged its immediate publication before it could be illustrated.21 While it was not Paolo’s intention to divert readers from Vasari’s book, anyone who did want to look into the eyes of the most celebrated artists needed only to make their way to his Plinian museum. His magnificent building had views over the lake and a balcony to fish from in homage to one of the villas Pliny described in his letters.22
Pliny had ‘many villas’ near Comum, including an undisclosed number inherited from his parents, but there were two firm favourites.23 Perched on a high ridge ‘overlooking the lake like the villas at Baiae’ (in the Bay of Naples) was ‘Tragedy’. It was elevated on a rock that divided two bays, and in a marvellous conceit it was said to resemble a pair of cothurni – calf-hugging, heavy-soled, lace-up boots worn by actors when they performed Greek tragedies. Then there was ‘Comedy’, which curved around a single bay and sat low in its plot like a comic actor in his little socci slippers. It took some imagination to liken the two villas to footwear, not least because the theatre was not as popular in Pliny’s time as it once was, but whoever first named them might have taken his cue from the lake itself. Lake Como is shaped like a pair of splayed legs with two feet – or the thong of a sandal.24 Pliny extended both houses and endeavoured to make the most of their peculiarities. For once he let loose, indulging his fantasies of a spoiling otium (‘leisure’) and putting on a display worthy of the theatre itself. Throwing a line from a window of his low-rise ‘Comedy’, he would sit and fish from his bedroom – ‘and practically even from the bed’.25
Paolo Giovio liked to tell people that his museum stood on the site of one of these villas rather than Caninius Rufus’. His brother Benedetto, however, was anxious not to mislead.26 If he could only find evidence of where Pliny’s villas had really stood then the Veronese would have to concede defeat. Taking Pliny’s letters in his hands, Benedetto cast his eye over every ‘high ridge dividing two bays’ of the lake in the hope that he might still find Pliny’s ‘Tragedy’. While he had to admit there were rather a lot of bays, he could not help but notice one particularly prominent ridge overlooking the water. Positioned at the groin of the two legs of the lake, some hours from Como town, was Bellagio. Until recently it had been home to the palace of a courtier of Ludovico Sforza of Milan, but a fire had destroyed the building, leaving the expanse now occupied by the handsome gardens of Villa Serbelloni.27
Benedetto began the steep ascent from the lakefront to these elevated grounds. This would have been a trying walk for Pliny, who, as Benedetto recalled, had ‘a slender frame that could not tolerate much exertion’, but he found its inhabitants insistent that the famous ‘Tragedy’ had once stood here.28 The steep hills of Bellagio offered an exquisite panoramic view of the three branches of the lake and the Alps beyond. Resting here, Benedetto was high enough up to watch the fishermen without being sprayed by their catch: the site seemed to match Pliny’s description. Although the historian could see nothing of the villa itself, he learned of the discovery of some pieces of stone inscribed with the name of one Marcus Plinius.29 Dated to the first or second century AD, these fragments, made from black Varenna marble, reveal that Marcus Plinius came from the same tribe as Pliny and was involved in the ‘administration of justice’ as a quattuorvir or local magistrate.30 He may have been no relation of Pliny, but clearly Bellagio was a desirable spot for the wealthy men of Comum to keep a home.
A few decades after Benedetto surveyed the lake, a cartographer named Abraham Ortelius began to prepare what would be the first modern atlas. As he set about creating a map of Lake Como, he turned to the Giovio brothers and their recent scholarship. Depicting each and every mountain peak on the perimeters of the water, every town, village, and monument of interest, Ortelius marked Bellagio as the promontory where Pliny kept his villa called ‘Tragedy’.31 Benedetto’s ventures had not been in vain. The town of Torno, meanwhile, was identified merely as ‘Fons Plinianus’ (Pliny’s Spring), and ‘Comedy’ was situated at the town of Lenno.32 Looking at the finished map in Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum it is easy to imagine Pliny rowing leisurely from one to the other across the water. Ortelius’ drawing made it clear that, if Tragedy and Comedy were located at Bellagio and Lenno, then they had good views of one another across the lake, which would have been entirely appropriate to Pliny’s tastes and humour. Tragedy is the opposite of Comedy. Bellagio is opposite Lenno. As with so many features of his life, Pliny found his two villas all the more pleasant for the contrast between them. The contrast could only have been keener for the two villas being in sight of each other. With his seminal atlas Ortelius reinforced Pliny’s connection with Como.
Benedetto Giovio’s Historiae Patriae, published posthumously the following century, remains one of the most elegant pieces of scholarship on the lives of the Plinys in Comum. Yet to be translated from the Latin and Italian, it is a testament to one man’s pride in his native town. In it he demolished the arguments of the Veronese, illuminating the errors of Jerome, Petrarch, Biondo and others, and used his knowledge of former Gaul to explain what Pliny the Elder meant when he called Catullus his ‘fellow countryman’. Together with his brother Paolo, he had done everything he could to re-establish the place of the Plinys in Como’s history. To this day no trace of Tragedy or Comedy has been found, but Bellagio and Lenno remain for many scholars the most probable locations. Paolo’s lakeside museum no longer survives, but many of the antiquities and inscriptions he acquired were transferred to a palazzo formerly owned by his family. This palazzo is now home to Como’s Museo Civico. A plaque on the stairway commemorates the two brothers who invested so much in the lives of their ancient forebears.