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The Coat of Arms of Spello

Both of these older coats of arms, as painted in the Sala del Consiglio of the Palazzo Comunale, were at different times those of Spello, although properly the one on the right is that of the Baglioni family, once lords of the town, whose name is still borne by the Pinturicchio-frescoed chapel in the church of S. Maria Maggiore. Of the three elements they have in common, two are gone from the modern arms: the sky blue field and the mirrors.

Although Italian heraldry has always been less strict than its French and English counterparts, this cerulean blue, possibly attributable to fading, is not heraldic, and the particularly fine example on the right, from the 18c doors of the library in the same Palazzo Comunale — the only heraldically correct coat of arms on this page — does in fact have the proper azure.

The mirrors, now replaced by roses, are a punning indication of the name of the city: specchio (mirror) for Spello. This is usually stated in this form: the mirrors were added because it was actually believed that Spello derived its name from Latin speculum; but I don't believe this because it is unnecessarily complicated, and would then require an explanation, never so much as hinted at anywhere, of why the town of Antiquity might have been named after mirrors. Their 19c replacement seems to stem from embarrassment at this supposed bad etymologizing, but why specifically roses remains unclear to me.

Some of the difficulty might be removed by taking a cue from a passage of the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, in which, speaking of the names of Jerusalem, he says ". . . Sion, which in Hebrew means speculatio (something to gaze on), because it is built on a height, and can be seen from far away." (XV.I.5, my trans.) At some point in the early Middle Ages — when exactly, I don't know — the Hi- of Hispellum having been slurred out of the name by common speech, the gleaming white walls of the Roman city, still more or less intact and sharply visible since the statutory right-of‑way next to them would not have been drowned in more recent constructions, would have made the town a definite speculatio and encouraged *Spellum to be thought of as *Speclum. The mirrors complete the process a few centuries later, as a slightly off-mark explanation. I don't believe a word of this, but it's possible.

The bird is sometimes shown holding a key in its beak. This too seems to be a modern refinement.

The basic heraldic item is clearly the tower constituting the central charge, and I wouldn't be surprised that the original arms of Spello were merely Azure a tower or. The origin of the cross seems to lie partly in the arms of the counts Baglioni, partly in the miracle of the Cross that appeared over Spello, now commemorated by this fresco in the church of S. Ventura:

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