Belvedere Temple, showing outer sanctum, with bases of columns, and the inner sanctum beyond. St Patrick’s well lies behind the trees.

Numerous artefacts were found including the miniature bronze statue of Minerva, now in the Civic/Faina Museum. Freud’s favourite statue, bought some time after 1914, is almost identical, in fact Athena is the Greek Minerva. Freud described her as ‘perfect, only she has lost her spear.’ Freud’s Athena is a Roman copy of a Greek original. She holds a patera, a dish for pouring libations, whereas the Orvieto version carries the aegis cloak over her shoulder. Both have the Medusa breastplate.

Right hand ‘ cella ‘ of Inner Sanctum of Minerva

Minerva, the Greek Athena, in the Faina Museum which Freud visited.

The temple was dedicated to the three Capitoline gods: Tinia (Jupiter /Zeus), Uni (Juno/Hera) and Minerva (Athena), most probably on the right side of the sanctum where the tiny statue was found. The temple was constructed almost entirely of wood above the stone podium so little remains, but there would have been a large collonaded portico, the outer sanctum, and then three cellae dedicated to the three gods, the inner sanctum.

We know that Freud started collecting genuine antiquities, as opposed to replicas, the summer of his first Orvieto visit in 1897, and began to arrange them in his consulting rooms on the ground floor of Berggasse 19. Later he transferred to the floor above, the site of the present museum). As his collection grew he arranged his collection in the manner of the Belvedere Temple, the bulk of his antiquities jostled for space in his outer sanctum, the consulting room, in which he had his famous couch, many concealed in drawers; whereas, the Inner Sanctum, his study held his prize pieces, arranged in cabinets, vitrines, and arrayed across his desk, a small army, mainly of statuettes, all directed towards him, the commander in chief. His temple is estimated to have held around three thousand artefacts although many were donated to friends and colleagues over the years. He had a drawer entirely full of Etruscan bronze mirrors and would ask favoured guests to ‘help themselves.’

Engelman’s view of Freud’s study from his consulting room towards the study, Freud’s ‘inner sanctum’, which gave onto a central courtyard.

Edelman’s famous photographs taken just before the Freuds’ departure for London, clearly show the arrangement in his consulting rooms, by now upstairs, on the mezzanine floor, the entrance across the way from his family’s flat. He complained about the darkness of both flats. As a mezzanine, it was below the massive balconies of the piano nobile, the first-floor flat, which left it gloomy.

The heavy balustrade blocked the light

Perhaps this dimness, which he oft complained of while doing nothing to lighten it, is why he had need of his nearly three-month-long summer holidays, excursions always accompanied by his terracotta army, painstakingly packed and transported to the shores of Lake Aussee, Bad Gastein, to the Alpine heights at the Riemerlehen in Berchtesgaden, and his summer house in Grinzing in the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods. He wrote on holiday and was unable to do so without his ‘grubby old gods’.

When Freud visited Orvieto for three nights in 1897 he met Riccardo Mancini, who owned an antiquities emporium on Corso Cavour, a five-minute walk from his hotel, from which Freud began to acquire his own collection.

Entrance door of Mancini’s Emporium where he exhibited his archaeological finds.

ceiling of Mancini’s showroom with ‘cippi’.

‘Cippi’ from Etruscan tombs excavated at the Necropolis, high in oval niches.

Mancini called himself an archeologist and had the good fortune to own some rich sites around Orvieto including the famed Etruscan Necropolis of the Crocefisso del Tufo below the cliffs on which the town is built. Mancini’s enormous enthusiasm for archeology, which was not only commercial, no doubt infected Freud, to the point where he collected more books on the subject than he did on psychology. There are obvious parallels between excavating into the ancient past and delving into the unconscious.

Freud returned to Orvieto twice, most likely to further his collaboration with ‘my friend’ Engineer Mancini, who even offered him a plot of land to buy so that he could not only get his hands dirty digging for his own antiquities but export them more easily from Italy.

Freud’s Inner Sanctum, his study in May 1938. His favourite statuette of Athena/Minerva is no longer in the middle of his desk. It had been sent ahead to London in the care of his friend and benefactor Princess Marie Bonaparte, afraid that the Nazis might not allow him to export his collection in its entirety. On the side desk right is an open copy of his favourite magazine, Die Antike. Ph. Edmund Engelman, May 1938.

The same view today, his reading chair in the corner is a replica. The mirror is original. The study was darkly painted in Pompeian style red in 2016; it is now white, not a bit like the sombre tones of Freud’s day. The room beyond is his consulting room in which he had his famous couch. The waiting room is beyond that through the white doors.

Waiting room looking out onto the inner courtyard

Both flats in Berggasse 19 now belong to the Viennese Freud Museum. All the rooms have recently been redecorated in white, quite unlike the sombre coloured apartments of Freud’s day. Most of the furniture is in the London home and museum, though some of the waiting room furniture was donated by the youngest daughter Anna Freud to the Vienna Museum.

Freud’s Waiting Room in which he held the Wednesday Analytical Meetings

In this smoke-filled room he held the weekly meetings of  The Wednesday Psychological Society. My photographs were taken before the refurbishment, and I believe, render the atmosphere of Freud’s day rather better than the present-day photos with the trendy white patterned wallpaper which can be seen on the Freud Museum’s website.

Athena comes home to London

London, Freud’s study cum consulting room. The famous couch has temporarily lost its Persian drapes – dry-cleaning. His desk with its statues is on the left.

Engelman’s photo of Freud’s desk, sans Athena

Freud’s desk in London with Athena-Minerva in pride of place (highlighted). Thoth, the white baboon on the right, another favourite, had his top knot rubbed every morning by Freud.

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On his three visits to Orvieto, Freud always stayed in the comfortable Hotel delle Belle Arti on Corso Cavour in the town center, midway between Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele (now Piazza Repubblica) and the central clock tower, La Torre del Moro. There is a plaque. There were then 7,300 inhabitants, about three thousand more than now inhabit the old town.

Doorway of Freud’s Hotel delle Belle Arti in Corso Cavour. The plaque is on the right of the door.

In September 1897 Freud stayed in the Hotel Belle Arti with his younger brother Alexander and patient and pupil Dr Gertl, a rather mysterious figure who disappears without trace a few years later. One wing of the former hotel is now a lawyers’ office, the other,  the salon ( in Freud’s day, it was the dining room) has remained largely unchanged.

Hotel Belle Arti, Orvieto 1897

Ballroom, former Dining Room, Palazzo Bisenzi 2020

Here follows an excerpt from The Idler magazine in which W.L.Alden sets the scene in Orvieto a few years before Freud’s visit in 1893, “At the Hotel of the Fine Arts (Belle Arti) where you will inevitably go, you will find three other tourists, probably German, sitting silently in a vast room, waiting for dinner, which is the only thing the tourist does after he has seen the cathedral.” Orvieto offered little to the tourist after dinner, Freud probably wrote letters while his brother Alexander, somewhat of a ladies’ man, could not wait to move on to Rome. However, Freud would refuse to go on this occasion, something akin to a phobia was blocking him. He finally overcome his resistance in 1901, calling his first Roman visit, ‘the high point in my life’.

Freud embarked on his life’s journey into archeology while on his first visit to Orvieto through his friendship with Riccardo Mancini, proprietor of the Etruscan Necropolis below the walls and a showroom of artifacts found in a long career as an archeologist. It is probable that antique hunting provided the excuse to return to Orvieto on two further occasions, in 1902 and 1907. He may however have revisited old haunts such as the cathedral and Signorelli’s fresco cycle of the end of the world.

Entrance doorway (left) to Riccardo Mancini's Antiquities Emporium on Corso Cavour. Mancinelli Theatre in the distance. Listed in Baedeker's Guide at N°85, it is now 130.

Entrance hall to Mancini's Emporium showing Etruscan funerary 'cippi' in oval niches unearthed by Mancini in the Etruscan Necropolis.

Ceiling of corridor leading to Mancini's Emporium

 A 15-minute Video on Freud’s visit to Orvieto

More blog posts on this subject of Freud and Orvieto:

Tale of Three Cities Part I

Tale of Three Cities Part II

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Freud and a Tale of Three Cities: Vienna, London and……. Orvieto.

The Vienna home in Berggasse 19 is easy to spot – he lived and worked in two modest, dark flats on the mezzanine floor left and right of the long red Freud sign; 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, is by comparison quite understated, just the round Blue Plaque; Orvieto now has a modest grey plaque to the right of the doorway.

The Vienna flat contains little: his hats and cane, a hip flask used on his travels and the furniture of the waiting room where he held his 8.30 Wednesday evening meetings which Anna Freud returned to Vienna.

Freud lived in Vienna for 47 years,  whereas he lived in London for a mere eighteen months till he died an exile just after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, though his daughter Anna lived on in the Freud home in  Hampstead for another 40 years.

The London home contains most of his possessions shipped from Vienna before the war. His chair was specially built for him so that he could read with his leg over the arm. The glass jar above the antiquities cabinet contains his and his wife’s ashes. The original Apulian krater with a Dionysiac imagery was smashed by burglars in 2014.

In Orvieto he never lived at all, but he did stay in the Hotel delle Belle Arti in Corso Cavour 36 in 1897, 1902 and 1907. However, this small Umbrian town was to contribute to the development of his theories quite disproportionately.

The Former Hotel delle Belle Arti in Palazzo Bisenzi (building on right with balcony) where Freud stayed on the main street, Corso Cavour, Orvieto.

Freud admitted to three passions: travelling, archeology and smoking. Freud was an ardent, but anxious, traveller. He did most of his writing while away from Vienna. Italy was his favourite destination, he came here 24 times, seven to Rome alone. Travelling in Italy gave him the freedom and relaxation that he lacked in Vienna which he confessed to his friend Fliess was a city he loathed.

Archeology was more than a hobby, it dovetailed with his delving into the human psyche, in fact he had more archeology books in his library than any other subject. Just before his Orvieto trip he started collecting antique statuettes a hobby that developed in Orvieto when he met Riccardo Mancini who not only offered him newly unearthed antiquities, but invited him to the Etruscan necropolis at the Cimitero del Crocefisso where he preserved a tomb as it had been found with its grave goods and two skeletons. This tomb was to feature in an important dream of Freud’s.

Freud’s dream: “I had already been in a grave once, but it was an excavated Etruscan grave near Orvieto, a narrow chamber with two stone benches along its walls, on which the skeletons of two grown men were lying.The inside of the wooden house in the dream looked exactly like it, except that the stone was replaced by wood. The dream seems to have been saying:’If you must rest in a grave let it be the Etruscan now”.

Mancini even offered Freud a plot of land that was guaranteed to give up more Etruscan treasures; after mulling it over a while he declined.

Freud’s third passion was smoking, twenty-five cigars a day, yet he failed to quit even though he knew it was killing him and causing him terrible pain.

Freud’s father Jacob had died in October 1896, prompting a crisis in Freud’s thinking and writing in early 1897 that was to result in his embarking upon self-analysis, something that no one had ever done before. At around this time, he had also decided on chastity after his youngest and last child Anna (destined to become his intellectual heir) was born December 1895. From 1896 he would sublimate his libido into his mission, psychoanalysis, the term he coined in 1897.

When Freud arrived in September, Orvieto had, until the recent opening of the railway to Rome, been an out of the way place, a Bruges La Morte under an Umbrian sun. Olave Potter in her turn of the century book A Little Pilgrimage in Italy 1911 called the chapter on Orvieto, City of Woe; the Pre-Raphaelite painter Burne-Jones passing through in 1871 thought the people striking to look at, but the saddest looking folk he saw in all Italy.

Orvieto at dawn in April

From the station Freud would have taken the new funicular cable car up the precipitous rock and through the dark tunnel beneath the Albornoz fortress, itself a charged experience for someone of Freud’s sensibility.

Next to the funicular is the 16th century St Patrick’s Well, a tourist attraction mentioned in Freud’s Baedecker guidebook. Although Freud does not mention a visit it is unlikely that he would have passed up such a Dantesque experience on at least one of his sojourns.

The well is 62m deep and of a double helix spiral, like DNA, so that the donkey carrying water up did not meet the donkey going down. The increasing gloom during the descent, the marvel of the engineering, the effort of returning to the light up a sort of Jacob’s ladder, the suggestive nature of the spiralling shaft must surely have impressed him; yet he never mentions the well.

Freud though a non-believer was well read in the scriptures and would certainly have known of many references to wells and their importance to a desert people, not least Moses with whom he identified in his quest for a psychoanalytical promised land; indeed, Moses met his wife Zipporah at the Midian well.  The commissioner of the well, Pope Clement VII (the one who gave Henry VIII such a hard time over his divorce), also saw himself as a new Moses, having a commemorative medal struck by Cellini showing Moses striking the rock with water gushing forth and the motto ”Ut bibat populous” (for the people to drink).

However, the letters he wrote to his wife’s sister Minna Bernays with whom he corresponded in the most intimate manner about his work, vacations and thoughts, are all missing from the period 1893 to 1910, the timespan of his three Orvieto visits. There has been much speculation that Freud and Minna had an affair, even that he procured her an abortion, and that their correspondence may have been occulted or destroyed for this reason.
The well may or not have been important to the formulation of Freud’s theories, but the frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral by the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli most certainly were.

To be continued……..

Tale of Three Cities Part II

Tale of Three Cities Part III

Tale of Three Cities Part IV

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