The gates of the dead

Gubbio is the most beautiful medieval town in Italy. If the view from the Montefeltro Garden on the side of Monte Ingino, above the town hall, does not convince you, then you must believe the signs posted at the town gates, which announce the same in Italian. And there must be something to it.

Gubbio may be familiar to a Hungarian reader from two places. One of them is the story of the converted wolf, who was turned to great gentleness for Saint Francis, as described in the Jókai Codex, the first book in Hungarian, written around 1440. And the other is that of Pater Severinus and the gates of the dead, anchored in Hungarian literary public conscience by Antal Szerb’s 1937 cult novel Traveler and Moonlight.

The gates of the dead are mentioned by Doctor Ellesley in Foligno, where the novel’s protagonist, Mihály is convalescing:

“You know, it so happened that I was a town doctor in Gubbio before I came here to the hospital. Once I was called to see a patient who appeared to be suffering from a serious nervous problem. She lived in Via dei Consoli, a completely medieval street, in a dark, old house. She was a young woman, not from Gubbio, nor an Italian. I don’t even know what nationality she might have been, but she spoke English well. She was a very beautiful woman. The owners of the house said that the woman who had been living with them as a paying guest, had been tormented by hallucinations for some time. Her obsession was that the gate of the dead was not locked at night.”

“What?”

“The gate of the dead. You must know that these medieval houses in Gubbio have two gates. A regular gate for the living and, next to it, another, narrower gate for the dead. This latter is opened only when the coffin is taken out of the house. Then they wall it up again so that the dead person cannot come back. Because they know that the dead can only come back through the same door where they left. This gate is not even on the same street level, but about a meter higher, so that the coffin can be handed out to those standing on the street. The lady I’m talking about lives in such a house. One night she woke up to see the gate of the dead opening and someone she loved very much, who had died a long time ago, entering through it. And from then on, the dead person returned every night.”

Mihály then goes to Gubbio to meet this dead person and those who loved him.

“Coming out of the cathedral, he turned onto Via dei Consoli. ‘This is the street Ellesley was talking about’, he thought. In fact, you could believe a lot about this street. One could imagine into its black, ancient, barren, poor and dignified medieval houses inhabitants who for centuries have been living only on the memory of their more glorious past, on bread and water...

And sure enough, right on the third house there was the gate of the dead. Next to the regular gate, one meter above the ground, a narrow, bricked-up Gothic doorway. Almost every house on Via dei Consoli has one. There is nothing else in the whole street, in particular no person.”

You can still see the gates of the dead when walking along Via dei Consoli. You can identify them by their narrow, high Gothic arches, and by the fact that the masonry of the walled in ones is different from the elegant block stones of the house. They are mostly filled with cheaper material: bricks, rubble or rough stone. But many of them are open as windows or doors. After all, since people don’t die at home, the only person who has to keep the returning soul at bay is the doctor on duty in the hospital.

However, the most beautiful and atmospheric procession route of the gates of the dead is not Via dei Consoli, but the Via dei Galeotti alley behind it, which is overlooked by the back façades of the buildings on the main street. Freed from the solemnity of the main street, the alley meanders freely, narrows and widens, rises and falls, as the façades, projections and gates decide. A multitude of arches lead above it from one side to the other, just as medieval owners felt the need to open a short path to their garden on the other side, or to connect their house with that of a neighboring lady they married because of the good location of her plot. Due to the many reconstructions, fewer gates of the dead have remained intact here than on the main street side. But these few open onto such a cozy street where – especially when the evening lights are turned on – a ghost seeking admission to his former house may appear at any time.

But seriously, were the gates of the dead really meant to prevent the spirit of the dead from returning to his former home? We know that in some archaic societies, the soul of the dead wanders around for a while – a few weeks, forty days – longing for life, and if necessary, he takes it from the living, so it is harmful, and one must protect themselves against it in various ways. In ancient Italy, however, we do not know about such an idea, about rites of keeping the dead away. However, we know about a different kind of gate of the dead – and even a double gate for the dead and for the living – which should have occurred to Antal Szerb as well if he had logically considered everything he wrote about the death cult of the Etruscans in the third part of his brilliant book.

The gates of the dead are not only known from Gubbio, but also from the wider area, Umbria, Tuscany, Marche, North Lazio, that is exactly the region where the Etruscans once lived, and then quietly merged into the Latinized population, passing on their culture to them. It can therefore be assumed that the gate of the dead is an Etruscan tradition. In Etruscan necropolises, the tombs also often had a double gate: a real one for the living who bring in the sarcophagus and grave goods, and a painted or carved fake gate for the dead, who, being spirits, march through it gloriously into the afterlife.

The fake gates are often flanked by winged gatekeepers with torches or hammers. The inscriptions call them Charun. They are the Etruscan equivalents of the mythic Greek ferryman Kharon. They, however, do not transport souls across the Lethe river, but open the door with their hammer before the festive procession accompanying the dead – or led by the dead on horseback – as we see on Etruscan sarcophagi.

The Etruscan gates of the dead are therefore not exits from the house of the living for the dead who is now considered persona non grata. On the contrary: they are festive entrances for the exalted dead into a transcendent world, considered higher than this one. They do not want to prevent the return of the dead, but to exalt his entry and stand in the way of the living who are not yet worthy of entry.

With the disappearance of the Etruscan cult of the dead and their cave tombs, the double entrance has also vanished. But it seems that the successors of the Etruscans felt so important the ceremonial door for the passage of the dead into the afterlife that they now reproduced it on their own houses. This new door took on both the physical function of giving out the coffin, and, as an afterthought, the superstitious function of preventing the return of the dead.

However, we have an important medieval source, the second chapter of the Fioretti of St. Claire of Assisi, in which, when Claire decides to secretly join the order of St. Francis, leaves the family home through the gate of the dead. In this way, on the one hand she dies for her previous life, her family and this world, but on the other hand, she passes to a higher life, just like the Etruscan dead, as this was the original function of the gate of the dead.

And this gives a wider context to a “gate of the dead” that I wrote about recently. This is an altarpiece made in Gubbio in 1418, whose two protagonists are St. Anthony the Hermit and St. Lawrence, but its scenes display the contrast between this world as a wasteland tormented by evil and good death as the gate to a higher transcendent life. And the altar itself is also a gate, since the function of these early Renaissance Italian altar ensembles assembled from several icons, just like of their predecessors, the Byzantine iconostases also assembled from several icons, is precisely to testify, as closed gates, about the transcendent reality that is on the other side, to be experienced by those who will cross over there in due time. The citizen of Gubbio set up the altar and decorated it with his coat of arms, just like their Etruscan predecessors who set up the gates of the dead.

Benedetto Bonfigli: Totila captures Perugia, 1454, detail. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria