The need of running water is, of course, the most serious point about so
big and prosperous a city, and a running stream to turn a paper mill
would heal more ills than all her pictures and her wide calm view. The
great rushing stream of the Tiber down at the foot of the hill seems
like a sort of solemn mockery to people who have only wells and a little
river from the hill to drink from and to wash their linen in. We have
realized this on winter nights when the Tiber was out in flood in the
moonlight down below our windows, and small drops freezing, one by one,
on Pisano's fountain behind us in the square.
Yet the town is prosperous. Its inhabitants and those of the commune
have increased by some six thousand since the days of its first
prosperity. Commerce, it is true, seems somewhat at a standstill. There
is the commerce of travellers, which is by no means inconsiderable; and
there is the commerce of Mind. This last Perugia has always had since
the days when she grew powerful, and the University of Perugia has
played a constant and important part throughout her annals. It was
founded in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and its management,
like other things in the city, was chiefly in the hands of the people
and their representatives, the _Priori_. Five _Savi_, one from each
_rione_, were told off to regulate its affairs and to elect its
professors. Urban VIII. brought it under the management of the Church,
but this did not in any way alter its first rules and laws. We hear that
"the Emperor Charles IV. bestowed upon the University all those
distinctions which were enjoyed by the most celebrated universities of
the Empire," and Napoleon confirmed these and added much to the
magnificence of Perugia's university. It was during the Napoleonic rule
that the college was transferred from its old quarters in the Piazza
Sopramuro to the vast new buildings at Montemorcino. Her three main
branches of study are jurisprudence, science, and theology. Several of
the popes studied in Perugia. S. Thomas Aquinas lectured here, and many
distinguished men of science and of law passed through their first
schools in the Umbrian hill town. The two great lawyers Baldo Baldeschi
and Bartolo Alfani were students in the University of Perugia, and
Alberico Gentile, who afterwards lectured in Oxford, studied here at the
University. The affairs of war were never allowed to interfere with
those of the mind, and we hear that a guarantee of safe conduct was
given to any scholar who came here from a distance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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