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EX LIBRIS 




®rjr. ©. pubb 



Stanford I'xivkrsitv I.ibkakiks 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



TUSCAN CITIES 



BY 



WILLIAM D. HOWELLS 



BSit^ IlIu0tnittoTUi 



FBOM DBAWIX08 AXD KTCHIXOS BT JOSEPH PEKXELL AND OTHERS 



/4l 



\n OIE Df 



a: :x 






• . ' * •• 



BOSTON 
TICKNOR AND COMPANY 

1886 



•J V 



ff K-5 + C1, 



509232 

Copyright, ISSi and 1885, 
Bt W. D. H0WELL8. 



All rights reserved. 



• • •• 



• • 






• •• •• 

♦ -• • 

•^ • • • 



• » 






• • • • • • 



Qlntbcrsits Tj^xttt : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



-•- 



£SCCTCHS058 15 THE ClOUTEB OF SaSTA MaUA NoVELLA S 

The ViEGDriA Cigajl 6 

Ax Oeaxge-texder 10 

School-boy 10 

A Cbbstsut-vendku 11 

Is THE SUS 12 

A Labobeb 12 

FL0BE5CE, OX THE AB50. — Po2?TE YeCCHIO 15 

A Floee5Tike Flowee-gibl 22 

At Doxey's 23 

Across the Poxte Yecchio 80 

A Street ix Florence 33 

Sax Martixo. — Exterior 35 

Door op Daxte's House 36 

Church where Dante was married. — Sax Martixo 37 

John o? Bologna*s Devil 41 

IxiTLix Letter 42 

Ix the Old Market 47 

Ix THE Bargello 62 

A Street ix Oltrarxo 64 



iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAOI 

The Porta Komana 6() 

PoKTK Santa Trinita G8 

Tailpiece 75 

Initial Letter , 7G 

LOGGLA DEI LaNZI 81 

The Brothers of the Misericordia U9 

Stenterello 102 

The Clown 104 

On the Arno. — Rear op Via de' Bardi 110 

Florentine Housetops 116 

Fountain in the Boboli Garden 121 

Initial Letter 125 

A Mountain Town 127 

A City Gate V61 

Piazza Comuunale and Tower op the Mangia 140 

A Street in Siena 148 

A High Breeze 149 

Under the Arches in Siena 152 

Fountain outside of the Wall at Siena 157 

Washing-day. — Siena 159 

Initial Letter 161 

The Beturn from the Fountain 164 

SiENESE Gardens 168 

Up and Down in Siena 169 

Fields within the Walls 171 

A Mediaeval Siknese 174 

One of the Listenetjs 175 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. v 

A^ AxcHTiT Hi SiOA 17'J 

Hi'BitYiNG Home ■ . 1S3 

SlEXESE FlBV-IIOUSE 1S6 

OcnmE A SiENESE Gate 187 

GoiKG TO Hauket 191 

Tub Sweep op tue Aaso at Pisa 80i 

A.1 AscADED Stbeet 305 

Rxusr nov Puzza della Signobia 817 

Sketch is Lccca S25 

The Clock-towek op Lucca 289 

The Gcasigi Tower 338 

A Staibvat, Lccca 833 

Tailpiece «84 

Akhokul Beabijcos op the Podestas nt tub Palazeo Coxxlxalk at 

PUTOJA 838 

A COBSEE, PWTW* 840 

Harket-place, Pistoja 848 

A Street is Fiesole 84B 

A Flokestixe Villa 849 

A COCBTTUU), FlESOLB 850 

Tailpikcb 251 




FHOM THE CATHEDBAI, r.rCCA. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 



BSCDTCHBOliS IN THE CMI8TKR OF aAMlA I 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 



ALL the way dowD from Turin to Bologna there was snow; 
not, of course, the sort of snow we had left on the other side 
of the Alps, or the snow we remembered in America, but a snow 
picturesque, spectacular, and no colder or bleaker to the eye from 
the car-window than the cotton-woolly counterfeit which clothes a 
landscape of the theatre. It covered the whole Lombard plain to 
the depth of several inches, and formed a very pretty decoration for 
the naked vines and the trees they festooned. A sky which remained 
thick and dun throughout the day contributed to the effect of winter, 
for which, indeed, the Genoese merehant in our carriage said it was 
now the season. 

But the snow grew thinner as the train drew southward, and about 
Bologna the ground showed through it in patches. Then the night 
came on, and whea we reached Florence at nine o'clock we emerged 
into an atmosphere which, in comparison with the severity of the 
transalpine air, could only be called mildly reproachful. For a few 
days we rejoiced in its concessive softness with some such sense of 
escape as must come to one who has left moral obligation behind; 



4 TUSCAN CITIES. 

and then our penalty b^an. If we walked half a mile away from 
our hotel, we despaired of getting back, and commonly had ourselves 
brought home by one of the kindly cab-drivers who had observed 
our exhaustion. It came finally to our not going away from our 
hotel to such distances at alL We observed with a mild passivity 
the vigor of the other guests, who went and came from morning till 
night, and brought to the table cChdte minds full of the spoil of their 
day's sight-seeing. We confessed that we had not, perhaps, been 
out that day, and we accounted for ourselves by saying that we had 
seen Florence before, a good many years ago, and that we were in 
no haste, for we were going to stay all winter. We tried to pass it 
off as well as we could, and a fortnight had gone by before we had 
darkened the doors of a church or a gallery. 

I suppose that all this lassitude was the effect of our sudden tran- 
sition from the tonic air of the Swiss mountains ; and I should be 
surprised if our experience of the rigors of a Florentine December 
were not considered libellous by many whose experience was different 
Nevertheless, I report it ; for the reader may like to trace to it the 
languid lack of absolute opinion concerning Florence and her phe- 
nomena, and the total absence of final wisdom on any point, which 
I hope he will be able to detect throughout these pages. 

n. 

It was quite three weeks before I began to keep any record of 
impressions, and I cannot therefore fix the date at which I pushed 
my search for them beyond the limits of the Piazza Santa Maria 
Novella, where we were lodged. It is better to own up at once to 
any sin which one is likely to be found out in, for then one gains at 
least the credit of candor and courage ; and I will confess here that 
I had come to Florence with the intention of writing about it. But 
I rather wonder now why I should have thought of writing of the 
whole city, when one piazza in it was interesting enough to make a 
book about. It was in itself not one of the most interesting piazzas 
of Florence in the ordinary way. I do not know that anything verj^ 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 5 

historical ever happened there ; but that is by no means saying that 
there did not. There used, under the early Medici and the late 
grand dukes, to be chariot-races in it, the goals of which are the 
two obelisks by John of Bologna, set upon the backs of the bronze 
turtles which the sympathetic observer will fancy gasping under 
their weight at either end of the irregular space ; and its wide floor 
is still unpaved, so that it is a sop of mud in rainy weather, and a 
whirl of dust in dry. At the end opposite the church is the terminus 
of the steam tramway running to Prato, and the small engine that 
drew the trains of two or three horse-cars linked together was per- 
petually fretting and snuffling about the base of the obelisk there, as 
if that were a stump and the engine were a boy's dog with intolerable 
conviction of a woodchuck under it From time to time the con- 
ductor blew a small horn of a feeble, reedy note, like that of the 
horns which children find in their stockings on Christmas morning; 
and then the poor little engine hitched itself to the train, and with 
an air of hopeless affliction snuffled away toward Prato, and left the 
woodchuck under the obelisk to escape. The impression of a wood- 
chuck was confirmed by the digging round the obelisk which a gang 
of workmen kept up all winter ; they laid down water-pipes, and 
then dug them up again. But when the engine was gone we could 
give our minds to other sights in the piazza. 

III. 

One of these was the passage of troops, infantry or cavalry, who 
were always going to or from the great railway station behind the 
church, and who entered it with a gay blare of bugles, extinguished 
midway of the square, letting the measured tramp of feet or the 
irregular clack of hoofs make itself heard. This was always thrilling, 
and we could not get enough of the brave spectacle. We rejoiced in 
the parade of Italian military force with even more than native ardor, 
for we were not taxed to pay for it, and personally the men were 
beautiful ; not large or strong, but regular and refined of face, rank 
and file alike, in that democracy of good looks which one sees in no 




6 TUSCAN CITIES, 

other knd. They marched with a lounging, swinging step, under a 
heavy burden of equipment, and with the sort of quiet patience to 
which the whole nation has been schooled in its advance out of 
slavish subjection to the van of civilization. 

They were not less charming when they came through off duty, 
the ofl&cers in their statuesque cloaks, with the gleam of their swords 
beneath the folds, striding across the piazza in twos or threes, the 

common soldiers straggling loosely over its 
space with the air of peasants let loose amid 
the wonders of a city, and smoking their long, 
straw-stemmed Italian cigars, with their eyes 
all abroad. I do not think they kept up so 
active a courtship with the nursemaids as the 
soldiers in the London squares and parks, but 

THE VIRGINIA CIGAR. ^^^^^ ^^ » fricndliness in their relations with 

the population everywhere that spoke them 
still citizens of a common country, and not alien to its life in any 
way. They had leisure just before Epiphany to take a great in- 
terest in the preparations the boys were making for the celebration 
of that feast, with a noise of long, slender trumpets of glass ; and I 
remember the fine behavior of a corporal in a fatigue-cap, who 
happened along one day when an orange-vender and a group of 
urchins were trying a trumpet, and extorting from it only a 
few stertorous crumbs of sound. The corporal put it lightly to 
his lips, and blew a blast upon it that almost shivered our win- 
dow-panes, and then walked off with the effect of one who would 
escape gratitude; the boys looked after him till he was quite 
out of sight with mute wonder, such as pursues the doer of a 
noble action. 

One evening an officer's funeral passed through the piazza, with a 
pomp of military mourning ; but that was no more effective than the 
merely civil funeral which we once saw just at twilight. The bearers 
were in white cowls and robes, and one went at the head of the bier 
with a large cross. The others carried torches, which sometimes 
they inverted, swinging forward with a slow processional movement. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 7 

and chanting monotonously, with the clear dark of the evening light 
keen and beautiful around them. 

At other times we heard the jangle of a small bell, and looking 
out we saw a priest of Santa Maria, with the Host in his hand and 
his taper-bearing retinue around him, going to administer the extreme 
unction to some passing soul in our neighborhood. Some of the 
spectators uncovered, but for the most part they seemed not to notice 
it, and the solemnity had an effect of business which I should be at 
some loss to make the reader feel. But that is the effect which 
church ceremonial in Italy has always had to me. I do not say that 
the Italians are more indifferent to their religion than other people, 
but that, having kept up its shows, always much the same in the 
celebration of different faiths, — Etruscan, Hellenic, Hebraic, — so 
long, they were more tired of them, and were willing to let it trans- 
act itself without their personal connivance when they could. 

IV. 

All the life of the piazza was alike novel to the young eyes which 
now saw it for the first time from our windows, and lovely in ours, 
to which youth seemed to come back in its revision. I should not 
know how to give a just sense of the value of a man who used to 
traverse the square with a wide wicker tray on his head, piled up 
with Chianti wine-flasks that looked like a heap of great bubbles. I 
must trust him to the reader's sympathy, together with the pensive 
donkeys abounding there, who acquired no sort of spiritual pride 
from the sense of splendid array, though their fringed and tasselled 
harness blazed with burnished brass. They appeared to be stationed 
in our piazza while their peasant-owners went about the city on their 
errands, and it may have been in an access of homesickness too acute 
for repression that, with a preliminary quivering of the tail and final 
rise of that member, they lifted their woe-begone countenances and 
broke into a long disconsolate bray, expressive of a despair which 
has not yet found its way into poetry, and is only vaguely suggested 
by some music of the minor key. 



8 TUSCAN CITIES, 

These donkeys, which usually stood under our hotel, were balanced 
in the picture by the line of cabs at the base of the tall buildings 
on the other side, whence their drivers watched our windows with 
hopes not unnaturally excited by our interest in them, which they 
might well have mistaken for a remote intention of choosing a cab. 
From time to time one of them left the rank, and took a turn in 
the square from pure effervescence of expectation, flashing his equi- 
page upon our eyes, and snapping his whip in explosions that we 
heard even through the closed windows. They were of all degrees 
of splendor and squalor, both cabs and drivers, from the young 
fellow with false, floating blue eyes and fur-trimmed coat, who drove 
a shining cab fresh from the builder's hands, to the little man whose 
high hat was worn down almost to its structural pasteboard, and 
whose vehicle limped over the stones with querulous complaints from 
its rheumatic joints. When we began to drive out, we resolved to 
have always the worldlier turnout ; but we got it only two or three 
times, falling finally and permanently — as no doubt we deserved, 
in punishment of our heartless vanity — to the wreck at the other 
extreme of the scale. There is no describing the zeal and vigi- 
lance by which this driver obtained and secured us to himself. 
For a while we practised devices for avoiding him, and did not 
scruple to wound his feelings; but we might as well have been 
kind, for it came to the same thing in the end. Once we had 
almost escaped. Our little man's horse had been feeding, and 
he had not fastened his bridle on when the portiere called a 
carriage for us. He made a snatch at his horse's bridle; it came 
oflf in his hand and hung dangling. Another driver saw the sit- 
uation, and began to whip his horse across the square ; our little 
man seized his horse by the forelock, and dragging him along 
at the top of his speed, arrived at the hotel door a little the 
first What could we do but laugh? Everybody in the piazza 
applauded, and I think it must have been this fact which confirmed 
our subjection. After that we pretended once that our little man 
had cheated us ; but with respectful courage he contested the fact, 
and convinced us that we were wrong; he restored a gold pencil 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 9 

which he had found m his cab; and, though he never got it, he 
voluntarily promised to get a new coat, to do us the more honor 
when he drove us out to pay visits. 

V. 

He was, like all of his calling with whom we had to do in Florence, 
amiable and faithful, and he showed that personal interest in us 
from the beginning which is instant with most of them, and which 
found pretty expression when I was sending home a child to the 
hotel from a distance at nightfall I was persistent in getting the 
driver's number, and he divined the cause of my anxiety. 

" Oh, rest easy ! " he said, leaning down toward me from his perch. 
** I, too, am a father !'* 

Possibly a Boston hackman might have gone so far as to tell me 
that he had young ones of his own, but he would have snubbed in 
reassuring me ; and it is this union of grace with sympathy which, I 
think, forms the true expression of Italian civilization. It is not yet 
valued aright in the world ; but the time must come when it will 
not be shouldered aside by physical and intellectual brutality. I 
hope it may come so soon that the Italians will not have learned bad 
manners from the rest of us. As yet, they seem uncontaminated, 
and the orange-vender who crushes a plump grandmother up against 
the wall in some narrow street is as gayly polite in his apologies, and 
she as graciously forgiving, as they could have been under any older 
regime. 

But probably the Italians could not change if they would. They 
may fancy changes in themselves and in one another, but the barba- 
rian who returns to them after a long absence cannot see that they 
are personally different, for all their political transformations. Life, 
which has become to us like a book which we silently peruse in the 
closet, or at most read aloud with a few friends, is still a drama 
with them, to be more or less openly played. This is what strikes 
you at first, and strikes you at last. It is the most recognizable 
thing in Italy, and I was constantly pausing in my languid strolls, 




confronted by some dramatic episode bo I^wilderingly familiar that 
it seemed to me I must have already attempted to write ahout it. 
One day, on the nnrrow sidewalk lieside the esciitchooned cloiater- 
wall of the church, two young and handsome pen- 
pie stopped me while they put upon that puhlic 
stage the pretty melodrama of their feelings. The 
hare-headed girl wore a dress of the red and black 
plaid of the Florentine laundresses, and the young 
fellow standing beside her had a cloak falling from 
his left shoulder. She was looking down and 
away from him, impatiently pulling with one hand 
at the fingers of another, and he was vividly ges- 
ticulating, while he explained or expostulated, with 
hi.'; eyes not upon her, hut looking straight for- 
ward ; and they both stood as if, in a moment of 
opera, they were confronting an audience over the 
footlights. But they were l)otli quite unconscions. and were merely 
obeying the histrionic instinct of their race. So was the school-boy 
in clerical rol)es, when, goaded by some taunt, pointless to the foreign 




A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 



11 



bystander, he fluDg himself Into an attitude of deadly scorn, and 
defied the tormenting gamins ; so were the vender of chestnutrpaste 
and his customer, as they debated 
over the smoking viand the exact 
qnautity aud quality which a aoldo ■•■' 

ought to purchase, in view of the 
state of the chestnut market and the 
price demanded elsewhere; so was 
the little woman who deplored, in 
impassioned accents, the non-arrival 
of the fresh radishes we liked with 
oar coffee, when I went a little too 
early for them to her stall ; so was 
the fruiterer who called me back 
with an effect of heroic maguanimity 
to give me the change I had for- 
gotten, after beating him down from 
a franc to seventy centimes on a 
dozen of mandarin oranges. The 

sweetness of his air, tempering the severity of his self-righteousness 
in doing this, lingers with me yet, and makes me ashamed of 
having got the oranges at a just price. I wish he had cheated me 

We, too, can be honest if we try, but the effort seems to sour most 
of us. We hurl our int^rity in the teeth of the person whom we 
deal birly with ; but when the Italian makes up his mind to be just, 
it is in no ungracious spirit. It was their lovely ways, ^ more than 
Uieir monuments of history and art, that made return to the Floren- 
tines delightful I would rather have had a perpetuity of the came- 
riere's smile when he came up with our coffee in the morning than 
Donatello's San Giorgio, if either were purchasable ; and the face of 
the old chamber-maid, Maria, full of motherly affection, was better 
than the facade of Santa Maria Novella. 




k CHESTNUT-VKKDIB. 



TUSCAN VtTlES. 



VL 

It is true that the church bore its age somewhat better ; for though 

Maria must have been beautiful, too, in her youth, her complexion 

had not that luminous flush in which three hundred years have been 
painting the marble front of the 
church. It is this light, or this 
color, — I hardly know which to 
call it, — that remains in my mind 
as the most characteristic quality 
of Santa Maria Novella ; and I 
would like to have it go as far as 
possible with the reader, for I know 
that the edifice would not otherwise 
present itself in my pages, however 
flatteringly entreated or severely 
censured. I remember the bold 
mixture of the styles in its archi- 
tecture, the lovely sculptures of its 
grand portals, the curious sun-dials 
high in its front; I remember the 

brand-new restoration of the screen of monuments on the right, with 

the arms of the noble patrons of the church 

carved below them, and the grass of the 

space enclosed showing green through the 

cloister-arches all winter long ; I remem- 
ber also the unemployed laborers crouching 

along its sunny base for the heat publicly 

dispensed in Italy on bright days — when 

it is not needed ; and they all gave me the 

same pleasure, eqnal in degree, if not in 

kind. While the languor of tliese first ^ laborer. 

days was still heavy upon me, I crept into 

the church tor a look at the Ghirlandajo frescos behind the high 

altar, the Virgin of Cimabue, and the other objects which one is 




IN THE BUN. 




A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 13 

advised to see there, and had such modest satisfaction in them as 
may come to one who long ago, once for all, owned to himself that 
emotions to which others testified in the presence of such things were 
beyond him. The old masters and their humble acquaintance met 
shyly, after so many years ; these were the only terms on which I, 
at least, could preserve my self-respect ; and it was not till we had 
given ourselves time to overcome our mutual diffidence that the spirit 
in which their work was imagined stole into my heart and made me 
thoroughly glad of it again. Perhaps the most that ever came to me 
was a sense of tender reverence, of gracious quaintness in them ; but 
this was enough. In the mean while I did my duty in Santa Maria 
Novella. I looked conscientiously at all the pictures, in spite of a 
great deal of trouble I had in putting on my glasses to read my 
" Walks in Florence " and taking them oflf to see the paintings ; and 
I was careful to identify the portraits of Poliziano and the other 
Florentine gentlemen and ladies in the frescos. I cannot say that 
I was immediately sensible of advantage in this achievement ; but I 
experienced a present delight in the Spanish chapel at finding not 
only Petrarch and Laura, but Boccaccio and Fiammetta, in the groups 
enjo}4ng the triumphs of the church militant. It will always remain 
a confusion in our thick Northern heads, this attribution of merit 
through mere belief to people whose lives cast so little lustre on their 
creeds ; but the confusion is an agreeable one, and I enjoyed it as 
much as when it first overcame me in Italy. 

VIL 

The cicerone who helped me about these figures was a white-robed 
young monk, one of twelve who are still left at Santa Maria Novella 
to share the old cloisters now mainly occupied by the pupils of a 
military college and a children's school It was noon, and the corri- 
dors and the court were full of boys at their noisy games, on whom 
the young father smiled patiently, lifting his gentle voice above their 
clamor to speak of the suppression of the convents. This was my 
first personal knowledge of the effect of that measure, and I now 



14 TUSCAN CITIES. 

perceived the hardship which it must have involved, as I did not 
when I read of it, with my Protestant satisfaction, in the newspapers. 
The uncomfortable thing about any institution which has survived 
its usefulness is that it still embodies so much harmless life that 
must suffer in its destruction. The monks and nuns had been a 
heavy burden no doubt, for many ages, and at the best they cum- 
bered tlie ground ; but when it came to a question of sweeping them 
away, it meant sorrow and exile and dismay to thousands of gentle 
and blameless spirits like the brother here, who recounted one of 
many such histories so meekly, so unresentfully. He and his few 
fellows were kept there by the piety of certain faithful who, through- 
out Italy, still maintain a dwindling number of monks and nuns in 
their old cloisters wherever the convent happened to be the private 
projHjrty of the order. I cannot say that they thus quite console 
the sentimentalist who would not have the convents re-established, 
even while suffering a poignant regret for their suppression ; but I 
know from myself that this sort of sentimentalist is very diflBcult, 
and perhaps he ought not to be too seriously regarded. 

VIII. 

TllK sentimentalist is very abundant in Italy, and most commonly 
ho is of our nice and religion, though he is rather English than 
American. The Englishman, so chary of his sensibilities at home, 
almndons himself to them abroad. At Rome he already regrets the 
gt>od old days of the temporal power, when the streets were unsafe 
after nightfall and unclean the whole twenty-four hours, and there 
was no new quarter. At Venice he is bowed down under the res- 
torations of the Ducal Palace and the church of St Mark ; and he 
ha« no language in which to speak of the little steamers on the 
Orand Canal, which the Venetians find so convenient In Florence, 
from time to time, he has a ptmic prescience that they are going 
to tear down the Ponte Vecohia I do not know how he gets this, 
but ho has it, and all the rest of us sentimentalists eagerly share 
it with him when he comes in Xo the tahU iVkote luncheon, puts 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 17 

his Baedeker down by his plate, and before he has had a bite of 
anything calls out : " Well, they are going to tear down the Ponte 
Vecchio ! " 

The first time that this happened in our hotel, I was still under 
the influence of the climate ; but I resolved to visit the Ponte Vec- 
chio with no more delay, lest they should be going to tear it down 
that afternoon. It was not that I cared a great deal for the bridge 
itself, but my accumulating impressions of Florentine history had 
centred about it as the point where that history really began to 
be historic. I had formed the idea of a little dramatic opening for 
my sketches there, with Buondelmonte riding in from his villa to 
meet his bride, and all that spectral train of GhibeUine and Guelphic 
tragedies behind them on the bridge; and it appeared to me that 
this could not be managed if the bridge were going to be torn 
down. I trembled for my cavalcade, ignominiously halted on the 
other side of the Amo, or obliged to go roimd and come in on some 
other bridge without regard to the fact ; and at some personal incon- 
venience I hurried off to the Ponte Vecchio. I could not see that 
the preparations for its destruction had begun, and I believe they 
are still threatened only in the imagination of sentimental Anglo- 
Saxons. The omnibuses were following each other over the bridge 
in the peaceful succession of so many horse-cars to Cambridge, and 
the ugly httle jewellers' booths glittered in their wonted security on 
either hand all the way across. The carriages, the carts, the foot- 
passengers were swarming up and down from the thick turmoil of 
Por San Maria; and the bridge did not respond with the sUghtest 
tremor to the heel clandestinely stamped upon it for a final test of 
its stabihty. 

But the alarm I had suffered was no doubt useful, for it was after 
this that I really began to be serious with my material, as I found it 
everywhere in the streets and the books, and located it from one to 
the other. Even if one has no literary designs upon the facts, that 
is incomparably the best way of dealing with the past At home, 
in the closet, one may read history, but one can realize it, as if it 

were something personally experienced, only on the spot where 

2 



18 TUSCAN CITIES, 

it was lived. This seems to me the prime use of travel ; and to 
create the reader a partner in the enterprise and a sharer in its 
realization seems the sole excuse for books of travel, now when mod- 
em facilities have abolished hardship and danger and adventure, 
and nothing is more likely to happen to one in Florence than in 
Fitchburg. 

In this pursuit of the past, the inquirer will often surprise himself 
in the possession of a genuine emotion ; at moments the illustrious 
or pathetic figures of other days will seem to walk before him un- 
mocked by the grotesque and burlesquing shadows we all cast while 
in the flesh. I will not swear it, but it would take little to persuade 
me that I had vanishing glimpses of many of these figures in Flor- 
ence. One of the advantages of this method is that you have your 
historical personages in a sort of picturesque contemporaneity with 
one another and with yourself, and you imbue them all with the 
sensibilities of our own time. Perhaps this is not an advantage, but 
it shows what may be done by the imaginative faculty ; and if we 
do not judge men by ourselves, how are we to judge them at all ? 

IX. 

I TOOK some pains with my Florentines, first and last, I will con- 
fess it I went quite back with them to the lilies that tilted all over 
the plain where they founded their city in the dawn of history, and 
that gave her that flowery name of hers. I came down with them 
from Fiesole to the first marts they held by the Amo for the conven- 
ience of the merchants who did not want to climb that long hill to 
the Etruscan citadel ; and I built my wooden hut with the rest hard 
by the Ponte Vecchio, which was an old bridge a thousand years 
before Gaddi's structure. I was with them all through that dim 
turmoil of wars, martyrdoms, pestilences, heroisms, and treasons for 
a thousand years, feeling their increasing purpose of municipal free- 
dom and hatred of the one-man power {U govemo d'un solo) alike 
under Romans, Huns, Longobards, Franks, and Germans, till in the 
eleventh century they marched up against their mother city, and 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 19 

destroyed Fiesole, leaving nothing standing but the fortress, the 
cathedral, and the Caffe Aurora, where the visitor lunches at this 
day, and has an incomparable view of Florence in the distance. 
When, in due time, the proud citizens began to go out from their 
gates and tumble their castles about the ears of the Germanic counts 
and barons in the surrounding country, they had my sympathy 
almost to the point of active co-operation ; though I doubt now if we 
did well to let those hornets come into the town and build other 
nests within the walls, where they continued nearly as pestilent as 
ever. Still, so long as no one of them came to the top permanently, 
there was no danger of the one-man power we dreaded, and we could 
adjust our arts, our industries, our finances to the state of street war- 
fare, even if it lasted, as at one time, for forty years. I was as much 
opposed as Dante himself to the extension of the national limits, 
though I am not sure now that our troubles came from acquiring 
territory three miles away, beyond the Ema, and I could not trace 
the bitterness of partisan feeling even to the annexation of Prato, 
whither it took me a whole hour to go by the steam-tram. But 
when the factions were divided under the names of Guelph and 
Ghibelline, and subdivided again into Bianchi and Neri, I was always 
of the Guelph and the Bianchi party, for it seemed to me that these 
wished the best to the commonwealth, and preserved most actively 
the traditional fear and hate of the one-man power. I believed 
heartily in the wars against Pisa and Siena, though afterward, when 
I visited those cities, I took their part against the Florentines, per- 
haps because they were finally reduced by the Medici, — a family I 
opposed from the very first, uniting with any faction or house that 
contested its rise. They never deceived me when they seemed to 
take the popular side, nor again when they voluptuously favored the 
letters and arts, inviting the city full of Greeks to teach them. I 
mourned all through the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent over the 
subjection of the people, never before brought under the one-man 
power, and flattered to their undoing by the splendors of the city 
and the state he created for him. When our dissolute youth went 
singing his obscene songs through the moonlit streets, I shuddered 



20 TUSCAN CITIES, 

with a good Piagnone's abhorrence ; and I heard one morning with 
a stem and solemn joy that the great Frate had refused absolution to 
the dying despot who had refused freedom to Florence. Those were 
great days for one of my thinking, when Savonarola realized the old 
Florentine ideal of a free commonwealth, with the Medici banished, 
the Pope defied, and Christ king ; days incredibly dark and terrible, 
when the Frate paid for his good-will to us with his life, and suffered 
by the Eepublic which he had restored. Then the famous siege 
came, the siege of fifteen months, when Papist and Lutheran united 
under one banner against us, and treason did what all the forces of 
the Empire had failed to effect Yet Florence, the genius of the 
great democracy, never showed more glorious than in that supreme 
hour, just before she vanished forever, and the Medici bastard en- 
tered the city out of which Florence had died, to be its liege lord 
where no master had ever been openly confessed before. I could 
follow the Florentines intelligently through all till that ; but then, 
what suddenly became of that burning desire of equality, that deadly 
jealousy of a tyrant's domination, that love of country surpassing the 
love of life ? It is hard to reconcile ourselves to the belief that the 
right can be beaten, that the spirit of a generous and valiant people 
can be br oken ; b ut this is what seems again afid'figaih to happen in 
iistory, though never so signally, so spectacularly, as in Florence 
when the Medici were restored. After that there were conspiracies 
and attempts of individuals to throw off the yoke ; but in the great 
people, the prostrate body of the old democracy, not a throe of revolt 
Had they outlived the passion of their youth for liberty, or were they 
sunk in despair before the odds arrayed against them ? I did not 
know what to do with the Florentines from this point ; they mystified 
me, silently suffering imder the Medici for two hundred years, and 
then sleeping under the Lorrainese for another century, to awake in 
our own time the most polite, the most agreeable of the Italians per- 
haps, but the most languid. They say of themselves, "We lack 
initiative ; " and the foreigner most disposed to confess his ignorance 
cannot help having heard it said of them by other Italians that 
while the Turinese, Genoese, and Milanese, and even the Venetians, 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 21 

excel them in industrial enterprise, they are less even than the 
Neapolitans in intellectual activity ; and that when the capital was 
removed to Rome they accepted adversity almost with indifference, 
and resigned themselves to a second place in everything. I do 
not know whether this is true; there are some things against it, 
as that the Florentine schools are confessedly the best in Italy, 
and that it would be hard anywhere in that country or another 
to match the group of scholars and writers who form the Univer- 
sity of Florence. These are not all Florentines, but they live in 
Florence, where almost any one would choose to live if he did not 
live in Loudon, or Boston, or New York, or Helena, Montana T. 
There is no more comfortable city in the world, I fancy. But you 
cannot paint comfort so as to interest the reader of a book of 
travel. Even the lack of initiative in a people who conceal their 
adversity under very good clothes, and have abolished beggary, 
cannot be made the subject of a graphic sketch; one must go 
to their past for that 

X. 

Yet if the reader had time, I would like to linger a little on our 
way down to the Via Borgo Santi Apostoli, where it branches off 
into the Middle Ages out of Via Tomabuoni, not far from Vieusseux's 
Circulating Library. For Via Tomabuoni is charming, and merits 
to be obser\'ed for the ensemble it offers of the contemporary Floren- 
tine expression, with its alluring shops, its confectioners and cafes, 
its florists and milliners, its dandies and tourists, and, ruggedly 
massing up out of their midst, the mighty bulk of its old Strozzi 
Palace, mediaeval, sombre, superb, tremendously impressive of the 
days when really a man's house was his castla Everywhere in 
Florence the same sort of contrast presents itself in some degree ; but 
nowhere quite so dramatically as here, where it seems expressly con- 
trived for the sensation of the traveller when he arrives at the Amer- 
ican banker's with his letter of credit the first morning, or comes 
to the British pharmacy for his box of quinine pills. It is eminently 



22 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



the street of the tourista, who are always baunting it on some 
errand. The best shops are here, and the most English is spoken ; 
you hear our tongue spoken almost as commonly as Italian and 
much more loudly, both from the chest and throi^h the nose, whether 
the one is advanced with British firmness to divide the groups of civil 
and military loiterers on the narrow pavement before the confectioner 
Giacosa's, or the other is flattened with American curiosity against 
the panes of the jewellers' windows. There is not here the glitter of 
mosaics which fatigues the eye on the Lungamo or in Via Borgog- 
nissanti, nor the white glare of new statuary — or statuettary, rather 
— which tenders other streets impassable ; but there is a sobered 
richness in the display, and a local character in the prices which will 
sober the purchaser, 

Florence is not well provided with spaces for the ont-door lounging 
which Italian leisure loves, and you must go to the Cascine for much 
Florentine fashion if you want it; 
but sometliing of it is always rolling 
down through Via Tornabuoni in its 
carriage at the proper hour of the 
day, and something more is always 
standing before Giacosa's, English- 
tailored, Italian-mannered, to bow, 
and smile, and comment I was 
glad that the sort of swell whom I 
used to love in the Piazza at Venice 
abounded in the narrower limits of 
Via Tornabuoni. I was afraid he 
was dead; but he graced the curb- 
stone there with the same lOy-like 
disoccupation and the same sweet- 
ness of aspect which made the Pro- 
curatie Nuove like a garden. He 
was not without his small dog or his 
cane held to his mouth ; he was very, very patient and kind with 
the aged crone who plays the part of Florentine flower-girl in Via 




. FLORENTINE FU)WBR-BniL. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 



23 



Tornabuooi, and whom I after saw aiming witt uncertain eye a 
bonttmniire of violets at his coat-lapel ; there was the same sort of 
calm, heavy-eyed beauty looking out at him from her ice or coffee 
through the vast pane of the confectioner's window, that stared 
epbinx-like in her mystery from a cushioned comer of Florian's; 
and the officers went by with tinkling spurs and sabres, and clicking 
boot-heels, differing iu nothing but their Italian uniforms and com- 
plexions from the blonde Austrian military of those far-off days. I 
often wondered who 
or what those beauti- 
ful swells might be, 
and now I rather won- 
der that I did not ask 
some one who could 
tell me. But perhaps 
it was not important; 
perhaps it might even 
have impaired their 
value in the picture of 
a conscientious artist 
who can now leave 
them, without a 
qualm, to be imagined 
as rich and noble as 
the reader likes. Not 
all the frequenters of ^x noKEi's. 

Doney's famous cafe 

were both, it one could trust hearsay. Besides those who could 
afford to drink the first sprightly runnings of his coffee-pot, it was 
said that there was a genteel cla.ss, who, for the sake of being seen 
to read their newspapers there, paid for the second decantation 
from its grounds, which comprised what was left in the cups from 
the former. This might be true of a race which loves a goodly out- 
side perhaps a little better than we do; but Doney's is not the 
Doney's of old days, nor its coffee so very good at first hand. Tet if 




24 TUSCAN CITIES. 

that sort of self-sacrifice goes on in there, I do not object ; it con- 
tinues the old Latin tradition of splendor and hunger which runs 
through so many pleasant books, and is as good in its way as a 
b^gar at the gate of a palace. It is a contrast ; it flatters the reader 
who would be incapable of it ; and let us have it. It is one of the 
many contrasts in Florence which I spoke of, and not all of which 
there is time to point out But if you would have the full effect of 
the grimness and rudeness of the Strozzi Palace (drolly parodied, by 
the way, in a structure of the same street which is like a Strozzi 
Palace on the stage), look at that bank of flowers at one corner of 
its base, — roses, carnations, jonquils, great Florentine anemones, — 
laying their delicate cheeks against the savage blocks of stone, rent 
and burst from their quarry, and set here with their native rudeness 
untamed by hammer or chisel. 

XL 

TnK human jmssions were wrought almost as primitive into the 
civic Htnictun». of Florence, down in the thirteenth century, which you 
will liiid with iiui at the bottom of the Borgo Santi Apostoli, if you 
like to come, 'i'here ami thereabouts dwelt the Buondelmonti, the 
Amidci, the Ubtirti, the Lamberti, and other noble families, in fast- 
ncHHCH of Htouc a 11(1 iron as formidable as the castles from which their 
aiiceHt(»rs were dislodged when the citizens went out into the country 
around Florence, and dcHtroyed their strongholds and obliged them 
to come intt) the city ; and thence from their casements and towers 
they carried on their jirivate wars as conveniently as ever, descend- 
ing into the streets, and battling about among the peaceful industries 
of the vicinity for generations. It must have been inconvenient for 
the industries, but so far as one can understand, they suffered it just 
as a Kentucky community now suffers the fighting out of a family 
feud in its streets, and philosophically gets \mder shelter when the 
shooting begins. It does not seem to have been objected to some of 
these palaces that they had vaulted passageways under their first 
stories, provided with trap-doors to let the besieged pour hot water 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 25 

down on the passers below; these avenues were probably strictly 
private, and the citizens did not use them at times when family 
feeling ran high. In fact, there could have been but little coming 
and gomg about these houses for any who did not belong in theuL 
A whole quarter, covering the space of several American city blocks, 
would be given up to the palaces of one family and its adherents, 
in a manner which one can hardly understand without seeing it. 
The Peruzzi, for example, enclosed a Roman amphitheatre with their 
palaces, which still follow in structure the circle of the ancient edi- 
fice ; and the Peruzzi were rather peaceable people, with less occasion 
for fighting-room than many other Florentine families, — far less than 
the Buondelmonti, Uberti, Amidei, Lamberti, Gherardini, and others, 
whose domestic fortifications seem to have occupied all that region 
lying near the end of the Ponte Vecchio. They used to fight from 
their towers on three corners of Por San Maria above the heads of 
the people passing to and from the bridge, and must have occasioned 
a great deal of annoyance to the tourists of that day. Nevertheless, 
they seem to have dwelt in very tolerable enmity together till one 
day when a Florentine gentleman invited all the noble youth of the 
city to a banquet at his villa, where, for their greater entertainment, 
there was a bufifoon playing his antics. This poor soul seems not to 
have been a person of better taste than some other humorists, and 
he thought it droll to snatch away the plate of Uberto degl* Infan- 
gati, who had come with Buondelmonte, at which Buondelmonte 
became furious, and resented the insult to his friend, probably in 
terms that disabled the politeness of those who laughed, for it is 
recorded that Oddo di Arrigo dei Fifanti, "a proud and resolute 
man," became so incensed as to throw a plate and its contents into 
Uberto's face. The tables were overturned, and Buondelmonte 
stabbed Oddo with a knife ; at which point the party seems to have 
broken up, and Oddo returned to Florence from Campi, where the 
banquet was given, and called a family council to plot vengeance. 
But a temperate spirit prevailed in this senate, and it was decided 
that Buondelmonte, instead of dying, should marry Oddo's niece, 
Reparata degli Amidei, differently described by history as a plain 



26 TUSCAN CITIES. 

girl, and as one of the most beautiful and accomplished damsels 
of the city, of a very noble and consular family. Buondelmonte, 
a handsome and gallant cavalier, but a weak will, as appears 
from all that happened, agreed to this, and everything was happily 
arranged, till one day when he was riding by the house of Forese 
DonatL Monna Gualdrada Donati was looking out of the win- 
dow, and possibly expecting the young man. She called to him, 
and when he had alighted and come into the house she began to 
mock him. 

" Cheer up, young lover ! Your wedding-day is coming, and you 
will soon be happy with your bride." 

"You know very well," said Buondelmonte, "that this marriage 
was a thing I could not get out of." 

" Oh, indeed !'' cried Monna Gualdrada. "As if you did not care 
for a pretty wife ! " And then it was, we may suppose, that she 
hinted those things she is said to have insinuated against Separata's 
looks and her fitness otherwise for a gentleman like Buondelmonte. 
" If I had known you were in such haste to marry — but God's will 
be done I We cannot have things as we like in this world ! " And 
Machiavelli says that the tiling Monna Gualdrada had set her heart 
on was Buondelmonte's marriage with her daughter, " but either 
through carelessness, or because she thought it would do any time, 
she had not mentioned it to any one." She added, probably with an 
affected carelessness, that the Donati were of rather better lineage 
than the Amidei, though she did not know whether he would have 
thought her Beatrice as pretty as Beparata. Then suddenly she 
brought him face to face with the girl, radiantly beautiful, the most 
beautiful in Florence. "This is the wife I was keeping for you," 
said Monna Gualdrada ; and she must have known her ground well, 
for she let the poor young man understand that her daughter had 
long been secretly in love with him. Malespini tells us that Buon- 
delmonte was tempted by a diabolical spirit to break faith at this 
sight ; the devil accounted for a great many things then to which 
we should not now, perhaps, assign so black an origin. "And I 
would very willingly marry her, ' he faltered, " if I were not bound 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 27 

by that solemn promise to the Amidei ; " and M onna Gualdrada now 
plied the weak soul with such arguments and reasons, in such wise 
as women can use them, that he yielded, and giving his hand to 
Beatrice, he did not rest till they were married. Then the Amidei, 
the Uberti, the Lamberti, and the Fifanti, and others who were out- 
raged in their cousinship or friendship by this treachery and insult 
to Separata, assembled in the church of Santa Maria sopra Porta to 
take counsel again for vengeance. Some were of opinion that Buon- 
delmonte should be cudgelled, and thus publicly put to shame; others 
that he should be wounded and disfigured in the face ; but Mosca 
Lamberti rose and said : " There is no need of all these words. If 
you strike him or disfigure him, get your graves ready to hide in. 
Cosa fatia capo ha!"* With which saying he ad\Tsed them to make 
an end of Buondelmonte altogether. His words had the acceptance 
that they would now have in a Kentucky family council, and they 
agreed to kill Buondelmonte when he should come to fetch home hia 
bride. On Easter morning, in the year 1215, they were waiting for 
him in the house of the Amidei, at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio ; 
and when they saw him come riding, richly dressed in white, on a 
white palfrey, over the bridge, and "fancying,** says Machiavelli, 
" that such a wrong as breaking an engagement could be so easily 
forgotten," they sallied out to the statue of Mars which used to be 
there. As Buondelmonte reached the group, — it must have been, 
for all his courage, with a face as white as his mantle, — Schiatta 
degli Uberti struck him on the head with a stick, so that he dropped 
stunned from his palfrey. Then Oddo di Arrigo, whom he had 
stabbed, and Mosca Lamberti, who had pronounced his sentence, and 
Lambertaccio Amidei, " and one of the Gangolandi," ran and cut his 
throat. 

There arose a terrible tumult in the city, and the girl whose fatal 
beauty had wrought this horror, governing herself against her 
woman's weakness with supernatural strength, mounted the funeral 
car beside her lover s body, and taking his head into her lap, with 
his blood soaking her bridal robes, was drawn through the city 
everywhere, crying for vengeance. 



28 , TUSCAN CITIES. 

From that hour, they tell us, the factions that had long tormented 
Florence took new names, and those who had sided with the Buon- 
delmonti and the Donati for the Pope against the Emperor became 
Guelphs, while the partisans of the Amidei and the Empire became 
Ghibellines, and began that succession of reciprocal banishments 
which kept a good fourth of the citizens in exile for three hundred 
years. 

XII. 

What impresses one in this and the other old Florentine stories is 
the circumstantial minuteness with which they are told, and their 
report has an air of simple truth very different from the literary 
factitiousness which one is tempted to in following them. After six 
centuries the passions are as living, the characters as distinct, as if 
the thing happened yesterday. Each of the persons stands out a 
very man or woman, in that clear, strong light of the early day 
which they move through. From the first the Florentines were able 
to hit each other ofif with an accuracy which comes of the southern 
habit of living much together in public, and one cannot question 
these lineaments. Buondelmonte, Mosca Lamberti, Monna Gual- 
drada, and even that " one of the Gangolandi," how they possess the 
imagination ! Their palaces still rise there in the grim, narrow streets, 
and seem no older in that fine Florentine air than houses of fifty 
years ago elsewhere. They were long since set apart, of course, to 
other uses. The chief palace of the Buondelmonti is occupied by an 
insurance company ; there is a little shop for the sale of fruit and 
vegetables niched into the grand Gothic portal of the tower, and 
one is pushed in among the pears and endives by the carts which 
take up the whole street from wall to wall in passing. The Lamberti 
palace was confiscated by the Guelph party, and was long used by 
the Art of Silk for its guild meetings. Now it is a fire-engine house, 
where a polite young lieutenant left his architectural drawings to 
show us some frescos of Giotto lately uncovered there over an old 
doorway. Over a portal outside the arms of the guild were beauti- 
fully carved by Donatello, as you may still see ; and in a lofty angle 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 29 

of the palace the exquisite loggia of the family shows its columns 
and balustrade against the blue sky. 

I say blue sky for the sake of the color, and because that is 
expected of one in mentioning the Florentine sky; but, as a matter 
of fact. I do not believe it was blue half a dozen days during the 
winter of 1882-83. The prevailing weather was gray, and down in 
the passages about the bases of these mediaeval structures the sun 
never stnick, and the point of the mediaeval nose must always have 
been very cold from the end of November till the b^inning of 
ApriL 

The tradition of an older life continues into the present every- 
where ; only in Italy it is a little more evident, and one realizes in 
the discomfort of the poor, who have succeeded to these dark and 
humid streets, the discomfort of the rich who once inhabited them, 
and whose cast-off manners have been left there. Monna Gualdrada 
would not now call out to Buondelmonte riding under her window, 
and make him come in and see her beautiful daughter ; but a woman 
of the class which now peoples the old Donati houses might do it. 

I walked through the Borgo Santi Apostoli for the last time late 
in March, and wandered round in the winter, still lingering in that 
wonderful old nest of palaces, before I came out into the cheerful 
bustle of Por San Maria, the street which projects the glitter of its 
jewellers* shops quite across the Ponte Vecchio. One of these, on 
the left comer, just before you reach the bridge, is said to occupy the 
site of the loggia of the Amidei ; and if you are young and strong, 
you may still see them waiting there for Buondelmonte. But my 
eyes are not very good any more, and I saw only the amiable modem 
Florentine crowd, swollen by a vast number of English and American 
tourists, who at this season begin to come up from Bome. There are 
a good many antiquarian and bricabrac shops in Por San Maria; 
but the towers which the vanished families used to fight from have 
been torn down, so that there is comparatively little danger from 
a chance bolt there. 



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A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 31 

ing privileges long after those of their friends and acquaintances 
remaining in Florence had been cut ofif. The city annals would no 
doubt tell us what end the Amidei and the Lamberti made ; from 
the Uberti came the great Farinata, who, in exile with the other 
Ghibellines, refused with magnificent disdain to join them in the 
destruction of Florence. But the history of the Buondelmonti has 
become part of the history of the world. One branch of the family 
migrated from Tuscany to Corsica, where they changed their name 
to Buonaparte, and from them came the great Napoleon. As to 
that "one of the (Jangolandi," he teases me into vain conjecture, 
lurking in the covert of his family name, an elusive personality 
which I wish some poet would divine for us. The Donati afterward 
made a marriage which brought them into as lasting remembrance 
as the Buondelmonti; and one visits their palaces for the sake of 
Dante rather than Napoleon. They enclose, with the Alighieri 
house in which the poet was bom, the little Piazza Donati, which 
you reach by going up the Corso to the Borgo d^li Albizzi, and 
over against them on that street the house of the Portinari stood, 
where Beatrice lived, and where it must have been that she first 
appeared to the rapt boy who was to be the world's Dante, " clothed 
in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, garlanded 
and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age." The 
palace of the Salviati — in which Cosimo I. was bom, and in which his 
father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, taught the child courage by fling- 
ing him from an upper window into the arms of a servitor below — 
has long occupied the site of the older edifice ; and the Piazza Donati, 
whatever dignity it may once have had, is now nothing better than 
a shabby court. The back windows of the tall houses surrounding 
it look into it when not looking into one another, and see there a 
butcher's shop, a smithy, a wagon-maker's, and an inn for peasants 
with stabling. On a day when I was there, a wash stretched flutter- 
ing across the rear of Dante's house, and the banner of a green vine 
trailed from a loftier balcony. From one of the Donati casements 
an old woman in a purple knit jacket was watching a man repainting 
an omnibus in front of the wagon-shop ; a great number of canaries 



32 TUSCAN CITIES, 

Ming in cage* all round the piazza ; a wrinkled peasant with a faded 
$[r^^ f'MUm uml/rella under hix arm gave the place an effect of rustic 
mymm ; and a diligence that two playful stable-boys were long in 
bit/;hing up drove jingling out, with its horses in brass-studded head- 
nUilhf ifHht where I stood under the fine old arches of the gateway. 
I hdd nothing to object to all this, nor do I suppose that this last 
fiiaUi fft hiA old neigh l>orhorxl much vexes the poet now. It was 
i^utufrttily pidurif^iue, with a sort of simple cheerfulness of aspect, 
tli^; walk of the houses in the little piazza being of different shades 
f/f l/fj/f, wjtii window-shutters in light green opening back upon them 
from i\um(i ras^rments where the shrieking canaries hung. The place 
lia/l that t^;ne witich charar;terizes so many city perspectives in Italy, 
and ttH]H'j:'ui\\y Horence, — which makes the long stretch of Via 
JJ</rg^ignij*Kanti so smiling, and Ijathes the sweep of Lungamo in a 
sunny glow wholly indejjendent of the state of the weather. As you 
stroll ahmg oru; of these light-yellow avenues you say to yourself, 
"Ah, thin is Florence!" And then suddenly you plunge into the 
gray-lirown gloom of such a street as the Borgo degli Albizzi, with 
lofty palHces (;limbing in vain toward the sun, and frowning upon 
the stnM!t below with fronts of stone, rude or sculptured, but always 
HUini and cold ; and then that, too, seems the only Florence. They 
are in fact equally Florentine; but I suppose one expresses the 
stormy yet poetic life of the old commonwealth, and the other the 
Htirene, sunny commonplace of the Lorrainese regime. 

I was not sorry to find this the tone of Piazza Donati, into which 
1 had eddied from the austerity of Borgo degli Albizzi. It really 
belongs to a much remoter period than the older-looking street, — 
to the Florence that lingers architecturally yet in certain narrow 
avt^nues to the Mercato Vecchio, where the vista is broken by in- 
numerable i)eut-roofs, balconies, and cornices ; and a throng of 
oi>eratic figures in slouch hats and short cloaks are so very improba- 
bly l)ent on any realistic business, that they seem to bo masquerading 
thon^ in the mysterious fumes of the cook-shops. Yet I should be 
loath, for no very tangible reason, to have Piazza Donati like n\w of 
these avenues or in any wise different from what it is; cc^rtainly I 



A FZORSyTINB MOSAIC. 



35 



should not like to have the hack of Dante's house smartened up like 
the front, which looks into the Piazza San Martiuo. I do not com- 
plain that the restoration is bad ; it is even very good, for all that 
I know ; but the unrestored back is better, and I have a general 
feeling titat the past ought to be allowed to tumble down in peace, 
though I have no doubl that whenever this happened 1 should be 
one of the first to cry 
out agamst the barba- 
rous indifference that 
suffered it. I dare 
say tliat in a few him- 
dred years, when the fact uf 
the restoration is forgotten, the 
nineteenth-century medievalism of 
Dante's house will be acceptable 
to the most fastidious toui^ 
ist, I tried to get into the 
house, which is open to the 
public at certain Ijours on cer- 
tain days, but I always came 
at ten on Saturday, when I ought 
to have come at two on Monday, or 
the like ; and so at last I had to con- 
tent myself with the interior of the httle 
church of San Alartiuo, where Dante v 
raarried, half a stone's-cast from where 
he was bom. The church was closed, 
and I asked a cobbler, who had brought 

his work to the tlinshold of his shop hard by, for the sake of the 
light, where the sacristan lived. He answered me unintelligibly, 
without leaving off for a moment bis furious hammering at the 
shoe in his lap. He must have been asked that question a great 
many times, and I do not know that I should have taken any 
more trouble in his place ; but a woman m a fruit^tall next door 
had pity on me, knowing doubtless that I was interested in San 





TUSCAir CITIES. 



MartiLct on account of the wedding, and si;iit me t« No. I. But 
No, 1 was a house so imprubalily genteel that I had not the courage 
Ui ring i Olid I asked the grocer alongside for a better direction. He 
did not know how to give it, but he sent lue to the local apothecary, 
wlio in turn sent me to another numbei. Here another shoemaker, 
friendlier or idler than the first, left off gossiping with some friends 
of iiis, and showed me the right door at last in the rear of 
the clmreh. My pull ut the bell shot the sacristan's head 
out of the fourth-story window in the old way that 
always delighted me, and I i>erceived even at that 
distance tiiat he was a man x>eriwtually fired with 
Keal for his church hy the curiosity of strangers. I 
could certainly see the church, yes ; lie would 
come down instantly and open it from tlie in- 
side if I would do liim the grace to close liis 
1 door from the outside. I complied will- 
ingly, and in another moment I stood 
within the little temple, where, upon the 
whole, for the sake of the emotion that 
divine genius, majestic sorrow, and im- 
mortal fame can accumulate within 
one's average commonplaceness. it 
is as well to stand as any other 
spot on earth. It b a very little 
place, with one-third of the space 
divided from the rest hy an iron- 
tipped wooden screen. Behind 
this is the simple altar, and here 
Dante Alighieri and Gemma Do- 
door op dastk's norsE. nati were married. In whatever 
state the walls were then, they 
are now plainly whitewashed, though in one of the lunettes form- 
ing a sort of frieze half round the top was a fresco said to repre- 
sent the espousals of the poet. The church was continually visited, 
the sacristan told me, by all sorts of foreigners, English, French, 




■ifa 



JHAi 



A FLORfiyriSB MOSAIC. 



87 



Germans, Spaniards, eveii Auiericans, but especially Russians, the 
most impassioned of all for it. One of this nation, one liiissian 
eminent even among bia impassioned race, fljient several hours in 
looking at that picture, taking his stand at the fool of the stairs 
by which the sacris- 
tan descended from 
his lodging into the 
church. He showed 
me the very sp"t ; 1 
do not know why, 
unless he took me fur 
unotlier Russian, ainl 
thought my pride in 
a compatriot so im- 
passioned might have 
some effect iiiKin the 
tix 1 was to give him. 
He was a credulous 
sacristmi. and I can- 
not find any evidence 
in Mias Horner's 
faithful and trusty 
" Walks iu Florence " 
that there is a fresco 
in that chureh repre- 
senting the espousals of Dante. The paintings in the lunettes are 
by a pupil of Masaccio's, and deal with the good works of the 
twelve Good Men of San Martino. who, ever since 1441, have had 
charge of a fund tor the iBlief of such shamefaced poor as were 
unwilling to ask alms. I*rince Strozzi and uth'-t patricians of Flor- 
eaice are at present among these Good Men, so the sacristan said; 
and there is an iron contribution-box at the church door, with an 
inscription promising any giver indulgence, snccesaively guaranl«ed 
by four popes, of twenty-four hundred years ; which seemed really to 
nioke it worth one's wliile. 




CHORCR WHERK DAXTE 



38 TUSCAN CITIES. 

XIV. 

In visiting these scenes, one cannot but wonder at the small com- 
pass in which the chief facts of Dante's young life, suitably to the 
home-keeping character of the time and race, occurred. There he 
was bom, there he was bred, and there he was married to Gemma 
Donati after Beatrice Portinari died. Beatrice's father lived just 
across the way from the Donati houses, and the Donati houses ad- 
joined the house where Dante grew up with his widowed mother. 
He saw Beatrice in her father's house, and he must often have been 
in the house of Manetto de' Donati as a child. As a youth he no 
doubt made love to Gemma at her casement ; and here they must 
have dwelt after they were married, and she began to lead him a 
restless and unhappy life, being a fretful and foolish woman, by the 
accounts. 

One realizes all this there with a distinctness which the clear- 
ness of the Italian atmosphere permits. In that air events do not 
seem to age any more than edifices; a life, like a structure, of six 
hundred years ago seems of yesterday, and one feels toward the 
Donati as if that troublesome family were one's own contemporaries. 
The evil they brought on Dante was not domestic only, but they 
and their party were the cause of his exile and his barbarous sen- 
tence in the process of the evil times which brought the Bianchi and 
Neri to Florence. 

There is in history hardly anything so fantastically malicious, 
so tortuous, so perverse, as the series of chances that ended in 
his banishment. Nothing could apparently have been more re- 
mote from him, to all human perception, than that quarrel of a 
Pistoja family, in which the children of Messer Cancelliere's first 
wife, Bianca, called themselves Bianchi, and the children of the 
second called themselves Neri, simply for contrary-mindedness' sake. 
But let us follow it, and see how it reaches the poet and finally 
delivers him over to a life of exile and misery. One of these Can- 
cellieri of Pistoja falls into a quarrel with another and wounds him 
with his sword. They are both boys, or hardly more, and the father 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 39 

of the one who struck the blow bids him go to his kinsmen and b^ 
their forgiveness. But when he comes to them the father of the 
wounded youth takes him out to the stable, and striking off the 
offending hand on a block there, flings it into his face. " Go back to 
vour father and tell him that hurts are healed with iron, not with 
words." 

The news of this cruel deed throws all Pistoja into an in- 
comprehensible medieval frenzy. The citizens arm and divide 
themselves into Bianchi and Neri ; the streets become battle-fields. 
Finally some cooler heads ask Florence to interfere. Florence is 
always glad to get a finger into the affairs of her neighbors, and to 
quiet Pistoja she calls the worst of the Bianchi and Neri to her. 
Her own factions take promptly to the new names; the Guelphs 
have long ruled the city ; the Ghibellines have been a whole genera- 
tion in exile. But the Neri take up the old Ghibelline role of 
invoking foreign intervention, with Corso Donati at their head, — a 
brave man, but hot, proud, and lawless. Dante is of the Bianchi 
party, which is that of the liberals and patriots, and in this quality 
he goes to Bome to plead with the Pope to use his good offices for 
the peace and freedom of Florence. In his absence he is banished 
for two years and heavily fined ; then he is banished for life, and 
will be burned if he comes back. His party comes into power, 
but the sentence is never repealed, and in the despair of exile 
Dante, too, invokes the stranger's help. He becomes Nero; he 
dies Ghibellina 

I walked up from the other Donati houses through the Via Borgo 
d^li Albizzi to the Piazza San Pier Maggiore to look at the trun- 
cated tower of Corso Donati, in which he made his last stand against 
the people when summoned by their Podesta to answer for all his 
treasons and seditions. He fortified the adjoining houses, and em- 
battled the whole neighborhood, galling his besiegers in the streets 
below with showers of stones and arrows. They set fire to his for- 
tress, and then he escaped through the city wall into the open 
country, but was hunted down and taken by his enemies. On the 
way back to Florence he flung himself from his horse, that they 



40 TUSCAN CITIES. 

might not have the pleasure of triumphing with him through the 
streets, and the soldier in charge of him was surprised into running 
him through with his lance, as Corso intended. This is the story 
that some tell ; but others say that his horse ran away, dragging him 
over the road by his foot, which caught in his stirrup, and the guard 
killed him, seeing him already hurt to death. Dante favors the 
latter version of his end, and sees him in hell, torn along at the heels 
of a beast, whose ceaseless flight is toward " the valley where never 
mercy is." 

The poet had once been the friend as well as brother-in-law of Corso, 
but had turned against him when Corso's lust of power threatened 
the liberties of Florence. You must see this little space of the city 
to understand how intensely narrow and local the great poet was in 
his hates and loves, and how considerably he has populated hell and 
purgatory with his old neighbors and acquaintance. Among those 
whom he puts in Paradise was that sister of Corso's, the poor Pic- 
carda, whose story is one of the most pathetic and pious legends of 
that terrible old Florence. The vain and worldly life which she saw 
around her had turned her thoughts toward heaven, and she took 
the veil in the convent of Santa Chiara. Her brother was then at 
Bologna, but he repaired straightway to Florence with certain of his 
followers, forced the convent, and dragging his sister forth amid the 
cries and prayers of the nuns, gave her to wife to Bosellino della 
Tosa, a gentleman to whom he had promised her. She, in the bridal 
garments with which he had replaced her nun's robes, fell on her 
knees and implored the succor of her Heavenly Spouse, and suddenly 
her beautiful body was covered with a loathsome leprosy, and in a 
few days she died inviolate. Some will have it that she merely fell 
into a slow infirmity, and so pined away. Corso Donati was the 
brother of Dante's wife, and without ascribing to Gemma more of his 
quality than Piccarda's, one may readily perceive that the poet had 
not married into a comfortable family. 

In the stump of the old tower which I had come to see, I found a 
poulterer's shop, bloody and evil-smelling, and two frowzy girls 
picking chickens. In the wall there is a tablet signed by the Messer 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 41 

Capitaui of the Gnelph Party, forbidding any huckster to sell bis 
wares in that square under pain of a certain fine. The place now 
naturally abounds in them. 

The Messer Capitani are all dead, wiUi their party, and the 
hucksters are no longer afraid. 



JOBN OF bologna's DEVIL. 




TUSCAN CITIES. 



XV. 



■OR my part, I find it hard to 
be serious about the tragedy o£ 
a people who seem, as one 
looks back at them in their 
history, tu have lived in such 
perpetual broil as the Floren- 
tines. They cease to be even 
pathetic; they become absurd, 
aod t«mpt the observer to a cer- 
tain mood of triviality, by their 
indefatigable antics in cutting and 
thrusting, chopping off heads, mutilat- 
ing, burning, and banishing, But I have often thought 
that we must get a false impression of the past by the laws gov- 
erning perspective, in which the remoter objects are inevitably 
pressed together in their auccesaion, and the spaces between are 
ignored. In looking at a painting, these spaces are imagined ; 
but in history, the objects, the events are what alone make their 
appeal, and there seems nothing else. It must always remam for 
the reader to revise his impressions, and rearrange them, so as 
to give some value to conditions as well as to occun-ences. It 
looks very much, at first glance, as if the Florentines had no peace 
from the domination of the Romans to the domination of the MedicL 
But in all that time they liad been growing in wealth, power, the 
arts and letters, and were constantly striving to realize in their state 
the ideal which is still our only political aim, — "a government of 
the people by the people for the people." "Whoever opposed himself, 
his interests or his pride, to that ideal, was destroyed sooner or later; 
and it appears that if there had been no foreign interference, the one- 
man power would never have been fastened on Florence. We must 
account, therefore, not only for seasons of repose not obvious in his- 
tory, but fora measure of success in the realization of her political 
ideal The feudal nobles, forced into the city from their petty 



J 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 43 

sovereignties beyond its gates; the rich merchants and bankers, 
creators and creatures of its prosperity ; the industrious and power- 
ful guilds of artisans ; the populace of unskilled laborers, — authority 
visited each in turn ; but no class could long keep it from the others, 
and no man from all the rest. The fluctuations were violent enough, 
but they only seem incessant through the necessities of perspective ; 
and somehow, in the most turbulent period, there was peace enough 
for the industries to fruit and the arts to flower. Now and then a 
whole generation passed in which tnere was no upheaval, though it 
must be owned that these generations seem few. A life of the ordi- 
nary compass witnessed so many atrocious scenes, that Dante, who 
peopled his Inferno with his neighbors and fellow-citizens, had but 
to study their manners and customs to give life to his picture. 
Forty years after his exile, when the Florentines rose to drive out 
Walter of Brienne, the Duke of Athens, whom they had made their 
ruler, and who had tried to make himself their master by a series of 
cruel oppressions, they stormed the Palazzo Vecchio, where he had 
taken refuge, and demanded certain of his bloody minions ; and when 
his soldiers thrust one of these out among them, tbey cut him into 
small pieces, and some tore the quivering fragments with their 
teeth. 

XVI. 

The savage lurks so near the surface in every man that a constant 
watch must be kept upon the passions and impulses, or he leaps out 
in his war-paint, and the poor int^ument of civilization that held 
him is flung aside like a useless garment The Florentines were a 
race of impulse and passion, and the mob was merely the frenzy of 
that popular assemblage by which the popular will made itself 
known, the sufirage being a thing as yet imperfectly understood and 
only secondarily exercised. Yet the peacefulest and apparently the 
wholesomest time known to the historians was that which followed 
the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, when the popular mob, having 
defeated the aristocratic leaders of the revolt, came into power, with 
such unquestionable authority that the nobles were debarred from 



44 TUSCAN CITIES. 

office, and punished not only in their own persons, but in kith and 
kin, for oflfences against the life of a plebeian. Five hundred noble 
families were exiled, and of those left, the greater part sued to be 
admitted among the people. This grace was granted them, but upon 
the condition that they must not aspire to office for five years, and 
that if any of them killed or grievously wounded a plebeian, he 
should be immediately and hopelessly re-ennobled; which sounds 
like some fantastic invention of Mr. Frank R Stockton's, and only 
too vividly recalls Lord Tollollevs appeal in " lolanthe : " — 

"Spum not the nobly born 

With love affected, 
Nor treat with virtuous scorn 

The well-connected. 
High rank involves no shame — 
We boast an equal claim 
With him of humble name 

To be respected." 

The world has been ruled so long by the most idle and worthless 
people in it, that it always seems droll to see those who earn the 
money spending it, and those from whom the power comes using it. 
But we who are now tr)ang to offer this ridiculous spectacle to the 
world ought not to laugh at it in the Florentine government of 
1343-46. It seems to have lasted no long time, for at the end of 
three or four years the divine wrath smote Florence with the pest. 
This was to chastise her for her sins, as the chroniclers tell us ; but 
as a means of reform it failed apparently. A hundred thousand of 
the people died, and the rest, demoralized by the terror and enforced 
idleness in which they had lived, abandoned themselves to all man- 
ner of dissolute pleasures, and were much worse than if they had 
never had any pest. This pest, of which the reader will find a lively 
account in Boccaccio's introduction to the " Decamerone," — he was 
able to write of it because, like De Foe, who described the plague of 
London, he had not seen it, — seems rather to have been a blow at 
popular government, if we may judge from the disorders which it 
threw the democratic city into, and the long train of wars and mis- 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 45 

eries that presently followed But few of us are ever suflBciently in 
the divine confidence to be able to say just why this or that thing 
happens, and we are constantly growing more modest about assum- 
ing to know. What is certain is that the one-man power, foreboded 
and resisted from the first in Florence, was at last to possess itself of 
the fierce and jealous city. It showed itself, of course, in a patriotic 
and beneficent aspect at the beginning, but within a generation the 
first memorable Medici had befriended the popular cause and had 
made the weight of his name felt in Florenca From Salvestro de' 
Medici, who succeeded in breaking the power of the Guelph nobles 
in 1382, and, however unwillingly, promoted the Tumult of the 
Ciompi and the rule of the lowest classes, it is a long step to Ave- 
rardo de' Medici, another popular leader in 1421 ; and it is again 
another long step from him to Cosimo de Medici, who got himself 
called the Father of his Country, and died in 1469, leaving her with 
her throat fast in the clutch of his nephew, Lorenzo the Magnificent. 
But it was the stride of destiny, and nothing apparently could 
stay it 

XVII. 

The name of Lorenzo de' Medici is the next name of unrivalled 
greatness to which one comes in Florence after Dante's. The Medici, 
however one may be principled against them, do possess the imagina- 
tion there, and I could not have helped going for their sake to the 
Piazza of the ilercato Vecchio, even if I had not wished to see again 
and again one of the most picturesque and characteristic places in the 
city. As I think of it, the pale, delicate sky of a fair winters day in 
Florence spreads over me, and I seem to stand in the midst of the old 
square, with its mouldering colonnade on one side, and on the other 
its low, irregular roofs, their brown tiles thinly tinted with a growth 
of spindling grass and weeds, green the whole year round. In front 
of me a vast, white old palace springs seven stories into the sunshine, 
disreputably shabby from basement to attic, but beautiful, with the 
rags of a plebeian wash-day caught across it from balcony to balcony, 
as if it had fancied trying to hide its forlomness in theuL Around me 



46 TUSCAN CITIES, 

are peasants aud donkey-carts and Florentines of all sizes and ages ; 
my ears are filled with the sharp din of an Italian crowd, and my nose 
with the smell of immemorial, innumerable market-days, and the 
rank, cutting savor of frying fish and cakes from a score of neighbor- 
ing cook-shops ; but I am happy, — happier than I should probably 
be if I were actually there. Through an archway in the street behind 
me, not far from an admirably tumble-down shop full of bricabrac 
of low degree, all huddled — old bureaus and bedsteads, crockery, 
classic lamps, assorted saints, shovels, flat-irons, and big-eyed madon- 
nas — under a sagging pent-roof, I enter a large court, like Piazza 
DonatL Here the Medici, among other great citizens, had their first 
houses ; and in the narrow street opening out of this court stands 
the little church which was then the family chapel of the Medici, 
after the fashion of that time, where all their marriages, christenings, 
and fimerals took place. In time this highly respectable quarter 
sufiered the sort of social decay which so frequently and so capri- 
ciously aflects highly respectable quarters in all cities ; and it had 
at last fallen so low, in the reign of Cosimo I., that when that grim 
tyrant wished cheaply to please the Florentines by making it a little 
harder for the Jews than for the Christians under him, he shut them 
up in the old court. They had been let into Florence to counteract 
the extortion of the Christian usurers, and upon the condition that 
they would not ask more than twenty per cent interest. How much 
more had been taken by the Christians one can hardly imagine ; but 
if this was a low rate to Florentines, one easily understands how the 
bankers of the city grew rich by lending to the necessitous world 
outside. Now and then they did not get back their principal, and 
Edward III. of England has still an outstanding debt to the house 
of Peruzzi, which he bankrupted in the fourteenth century. The 
best of the Jews left the city rather than enter the Ghetto, and only 
the baser sort remained to its captivity. Whether any of them still 
continue there, I do not know ; but the place has grown more and 
more disreputable, till now it is the home of the forlomest rabble 
I saw in Florence, and if they were not the worst, their looks are 
unjust to them. They were mainly women and children, as the 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 49 

worst classes seem to be everywhere, — I do not know why, — and 
the air was full of the clatter of their feet and tongues, intolerably 
reverberated from the high many-windowed walls of scorbutic brick 
and stucco. These walls were, of course, garlanded with garments 
hung to dry from their casements. It is perpetually washing-day in 
Italy, and the observer, seeing so much linen washed and so little 
clean, is everywhere invited to the solution of one of the strangest 
problems of the Latin civilization. 

The ancient home of the Medici has none of the feudal dignity, 
the baronial pride, of the quarter of the Lamberti and the Buon- 
delmonti ; and, disliking them as I did, I was glad to see it in the 
possession of that squalor, so different from the cheerful and indu^ 
trious thrift of Piazza Donati and the neighborhood of Dante's house. 
No touch of sympathetic poetry relieves the history of that race of 
demagogues and tyrants, who, in their rise, had no thought but to 
aggrandize themselves, and whose only greatness was an apotheosis 
of egotism. It is hard to understand through what law of develop- 
ment, from lower to higher, the Providence which rules the affairs of 
men permitted them supremacy ; and it is easy to understand how 
the better men whom they supplanted and dominated should abhor 
them. They were especially a bitter dose to the proud-stomached 
aristocracy of citizens which had succeeded the extinct Ghibelline 
nobility in Florence ; but, indeed, the three pills which they adopted 
from the arms of their guild of physicians, together with the only 
appellation by which history knows their lineage, were agreeable to 
none who wished their country welL From the first Medici to the 
last, they were nearly all hypocrites or ruffians, bigots or imbeciles ; 
and Lorenzo, who was a scholar and a poet, and the friend of scholars 
and poets, had the genius and science of tyranny in supreme degree, 
though he wore no princely title and assumed to be only the chosen 
head of the commonwealth. 

" Under his rule," says Villari, in his " Life of Savonarola," that 

almost incomparable biography, " all wore a prosperous and contented 

aspect; the parties that had so long disquieted the city were at 

peace ; imprisoned, or banished, or dead, those who would not sub- 

4 



50 TUSCAN CITIES. 

mit to the Medicean domination ; tranquillity and calm were every- 
where. Feasting, dancing, public shows, and games amused the 
Florentine people, who, once so jealous of their rights, seemed to have 
forgotten even the name of liberty. Lorenzo, who took part in all these 
pleasures, invented new ones every day. But among all his inven- 
tions, the most famous was that of the carnival songs {canti cama- 
sdaleschi), of which he composed the first, and which were meant to 
be sung in the masquerades of carnival, when the youthful nobility, 
disguised to represent the Triumph of Death, or a crew of demons, or 
some other caprice of fancy, wandered through the city, filling it 
with their riot. The reading of these songs will paint the corruption 
of the town far better than any other description. To-day, not only 
the youthful nobility, but the basest of the populace, would hold 
them in loathing, and to go singing them through the city would be 
an offence to public decency which could not fail to be punished. 
These things were the favorite recreation of a prince lauded by all 
the world and held up as a model to every sovereign, a prodigy of 
wisdom, a political and literary genius. And such as they called 
him then, many would judge him still," says our author, who ex- 
plicitly warns his readers against Roscoe's "Life of Lorenzo de' 
Medici," as the least trustworthy of all in its characterization. " They 
would forgive him the blood spilt to maintain a dominion unjustly 
acquired by him and his; the disorder wrought in the common- 
wealth; the theft of the public treasure to supply his profligate 
waste ; the shameless vices to which in spite of his feeble health he 
abandoned himself ; and even that rapid and infernal corruption of 
the people, which he perpetually studied with all the force and 
capacity of his souL And all because he was the protector of letters 
and the fine arts ! 

" In the social condition of Florence at that time there was indeed 
a strange contrast. Culture was universally diffused; everybody 
knew Latin and Greek, everybody admired the classics ; many ladies 
were noted for the elegance of their Greek and Latin verses. The 
arts, which had languished since the time of Giotto, revived, and on 
all sides rose exquisite palaces and churches. But artists, scholars. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 51 

politicians, nobles, and plebeians were rotten at heart, lacking in every 
public and private virtue, every moral sentiment. Religion was the 
tool of the government or vile hypocrisy ; they had neither civil, nor 
religious, nor moral, nor philosophic faith ; even doubt feebly asserted 
itself in their souls. A cold indifference to every principle prevailed, 
and those visages full of guQe and subtlety wore a smile of chilly 
superiority and compassion at any sign of enthusiasm for noble and 
generous ideas. They did not oppose the&e or question them, as a 
philosophical sceptic would have done; they simply pitied them. 
. . . But Lorenzo had an exquisite taste for poetry and the arts. . . . 
Having set himself up to protect artists and scholars, his house be- 
came the resort of the most illustrious wits of his time, . . . and 
whether in the meetings under his own roof, or in those of the famous 
Platonic Academy, his own genius shone brilliantly in that elect 
circle. ... A strange life indeed was Lorenzo's. After giving his 
whole mind and soul to the destruction, by some new law, of some 
last remnant of liberty, after pronouncing some fresh sentence of 
ruin or death, he entered the Platonic Academy, and ardently dis- 
cussed virtue and the immortality of the soul ; then sallying forth to 
mingle with the dissolute youth of the city, he sang his carnival 
songs, and abandoned himself to debauchery ; returning home with 
Pulci and PoUtian, he recited verses and talked of poetry ; and to 
each of these occupations he gave himself up as wholly as if it were 
the sole occupation of his life. But the strangest thing of all is that 
in all that variety of life they cannot cite a solitar}' act of real gen- 
erosity toward his people, his friends, or his kinsmen ; for surely if 
there had been such an act, his indefatigable flatterers would not 
have forgotten it. . . . He had inherited from Cosimo all that subtlety 
by which, without being a great statesman, he was prompt in cunning 
subterfuges, full of prudence and acuteness, skilful in dealing with 
ambassadors, most skilful in extinguishing his enemies, bold and 
cruel when he believed the occasion permitted. . . . His face revealed 
his character; there was something sinister and hateful in it; the 
complexion was greenish, the mouth very large, the nasc flat, and 
the voice nasal ; but his eye was quick and keen, his forehead was 



52 TUSCAN CITIES. 

high, and his manner had all of gentleness that can be imagined 
of an age so refined and elegant as that; his conversation was 
full of vivacity, of wit and learning; those who were admitted 
to his familiarity were always fascinated by him. He seconded 
his age in all its tendencies; corrupt as it was, he left it cor- 
rupter still in every way ; he gave himself up to pleasure, and he 
taught his people to give themselves up to it, to its intoxication 
and its deliriunL" 

XVIII. 

This is the sort of being whom human nature in self-defence 
ought always to recognize as a devil, and whom no glamour of cir- 
cumstance or quality should be suffered to disguise. It is success 
like his which, as Victor Hugo says of Louis Napoleon's similar suc- 
cess, " confounds the human conscience," and kindles the lurid light 
in which assassination seems a holy duty. Lorenzo's tyranny in 
Florence was not only the extinction of public liberty, but the con- 
trol of private life in all its relations. He made this marriage and 
he forbade that among the principal families, as it suited his pleas- 
ure; he decided employments and careers; he regulated the most 
intimate affairs of households in the interest of his power, with a 
final impunity which is inconceivable of that proud and fiery Florence. 
The smoldering resentment of his tyranny, which flamed out in the 
conspiracy of the Pazzi, adds the consecration of a desperate love of 
liberty to the cathedral, hallowed by religion and history, in which 
the tragedy was enacted. It was always dramatizing itself there 
when I entered the Duomo, whether in the hush and twilight of 
some vacant hour, or in the flare of tapers and voices while some 
high ceremonial filled the vast nave with its glittering procession. 
But I think the ghosts preferred the latter setting. To tell the truth, 
the Duomo at Florence is a temple to damp the spirit, dead or alive, 
by the immense impression of stony bareness, of drab vacuity, which 
one receives from its interior, unless it is filled with people. Outside 
it is magnificently imposing, in spite of the insufficiency and irregu- 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 53 

laritj of its piazza. lu spite of having no such approach as St Mark's 
at Venice, or St Peter's at Rome, or even the cathedral at Milan, in 
spite of being almost crowded upon by the surrounding shops and 
cafes, it is noble, and more and more astonishing ; and there is the 
baptistery, with its heavenly gates, and the tower of Giotto, with its 
immortal beauty, as novel for each new-comer as if freshly set out 
there overnight for his advantage. Nor do I object at all to the cab- 
stands there, and the little shops all round, and the people thronging 
through the piazza, in and out of the half-score of crooked streets 
opening upon it You do not get all the grandeur of the cathedral 
outside, but you get enough, while you come away from the interior 
in a sort of destitution. One needs some such function as I saw 
there one evening at dusk in order to realize all the spectacular 
capabilities of the place. This function consisted mainly of a visible 
array of the Church's forces "against blasphemy," as the printed 
notices informed me ; but with the high altar blazing, a constellation 
of candles in the distant gloom, and the long train of priests, chor- 
isters, acolytes, and white-cowled penitents, each with his taper, and 
the archbishop, bearing the pyx, at their head, under a silken canopy, 
it formed a setting of incomparable vividness for the scene on the 
last Sunday before Ascension, 1478. 

There is, to my thinking, no such mirror of the spirit of that time 
as the story of this conspiracy. A pope was at the head of it, and 
an archbishop was there in Florence to share actively in it Having 
failed to find Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici together at Lorenzo's 
villa, the conspirators transfer the scene to the cathedral ; the mo- 
ment chosen for striking the blow is that supremely sacred moment 
when the very body of Christ is elevated for the adoration of the 
kneeling worshippers. What a contempt they all have for the place 
and the oflBce ! In this you read one effect of that study of antiquity 
which was among the means Lorenzo used to corrupt the souls of 
men; the Florentines are half repaganized. Yet at the bottom of 
the heart of one conspirator lingers a mediaeval compunction, and 
though not unwilling to kill a roan, this soldier does not know about 
killing one in a church. Very well, then, give up your dagger, you 



54 TUSCAN CITIES, 

simple soldier ; give it to this priest ; he knows what a church is, 
and how little sacred! 

The cathedral is packed with people, and Lorenzo is there, but 
Giuliano is not come yet. Are we to be fooled a second time ? 
Malediction ! Send some one to fetch that Medicean beast, who is 
so slow coming to the slaughter ! I am of the conspiracy, for I hate 
the Medici; but these muttered blasphemies, hissed and ground 
through the teeth, this frenzy for murder, — it is getting to be little 
better than that, — make me sick. Two of us go for Giuliano to his 
house, and being acquaintances of his, we laugh and joke familiarly 
with him ; we put our arms caressingly about him, and feel if he has 
a shirt of mail on, as we walk him between us through the crowd at 
the corner of the caftJ there, invisibly, past all the cabmen ranked 
near the cathedral and the baptistery, not one of whom shall snatch 
his horse's oat-bag from his nose to invite us phantoms to a turn in 
the city. We have our friend safe in the cathedral at last, — hap- 
less, kindly youth, whom we have nothing against except that lie is 
of that cursed race of the Medici, — and now at last the priest ele- 
vates the host and it is time to strike ; the little bell tinkles, the 
multitude holds its breath and falls upon its knees; Lorenzo and 
Giuliano kneel with the rest. A moment, and Bernardo Bandini . 
plunges his short dagger through the boy, who drops dead upon his 
face, and Francesco Pazzi flings himself upon the body, and blindly 
striking to .make sure of his death, gives himself a wound in the leg 
that disables him for the rest of the work. And now we see the 
folly of intrusting Lorenzo to the unpractised hand of a priest, who 
would have been neat enough, no doubt, at mixing a dose of poison. 
The bungler has only cut his man a little in the neck ! Lorenzo's 
sword is out and making desperate play for his life ; his friends close 
about him, and while the sacred vessels are tumbled from the altar 
and trampled under foot in the mellay, and the cathedral rings with 
yells and shrieks and curses and the clash of weapons, they have 
hurried him into the sacristy and barred the doors, against which we 
shall beat ourselves in vain. Furj' ! Infamy ! ]\Ialediction ! Pick 
yourself up, Francesco Pazzi, and get home as you may ! There is 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 55 

no moantiiig to horse and crying liberty through the streets for you ! 
All is over ! The wretched populace, the servile signory, side with 
the Medici ; in a few hours the Archbishop of Pisa is swinging by 
the neck from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio ; and while he is yet 
alive you are dragged, bleeding and naked, from your bed through the 
streets and hung beside him, so close that in his dying agony he sets 
his teeth in your breast with a convulsive frenzy that leaves you fast 
in the death-clutch of his jaws till they cut the ropes and you ruin 
hideously down to the pavement below. 

XIX. 

One must face these grisly details from time to time if he would 
feel what Florence was. All the world was like Florence at that 
time in its bloody cruelty ; the wonder is that Florence, being what 
she otherwise was, should be like aU the world in that. One should 
take the trouble also to keep constantly in mind the smallness of the 
theatre in which these scenes were enacted. Compared with modem 
cities, Florence was but a large town, and these Pazzi were neighbors 
and kinsmen of the Medici, and they and their fathers had seen the 

• 

time when the Medici were no more in the state than other families 
which had perhaps scorned to rise by their arts. It would be insuf- 
ferable to any of us if some acquaintance whom we knew so well, 
root and branch, should come to reign over us; but this is what 
happened through the Medici in Florence. 

I walked out one pleasant Sunday afternoon to the Villa Car^gi, 
where Lorenzo made a dramatic end twenty years after the tragedy 
in the cathedraL It is some two miles from the city ; I could not 
say in just what direction ; but it does not matter, since if you do 
not come to Villa Car^gi when you go to look for it, you come to 
something eke equally meniorable, by ways as beautiful and through 
landscapes as picturesque, I remember that there was hanging from 
a crevice of one of the stone walls which we sauntered between, one 
of those great purple anemones of Florence, tilting and swaying in 
the sunny air of February, and that there was a tender presentiment 



56 TUSCAN CITIES. 

of spring in the atmosphere, and people were out languidly enjoying 
the warmth about their doors, as if the winter had been some malady 
of theirs, and they were now slowly convalescent. The mountains 
were white with snow beyond Fiesole, but that was perhaps to set oflF 
to better advantage the nearer hill-sides, studded with villas gleam- 
ing white through black plumes of cypress, and blurred with long 
gray stretches of olive orchard ; it is impossible to escape some such 
crazy impression of intention in the spectacular prospect of Italy, 
though that is probably less the fault of the prospect than of the 
people who have painted and printed so much about it. There were 
vineyards, of course, as well as olive orchards on all those broken 
and irregular slopes, over which wandered a tangle of the high walls 
which everywhere shut you out from intimate approach to the fields 
about Florence ; you may look up at them, afar off, or you may look 
down at them, but you cannot look into them on the same level. 

We entered the Villa Careggi, when we got to it, through a higli, 
grated gateway, and then we found ourselves in a delicious garden, 
the exquisite thrill of whose loveliness lingers yet in my utterly 
satisfied senses. I remember it as chiefly a plantation of rare trees, 
with an enchanting glimmer of the inexhaustibly various landscape 
thr6ugh every break in their foliage; but near the house was a for- 
mal parterre for flowers, silent, serene, aristocratic, touched not with 
decay, but a sort of pensive regret. On a terrace yet nearer were 
some putti, some frolic boys cut in marble, with a growth of brown 
moss on their soft backs, and looking as if, in their lapse from the 
civilization for which they were designed, they had begun to clothe 
themselves in skins. 

As to the interior of the villa, every one may go there and observe 
its facts; its vast, cold, dim saloons, its floors of polished cement, 
like ice to the foot, and its walls covered with painted histories and 
anecdotes and portraits of the Medici. The outside warmth had not 
got into the house, and I shivered in the sepulchral gloom, and could 
get no sense of the gay, voluptuous, living past there, not even in the 
prettily painted loggia where Lorenzo used to sit with his friends 
overlooking Val d'Amo, and glimpsing the tower of Giotto and the 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 57 

dome of Brunellescln. But there is one room, next to the last of the 
long suite fronting on the lovely garden, where the event which 
makes the place memorable has an incomparable actuality. It is the 
room where Lorenzo died, and his dying eyes could look from its 
windows out over the lovely garden, and across the vast stretches of 
villa and village, olive and cypress, to the tops of Florence swimming 
against the horizon. He was a long time dying, of the gout of his 
ancestors and his own debaucher\', and he drew near his end cheer- 
fully enough, and very much as he had always lived, now reasoning 
high of philosophy and poetry with Pico della Mirandola and Politian, 
and now laughing at the pranks of the jesters and buffoons whom 
they brought in to amuse him, till the very last, when he sickened 
of all those delights, fine or gross, and turned his thoughts to the 
mercy despised so long. But, as he kept saying, none had ever dared 
give him a resolute No, save one ; and dreading in his final hours the 
mockery of flattering priests, he sent for this one fearless soul ; and 
Savonarola, who had never yielded to liis threats or caresses, came 
at the prayer of the dying man, and took his place beside the bed we 
still see there, — high, broad, richly carved in dark wood, with a pic- 
ture of Perugino's on the wall at the left beside it. Piero, Lorenzo's 
son, from whom he has just parted, must be in the next room yet, 
and the gentle Pico della Mirandola, whom Lorenzo was so glad to 
see that he smiled and jested with him in the old way, has closed 
the door on the preacher and the sinner. Lorenzo confesses that he 
has heavv on his soul three crimes : the cruel sack of Volterra, the 
theft of the public dower of young girls, by which many were driven 
to a wicked life, and the blood shed after the conspiracy of the Pazzi. 
" He was greatly agitated, and Savonarola to quiet him kept repeat- 
ing * God is good ; God is merciful. But,' he added, when Lorenzo 
had ceased to speak, * there is need of three things.* * And what are 
they, father ? ' * First, you must have a great and living faith in the 
mercy of God.' * This I have — the greatest' ' Second, you must 
restore that which you have wrongfully taken, or require your chil- 
dren to restore it for you.' Lorenzo looked surprised and troubled ; 
but he forced himself to compliance, and nodded his head in sign of 



58 TUSCAN CITIES, 

assent Then Savonarola rose to his feet, and stood over the dying 
prince. ' Last, you must give back their liberty to the people of 
Florence/ Ix)renzo, summoning all his remaining strength, disdain- 
fully turned his back ; and, without uttering a word, Savonarola 
departed without giving him absolution." 

It was as if I saw and heard it all, as I stood there in the room 
where the scene had been enacted ; it still remains to me the vividest 
event in Florentine history, and Villari has no need, for me at least, 
to summon all the witnesses he calls to establish the verity of the 
story. There are some disputed things that establish themselves in 
our credence through the nature of the men and the times of which 
they are told, and this is one of them. Lorenzo and Savonarola were 
equally matched in courage, and the Italian soul of the one was as 
subtle for good as the Italian soul of the other was subtle for evil. 
In that encounter, the preacher knew that it was not the sack of a 
city or the blood of conspirators for which the sinner really desired 
absolution, however artfully and naturally they were advanced in 
his appeal ; and Lorenzo knew when he sent for him that the monk 
would touch the sore spot in his guilty heart unemngly. It was a 
profound drama, searching the depths of character on either side, and 
on either side it was played with matchless magnanimity. 

XX. 

After I had been at Careggi, I had to go again and look at San 
Marco, at the cell to which Savonarola returned from tliat death-bed, 
sorrowing. Yet, at this distance of time and place, one must needs 
wonder a little why one is so pitiless to Lorenzo, so devoted to 
Savonarola. I have a suspicion, which I own with shame and reluc- 
tance, that I should have liked Lorenzo's company much better, and 
that I, too, should have felt to its last sweetness the charm of his 
manner. I confess that I think I should have been bored — it is 
well to be honest with one's self in all things — by the menaces and 
mystery of Savonarola's prophesying, and that I should have thought 
his crusade against the pomps and vanities of Florence a vulgar and 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 59 

ridiculous business. He and his monks would have been terribly 
dull companions for one of my make within their convent; and 
when they came out and danced in a ring with his male and female 
devotees in the square before the church, I should have liked them 
no better than so many soldiers of the Army of Salvation. That is 
not my idea of the way in which the souls of men are to be purified 
and elevated, o: their thoughts turned to God. Puerility and vul- 
garity of a sort to set one's teeth on edge marked the excesses which 
Savonarola permitted in his followers ; and if he could have realized 
his puritanic republic, it would have been one of the heaviest yokes 
about the neck of poor human nature that have ever burdened it. 
For the reality would have been totally different from the ideal. So 
far as we can understand, the popular conception of Savonarola's 
doctrine was something as gross as Army-of-Salvationism, as wild 
and sensuous as backwoods Wesleyism, as fantastic, as spiritually 
arrogant as primitive Quakerism, as bleak and grim as militant 
Puritanism. We must face these facts, and the fact that Savonarola, 
though a Puritan, was no Protestant at all, but the most devout of 
Catholics, even while he defied the Pope. He was a sublime and 
eloquent preacher, a genius inspired to ecstasy with the beauty of 
holiness; but perhaps — perhaps! — Lorenzo knew the Florentines 
better than he when he turned his face away and died unshriven 
rather than give them back their freedom. Then why, now that 
they have both been dust for four hundred years, — and in all things 
the change is such that if not a new heaven there is a new earth 
since their day, — why do we cling tenderly, devoutly, to the strange, 
frenzied apostle of the Impossible, and turn, abhorring, from that 
gay, accomplished, charming, wise, and erudite statesman who knew 
what men were so much better? There is nothing of Savonarola 
now but the memory of his purpose, nothing of Lorenzo but the 
memorj' of his ; and now we see, far more clearly than if the frate 
had founded his free state upon the ruins of the magnifico's tyranny, 
that the one willed only good to others, and the other willed it only 
to himself. All history, like each little individual experience, en- 
forces nothing but this lesson of altruism; and it is because the 



60 TUSCAN CITIES. 

memory which consecrates the church of San Marco teaches it in 
supreme degree that one stands before it with a swelling heart 

In itself the church is nowise interesting or imposing, with that 
ugly and senseless classicism of its facade, which associates itself 
with Spain rather than Italy, and the stretch of its plain, low con- 
vent walls. It looks South American, it looks Mexican, with its 
plaza-like piazza; and the alien effect is heightened by the stiff 
tropical plants set round the recent military statue in the centre. 
But when you are within the convent gate, all is Italian, all is 
Florentine again ; for there is nothing more Florentine in Florence 
than those old convent courts hito which your sight-seeing takes you 
so often. The middle space is enclosed by the sheltering cloisters, 
and here the grass lies green in the sun the whole winter through, 
with daisies in it, and other simple little sympathetic weeds or 
flowers ; the still air is warm, and the place lias a climate of its own. 
Of course, the Dominican friars are long gone from San Marco ; the 
place is a museum now, admirably kept up by the Government 
I paid a franc to go in, and found the old cloister so little convent- 
ual that there was a pretty girl copying a fresco in one of the 
lunettes, who presently left her scaldino on her scaffolding, and got 
down to start the blood in her feet by a swift little promenade under 
the arches where the monks used to walk, and over the dead whose 
gravestones pave the way. You cannot help those things ; and she 
was really very pretty, — much prettier than a monk. In one of the 
cells upstairs there was another young lady ; she was copying a Fra 
Angelico, who might have been less shocked at her presence than 
some would think. He put a great number of women, as beautiful 
as he could paint them, in the frescos with which he has illuminated 
the long line of cells. In one place he has left his own portrait in 
a saintly company, looking on at an Annunciation : a very handsome 
youth, with an air expressive of an artistic rather than a spiritual 
interest in the fact represented, which indeed has the effect merely 
of a polite interview. One looks at the frescos glimmering through 
the dusk of the little rooms in hardly discernible detail, with more 
or less care, according to one's real or attemj)ted delight in them. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 61 

and then suddenly comes to the cell of Savonarola ; and all the life 
goes out of those remote histories and all^ories, and pulses in an 
agony of baffled good in this martyrdom. Here is the desk at which 
he read and wrote ; here are laid some leaves of his manuscript, as 
if they had just trembled from those wasted hands of his ; here is 
the hair shirt he wore, to mortify and torment that suflfering flesh 
the more; here is a bit of charred wood gathered from the fire in 
wliich he expiated his love for the Florentines by a hideous death 
at their hands. It rends the heart to look at them I Still, after 
four hundred years, the event is as fresh as yesterday, — as fresh as 
Calvary ; and never can the race which still gropes blindly here con- 
ceive of its divine source better than in the sacrifice of some poor 
fellow-creature who perishes by those to whom he meant nothing 
but good. 

As one stands in the presence of these pathetic witnesses, the 
whole lamentable tragedy rehearses itself again, with a power that 
makes one an actor in it Here, I am of that Florence which has 
sprung erect after shaking the foot of the tyrant from its neck, too 
fiercely free to endure the yoke of the reformer ; and I perceive the 
waning strength of Savonarola's friends, the growing number of his 
foes. I stand with the rest before the Palazzo Vecchio waiting for 
the result of that ordeal by fire to which they have challenged his 
monks in test of his claims, and I hear with foreboding the murmurs 
of the crowd when they are balked of their spectacle by that question 
between the Dominicans and the Franciscans about carrying the host 
through the flames ; I return with him hea\Tr and sorrowful to his 
convent, prescient of broken power over the souls which his voice 
has swayed so long; I am there in San Marco when he rises to 
preach, and the gathering storm of insult and outrage bursts upon 
him, with hisses and yells, till the battle begins between his Piagnoni 
and the Arrabbiati, and rages through the consecrated edifice, and 
that fiery Peter among his friars beats in the skulls of his assailants 
with the bronze crucifix caught up from the altar ; I am in the piazza 
before the church when the mob attacks the convent, and the monks, 
shaking off his meek control, reply with musket-shots from their 




I hear his confused and uiicertam 
repliea under die torture when they 
ask him whether he claims now to have -■- ' |^v- 

propheaiod from God; I climb with him, 

for that month's respite they allow him hefore they put him tn 
the question again, to the narrow cell high up in the tower of 
the Old Palace, where, with the roofs and towers of the cruel 
city he had so loved far 'below him, and the purple hills misty 
against the snow-clad mountains all round the horizon, he recovers 
something of his peace of mind, and keeps his serenity of soul ; I 
follow him down to the chapel beautiful with Ghirlandajo's frescos. 
where he spends his last hours, before they lead him between the 
two monks who are to suffer with him; and once more T stand 
among the pitiless multitude in the piazxa. They make him taste 
the agony of death twice in the death of his monks ; then he submits 
his neck to the halter and the hangman thrusts him from the 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 63 

scaffold, where the others hang dangling in their chains above the 
pyre that is to consume their bodies. " Prophet I " cries an echo of 
the mocking voice on Calvary, " now m the time for a miracle ! " The 
hangman thinks to please the crowd by playing the buffoon with 
the quivering form ; a yell of abhorrence breaks from them, and he 
makes haste to descend and kindle the fire that it may reach Savona- 
rola while he is still aliva A wind rises and blows the flame away. 
The crowd shrinks back terrified : " A miracle ! a miracle ! " But 
the wind falls again, and the bodies slowly bum, dropping a rain of 
blood into the hissing embers. The heat moving the right hand of 
Savonarola, he seems to lift it and bless the multitude. The Pia- 
gnoni fall sobbing and groaning to their knees ; the Arrabbiati set 
on a crew of ribald boys, who, dancing and yelling round the fire, 
pelt the dead martyrs with a shower of stones. 

Once more I was in San Marco, but it was now in the nineteenth 
century, on a Sunday of January, 1883. There, in the place of Savon- 
arola, who, though surely no Protestant, was one of the precursors 
of the Reformation, stood a Northern priest, chief perhaps of those 
who would lead us back to Rome, appealing to us in the harsh sibi- 
lants of our English, where the Dominican had rolled the organ 
harmonies of his impassioned Italian upon his hearers' souls. I have 
certainly nothing to say against Monsignor Capel, and I have never 
seen a more picturesque figure than his as he stood in his episcopal 
purple against the curtain of pale green behind him, his square 
priest's cap on his fine head, and the embroidered sleeves of some 
ecclesiastical under-vestment showing at every tasteful gesture. His 
face was strong, and beautiful with its deep-simk dreamy eyes, and 
he preached with singular vigor and point to a congr^ation of all 
the fashionable and cultivated English-speaking people in Florence, 
and to larger numbers of Italians whom I suspected of coming partly 
to improve themselves in our tongue. They could not have done 
better; his English was exquisite in diction and accent, and his 
matter was very good. He was warning us against Agnosticism and 
the limitations of merely scientific wisdom ; but I thought that there 
was little need to persuade us of Gk)d in a church where Savonarola 



64 



TUSCAN CfTISS. 



had lived aud aspired ; and that even the dead, who had known him 
and heard him, and who now sent up their chill througli the pave- 
ment fnim the tombs below, and made my feet so very cold, were 
more eloquent of immortality in that place. 



XXI. 

OjJE morning, early in February, I walked out through the pictur 
eaquenesa of Oltraruo, and up tho long a.^(?ont of the street t" Purtu 
Sau Giorgio, for the 
purpose of reverinji 
what is left of the for- 
titicalions designed liv 
Michael Angelo for the 
defence of the city in 
the great siege of 1535. 
There are many things 
to distract even the 
most resolute pilgrim 
ou the way to that gate. 
and I was but too will- 
ing to loiter. Then' 
are Itricabrac shops on 
the Pfinte Vecehio, and 
in the Via Guicciar- 
dini and the Fiaz/^i 
Pitti, with old canvasi^, 
and carvings, ami 
hroDzes in their win- 
dows ; and though a 

little past the time of ^ .strei.'t in oiTninNo 

life when one piously 

looks up the scenes of fiction, I had to make an excarsi 
Via de' Eardi for the sake of Komola, whose history begins in 
that street. It is a book which you must read again in Flor- 




i up the 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 65 

ence, for it gives a true and powerful impression of Savonarola's 
time, even if the author does burden her drama and dialogue 
with too much history. The Via de' Bardi, moreover, is worthy 
a \4sit for its own Grothic-palaced, mediaeval sake, and for the sake 
of that long stretch of the Boboli garden wall backing upon it 
with ivy flung over its shoulder, and a murmur of bees in some 
sort of invisible blossoms beyond. In that neighborhood I had to 
stop a moment before the house — simple, but keeping its counte- 
nance in the presence of a long line of Giiicciardini palaces — where 
Machiavelli lived ; a barber has his shop on the ground floor now, 
and not far ofl*, again, are the houses of the Canigiani, the maternal 
ancestors of Petrarch. And yet a little way, up a steep, vrinding 
street, is the house of Galileo. It bears on its front a tablet record- 
ing the great fact that Ferdinand II. de' Medici visited his valued 
astronomer there, and a portrait of the astronomer is painted on the 
stucco; there is a fruiterer underneath, and there are a great many 
children playing about, and their mothers screaming at them. The 
vast sky is blue without a speck overhead, and I look down on the 
tops of garden trees, and the brown-tiled roofs of houses sinking in 
ever richer and softer picturesqueness from level to level below. 
But to get the prospect iu all its wonderful beauty, one must push 
on up the street a little farther, and pass out between two indolent 
sentries lounging under the Giottesquely frescoed arch of Porta San 
Giorgio, into the open road. By this time I fancy the landscape will 
have got the better of history in the interest of any amateur, and he 
will give but a casual glance at Michael Angelo's bastions or towers, 
and will abandon himself altogether to the rapture of that scene. 

For my part, I cannot tell whether I am more blest in the varieties 
of effect which every step of the descent outside the wall reveals in 
the city and its river and valley, or in the near olive orchards, gray 
in the sun, and the cypresses, intensely black against the sky. The 
road next the wall is bordered by a tangle of blackberry vines, which 
the amiable Florentine winter has not had the harshness to rob of 
their leaves ; they hang green from the canes, on which one might 
almost hope to find some berries. The lizards, basking in the warm 

5 



66 TUSCAN CITIES. 

dust, rustle away among tbem at my approach, and up the path 
comes a gentleman in the company of two small terrier dogs, whose 
little hella finely tinkle as they advance. It would be hard to say 
just how these gave the final touch to my satisfaction with a prospect 
in which everything gUstened and sparkled as far as the snows of 
Vollombrosa, lustrous along the horizon ; hut the reader oQght to 
understand. 

xxn. 

I WAS instructed by the friend in whose tutelage I was pursuing 
with so much passion my search for historical locahties that I had 
better not give myself c[uite away to either the asso- 
ciations or the landscapes at Porta San Giorgio, but 
wait till I visited San Miniato. Afterward I was glad 
that I did so, for that is certainly the point from 




THB PORTA KOMANA. 



which best to enjoy botli. The day of onr visit was gray and 
overcast, but the air was clear, and nothing was lost to the eye 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 67 

among the objects distinct in line and color, almost as far as it could 
reach. We went out of the famous Porta Romana, by which so much 
history enters and issues that if the customs oflBcers there were not 
the most circumspect of men, they never could get round among the 
peasants' carts to tax their wine and oil without trampling a multi- 
tude of august and pathetic presences under foot One shudders at 
the rate at which one's cocchierc dashes through the Past thronging 
the lofty archway, and scatters its phantoms right and left with loud 
explosions of his whip. Outside it is somewhat better, among the 
curves and slopes of the beautiful suburban avenues, with which 
Florence was adorned to be the capital of Italy twenty years ago. 
But here, too, history thickens upon you, even if you know it but a 
little ; it springs from the soil that looks so red and poor, and seems 
to fill the air. In no other space, it seems to me, do the great events 
stand so dense as in tliat city and the circuit of its hills ; so that, for 
mere pleasure in its beauty, the sense of its surpassing loveliness, 
perhaps one had better not know the history of Florence at all. As 
little as I knew it, I was terribly incommoded by it ; and that morn- 
ing, when I drove up to San Miniato to " realize " the si^e of Flor- 
ence, keeping a sharp eye out for Montici, where Sciarra Colonna had 
his quarters, and the range of hills whence the imperial forces joined 
in the chorus of his cannon battering the tower of the church, I 
would far rather have been an unpremeditating listener to the poem 
of Browning which the friend in the carriage with me was repeating. 
The din of the guns drowned his voice from time to time, and while 
he was trj'ing to catch a faded phrase, and going back and correcting 
himself, and saying, " No — yes — no ! That 's it — no ! Hold on — 
I have it ! " as people do in repeating poetry, my embattled fancy was 
flying about over all the historic scene, sallying, repulsing, defeating, 
succumbing; joining in the famous camisada when the Florentines 
put their shirts on over their armor and attacked the enemy's sleep- 
ing camp by night, and at the same time playing ball down in the 
piazza of Santa Croce with the Florentine youth in sheer contempt of 
the besiegers. It was prodigiously fatiguing, and I fetched a long 
sigh of exhaustion as I dismounted at the steps of San Miniato, which 



TUSCAN CITIBS. 

was the outpost of the Florentines, and walked tremulously rouud it 
for a better view of the tower in whose top they had planted their 
great gun. It was all battered there by the enemy's shot aimed to 
dislodge the piece, and in the crumbling brickwork nodded tufts of 
grass and dry weeds in the wind, like so many conceits of a frivolous 
Kturist springing from tlie tragic history it recorded. The apse of the 
church below this tower is of the moat satisfying golden brown in 
color, and within, the church is what all the guide-books know, but 
what T own 1 have forgotten. It ia a very famous temple, and every 




one goes to see it, for its frescos and mosaics and its peculiar beauty 
of architecture ; and I dedicated a moment of reverent silence to the 
memory of the poet Ginsti, whose raocnment was there. After four 
hundred years of slavery, his pen was one of the keenest and bravest 




A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 69 

of those ^hich resumed the old Italian fight for freedom, and he 
might have had a more adequate monument I believe there is an 
insufficient statue, or perhaps it is only a bust, or may be a tablet 
with his fiace in bas-relief ; but the modem Italians are not happy in 
their commemorations of the dead The little Campo Santo at San 
Miniato is a place to make one laugh and cry with the hideous vul- 
garity of its realistic busts and its photographs set in the tombstones ; 
and yet it is one of the least offensive in Italy. When I could escape 
from the fascination of its ugliness, I went and leaned with my 
friend on the parapet that encloses the Piazza Michelangelo, and took 
my fill of delight in the landscape. The city seemed to cover the 
whole plain beneath us with the swarm of its edifices, and the steely 
stretch of the Amo thrust through its whole length and spanned by 
its half-dozen bridges. The Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio swelled 
up from the mass with a vastness which the distance seemed only to 
accent and reveal To the northward showed the snowy tops of the 
Apennines, while on the nearer slopes of the soft brown hills flanking 
the wonderful valley the towns and villas hung densely drifted 
everywhere, and whitened the plain to its remotest purple. 

I spare the reader the successive events which my unhappy ac- 
quaintance with the past obliged me to wait and see sweep over this 
mighty theatre. The winter was still in the wind that whistled 
round our lofty perch, and that must make the Piazza Michelangelo 
so delicious in the summer twilight ; the bronze copy of the David 
in the centre of the square looked half frozen. The terrace is part of 
the system of embellishment and improvement of Florence for her 
brief supremacy as capital; and it is fitly called after Michael Angelo 
because it covers the site of so much work of his for her defence in 
the great siege. We looked about till we could endure the cold no 
longer, and then returned to our carriage. By this time the siege 
was over, and after a resistance of fifteen months we were betrayed 
by our leader Malatesta Baglioni, who could not resist the Pope's 
bribe. With the disgraceful facility of pleasure-seeking foreigners 
we instantly changed sides, and returned through the Porta Somana, 
which his treason opened, and, because it was so convenient, entered 



70 TUSCAN CITIES. 

the city with a horde of other Spanish and German bigots and mer- 
cenaries that the empire had hurled against the stronghold of Italian 
liberty. 

XXIII. 

Yet, once within the beloved walls, — I must still call them walls, 
though they are now razed to the ground and laid out in fine avenues, 
with a perpetual succession of horse-cars tinkling down their midst, 
— I was all Florentine again, and furious against the Medici, whom 
after a whole generation the holy league of the Emperor and the 
Pope had brought back in the person of the bastard Alessandro. 
They brought him back, of course, in prompt and explicit violation of 
their sacred word ; and it seemed to me that I could not wait for his 
cousin Lorenzino to kill him, — such is the ferocity of the mildest 
tourist in the presence of occasions sufficiently remote. But surely 
if ever a man merited murder it was that brutal despot, whose tyran- 
nies and excesses had something almost deliriously insolent in them, 
and who, crime for crime, seems to hav^e preferred that which was 
most revolting. But I had to postpone this exemplary assassination 
till I could find the moment for visiting the Eiccardi Palace, in the 
name of which the fact of the elder Medicean residence is clouded. 
It has long been a public building, and now some branch of the 
municipal government has its meetings and offices there ; but what 
the stranger commonly goes to see is the chapel or oratory frescoed 
by Benozzo Gozzoli, which is perhaps the most simply and satisfy- 
ingly lovely little space that ever four walls enclosed. The sacred 
histories cover every inch of it with form and color ; and if it all 
remains in my memory a sensation of delight, rather than anything 
more definite, that is perhaps a witness to the efficacy with which 
the painter \vrought. Serried ranks of seraphs, peacock-plumed, and 
kneeling in prayer ; garlands of roses everywhere ; contemporary 
Florentines on horseback, riding in the train of the Three Magi 
Kings under the low boughs of trees ; and birds fluttering through 
the dim, mellow atmosphere, the whole set dense and close in an 
opulent yet dehcate fancifulness of design, — that is what I recall, 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 71 

with a conviction of the idleness and absurdity of recalling anything. 
It was like going out of doors to leave the dusky splendor of this 
chapel, which was intended at first to be seen only by the light of 
silver lamps, and come into the great hall frescoed by Luca Giordano, 
where his classicistic fables swim overhead in immeasurable light 
They still have the air, those boldly foreshortened and dramatically 
postured figures, of being newly dashed on, — the work of yesterday 
begun the day before; and they fill one with an ineffable gayety: 
War, Pestilence, and Famine, no less than Peace, Plenty, and Hygi- 
enic Plumbing, — if that was one of the antithetical personages. 
Upon the whole, I think the seventeenth century was more comfort- 
able than the fifteenth, and that when men had fairly got their 
passions and miseries impersonalized into allegory, they were in a 
state to enjoy themselves much better than before. One can very 
well imagine the old Cosimo who built this palace having himself 
carried through its desolate magnificence, and crying that, now his 
son was dead, it was too big for his family; but grief must have been 
a much politer and seemlier thing in Florence when Luca Giordano 
painted the ceiling of the great hall. 

In the Duke Alessandro's time they had only got half-way, and 
their hearts ached and burned in primitive fashion. The revival of 
learning had brought them the consolation of much classic example, 
both virtuous and vicious, but they had not yet fully philosophized 
slavery into elegant passivity. Even a reprobate like Lorenzino de* 
Medici — "the morrow of a debauch," as De Musset calls him — 
had his head full of the high Eoman fashion of finishing tyrants, and 
behaved as much like a Greek as he could. 

The Palazzo Riccardi now includes in its mass the site of the 
house in which Lorenzino lived, as well as the narrow street which 
formerly ran between his house and the palace of the Medici; so 
that if you have ever so great a desire to visit the very spot where 
Alessandro died that only too insuflBcient death, you must wreak 
your frenzy upon a small passage opening out of the present court. 
You enter this from the modem liveliness of the Via Cavour, — in 
every Italian city since the unification there is a Via Cavour, a Via 



72 TUSCAN CITIES. 

(Jaribaldi, and a Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, — and you ordinarily 
linger for a moment among the Etruscan and Soman marbles before 
paying your half franc and going upstairs. There is a little confusion 
in this, but I think upon the whole it heightens the effect ; and the 
question whether the custodian can change a piece of twenty francs, 
debating itself all the time in the mind of the amateur of tyranni- 
cide, sharpens his impatience, while he turns aside into the street 
which no longer exists, and mounts the phantom stairs to the van- 
ished chamber of the demolished house, where the Duke is waiting 
for the Lady Ginori, as he believes, but really for his death. No one, 
I think, claims that he was a demon less infernal than Lorenzino 
makes him out in that strange Apology of his, in which he justifies 
himself to posterity by appeals to antiquity. " Alessandro," he says, 
" went far beyond Phalaris in cruelty, because, whereas Phalaris 
justly punished Perillus for his cruel invention for miserably tor- 
menting and destroying men in his brazen Bull, Alessandro would 
have rewarded him if he had lived in his time, for he was himself 
always thinking out new sorts of tortures and deaths, like building 
men up alive in places so narrow that they could not turn or move, 
but might be said to be built in as a part of the wall of brick and 
stone, and in that state feeding them and prolonging their misery as 
much as possible, the monster not satisfying himself with the mere 
death of his people ; so that the seven years of his reign, for de- 
bauchery, for avarice and cruelty, may be compared with seven 
others of Nero, of Caligula, or of Phalaris, choosing the most abomi- 
nable of their whole lives, in proportion, of course, of the city to the 
empire ; for in that time so many citizens will be found to have been 
driven from their country, and persecuted, and murdered in exile, and 
so many beheaded without trial and without cause, and only for 
empty suspicion, and for words of no importance, and others poisoned 
or slain by his own hand, or his satellites, merely that they might 
not put him to shame before certain persons, for the condition in 
which he was born and reared ; and so many extortions and robberies 
will be found to have been committed, so many adulteries, so many 
violences, not only in things profane but in sacred also, that it will 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 73 

be difficult to decide whether the tyrant was more atrocious and 
impious, or the Florentine people more patient and vila . . . And if 
Timoleon was forced to kill his own brother to liberate his country, 
and was so much praised and celebrated for it, and still is so, what 
authority have the malevolent to blame me ? But in regard to kill- 
ing one who trusted me (which I do not allow I have done), I say 
that if I had done it in this case, and if I could not have accom- 
plished it otherwise, I should have done it . . . That he was not of 
the house of Medici and my kinsman is manifest, for he was bom of 
a woman of base condition, from Castelvecchi in the Romagna, who 
lived in the house of the Duke Lorenzo [of Urbino], and was em- 
ployed in the most menial services, and married to a coachman. . . . 
He [Alessandro] left her to work in the fields, so that those citizens 
of ours who had fled from the tyrant's avarice and cruelty in the city 
determined to conduct her to the Emperor at Naples, to show his 
Majesty whence came the man he thought fit to rule Florence. Then 
Alessandro, forgetting his duty in his shame, and the love for his 
mother, which indeed he never had, and through an inborn cruelty 
and ferocity, caused his mother to be killed before she came to the 
Emperor's presence." 

On the way up to the chamber to which the dwarfish, sickly little 
tyrannicide has lured his prey, the most dramatic moment occurs. 
He stops the bold ruffian whom he has got to do him the pleasure of 
a certain unspecified homicide, in requital of the good turn by which 
he once saved his life, and whispers to him, "It is the Duke!" 
Scoronconcolo, who had merely counted on an every-day murder, 
falters in dismay. But he recovers himself: "Here we are; go 
ahead, if it were the devil himself ! " And after that he has no more 
compunction in the affair than if it were the butchery of a simple 
citizen. The Duke is lying there on the bed in the dark, and Loren- 
zino bends over him with "Are you asleep, sir?" and drives liis 
sword, shortened to half length, through him , but the Duke springs 
up, and crying out, " I did not expect this of thee ! " makes a fight 
for his life that tasks the full strength of the assassins, and covers 
the chamber with blood. When the work is done, Lorenzino draws 



74 TUSCAN CITIES. 

the curtains round the bed again, and pins a Latin verse to them 
explaining that he did it for love of country and the thirst for 
glory. 

XXIV. 

Is it perhaps all a good deal too much like a stage-play ? Or is 
it that stage-plays are too much like facts of this sort ? If it were 
at the theatre, one could go away, deploring the bloodshed, of course, 
but comforted by the justice done on an execrable wretch, the mur- 
derer of his own mother, and the pollution of every life that he 
touched. But if it is history we have been reading, we must turn 
the next page and see the city filled with troops by the Medici and 
their friends, and another of the race established in power before the 
people know that the Duke is dead. Clearly, poetical justice is not 
the justice of God. If it were, the Florentines would have had the 
republic again at once. Lorenzino, instead of being assassinated in 
Venice, on his way to see a lady, by the emissaries of the Medici, 
would have satisfied public decorum by going through the form of a 
trial, and would then have accepted some oflBcial employment and 
made a good end. Yet the seven Medicean dukes who followed 
Alessandro were so variously bad for the most part that it seems 
impious to regard them as part of the design of Providence. How, 
then, did they come to be ? Is it possible that sometimes evil pre- 
vails by its superior force in the universe ? We must suppose that 
it took seven Medicean despots and as many more of the house of 
Lorraine and Austria to iron the Florentines out to the flat and 
polished peacefulness of their modem efifect. Of course, the com- 
monwealth could not go on in the old way ; but was it worse at its 
worst than the tyranny that destroyed it ? I am afraid we must 
allow that it was more impossible. People are not put into the world 
merely to love their country ; they must have peace. True freedom 
is only a means to peace ; and if such freedom as they have will not 
give them peace, then they must accept it from slavery. It is always 
to be remembered that the great body of men are not affected by 
oppressions that involve the happiness of the magnanimous few ; the 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 75 

affair of most men is inainly to be sheltered and victualled and 
allowed to prosper and bring up their famihes. Yet when one thinks 
of the sacrifices made to perpetuate popular rule in Florence, one's 
heart is wrung in indignant sympathy with the hearts that broke for 
it Of course, one must, in order to experience this emotion, put out 
of liis mind certain facts, as that there never was freedom for more 
than one party at a time under the old commonwealth ; that as soon 
as one party came into power the otlier was driven out of the city ; 
and that even within the triumphaut party everj' soul seemed cor- 
roded by envy and distrust of every other. There is, to be sure, the 
consoling retlection that the popular party was always the most 
generous and hberal, and that the oppression of all parties under the 
despotism was not exactly an improvement on the oppression of one. 
With this thought kept before you vividly, and with those facts 
blinked, you may go, for example, into the Medici Chapel of San 
Lorenzo and make pretty sure of your pang in the presence of those 
solemn figures of Michael Angelo's, where his Xight seems to have 
his words of grief for the loss of liberty upon her lips : — 

" T is Bweet to sleep, sweeter of stune to be, 
And while endure the inlkiDy snd woe, 
For me 'tis bappioesB not to feel or see. 
Do not swoke me therefote. Ab, speak low ! " 





TUSCAN CITIES. 



XXV. 



^HOSE words of Michael Angelo's answer to 
Strozzi's civil verses on his Day and Night 
are nobly simple, and of a colloquial and 
natural pitch to which their author sel- 
dom condescended in sculpture. Even 
the Day is too muscularly awaking and the Night too anatomi- 
caliy sleeping for the spectator's perfect loss of himself in the 
sculptor's tliought; but the figures are so famous that it is hard to 
reconcile one's self to the fact that they do not celebrate the memory 
of the greatest Medici. That (liuliano whom we see in the chapel 
there is little known to history; of that Lorenzo, history chiefly 
remembers tliiit he was the father of Alessandro, whom we have seen 
slain, and of Catharine de' Medici. Some people may think this 
enough ; but we ought to read the lives of the other Medici before 
deciding. Another thing to guard against in that chapel is the cold ; 
and, in fact, one ought to go well wrapped up in vLsiting any of the 
in-door nionumeuts of Florence. Santa Croee, for example, is a tem- 
ple whose rigors I should not like to encounter again in January, 
especially if the day be fine witliout. Then the sun streams in with 
a deceitful warmth tlirongli the mellow blazon of the windows, and 
the crone, with her scaldiuo at the door, has the air almost of sitting 
by a register. But it is all an illusion. By the time you have gone 
the round of the strutting and mincing allegories, and the pompous 
effigies with whicli art here, as everywhere, renders death ridiculous, 
you have scarcely tlie courage to penetrate to those remote chapels 
where the Giotto frescos are. Or if you do, you shiver round among 
them with no more pleasure in tbem than if they were so many 
boreal liglits. Vague they are, indeed, and spectral enough, those 
faded histories of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, and St. 
Francis of Assisi, and as far from us, morally, as anything at the 
jiole ; so that the Iionest sufferer, who feels himself taking cold in 
his Iwire head, would blush for his absurdity in pretending to get any 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 77 

comfort or joy from them, if all the available blood in his body were 
not then concentrated in the tip of his nose. For my part, I mar- 
velled at myself for being led, even temporarily, into temptation of 
that sort ; and it soon came to my putting my book under my arm 
and my hands in my pockets, and, with a priest's silken skull-cap on 
my head, sauntering among those works of art with no more sense of 
obligation to them than if I were their contemporary. It is well, if 
possible, to have some one with you to look at the book, and see 
what the works are and the authors. But nothing of it is comparable 
to getting out into the open piazza again, where the sun is so warm, 
— though not so warm as it looks. 

It suflSces for the Italians, however, who are greedy in nothing and 
do not require to be warmed through, any more than to be fed fulL 
The wonder of their temperance comes back with perpetual surprise 
to the gluttonous Northern nature. Their shyness of your fire, their 
gentle deprecation of your out-of-hours hospitality, amuse as freshly 
as at first ; and the reader who has not known the fact must imagine 
the well-dressed throng in the Florentine street more meagrely break- 
fasted and lunched than anything but destitution with us, and pro- 
tected against the cold in-doors by nothing but the clothes which are 
much more efficient without 

XXVI. 

What strikes one first in the Florentine crowd is that it is so well 
dressed. I do not mean that the average of fashion is so great as 
with us, but that the average of raggedness is less. Venice, when I 
saw it again, seemed in tatters, but, so far as I can remember, Florence 
was not even patched ; and this, in spite of the talk one constantly 
hears of the poverty which has befallen the city since the removal of 
the capital to Home. All classes are said to feel this adversity more 
or less, but none of them show it on the street; beggary itself is 
silenced to the invisible speech which one sees moving the lips of 
the old women who steal an open palm towards you at the church 
doors. Florence is not only better dressed on the average than 



78 TUSCAN CITIES. 

Boston, but, with little over half the population, there are, I should 
think, nearly twice as many private carriages in the former city. I 
am not going beyond the most non-committal si dice in any study of 
the Florentine civilization, and I know no more than that it is said 
(as it has been said ever since the first northern tourist discovered 
them) that they will starve themselves at home to make a show 
abroad. But if they do not invite the observer to share their domes- 
tic self-denial, — and it is said that they do not, even when he has 
long ceased to be a passing stranger, — I do not see why he should 
complain. For my part their abstemiousness cost me no sacrifice, 
and I found a great deal of pleasure in looking at the turnouts in 
the Cascine, and at the fur-lined coats in the streets and piazzas. 
They are always great wearers of fur in the south, but I think it is 
less fashionable than it used to be in Italy. The younger swells did 
not wear it in Florence, but now and then I met an elderly gentle- 
man, slim, tall, with an iron -gray mustache, who, in folding his long 
fur-lined overcoat loosely about him as he walked, had a gratifying 
effect of being an ancestral portrait of himself ; and with all persons 
and classes content to come short of recent fashion, fur is the most 
popular wear for winter. Each has it in such measure as he may ; 
and one day in the Piazza della Signoria, when there was for some 
reason an assemblage of market-folk there, every man had hanging 
operatically from his shoulder an overcoat with cheap fur collar and 
cuffs. They were all babbling and gesticulating with an impassioned 
amiability, and their voices filled the place with a leafy rustling 
which it must have known so often in the old times, when the Floren- 
tines came together there to govern Florence. One ought not, I 
suppose, to imagine them always too grimly bent on public business 
in those times. They must have got a great deal of fun out of it, in 
the long run, as well as trouble, and must have enjoyed sharpening 
their wits upon one another vastly. 

The presence now of all those busy-tongued people — bargaining 
or gossiping, whichever they were — gave its own touch to the pecu- 
liarly noble effect of the piazza, as it rose before me from the gentle 
slope of the Via Borgo dei GrecL I was coming back from that visit 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 79 

to Santa Croce, of which I have tried to give the sentiment, and I 
was resentfully tingling still with the cold, and the displeasure of a 
backward glance at the brand-new ugliness of the facade, and of the 
big clumsy Dante on his pedestal before it, when all my burden 
suddenly lifted from me, as if nothing could resist the spring of that 
buoyant air. It was too much for even the dull, vague rage I felt at 
having voluntarily gone through that dreary old farce of old-master 
doing again, in which the man only averagely instructed in the his- 
tory of art is at his last extreme of insincerity, weariness, and d^ra- 
dation, — the ridiculous and miserable slave of the guide-book asterisks 
marking this or that thing as worth seeing. All seemed to rise and 
float away with the thin clouds, chasing one another across the gen- 
erous space of afternoon sky which the piazza opened to the vision ; 
and my spirit rose as light as the lion of the Sepublic, which capers 
so nimbly up the staff on top of the palace tower. 

There is something fine in the old piazza being still true to the 
popular and even plebeian use. In narrow and crowded Florence, 
one might have supposed that fashion would have tried to possess 
itself of the place, after the public palace became the residence of the 
Medici ; but it seems not to have changed its ancient character. It 
is now the starting-point of a line of onmibuses ; a rank of cabs sur- 
rounds the base of Cosimo's equestrian statue ; the lottery is drawn 
on the platform in front of the palace ; second-rate shops of all sorts 
face it from two sides, and the restaurants and caf^s of the neighbor- 
hood are inferior. But this unambitious environment leaves the 
observer all the freer to his impressions of the local art, the groups 
of the Loggia dei Lanzi, the symmetrical stretch of the Portico degli 
UfBzzi, and, best of all, the great, bold, irr^ular mass of the old 
palace itself, beautiful as some rugged natural object is beautiful, 
and with the kindliness of nature in it Plenty of men have been 
hung from its windows, plenty dashed from its turrets, slain at its 
base, torn in pieces, cruelly martyred before it ; the wild passions of 
the human heart have beaten against it like billows ; it has faced 
every violent crime and outbreak. And yet it is sacred, and the 
scene is sacred, to all who hope for their kind; for there, in some 



80 TUSCAN CITIES, 

sort, century after century, the purpose of popular sovereignty — the 
rule of all by the most — struggled to fulfil itself, purblindly, 
bloodily, ruthlessly, but never ignobly, and inspired by an instinct 
only less strong than the love of life. There is nothing superfine, 
nothing of the salon about the place, nothing of the beauty of Piazza 
San Marco at Venice, which expresses the elegance of an oligarchy 
and suggests the dapper perfection of an aristocracy in decay ; it is 
loud with wheels and hoofs, and busy with commerce, and it has a 
certain ineffaceable rudeness and unfinish like the structure of a 
democratic state. 

XXVII. 

When Cosimo I., who succeeded Alessandro, moved his residence 
from the family seat of the Medici to the Palazzo Vecchio, it was as 
if he were planting his foot on the very neck of Florentine liberty. 
He ground his iron heel in deeply ; the prostrate city hardly stirred 
afterwards. One sees what a potent and valiant man he was from 
the terrible face of the bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini, now in the 
Bargello Museum; but the world, going about its business these 
many generations, remembers him chiefly by a horrid crime, — the 
murder of his son in the presence of the boy's mother. Yet he was 
not only a great warrior and wild beast; he befriended letters, 
endowed universities, founded academies, encouraged printing; he 
adorned his capital with statues and public edifices ; he enlarged and 
enriched the Palazzo Vecchio; he bought Luca Pitti's palace, and 
built the Uftizzi, thus securing the eternal gratitude of the tourists 
who visit these galleries, and have something to talk about at the table 
cChdte, It was he who patronized Benvenuto Cellini, and got him to 
make his Perseus in the Loggia de* Lanzi ; he built the fishermen's 
arcade in the Mercato Vecchio, and the fine loggia of the Mercato 
Nuovo; he established the General Archives, and reformed the laws 
and the public employments ; he created Leghorn, and throughout 
Tuscany, which his arras had united under his rule, he promoted the 
material welfare of his people, after the manner of tyrants when 
they do not happen to be also fools. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 83 

His care of them in other respects may be judged from the fact 
that he established two official spies in each of the fifty wards of 
the city, whose business it was to keep him informed of the smallest 
events, and all that went on in the houses and streets, together with 
their conjectures and suspicions. He did not n^lect his people in 
any way; and he not only built all those fine public edifices in 
Florence, — having merely to put his hand in his people's pocket and 
do it, and then take the credit of them, — but he seems to have loved 
to adorn it with that terrible face of his on many busts and statues. 
Its ferocity, as Benvenuto Cellini has frankly recorded it, and as it 
betrays itself in all the effigies, is something to appall us still ; and 
whether the story is true or not, you see in it a man capable of 
striking his son dead in his mother's arms. To be sure, Grarzia was 
not Cosimo's favorite, and, like a Medici, he had killed his brother ; 
but he was a boy, and when his father came to Pisa to find him, 
where he had taken refuge with his mother, he threw himself at 
Cosimo's feet and implored forgiveness. " I want no Cains in my 
family ! " said the father, and struck him with the dagger which he 
had kept hidden in his breast " Mother ! Mother ! " gasped the boy, 
and fell dead in the arms of the hapless woman, who had urged him 
to trust in his father's mercy. She threw herself on the bed where 
they laid her dead son, and never looked on the light again. Some 
say she died of grief, some that she starved herself ; in a week she 
died, and was carried with her two children to Florence, where it 
was presently made known that all three had fallen victims to the 
bad air of the Maremma, She was the daughter of a Spanish king, 
and eight years after her death her husband married the vulgar and 
ignoble woman who had long been his mistress. This woman was 
young, handsome, full of life, and she queened it absolutely over the 
last days of the bloody tyrant His excesses had broken Cosimo 
with premature decrepitude; he was helpless in the hands of this 
creature, from whom his son tried to separate him in vain ; and he 
was two years in dying, after the palsy had deprived him of speech 
and motion, but left him able to think and to remember ! 

The son was that Francesco I. who is chiefly known to fame as 



84 TUSCAN CITIES. 

the lover and then the husband of Bianca Cappello, — to so little 
may a sovereign prince come in the crowded and busy mind of after- 
time. This grand duke had his courts and his camps, his tribunals 
and audiences, his shows of authority and government ; but what we 
see of him at this distance is the luxurious and lawless youth, sated 
with every indulgence, riding listlessly by under the window of the 
Venetian girl who eloped with the Florentine banker's clerk from 
her father's palace in the lagoons, and is now the household drudge 
of her husband's family in Florence. She is looking out of the 
window that looks on Savonarola's convent, in the tallest of the 
stupid, commonplace houses that confront it across the square ; and 
we see the prince and her as their eyes meet, and the work is done 
in the gunpowdery way of southern passion. We see her again at 
the house of those Spaniards in the Via de' Banchi, which leads out 
of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella, from whence the Palazzo MaA- 
dragone is actually in sight ; and the marchioness is showing Bianca 
her jewels and — Wait a moment! There is something else the 
marchioness wishes to show her ; she will go get it ; and when the 
door reopens Francesco enters, protesting his love, to Bianca's con- 
fusion, and no doubt to her surprise ; for how could she suppose he 
would be there ? We see her then at the head of the grand-ducal 
court, the poor, plain Austrian wife thrust aside to die in neglect ; 
and then when Bianca's husband, whom his honors and good fortune 
have rendered intolerably insolent, is slain by some of the duke's 
gentlemen, — in the narrow street at Santo Spirito, hard by the 
handsome house in Via Maggio which the duke has given her, — we 
see them married, and receiving in state the congratulations of 
Bianca's father and brother, who have come on a special embassy 
from Venice to proclaim the distinguished lady Daughter of the 
Republic, — and, of course, to withdraw the price hitherto set upon 
her head. We see them then in the sort of life which must always 
follow from such love, — the grand duke had spent three hundred 
thousand ducats in the celebration of his nuptials, — overeating, 
overdrinking, and seeking their gross pleasures amid the ruin of the 
State. We see them trying to palm off a supposititious child upon 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 85 

the Cardinal Ferdinand, who was the true heir to his brother, and 
would have none of his spurious nephew ; and we see these three 
sitting down in the villa at Poggio a Caiano to the famous tart 
which Bianca, remembering the skill of her first married days, has 
made with her own hands, and which she courteously presses the 
Cardinal to be the first to partake of. He politely refuses, being pro- 
vided with a ring of admirable convenience at that time in Italy, set 
with a stone that turned pale in the presence of poison. " Some one 
has to b^in," cries Francesco, impatiently ; and in spite of his wife's 
signs — she was probably treading on his foot under the table, and 
frowning at him — he ate of the mortal viand ; and then in despair 
Bianca ate too, and they both died. Is this tart perhaps too much 
for the reader's digestion ? There is another story, then, to the effect 
that the grand duke died of the same malarial fever that carried ofiF 
his brothers Garzia and Giovanni, and Bianca perished of terror and 
apprehension ; and there is still another story that the Cardinal 
poisoned them both. Let the reader take his choice of them ; in any 
case, it is an end of Francesco, whom, as I said, the world remem- 
bers so little else of. 

It almost forgets that he was privy to the murder of his sister 
Isabella by her husband Paolo Orsini, and of his sister-in-law Eleo- 
nora by her husband Pietro de' Medici. The grand duke, who was 
then in the midst of his intrigue with Bianca, was naturally jealous 
of the purity of his family ; and as it has never been denied that 
both of those unhappy ladies had wronged their husbands, I suppose 
he can be justified by the moralists who contend that what is a venial 
lapse in a man is worthy death, or something like it, in a woman. 
About the taking-off of Eleonora, however, there was something 
gross, Medicean, butcherly, which all must deprecate. She knew she 
was to be killed, poor woman, as soon as her intrigue was discovered 
to the grand duke ; and one is not exactly able to sympathize with 
either the curiosity or the trepidation of that "celebrated Eoman 
singer " who first tampered with the letter from her lover, intrusted 
to him, and then, terrified at its nature, gave it to Francesco. When 
her husband sent for her to come to him at his villa, she took leave 



86 TUSCAN CITIES. 

of her child as for the last time, and Pietro met her in the dark of 
their chamber and plunged his dagger into her breast. 

The affair of Isabella Orsini was managed with much greater taste, 
with a sort of homicidal grace, a sentiment, if one may so speak, 
worthy a Boman prince and a lady so accomplished. She was 
Cosimo's favorite, and she was beautiful, gifted, and learned, knowing 
music, knowing languages, and all the gentler arts ; but one of her 
lovers had just killed her page, whom he was jealous of, and the 
scandal was very great, so that her brother, the grand duke, felt that 
he ought, for decency's sake, to send to Eome for her husband, and 
arrange her death with him. She, too, like Eleonora, had her fore- 
bodings, when Paolo Orsini asked her to their villa (it seems to have 
been the custom to devote the peaceful seclusion of the country to 
these domestic rites) ; but he did what he could to allay her fears by 
his affectionate gayety at supper, and his gift of either of those stag- 
hounds which he had brought in for her to choose from against the 
hunt planned for the morrow, as well as by the tender politeness 
with which he invited her to follow him to their room. At the door 
we may still see her pause, after so many years, and turn wistfully 
to her lady in waiting : — 

" Madonna Lucrezia, shall I go or shall I not go to my husband ? 
What do you say ? " 

And Madonna Lucrezia Frescobaldi answers, with the irresponsible 
shrug which we can imagine : " Do what you like. Still, he is your 
husband ! *' 

She enters, and Paolo Orsini, a prince and a gentleman, knows how 
to be as sweet as before, and without once passing from caresses to 
violence, has that silken cord about her neck — 

Terrible stories, which I must try to excuse myself for telling the 
thousandth time. At least, I did not invent them. They are all 
part of the intimate life of the same family, and the reader must 
group them in his mind to get an idea of what Florence must have 
been under the first and second grand dukes. Cosimo is believed to 
have killed his son Garzia, who had stabbed his brother Giovanni 
His son Pietro kills his wife, and his daughter Isabella is strangled 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 87 

by her husband, both murders being done with the knowledge and 
approval of the reigning prince. Francesco and Bianca his wife die 
of poison intended for Ferdinand, or of poison given them by him. 
On these facts throw the light of St. Bartholomew's day in Paris, 
whither Catharine de' Medici, the cousin of these homicides, had 
carried the methods and morals of her family, and you b^in to 
realize the MedicL 

By what series of influences and accidents did any race accumulate 
the enormous sum of evil which is but partly represented in these 
crimes ? By what process was that evil worked out of the blood ? 
Had it wreaked its terrible force in violence, and did it then no 
longer exist, like some explosive which has been fired ? These would 
be interesting questions for the casuist ; and doubtless such questions 
will yet come to be studied with the same scientific minuteness which 
is brought to the solution of contemporary social problems. The 
Medici, a family of princes and criminals, may come to be studied 
like the Jukes, a family of paupers and criminals. What we know 
at present is, that the evil in them did seem to die out in process of 
time ; though, to be sure, the Medici died with it That Ferdinand 
who succeeded Francesco, whichever poisoned the other, did prove 
a wise and beneficent ruler, filling Tuscany with good works, moral 
and material, and, by his marriage with Catharine of Lorraine, 
bringing that good race to Florence, where it afterwards reigned so 
long in the affections of the people. His son Cosimo 11. was like 
him, but feebler, as a copy always is, with a dominant desire to get 
the sepulchre of our Lord away from the Turks to Florence, and long 
waging futile war to that end. In the time of Ferdinand II., Tus- 
cany, with the rest of Italy, was wasted by the wars of the French, 
Spaniards, and Germans, who found it convenient to fight them out 
there, and by famine and pestilence. But the grand duke was a well- 
meaning man enough ; he protected the arts and sciences as he got 
the opportunity, and he did his best to protect Galileo against the 
Pope and the inquisitors Cosimo III., who followed him, was obliged 
to harass his subjects with taxes to repair the ruin of the wars in his 
father's reign ; he was much given to works of piety, and he had a 



88 TUSCAN CITIES. 

wife who hated him, and finally forsook him and went back to 
France, her own country. He reigned fifty years, and after him 
came his son Gian Gastone, the last of his line. He was a person, 
by all accounts, who wished men well enough, but, knowing himself 
destined to leave no heir to the throne, was disposed rather to enjoy 
what was left of his life than trouble himself about the affairs of 
state. Germany, France, England, and Holland had already provided 
him with a successor, by the treaty of London, in 1718 ; and when 
Gian Gustone died, in 1737, Francis 11. of Lorraine became Grand 
Duke of Tuscany. 

XXVIIL 

Under the later Medici the Florentines were drawing towards the 
long quiet which they enjoyed under their Lorrainese dukes, — the 
first of whom, as is well known, left being their duke to go and be 
husband of Maria Theresa and emperor consort. Their son, Pietro 
Leopoldo, succeeded him in Tuscany, and became the author of 
reforms in the civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical law, which then 
astonished all Europe, and which tardy civilization still lags behind 
in some things. For example, Leopold found that the abolition of 
the death penalty resulted not in more, but in fewer crimes of vio- 
lence ; yet the law continues to kill murderers, even in Massachu- 
setts. 

He lived to see the outbreak of the French revolution, and his 
son, Ferdinand III., was driven out by the forces of the Republic in 
1796, after which Tuscany rapidly underwent the Napoleonic meta- 
morphoses, and was republican under the Directory, regal under 
Lodovico I., Bonaparte's king of Etniria, and grand-ducal under 
Napoleon's sister, Elisa Bacciocchi. Then, in 1816, Ferdinand III. 
came back, and he and his descendants reigned till 1848. when Leo- 
pold II. was driven out, to return the next year with the Austrians. 
Ten years later he again retired, and in 1860 Tuscany united herself 
by popular vote to the kingdom of Italy, of which Florence became 
the capital, and so remained till the French evacuated Rome in 
1871. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 89 

The time from the restoration of Ferdinand III. till the first 
expulsion of Leopold II. must always be attractive to the student 
of Italian civilization as the period in which the milder Lorrainese 
traditions permitted the germs of Italian literature to live in Flor- 
ence, while everywhere else the native and foreign despotisms sought 
diligently to destroy them, instinctively knowing them to be the 
germs of Italian liberty and nationality ; but 1 confess that the time 
of the first Leopold's reign has a greater charm for my fancy. It is 
like a long stretch of sunshine in that lurid, war-clouded landscape 
of histor}',* full of repose and genial, beneficent growth. For twenty- 
five years, apparently, the good prince got up at six o'clock in the 
morning, and dried the tears of his people. To be more specific, he 
" formed the generous project," according to Signer Bacciotti, by 
whose "Firenze Illustrata" I would not thanklessly profit, "of re- 
storing Tuscany to her original happy state," — which, I think, must 
have been prehistoric. " His first occupation was to reform the laws, 
simplifying the civil and mitigating the criminal ; and the volumes 
are ten that t^ontain his wise statutes, edicts, and decrees. In his 
time, ten years passed in which no drop of blood was shed on the 
scaffold. Prisoners suffered no corporeal penalty but the loss of 
liberty. The amelioration of the laws improved the public morals; 
grave crimes, after the alx)lition of the cruel punishments, became 
rare, and for three months at one period the prisons of Tuscany 
remained empty. The hospitals that Leopold founded, and the order 
and propriety in whicli he kept them, justly entitled him to the 
name of Father of the Poor. The education he gave his children 
aimed to render them compassionate and beneficent to their fellow- 
beings, and to make them men rather than princes. An illustrious 
Englishman, then living in Florence, and consequently an eye-witness, 
wrote of him : * Leopold loves his people. He has abolished all the 
imposts which were not necessary; he has dismissed nearly all his 
soldiers; he has destroyed the fortifications of Pisa, whose main- 
tenance was extremely expensive, overthrowing the stones that de- 
voured men. He observed that his court concealed him from his 
people ; he no longer has a court He has established manufactures. 



90 TUSCAN CITIES. 

and opened superb roads at his own cost, and founded hospital& 
These might be called, in Tuscany, the palaces of the grand duke. 
I visited them, and found throughout cleanliness, order, and delicate 
and attentive treatment ; I saw sick old men, who were cared for as 
if by their own sons ; helpless children watched over with a mother's 
care ; and that luxury of pity and humanity brought happy tears to 
my eyes. The prince often repairs to these abodes of sorrow and 
pain, and never quits them without leaving joy behind him, and 
coming away loaded with blessings : you might fancy you heard the 
expression of a happy people's gratitude, but that hymn rises from 
a hospital. The palace of Leopold, like the churches, is open to all 
without distinction ; three days of the week are devoted to one class 
of persons ; it is not that of the great, the rich, the artists, the 
foreigners ; it is that of the unfortunate ! In many countries, com- 
merce and industry have become the patrimony of the few : in 
Tuscany, all that know how may do; there is but one exclusive 
privilege, — ability. Leopold has enriched the year with a great 
number of work-days, which he took from idleness and gave back 
to agriculture, to the arts, to good morals. . . . The grand duke 
always rises before the sun, and when that beneficent star rejoices 
nature with its rays, the good prince has already dried many 
tears. . . . Leopold is happy, because his people are happy ; he be- 
lieves in God ; and what must be his satisfaction when, before closing 
his eyes at night, beforfe permitting himself to sleep, he renders an 
account to the Supreme Being of the happiness of a million of sub- 
jects during the course of the day ! ' " 

English which has once been Italian acquires an emotionality 
which it does not perhaps wholly lose in returning to itself; and 
I am not sure that the language of the illustrious stranger, whom I 
quote at second hand, has not kept some terms which are native to 
Signor Bacciotti rather than himself. But it must be remembered that 
he was an eighteenth-century Englishman, and perhaps expressed him- 
self much in this wayr The picture he draws, if a little too idyllic, 
too pastoral, too operatic, for our realization, must still have l>een 
founded on fact, and I hope it is at least as true as those which 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 91 

commemorate the atrocities of the MedicL At any rate it is de- 
lightful, and one may as probably derive the softness of the modem 
Florentine morals and manners from the benevolence of Leopold as 
from the ferocity of Cosimo. Considering what princes mostly were 
in the days when they could take themselves seriously, and still are 
now when I should think they would give themselves the wink on 
seeing their faces in the glass, I am willing to allow that kindly 
despot of a Leoi)old all the glory that any history may claim for 
him. He had the genius of humanity, and that is about the only 
kind of genius which is entitled to reverence in this world. If he 
perhaps conceived of men as his children rather than his brothers 
still he wished them well and did them all the good he knew how. 
After a hundred vears it must be allowed that we have made a 
considerable advance beyond him — in theorj'. 

XXIX. 

What society in Florence may now be like underneath its super- 
ficial effect of gentleness and placidity, the stranger, who reflects how 
little any one really knows of his native civilization, will carefully 
guard himself from saying upon his own authority. From the report 
of others, of people who had lived long in Florence and were qualified 
in that degree to speak, one might say a great deal, — a great deal 
that would be more and less than true. A brilliant and accomplished 
writer, a stranger naturalized by many years' sojourn, and of an 
imaginable intimacy with his subject, sometimes spoke to me of a 
decay of manners which he had noticed in his time : the peasants 
no longer saluted persons of ci^^l condition in meeting them; the 
young nobles, if asked to a ball, ascertained that there was going to 
be supper before accepting. I could not find these instances very 
shocking, upon reflection ; and I was not astonished to hear that the 
sort of rich American girls who form the chase of young Florentine 
noblemen show themselves indi£ferent to untitled persons. There 
was something more of instruction in the fact that these fortune- 
hunters care absolutely nothing for youth or beauty, wit or character, 



92 TUSCAN CITIES. 

in their prey, and ask nothing but money. This implies certain other 
facts, — certain compensations and consolations, which the American 
girl with her heart set upon an historical name would be the last to 
consider. What interested me more was the witness which this 
gentleman bore, with others, to the excellent stuff of the peasants, 
whom he declared good and honest, and full of simple, kindly force 
and uprightness. The citizen class, on the other hand, was unen- 
lightened and narrow-minded, and very selfish towards those beneath 
them ; he believed that a peasant, for example, who cast his lot in 
the city, would encounter great unfriendliness in them if he showed 
the desire and the ability to rise above his original station. Both 
from this observer, and from other foreigners resident in Florence, 
I heard that the Italian nobility are quite apart from the national 
life ; they have no political influence, and are scarcely a social power ; 
there are, indeed, but three of the old noble families founded by the 
German emperors remaining, — the Ricasoli, the Gherardeschi, and 
the Stufe ; and a title counts absolutely for nothing with the Italians. 
At tlie same time a Corsini was syndic of Florence ; all the dead walls 
invited me to " vote for Peruzzi " in the approaching election for dep- 
uty, and at the last election a Ginori had been chosen. It is very 
hafd to know about these things, and I am not saying my informants 
were wrong; but it is right to oppose to theirs the declaration of 
the intelligent and sympathetic scholar with whom I took my walks 
about Florence, and who said that there was great good-will between 
the people and the historical families, who were in thorough accord 
with the national aspirations and endeavors. Again, I say, it is 
difficult to know the truth; but happily the truth in this case is 
not important. 

One of the few acquaintances I made with Italians outside of 
the English-speaking circles was that of a tradesman who, in the 
intervals of business, was reading Shakspeare in English, and — if I 
may say it — "Venetian Life." I think some Americans had lent 
him the latter classic. I did not leani from him that many other 
Florentine tradesmen gave their leisure to the same literature; in 
fact, I inferred that, generally speaking, there was not much interest 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 93 

in any sort of literature among the Florentines ; and I only mention 
him in the hope of throwing some light upon the problem with which 
we are playing. He took me one night to the Literary Club, of 
which he was a member, and of which the Marchese Bicci is presi- 
dent ; and I could not see that any presentation could liave availed 
me more than his with that nobleman or the other nobleman who 
was secretar}'. The president shook my hand in a friendly despair, 
perfectly evident, of getting upon any comuion ground with me ; and 
the secretary, after asking me if I knew Doctor Holmes, had an ami- 
able effect of being cast away upon the sea of American literature. 
These gentlemen, as I understood, came every week to the club, and 
assisted at its entertainments, which were sometimes concerts, some- 
times lectures and recitations, and sometimes conversation merely, 
for which I found the empty chairs, on my entrance, arranged in 
groups of threes and fives about the floor, with an air perhaps of too 
great social premeditation. Presently there was j)laying on the piano, 
and at the end the president shook hands with the ]>erformer. If 
there was anything of the snobbishness which poisons such inter- 
course for our race, I could not see it. May be snobbishness, like 
gcntlemanliness, is not appreciable from one race to another. 

XXX. 

My acquaintance, whom I should grieve to make in any sort a 
victim by my personalities, did me the pleasure to take me over the 
little ancestral farm which he holds just beyond one of the gates ; 
and thus I got at one of the homely aspects of life which the stranger 
is commonly kept aloof from. A narrow lane, in which some boys 
were pitching stones for quoits in the soft Sunday afternoon sun- 
shine, led up from the street to the farm-house, where one wandering 
roof covered house, stables, and offices with its mellow expanse of 
brown tiles. A d«x)r opening flush upon the lane admitted us to 
the picturesque interior, which was divided into the quarters of the 
farmer and his family, and the apartment which the owner occupied 
during the summer heats. This contained half a dozen pleasant 



94 TUrsCAN CITIES. 

rooms, chief of which was the library, overflowing with books repre- 
senting all the rich past of Italian literature in poetry, history, and 
philosophy, — the collections of my host's father and grandfather. 
On the table he opened a bottle of the wine made on his farm ; and 
then he took me up to the terrace at the house-top for the beautiful 
view of the city, and the mountains beyond it, streaked with snow. 
The floor of the terrace, which, like all the floors of the house, was of 
brick, was heaped with olives from the orchard on the hillside which 
bounded the little farm ; but I could see from this point how it was 
otherwise almost wholly devoted to market-gardening. The grass 
keeps green all winter long at Florence, not growing, but never 
withering ; and there were several sorts of vegetables in view, in the 
same sort of dreamy arrest Between the rows of cabbages I noticed 
the trenches for irrigation ; and I lost my heart to the wide, deep well 
under the shed-roof below, with a wheel, picturesque as a mill-wheel, 
for pumping water into these trenches. The farm implements and 
heavier household utensils were kept in order here ; and among the 
latter was a large wash-tub of fine earthenware, which had been in 
use there for a hundred and fifty years. My friend led the way up 
the slopes of his olive-orchard, where some olives still lingered among 
the willow-like leaves, and rewarded my curious palate with the 
insipidity of the olive which has not been salted. Then we returned 
to the house, and explored the cow-stables, where the well-kept 
Italian kine between their stone walls were much warmer than 
most Italian Christians in Florence. In a large room next the 
stable and behind the kitchen the farm-people were assembled, men, 
women, and children, in tlieir Sunday best, who all stood up when 
we came in, — all but two very old men, who sat in the chimney 
and held out their hands over the fire that sent its smoke up 
between them. Their eyes were bleared with age, and I doubt 
if they made out what it was all about ; but they croaked back a 
pleasant answer to my host's salutation, and then let their mouths 
fall open again and kept their hands stretched over the fire. It 
would be very hard to say just why these old men were such a 
pleasure to me. 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 95 

XXXI. 

One January afternoon I idled into the Baptistery, to take my 
chance of seeing some little one made a Christian, where so many 
habes, afterwards memorable for good and evil, had been baptized ; 
and, to be sure, there was the conventional Italian infant of civil 
condition tied up tight in the swathing of its civilization, perfectly 
quiescent, except for its feebly wiggling arms, and undergoing the 
rite with national patience. It lay in the arms of a half-grown boy, 
probably its brother, and there were the father and the nurse ; the 
mother of so young a child could not come, of course. The officiat- 
ing priest, with spectacles dropped quite to the point of his nose, 
mumbled the rite from his book, and the assistant, with one hand 
in his pocket, held a n^ligently tilted taper in the other. Then the 
priest lifted the lid of the font in which many a renowned poet's, 
artist's, tyrant's, philanthropist's twisted little features were similarly 
reflected, and poured on the water, rapidly drying the poor little 
skull with a single wipe of a napkin ; then the servant in attendance 
powdered the baby's head, and the group, grotesquely inattentive 
throughout to the sacred rite, dispersed, and left me and a German 
family who had looked on with murmurs of sympathy for the child 
to overmaster as we might any interest we had felt in a matter that 
had apparently not concerned them. 

One is always coming upon this sort of thing in the Italian 
churches, this droll nonchalance in the midst of religious solemnities, 
which I suppose is promoted somewhat by the invasions of sight- 
seeing everywhere. In the Church of the Badia at Florence, one day, 
the indifference of the tourists and the worshippers to one another's 
presence was carried to such a point that the boy who was showing 
the strangers about, and was consequently in their interest, drew the 
curtain of a picture, and then, with his back to a group of kneeling 
devotees, balanced himself on the chapel-rail and sat swinging his 
1^ there, as if it had been a store-box on a curbstone. 

Perhaps we do not sufficiently account for the domestication of 
the people of Latin countries in their every-day-open church. They 



96 TUSCAN CITIES. 

are quite at their ease there, whereas we are as unhappy in ours as 
if we were at an evening party ; we wear all our good clothes, and 
they come into the houses of their Father in any rag they chance to 
have on, and are at home there. I have never seen a more careless 
and familiar group than that of which I was glad to form one, in the 
Church of Ognissanti, one day. I had gone, in my quality of Ameri- 
can, to revere the tablet to Amerigo Vespucci which is there, and I 
found the great nave of the church occupied by workmen who were 
putting together the foundations of a catafalque, hammering away, 
and chatting cheerfully, with their mouths full of tacks and pins, 
and the funereal frippery of gold, black, and silver braid all about 
them. The church-beggars had left their posts to come and gossip 
with them, and the grandchildren of these old women were playing 
back and forth over the structure, unmolested by the workmen, and 
unawed either by the function going on in a distant chapel or by the 
theatrical magnificence of the sculptures around them and the fresco 
overhead, where a painted colonnade lifted another roof high above 
the real vault. 

I liked all this, and I could not pass a church door without the 
wish to go in, not only for the pictures or statues one might see, but 
for the delightfully natural human beings one could always be sure 
of. Italy is above all lands the home of human nature, — simple, 
unabashed even in the presence of its Maker, who is probably not 
so much ashamed of his work as some would like to have us think. 
In the churches, the beggary which the civil government has dis- 
heartened almost out of existence in the streets is still fostered, and 
an aged crone with a scaldino in her lap, a tattered shawl over her 
head, and an outstretched, skinny palm, guards the portal of every 
sanctuary. She has her chair, and the church is literally her home ; 
she does all but eat and sleep there. For the rest, these interiors 
had not so much novelty as the charm of old association for me. 
Either I had not enlarged my interests in the twenty years since I 
had known them, or else they had remained unchanged ; there was 
the same old smell of incense, the same chill, the same warmth, the 
same mixture of glare and shadow. A function in progress at a 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 97 

remote altar, the tapers starring the distant dusk; the straggling 
tourists ; the sacristan, eager, but not too persistent with his tale of 
some special attraction at one's elbow ; the worshippers, all women or 
old men ; a priest hurrying to or from the sacristy ; the pictures, 
famous or unknown, above the side altars ; the monuments, serious 
Gothic or strutting rococo, — all was there again, just as it used 
to be. 

But the thing that was really novel to me, who found the churches 
of 1883 in Florence so like the churches of 1863 in Venice, was the 
loveliness of the daserted cloisters belonging to so many of the for- 
mer. These enclose nearly always a grass-grown space, where daisies 
and dandelions began to abound with the earliest consent of spring. 
Most public places and edifices in Italy have been so much photo- 
graphed that few have any surprise left in them : one is sure that 
one has seen them before ; but tlie cloisters are not yet the prey of 
this sort of pre-acquaintanca Whether the vaults and walls of the 
colonnades are beautifully frescoed, like those of Sta. Maria Novella 
or Sta. Annunziata or San Marco, or the place has no attraction but 
its grass and sculptured stone, it is charming; and these cloisters 
linger in my mind as something not less Florentine in character than 
the Ponte Vecchio or the Palazzo Publico. I remember particularly 
an evening efiTect in the cloister of Santa Annunziata, when the belfry 
in the comer, lifted aloft on its tower, showed with its pendulous 
bells like a great, graceful flower against the dome of the church 
behind it The quiet in the place was almost sensible; the pale 
light, suffused with rose, had a delicate clearness ; there was a little 
agreeable thrill of cold in the air ; there could not have been a more 
refined moment's pleasure offered to a sympathetic tourist loitering 
slowly homeward to his hotel and its tabU cThdte; and why we can- 
not have old cloisters in America, where we are getting everything 
that money can buy, is a question that must remain to vex us. A 
suppressed convent at the comer of, say, Clarendon Street and Com- 
monwealth Avenue, where the new Brattle Street church is, would 
be a great pleasure on one's way home in the aftemoon ; but still 1 
should lack the final satisfaction of dropping into the chapel of the 



98 TUSCAN CITIES. 

Brothers of the Misericordia, a little farther on towards Santa Maria 
Novella. 

The sentimentalist may despair as he pleases, and have his fill of 
panic about the threatened destruction of the Ponte Vecchio, but I 
say that while these brothers, " black-stoled, black-hooded, like a 
dream," continue to light the way to dusty death with their flaring 
torches through the streets of Florence, the mediaeval tradition re- 
mains unbroken ; Italy is still Italy. They knew better how to treat 
Death in the Middle Ages than we do now, with our vain profanation 
of flowers to his service, our loathsome dappemess of " burial cas- 
kets," and dress-coat and white tie for the dead. Those simple old 
Florentines, with their street wars, their pestilences, their manifold 
destructive violences, felt instinctively tliat he, the inexorable, was 
not to be hidden or palliated, not to be softened or prettified, or any- 
wise made the best of, but was to be confessed in all his terrible 
gloom ; and in this they found, not comfort, not alleviation, which 
time alone can give, but the anaesthesis of a freezing horror. Those 
masked and trailing sable figures, sweeping through the wide and 
narrow ways by night to the wild, long rhythm of their chant, in the 
red light of their streaming torches, and bearing the heavily draped 
bier in their midst, supremely awe the spectator, whose heart falters 
within him in the presence of that which alone is certain to be. I 
cannot say they are so eflfective by daylight, when they are carrying 
some sick or wounded person to the hospital ; they have not their 
torches then, and the sun seems to take a cynical satisfaction in 
showing their robes to be merely of black glazed cotton. An ante- 
room of their chapel was fitted with locked and numbered drawers, 
where the brothers kept their robes ; half a dozen coffin-shaped biers 
and litters stood about, and the floor was strewn with laurel-leaves, 
— I suppose because it was the festa of St. Sebastian. 



• •• »•< 



:*! 



• .' 



• •• ••••• • 



A FLOREJSTIJ^rE MOSAIC. 



101 



XXXII. 

I DO not know that the festas are noticeably fewer than they used 
to be in Italy. There are still enough of them to account for the 
delay in doing almost anything that has been promised to be done. 
The carnival came on scatteringly and reluctantly. A lai^ sum of 
money which had been raised for its celebration was properly diverted 
to the relief of the sufiferers by the inundations in Lombardy and 
Venetia, and the Florentines patiently set about being merry each on 
his own personal account Not many were visibly merry, except in 
the way of business. The gentlemen of the operatic choruses clad 
themselves in stage-armor, and went about under the hotel-windows, 
playing and singing, and levying contributions on the inmates ; here 
and there a white clown or a red devil figured tlirough the streets ; 
two or three carriages feebly attempted a corso, and there was an 
exciting rumor that confetti had been thrown from one of them : I 
did not see the confetti. There was for a long time doubt whether 
there was to be any reglione or ball on the last night of the carnival ; 
but finally there were two of them : one of low degree at the Teatro 
Umberto, and one of more pretension at the Pergola Theatre. The 
latter presented an agreeable image of the carnival ball which has 
taken place in so many romances : the boxes filled with brilliantly 
dressed spectators, drinking champagne; the floor covered with 
maskers, gibbering in falsetto, dancing, capering, coquetting till day- 
light. This, more than any other aspect of the carnival, seemed to 
give one the worth of his money in tradition and association. Not 
but that towards the end the masks increased in the streets, and the 
shops where they sold costumes were very gay; but the thing is 
dying out, as at least one Italian, in whose veins the new wine of 
Progress had wrought, rejoiced to tell me. I do not know whether 
I rejoiced so much to hear it ; but I will own that I did not r^ret it 
a great deal. Italy is now so much the sojourn of barbarians that 
any such gayety must be brutalized by them, till the Italians turn 
from it in disgust. Then it must be remembered that the carnival 
was fostered by their tyrants to corrupt and enervate them ; and I 



102 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



canuot wonder that their love of Italy is wounded by it. They are 
trying to be men, and the carnival is childish. 1 fancy that is the 
way my friend felt about it. 



xxxin. 

After the churches, the Italians are most at home in their the- 
atres, and I went as often as I could to see them there, ijrefi^rably 
where they were giving the Sten- 
terello plays. Stenterello is the 
Florentine mask or type who 
survives the older Italian comedy 
which Goldoni destroyed ; and 
duruig carnival he appeared in a 
great variety of characters at 
three different theatres. He is 
always painted with wide purp- 
lish circles round his eyes, with 
ail effect of gobies, and a hare- 
lip; and his hair, caught into a 
queue behind, curls up into a 
jiigtail on his neck. With this 
face and this wig he assumes any 
character the farce requires, and 
becomes delicious in proportion 
to Ilia grotesque unfitness for it. The best Stenterello was an old 
man, since dead, who was very famous in the part. He was of such 
a sympathetic and lovely humor that your heart warmed to him 
the moment he came upon the stage, and when he opened his mouth, 
it scarcely mattered what he said: those Tuscan gutturals and 
abounding vowels as he uttered them were enough; but certainly 
to see him in "Stenterello and his own Corpse," or "Stenterello Um- 
brella-mender," or " Stenterello Quack Doctor " was one of the great 
and simple pleasures. He was an actor who united the quaintness 
of Jefferson to the sweetness of Warren; in his wildest burlesque he 




A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. . 103 

was 80 trae to nature in every touch and accent, that I wanted to sit 
there and spend my life in the innocent folly of enjoying him. Ap- 
parently, the rest of the audience desired the same. Nowhere, even 
in Italy, was the sense of rest from all the hurrying, great weary 
world outside so full as in certain moments of this Stenterello's ab- 
surdity at the Teatro Bossini, which was not otherwise a comfortable 
place. It was more like a section of a tunnel than like a theatre, 
being a rounded oblong, with the usual tiers of boxes, and the pit 
where there were seats in front, and two thirds of the space left free 
for standing behind. Every day there was a new bill, and I remem- 
ber •' Stenterello White Slave in America " and " Stenterello as Ham- 
let" among the attractions offered. In fact, he runs through an 
indefinite number of dramas, as Brighella, Arlecchino, Pautalone, 
Florindo, Bosaura, and the rest, appear and reappear in the comedies 
of Goldoni while he is temporizing with the old com media d*arte, 
where he is at his best 

At what I may call the non-Stenterello theatres in Florence, they 
were apt to give versions of the more heart-breaking, vow-broken, 
French melodramas, though occasionally there was a piece of Italian 
origin, generally Giacosas. But it seemed to me that there were 
now fewer Italian plays given than there were twenty years ago ; 
and the opera season was almost as short and inclement as in 
Boston. 

XXXIV. 

I VISITED many places of amusements more popular than the the- 
atre, but I do not know that I can fitly offer them all to the more 
polite and formal acquaintance of my readers, whom I like always to 
figure as extremely well-behaved and well-dressed persons. Which 
of these refined and fastidious ladies and gentlemen shall I ask, for 
example, to go with me to see a dying Zouave in wax in a booth 
at the llercato Vecchio, where there were other pathetic and mon- 
strous figures? At the door was a peasant-like personage who 
extolled himself from time to time as the inventor of a musical 
instrument within, which he said he had exemplarily spent his time 



104 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



ID perfecting, instead of playing cards and mora. I followed him 
inside with the crowd, chiefly soldiers, who were in such overwhelm- 
ing force that I was a little puzzled to make out which corps and 
regiment I belonged to ; but I shared the common edification of the 
performance, when our musical genius mounted a pUtform before a 
most intricate instrument, which combined in it^lf, as he boasted, 
the qualities of all other kinds of instnimenb^. He shuffled off his 
shoes and played its pedals with his hare feet, while he sounded its 
pipes with his mouth, pounding a drum-attachment with one liand 
and scraping a violin-attachment with the other. I do not think the 
instrument will ever come into general use, and I have my doubts 
whether the inventor might not have better spared a moment or two 
of his time to mora\ 1 enjoyed more a little vocal and acrobatic 
entertainment, where again I found my- 
self in the midst of my brothers in arms. 
Civilians paid three cents to come in, but 
we military only two ; and we had the best 
seats and smoked throughout the perform- 
ance. This consisted of the feats of two 
nice, innocent-looking boys, who came out 
and tumbled, and of two sisters who sang a 
very long duet ti^ether, screeching the dia- 
logue with which it was interspersed in the 
ear-pier cingest voices ; it represented a lov- 
ers' quarrel, and sounded very like some 
which I have heard on the roof and the 
hack fences But what I admired about this and other popular 
shows was the perfect propriety. At the circus in the Via Nazionale 
they had even a clown in a dress-coat 

Of course, the two iron tanks full of young crocodiles which T saw 
in a booth in our piazza classed themselves with great moral shows, 
because of their instnictiveness. The water in which they lay soak- 
ing was warmed for them, and the chill was taken oft the air by a 
sheet-iron stove, so that, upon the whole, these sauriana had the 
most comfortable quarters in the whole shivering city. Although 




A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 105 

thej had up a sign, " Animali pericolosi — non si toccano/' nothiDg 
was apparently further from their thoughts than biting; they lay 
blinking in supreme content, and allowed a captain of horse to poke 
them with his finger throughout my stay, and were no more to be 
feared than that younger brother of theirs whom the showman went 
about with in his hand, lecturing on him ; he was half-hatched from 
his native egg, and had been arrested and neatly varnished in the 
act for the astonishment of mankind. 



XXXV. 

We had the luck to be in Florence on the 25th of March, when 
one of the few sun'iving ecclesiastical shows peculiar to the city 
takes place. On that day a great multitude, chiefly of peasants from 
the surrounding countrj% assemble in front of the Duomo to see the 
explosion of the Car of the PazzL This car somehow celebrates tlie 
exploit of a crusading Pazzi, who broke off a piece of the Holy Sep- 
ulchre and brought it back to Florence with him ; I could not learn 
just how or why, from the verj' scoffing and ironical little pamphlet 
which was sold in the crowd ; but it is certain the car is covered 
with large fire-crackers, and if these explode successfully, the har\'est 
for that year will be something remarkable. The car is stationed 
midway between the Duomo and the Baptister}% and the fire to set 
off the crackers is brought from the high altar by a pyrotechnic dove, 
which flies along a wire stretched for that purpose. If a mother 
with a sick child passes under the dove in its flight, the child is as 
good as cured. 

The crowd was vast, packing the piazza outside around the car 
and the cathedral to its walls with all sorts and conditions of people, 
and every age and sex. An alley between the living walls was kept 
open under the wire, to let the archbishop, heading a procession of 
priests, go out to bless the car. When this was done, and he had 
returned within, we heard a faint pop at the high altar, and then a 
loud fizzing as the fier}' dove came flying along the wire, showering 
sparks on every side ; it rushed out to the car, and then fled back to 



106 TUSCAN CITIES. 

the altar, amidst a most satisfactory banging of the fire-crackers. It 
was not a very awful spectacle, and I suspect that my sarcastic 
pamphleteer's description was in the mood of most of the Florentines 
looking on, whatever the peasant thought " * Now, Nina,' says the 
priest to the dove, * we 're almost ready, and look out how you come 
back, as well as go out That 's a dear ! It 's for the good of all, 
and don't play me a trick — you understand? Eeadyl Are you 
ready? Well, then, — Gloria in excehis Deo, — go, go, dear, and look 
out for your feathers! ShJMih! pum, pum! Hurrah, little one! 
Now for the return ! Here you come ! SMMiJi ! pum, pum, pum ! 
And I don't care a fig for the rest !' And he goes on with his mass, 
while the crowd outside console themselves with the cracking and 
popping. Then those inside the church join those without, and 
follow the car up to the comer of the Pazzi palace, where the unex- 
ploded remnants are fired in honor of the family." 

XXXVI. 

The civil rite now constitutes the only legal marriage in Italy, 
the blessing of the church going for nothing without it before the 
law ; and I had had a curiosity to see the ceremony which one may 
see any day in the office of the syndic. The names of those intend- 
ing matrimony are posted for a certain time on the base of the Public 
Palace, which gives everybody the opportunity of dedicating sonnets 
to them. The pay of a sonnet is one franc, so that the poorest couple 
can afford one ; and I suppose the happy pair whom I saw waiting 
in the syndic's anteroom had provided themselves with one of these 
simple luxuries. They were sufficiently commonish, kindly faced 
young people, and they and their friends wore, with their best 
clothes, an air of natural excitement A bell sounded, and we followed 
the group into a large handsome saloon hung with red silk and old 
tapestries, where the bride and groom sat down in chairs placed for 
them at the rail before the syndic's desk, with their two witnesses at 
their left A clerk recorded the names and residences of all four ; 
and then the usher summoned the syndic, who entered, a large, stout 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 107 

old gentleman, with a tricolor sash accenting his fat middle — waist 
he had none. Everybody rose, and he asked the bride and groom 
severally if they would help each other through life and be kind and 
faithful; then in a long, meclianical formula, which I could not hear, 
he dismissed them. They signed a register, and the affair was all 
over for us, and just begun for them, poor things. The bride seemed 
a little moved when we returned to tlie anteroom ; she borrowed her 
husband's handkerchief, lightly blew her nose with it, and tucked it 
back in his breast-pocket 

XXX Y II. 

Ix pursuance of an inteutiim ot ;*tudying Florence more seriously 
than anything here represents, I assisted one nioniing at a session of 
the police court, which I was willing to compare with the like tribu- 
nal at home. I found mvself in nmch the same sort of crowd as 
frequents the jiolice court here ; but u]»on the whole the Florentine 
audience, though shabby, was not so truculent -looking nor so dirty 
as the Boston one ; and my respectability was consoled when I found 
mvself shoulder to shoulder with an allKiU in it. The thing that 
chieflv struck me in the court itself was the almndance of form and 
** presence,' as compared with ours. Instead of our clerk standing 
up in his sack-coat, the court was opened by a crier in a black gown 
with a white shoulder-knot, and order was kept by others as cere- 
moniously apparelled, instead of two fat, cravatless officers in blue 
flannel jackets and Japanese fans. The judges, who were three, sat 
on a dais under a bust of King Umberto, before desks equipped with 
inkstands and sand-boxes exactlv like those in the theatre. Like 
the ushers, they wore black goNvns and white shoulder-knots, and 
had on visorless caps bound with silver braid ; the lawyers also were 
in gowns. The business with which the court opened seemed to be 
some civil question, and I waited for no other. The judges exam- 
ined the witnesses, and were very keen and quick with them, but 
not severe ; and what I admired in all was the good manner, — self- 
respectful, unabashed ; nobody seemed browbeaten or afraid. One 



108 TUSCAN CITIES, 

of the witnesses was one whom people near me called a gobbino 
(hunchbackling), and whose deformity was so grotesque that I am 
afraid a crowd of our people would have laughed at him, but no one 
smiled there. He bore himself with dignity, answering to the beau- 
tiful Florentine name of Vanuccio Vanucci ; the judges first addressed 
him as voi (you), but slipped insensibly into the more respectful lei 
(lordship) before they were done with him. I was too far oflf from 
them to make out what it was all about 



XXXVIII. 

I BELIEVE there are not many crimes of violence in Florence ; the 
people are not brutal, except to the dumb brutes, and there is prob- 
ably more cutting and stabbing in Boston; as for shooting, it is 
almost unheard of. A society for the prevention of cruelty to 
animals has been established by some humane English ladies, which 
directs its efforts wisely to awakening sympathy for them in the 
children. They are taught kindness to cats and dogs, and it is 
hoped that when they grow up they will even be kind to horses. 
These poor creatures, which have been shut out of the pale of human 
sympathy in Italy by their failure to embrace the Christian doctrine 
(*' Non S0710 Cristiani ! "), are very harshly treated by the Florentines, 
I was told; though I am bound to say that I never saw an Italian 
beating a horse. The horses look wretchedly underfed and over- 
worked, and doubtless they suffer from the hard, smooth pavements 
of the city, which are so delightful to drive on ; but as for the savage 
scourgings, the kicking with heavy boots, the striking over the head 
with the butts of whips, I take leave to doubt if it is at all worse 
with the Italians than with us, though it is so bad with us that the 
sooner the Italians can be reformed the better. 

If they are not very good to animals, I saw how kind they could 
be to the helpless and hapless of our own species, in a visit which I 
paid one morning to the Pia Casa di Eicovero in Florence. This 
refuge for pauperism was established by the first Napoleon, and is 
formed of two old convents, which he suppressed and joined together 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 109 

for the purpose. It has now nearly eight hundred inmates, men, 
women, and children ; and any one found b^ging in the streets is 
sent there. The whole is imder police government, and an officer 
was detailed to show me about the airy wards and sunny courts, and 
the clean, wholesome dormitories. The cleanliness of the place, in 
fact, is its most striking characteristic, and is promoted in the persons 
of the inmates by baths, perfunctory or voluntary, every week. The 
kitchen, with its shining coppers, was deliciously fragrant with the 
lunch preparing, as I passed through it: a mush of Indian meal 
boiled in a substantial meat-broth. This was served with an abun- 
dance of bread and half a gill of wine in pleasant refectories ; some 
very old incapables and incurables were eating it in bed. The aged 
leisure gr^ariously gossiping in the wards, or blinking vacantly in 
the sunshine of the courts, was an enviable spectacle ; and I should 
have liked to know what these old fellows had to complain of ; for, 
of course, they were discontented. The younger inmates were all 
at work ; there was an admirably appointed shop where they were 
artistically instructed in wood-carving and fine cabinet-work; and 
there were whole rooms full of little girls knitting, and of big girls 
weaving: all the clothes worn there are woven there. I do not 
know why the sight of a very old tailor in spectacles, cutting out a 
dozen suits of clothes at a time, from as many thicknesses of cloth, 
should have been so fascinating. Perhaps in his presence I was 
hovering upon the secret of the conjectured grief of that aged leisure : 
its clothes were all cut of one size and pattern ! 

XXXIX. 

I HAVE spoken already of the excellent public schools of Florence, 
which I heard extolled again and again as the best in Italy ; and I 
was very glad of the kindness of certain friends, which enabled me 
to visit them nearlv all. The first which I saw was in that famous 
old Via de* Bardi where Romola lived, and which was inspired by 
a charity as lanje-minded as her own. It is for the education of 
young girls in book-keeping and those departments of commerce in 



no 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



which they can be useful to themselves and others, and has a subsidy 
from the state of two-fifths of ite expenses ; the girls pay each ten 
■ francs a year for their tuition, and the rest comes from private 
sources. The person who bad done most to establish it was the 
lady iu whose charge I found it, and wbo was giving ber time to 
it For notliing; she was the wife of a professor iu the School of 




-REAH OF VIA r 



Superior Studies (as the University of Florence modestly calls itself), 
and I hope I may be forgiven, for the sake of the completer idea of 
the fact which I wish to present, if I trench so far as to add that she 
found her devotion to it consistent with all her domestic duties and 
social pleasures: she had thoroughly philosopliized it, and enjoyed 
it practically as well as wsthetically. The school occupies three 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. Ill 

rooms on the ground floor of an old palace, whose rear windows 
look upon the Amo; and in these rooms are taught successively 
writing and mathematics, the principles of book-keeping, and prac- 
tical book-keeping, with English and French throughout the three 
years' course. The teacher of penmanship was a professor in the 
Academy of Fine Arts, and taught it in its principles ; in this case, 
as in most others, the instruction is without text-books, and seemed 
to me more direct and sympathetic than ours: the pupil felt the 
personal quality of the teacher. There are fifty girls in the school, 
mostly from shop-keeping families, and of all ages from twelve to 
seventeen , and although it had been established only a short time, 
several of them had already found places. They were prettily and 
tidily dressed, and looked interested and happy. They rose when 
we entered a room, and remained standing tiU we left it ; and it was 
easy to see that their mental training was based upon a habit of self- 
respectful subordination, which would be quite as useful hereafter. 
Some little infractions of discipline — I have forgotten what — were 

promptly rebuked by Signora G , and her rebuke was received in 

the best spirit She said she had no trouble with her girls, and she 
was experiencing now, at the end of the first year, the satisfaction of 
success in her experiment : hers I call it, because, though there is a 
similar school in Naples, she was the foundress of this in Florence. 

There is now in Italy much inquiry as to what the Italians can 
best do to resume their place in the business of the world ; and in 
giving me a letter to the director of the Popular Schools in Florence, 

Signora G told me something of wliat certain good heads and 

hearts there had been thinking and doing. It appeared to these 
that Italy, with her lack of natural resources, could never compete 
with the great industrial nations in manufacturing, but they believed 
that she might still excel in the mechanical arts which are nearest 
allied to the fine arts, if an intelligent interest in them could be 
reawakened in her people, and they could be enlightened and edu- 
cated to the appreciation of skill and beauty in these. To this end 
a number of Florentine gentlemen united to estabUsh the Popular 
Schools, where instruction is given free every Sunday to any man or 



112 TUSCAN CITIES. 

boy of any age who chooses to wash his hands and face and come. 
Each of these gentlemen pledges himself to teach personaUy in the 
schools, or to pay for a teacher in his place; there is no aid from 
the state; all is the work of private beneficence, and no one receives 
pay for service in the schools except the porter. 

I found them in a vast old palace in the Via Parione, and the 
director kindly showed me through every department Instruction 
is given in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the other simpler 
branches ; but the final purpose of the schools is to train the facul- 
ties for the practice of the decorative arts, and any art in w^hich 
disciplined and nimble wits are useful When a pupil enters, his 
name is registered, and his history in the school is carefully recorded 
up to the time he leaves it. It was most interesting to pass from 
one room t<.) another, and witness the operation of the admirable 
ideas which animated the whole. Of course, the younger pupils 
were the quicker ; but the director called them up without regard 
to age or standing, and let me hear them answer their teachers' 
questions, merely saying, "This one has been with us six weeks; 
this one, two; this one, tliree years," etc. They were mostly poor 
fellows out of the streets, but often they were peasants who walked 
five or SIX miles to and fro to profit by the chance offered them for 
a little life and hght. Sometimes they were not too clean, and the 
smell in the rooms must have been trying to the teachers ; but they 
were decently clad, attentive, and well-behaved. One of the teachers 
had come up through the schools, with no other training, and was 
very eflScient There was a gymnasium, and the pupils were taught 
the principles of hygiene; there was abundant scientific apparatus, 
and a free circulating library. There is no religious instruction, but 
in one of the rooms a professor from the Studii Sui)eriori was lectur- 
ing on the Duties of a Citizen ; I heard him talk to the boys about 
theft ; he was very explicit with them, but just and kindly ; from 
time to time he put a question to test their intelligence and atten- 
tion. An admirable spirit of democracy — that is to say, of humanity 
and good sense — seemed to prevail throughout. The director made 
one little fellow read to me. Then, " What is your business ? " he 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 113 

asked. ''Cleaning out eave-troughs." Some of the rest tittered. 
"Why laugh?" demanded the director sternly. "It is an occupa- 
tion, like another." 

There are no punishments ; for gross misbehavior the offender is 
expelled. On the other hand, the pupils are given premiums for 
excellence, and are encouraged to put them into the savings-bank. 
The whole course is for four years ; but in the last year s room few 
remained. Of these was a certain rosso (red-head), whom the director 
called up. Afterwards he told me that this rosso had a wild roman- 
tic passion for America, whither he supremely desired to go, and that 
it would be an inexpressible pleasure for him to have seen me. I 
came away r^;retting that he could form so little idea from my looks 
of what Ammca was really lika 

In an old Medici palace, which was also once a convent, at the 
Oltramo end of the Trinity bridge, is the National Female Normal 
School, one of two in the kingdom, the other being at Naples. On 
the day of my visit, the older girls had just returned from the funeral 
of one of their professors, — a priest of the neighboring parish of 
S. Spirito. It was at noon, and, in the natural reaction, they were 
chatting gayly ; and as they ranged up and down stairs and through 
the long sunny corridors, pairing off, and whispering and laughing 
over their luncheon, they were very much like school-girls at home. 
The porter sent me upstairs through their formidable ranks to the 
room of the professor to whom I was accredited, and he kindly 
showed me through his department It was scientific, and to my 
ignorance, at least, was thoroughly equipped for its work with the 
usual apparatus ; but at that moment the Ught, clean, airy rooms 
were empty of students ; and he presently gave me in charge of the 
directress, Signora Billi, wlio kindly led the way through the whole 
establishment Some Boston lady, whom she had met in our educa- 
tional exhibit at the Exposition in Paris, had made interest with her 
for all future Americans by giving her a complete set of our public- 
school text-books, and she showed me with great satisfaction, in one of 
the rooms, a set of American school furniture, desks, and seats. But 

there the Americanism of the Normal School ended. The instruction 

8 



114 TUSCAN CITIES, 

was oral, the text-books few or none; but every student had her 
note-book in which she set down the facts and principles imparted. 
I do not know what the comparative advantages of the different 
systems are ; but it seemed to me that there must be more life and 
sympathy in the Italian. 

The pupiLs, who are of all ages from six years to twenty, are five 
hundred in number, and are nearly all from the middle class, though 
some are from the classes above and below that They come there 
to be fitted for teaching, and are glad to get the places which the 
state, which educates them for nothing, pays scantily enough, — two 
hundred and fifty dollars a year at most. They were all neatly 
dressed, and well-mannered, of course, from the oldest to the young- 
est ; the discipline is perfect, and the relation of teachers and pupils, 
I understood, most affectionate. Perhaps after saying this I ought 
to add that the teachers are all ladies, and young ladies. One of 
these was vexed that I should see her girls with their hats and sacks 
on : but they were little ones and just going home ; the little ones 
were allowed to go home at one o'clock, while the others remained 
from nine till two. In the room of the youngest were two small 
Scotchwomen who had quite forgotten their parents' dialect ; but in 
their blue eyes and auburn hair, in everything but their speech, they 
were utterly alien to the dusky bloom and gleaming black of the 
Italians about them. The girls were nearly all of the dark type, 
though there was here and there one of those opaque Southern 
blondes one finds in Italy. Fair or dark, however, they all had 
looks of bright intelligence, though I should say that in beauty they 
were below the American average. All their surroundings here were 
wholesome and good, and the place was thoroughly comfortable, as 
the Italians understand comfort. They have no fire in the coldest 

weather, though at Signora G 's commercial school they had 

stoves, to be used in extreme cases; but on the other hand they 
had plenty of light and sunny air, and all the brick floors and 
whitewashed walls were exquisitely clean. I should not have been 
much the wiser for seeing them at their lessons, and I shall always 
be glad of that impression of hopeful, cheerful young life which the 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 115 

sight of their leisure gave me, as they wandered happy and free 
through the corridors where the nuns used to pace with downcast 
eyes and folded palms; and I came away veiy well satisfied with 
my century. 

My content was in nowise impaired by the visit which I made to 
the girls' public school in Via Montebella It corresponded, I sup- 
pose, to one of our primary schools; and here, as elsewhere, the 
teaching was by dictation ; the chUdren had readers, but no other 
text-books ; these were in the hands of the teachers alona Again 
everything was very clean, very orderly, veiy humane and kindly. 
The little ones in the various rooms, called up at random, were 
wonderfully proficient in reading, mathematics, grammar, and geog- 
raphy; one small person showed an intimacy \iith the map of 
Europe which was nothing less than dismaying. 

I did not succeed in getting to the boys* schools, but I was told 
that they were practically the same as this; and it seemed to me 
that if I must miss either, it was better to see the future mothers of 
Italy at their books. Here alone was there any hint of the church 
in the school : it was a Friday, and the priest was coming to teach 
the future mothers their catechism. 



XL 

Few of my readers, I hope, have failed to feel the likeness of these 
broken and ineffectual sketches to the pictures in stone which glare 
at you from the windows of the mosaicists on the Lungamo and in 
the Via Borgognissanti ; the wonder of them is greater than the 
pleasure. I have myself had the fancy, in my work, of a number 
of small views and figures of mosaic, set in a slab of black marble 
for a table-top, or — if the reader does not like me to be so ambi- 
tious — a paper-weight; and now I am tempted to form a border 
to this capo (Topera, bizarre and irr^ular, such as I have some- 
times seen composed of the bits of pieira viva left over from a 
larger work. They are mere fragments of color, scraps and shreds 
of Florence, which I find still gleaming more or less dimly in my 



116 



TUSCAN CITJBS. 



note-books, and I have no notion of making any ordered arrangement 
of them. 

But I am sure tbat if I shall but speak of bow the sunshiue lies 
in the I'iazza of iht; Aunuuziata at noonday, falling on the feebly 
dribbling grotesques of the fountain there, and on John of Bologna's 
eiiuestrian grand duke, and on that dear and ever lovely baud of 
babes by Luca della Hobbia in the facade of the Hospital of the 
Innocents, I shall do enough to bring it all back to him who has 
once seen it, and to justify myself at least in his eyas. 

The beautiful pulpit of Donatello in San Lorenzo 1 find associated 

in sensation with the effect, from the old cloistered court of tliat 

church, of Brunelleschi's dome and Giotto's 

tower sliowiug in the pale evening 




HOUSETOPS. 



air above all the picturesque roofa between 
San Lorenzo and the cathedral; and not remot« from these is my 
pleasure in the rich vulgarity and affluent bad taste of the modem 
decoration of the Cafi del Pnrlammto, in which one takes one's ice 
under the chins of all these pretty girls, popping their little sculp- 
tured heads out of the lunettes below the frieze, with the hats and 
bonnets of fifteen years ago on them. 

Do you rememl>er. beloved brethren and sisters of Florentine so- 
journ, tlie little windows beside the grand portals of the palaces, the 
cantiiu, where you could buy a graceful wicker-covered flask of the 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 117 

prince's or marquis's wine ? " Open from ten till four — till one on 
holidays/' they were lettered ; and in the Borgo d^li Albizzi I saw 
the Cantina Filicaja, though it had no longer the old sigh for Italy 
upon its lips : — 



<( 



Deh, foflsi tu men bella o almen piii forte! 



I am far from disdaining the memory of my horse-car tour of the 
city, on the track which followed so nearly the line of the old city 
wall that it showed me most of the gates still left standing, and the 
last grand duke's arch of triumph, very brave in the sunset light 
The tramways make all the long distances in the Florentine outskirts 
and suburbs, and the cars never come when you want them, just as 
with us, and are always as crowded. 

I had a great deal of comfort in two old fellows, unoccupied custo- 
dians, in the convent of San Marco, who, while we were all fidgeting 
about, doing our Fra Angelico or our Savonarola, sat motionless in a 
patch of sunshine and tranquiUy gossipped together in senile falsetto. 
On the other hand, I never saw truer grief, or more of it, in a custo- 
dian than the polite soul displayed in the Bargello on whom we came 
so near the hour of closing one day that he could show us almost 
nothing. I could see that it wrung his heart that we should have 
paid our francs to come in then, when the Dante in the peaceful 
Giotto fresco was ouly a pensive blur to the eye, and the hideous 
realizations of the great Pest in wax were mere indistinguishable 
nightmares. We tried to console him by assuring him of our delight 
in Delia Robbia's singing boys in another room, and of the compen- 
sation we had in getting away from the Twelve (Useless) Labors of 
Hercules by Hossi, and two or three particularly unpleasant muscular 
Abstractions of Michael Angelo. It was in fact too dark to see much 
of the museum, and we had to come again for that ; but no hour 
could have been better than that of the falling dusk for the old 
court, with its beautiful staircase, where so many hearts had broken 
in the anguish of death, and so many bloody heads rolled upon the 
insensible stones since the first Podesti of Florence had made the 
Bargello his home, till the last Medici had made it his prison. 



118 TUSCAN CITIES. 

Of statues and of pictures I have spoken verj little, because it 
seems to me that others have spoken more than enough. Tet I have 
hinted that I did my share both of suffering and enjoying in galleries 
and churches, and I have here and there still lurking in my con- 
sciousness a color, a look, a light, a line from some masterpiece of 
Botticelli, of Donatello, of Mino da Fiesole, which I would fain hope 
will be a consolation forever, but which I will not vainly attempt to 
impart to others. I will rather beg the reader when he goes to Flor- 
ence, to go for my sake, as well as his own, to the Academy and look 
at the Spring of Botticelli as long and often as he can keep away 
from the tender and dignified and exquisitely refined Mino da Fie- 
sole sculptures in the Badia, or wherever else he may find them. 
These works he may enjoy without technique, and simply upon con- 
dition of his being a tolerably genuine human creatura There is 
something also very sweet and winningly simple in the archaic reliefs 
in the base of Giotto's tower ; and the lessee of the Teatro Umberto 
in showing me behind the scenes of his theatre had a politeness that 
was delicious, and comparable to nothing less than the finest works 
of art. 

In quality of courtesy the Italians are still easily first of all 
men, as they are in most other things when they will, though I am 
not sure that the old gentleman who is known in Florence as The 
American, par excellence, is not perhaps pre-eminent in the art of 
driving a circus-chariot This compatriot has been one of the most 
striking and characteristic features of the place for a quarter of a 
century, with his team of sixteen or twenty horses guided through 
the Florentine streets by the reins gathered into his hands. From 
time to time his horses have run away and smashed his carriage, or 
at least pulled him from his seat, so that now he has himself strapped 
to the box, and four grooms sit with folded arms on the seats behind 
him, ready to jump down and fly at the horses' heads. As the 
strange figure, drawn at a slow trot, passes along, with stifHy waxed 
mustache and impassive face, it looks rather like a mechanical con- 
trivance in the human form; and you are yielding to this fancy, 
when, approaching a comer, it breaks into a long cry, astonishingly 



A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 119 

harsh and fierce, to warn people in the next street of its approach. 
. It is a curious sight, and seems to belong to the time when rich and 
privil^ed people used their pleasure to be eccentric, and the " mad- 
ness " of Englishmen especially was the amazement and delight of 
the Continent It is in character with this that the poor old gentle- 
man should bear one of our own briefly historical names, and that he 
should illustrate in the indulgence of his caprice the fact that no 
great length of time is required to arrive at all that centuries can do 
for a noble family. I have been sorry to observe a growing impa- 
tience with him on the part of the Florentine journalists. Upon 
the occasion of his last accident they asked if it was not time his 
progresses should be forbidden. Next to tearing down the Ponte 
Yecchio, I can imagine nothing worsa 

Journalism is very active in Florence, and newspapers are sold 
and read everywhere ; they are conspicuous in the hands of people 
who are not supposed to read ; and more than once the cab-driver 
whom I called at a street comer had to fold up his cheap paper and 
put it away before he could respond. They are of a varying quality. 
The " Nazione," which is serious and political, is as solidly, if not so 
heavily, written as an English journal ; the " FanfuUa della Dome- 
nica/' which is literary, contains careful and brilliant reviews of new 
books. The cheap papers are apt to be inflammatory in politics ; if 
humorous, they are local and somewhat unintelligibla The more 
pretentious satirical papers are upon the model of the French, — a 
little more political, but abounding mostly in jokes at the expense 
of the seventh commandment, which the Latins find so drolL There 
are in all thirty periodicals, monthly, weekly, and daily, published 
in Florence, which you are continuaUy assured is no longer the liter- 
ary centre of Italy. It is true none of the leaders of the new real- 
istic movement in fiction are Florentines by birth or residence ; the 
chief Italian poet, Carducci, lives in Bologna, the famous traveller 
De Amicis lives in Turin, and most new books are published at 
Milan or Naples. But I recur again to the group of accomplished 
scholars who form the intellectual body of the Studii Superiori, or 
University of Florence ; and thinking of such an able and delightful 



120 TUSCAN CITIES. 

historian as Yillari, and such a thorough and indefatigable litterateur 
as Gubematis, whom the congenial intellectual atmosphere of Flor- 
ence has attracted from Naples and Piedmont, I should not, if I were 
a Florentine, yield the palm without a struggle. 

One does not turn one's face from Florence without having paid 
due honors in many a regretful, grateful look to the noble and fa- 
mous river that runs through her heart. You are always coming 
upon the Arno, and always seeing it in some new phase or mood. 
Belted with its many bridges, and margined with towers and palaces, 
it is the most beautiful and stately thing in the beautiful and stately 
city, whether it is in a dramatic passion from the recent rains, or 
dreamily raving of summer drouth over its dam, and stretching a bar 
of silver from shore to shore. The tawny splendor of its flood ; the 
rush of its rapids ; the glassy expanses in which the skies mirror 
themselves by day, and the lamps by night ; the sweeping curve of 
the pale buff line of houses that follows its course, — give a fascination 
which is not lost even when the anxiety of a threatened inundation 
mingles with it The storms of a single night, sending down their 
torrents from the hills, set it foaming; it rises momently, and noth- 
ing but the presence of all the fire-engine companies in the city allays 
public apprehension. What they are to do to the Arno in case it 
overflows its banks, or whether they are similarly called out in 
summer when it shrinks to a rill in its bed, and sends up clouds of 
mosquitoes, I do not know ; nor am I quite comfortable in thinking 
the city is drained into it From the vile old rancid stenches which 
steam up from the crevices in the pavement everywhere, one would 
think the city was not drained at all ; but this would be as great a 
mistake as to think New York is not cleaned, merely because it 
looks filthy. 

Before we left Florence we saw the winter drowse broken in the 
drives and alleys of the Cascine ; we saw the grass, green from No- 
vember till April, snowed with daisies, and the floors of the dusky 
little dingles empurpled with violets. The nightingales sang from 
the poplar tops in the dull rich warmth; the carriages blossomed with 
lovely hats and parasols ; handsome cavaliers and slim-waisted ladies 



A FinREN^rms mosaic. 



121' 



dashed by on blooded horses (I will say blooded for the effect), and 
a fat Hower-girl urged her wares upon every one she could overtake. 
It was enough to surest what the Cascine could be to Florence in 
the summer, and enough to make one regret the winter, when one 
conld have it nearly all to one's self. 

You can never see the Boboli Garden with the same sense of 
ownership, for it distinctly belongs to the king's palace, and the 
public has Uie range uf it only o 
Sundays, when the people throng it ' 




122 TUSCAN CITIES. 

curtains of laurel-hedge, its black spires of cypress and domes of 
pine, its weather-beaten marbles, its sad, unkempt lawns, its gro- 
tesque, overgrown fountain, with those sea-horses so much too big 
for its lake, its wandering alleys and moss-grown seats abounding in 
talking age and whispering lovers. It has a tangled vastness in 
which an American might almost lose his self-consciousness; and the 
view of Florence from one of its heights is incomparably enchanting, 
— like every other view of Florence. 

Like that, for instance, which one has from the tower of the 
Palazzo Vecchio, looking down on the picturesque surfaces of the 
city tiles, the silver breadth and stretch of the Arno, the olive and 
vine clad hills, the vast champaign widening in the distance till the 
misty tops of the mountains softly close it in at last. Here, as from 
San Miniato, the domed and galleried bulk of the cathedral showed 
prodigiously first of all things ; then the eye rested again and again 
upon the lowered crests of the mediieval towers, monumentally 
abounding among the modern roofs that swelled above their broken 
pride. The Florence that I saw was indeed no longer the Florence 
of the sentimentalist's feeble desire, or the romancer's dream, but 
something vastly better: contemporary, real, busy in its fashion, and 
wholesomely and every-daily beautiful. And my heart still warms 
to the famous town, not because of that past which, however heroic 
and aspiring, was so wrong-headed and bloody and pitiless, but 
because of the present, safe, free, kindly, full of possibilities of pros- 
perity and fraternity, like that of Boston or Denver. 

The weather had grown suddenly warm overnight. I looked again 
at the distant mountains, where they smouldered along the horizon : 
they were purple to their tips, and no ghost of snow glimmered 
under any fold of their mist. Our winter in Florence had come to 
an end. 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 



I 




^10\TH out of our winter at Floreoce 
\;t gave to Siena, whither we went 
• :irlj- ill Februaiy. At that time there 
were uo more signs of spring in the 
I.indscape tlian ttiere were in December, 
L'xcept for here and there an almond- 
tree, which in the pale pink of its 
blossoms allowed delicately as a lady's 
complexion in the unfriendly air. The fields were in their green 
arrest, but the trees were bare, and the yellow river that wan- 
dered along beside the railroad looked sullen and cold under the 
dun sky. 

After we left the Florentine plain, we ran between lines of reddish 
hills, sometimes thickly wooded, sometimes showing on their crests 
only the stems and tops of scattering pines and poplars, such as the 
Tuscan painters were fond of putting into their Judejin backgrounds. 
There were few tokens of life in the picture ; we saw some old women 
tending sheep and spinning with their distaffs in the pastures ; and 
in the distance there were villages cropping out of the hill-tops and 
straggling a little way down the slopes. At times we whirled by tlie 
ruins of a castle, and nearer Siena we cauglit sight of two or three 
walled towers which had come down from the Middle Ages appar- 
ently with every turret in repair. Our course was south-westwanl. 



126 TUSCAN CITIES. 

but we were continually mounting into the cold, thin air of the 
volcanic hill-country, at the summit of which the old Ghibjelline city 
still sits capital, proud of her past, beautiful and noble even among 
Italian towns, and wearing in her mural crown the cathedral second 
in splendor and surprise only to the jewel-church in the belt of 
Venica 

It is not my habit to write such fine rhetoric as this, the reader 
will bear me witness ; and I suspect that it is a prophetic tint from 
an historical sketch of Siena, to which, after ascertaining the mo- 
notony of the landscape, I could dedicate the leisure of our journey 
with a good conscience. It forms part of "La Nuova Guida di 
Siena," and it grieves me that the titlepage of my copy should have 
been lost, so that I cannot give the name of an author whose elo- 
quence I delight in. He says : *' Siena is lifted upon hills that rise 
alluring and delicious in the centre of Tuscany. ... Its climate is 
soft, temperate, and wholesome. The summer sojourn is very grate- 
ful there on account of the elevated position and the sea breezes that, 
with an agreeable constancy, prevail in that season. . . . The pano- 
rama of the city is something enchanting. . . . Every step reveals 
startling changes of perspective, now lovely, now stern, but always 
stamped with a physiognomy of their own, a characteristic originality. 
From all points is seen the slim, proud tower of the Mangia, that 
lifts among the clouds its battlemented crest, its arrowy and exquisite 
shaft. Viewed from the top of this tower, Siena presents the figure 
of a star, — a figure formed by the diverse rays or lines of its streets 
traced upon the shoulder of the hills. The loveliest blue of the 
most lovely Italian sky irradiates our city with the purest light, in 
which horizons magnificent and vast open upon the eye. . . . The 
hills and the plain are everywhere clothed with rich olive groves, 
festive orchards, luxuriant vineyards, and delightful bosks of oak, of 
chestnut, and of walnut, which form the umbrageous breathing- 
places of the enchanting landsciipe, and render the air pure and 
oxygenated." The native inhabitants of this paradise are entirely 
worthy of it. " No people in Italy, except, perhaps, the Neapolitans, 
has the wide-awake-mindedness, the liveliness of character, the quick- 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 129 

ness of spirit, the keen-witted joyousness of the Sienese. . . . The 
women dress modestly, but with taste. They are gracious, amiable, 
inclined to amusement, and affectionate in their families. In general 
their honesty gives no ground for jealousy to their husbands ; they 
are extremely refined in manner, and renowned for their grace and 
beauty. The comeliness of their figures, the regularity of their linea- 
ments, as well as their vivid coloring, which reveals in them an 
enviable freshness of fibre and good blood purified by the mountain 
air, justly awaken the admiration of strangers. ... In the women 
and the men alike exist the sweetness of pronunciation, the elegance 
of phrase, and the soft clearness of the true Tuscan accent. . . . 
Hospitality and the cordial reception of strangers are the hereditarj', 
the proverbial virtues of the Sienese. . . . The pride of the Sienese 
character is equal to its hospitality ; and this does not spring from 
roughness of manners and customs, but is a noble pride, magnani- 
mous, worthy of an enlightened people with a self-derived dignity, 
and intensely attached to its own liberty and independence. The 
Sienese, whom one historian has called the French of Italy, are 
ardent spirits, enthusiastic, resolute, energetic, courageous, and prompt 
beyond any other people to brandish their arms in defence of their 
country. They have a martial nature, a fervid fancy, a lively imag- 
ination ; they are born artists ; laborious, affable, affectionate, expan- 
sive ; they are frank and loyal friends, but impressionable, impetuous, 
fiery to exaltation. Quick to anger, they are ready to forgive, which 
shows their excellence of heart. They are polite, but unaffected. 
Another trait of their gay and sympathetic character is their love of 
song, of the dance, and of all gymnastic exercises. . . . Dante called 
the Sienese goUe vana (a vain people). But we must reflect that the 
allimmo pacta was a Florentine, and though a sublime genius, he was 
not able to emancipate himself from that party hate and municipal 
rivalry, the great curse of his time." 

But for that final touch about Dante, I might have thought I was 
reading a description of the Americans, and more especially the 
Bostonians, so exactly did my author's eulogy of the Sienese embody 

the facts of our own character. But that touch disillusioned me: 

9 



130 TUSCAN CITIES. 

even Dante would not have called the Bostonians gente vana, unless 
he had proposed to spend the rest of his life in London. As it was, 
I was impatient to breathe that wondrous air, to bask in that light, 
to behold that incomparable loveliness, to experience that proverbial 
hospitality and that frank and loyal friendship, to mingle in the 
song and dance and the gymnastic exercises; and nothing but the 
sober-minded deliberation of the omnibus-train which was four hours 
in going to Siena, prevented me from throwing myself into the wel- 
coming embrace of the cordial city at once. 

II. 

I HAD time not only to reflect that perhaps Siena distinguished 
between strangers arriving at her gates, and did not bestow an indis- 
criminate hospitality, but to wander back with the " New Guide " 
quite to the dawn of her history, when Senio, the son of Remus, 
flying from the wrath of his uncle Somulus, stopped where Siena 
now stands and built himself a castle. Whether the city got her 
name from Senio or not, it is certain that she adopted the family 
arms ; and to this day the she-wolf suckling the twins is as mucli 
blazoned about Siena as about Rome, if not more. She was called 
Urbs Lupata even by the Romans, from the wolf-bearing seal of her 
chief magistrate ; and a noble Roman family sent one of its sons as 
early as 303 to perish at Siena for the conversion of the city to 
Christianity. When the empire fell, Siena suff'ered less than the 
other Tuscan cities from the barbarian incursions; but she came 
under the rule of the Longobard kings, and then was one of the 
" free cities " of Charlemagne, from whose counts and barons, enriched 
by his gifts of Sienese lands and castles, the Sienese nobility trace 
their descent. These foreign robbers,- whose nests the Florentines 
went out of their gates to destroy, in their neighborhood, voluntarily 
left their castles in the Sienese territory, and came into the city, 
which they united with the bishops in embelUshing with beautiful 
palaces and ruling with an iron hand, till the commons rose and 
made good their claim to a share in their own government. Immu- 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 131 

nities and privileges were granted by Caesar and Peter, and at the 
close of the twelfth century a republican government, with an elective 
magistracy, was fully developed, and the democratized city entered 
upon a career of great material prosperity. " But in the midst of 
this potent activity of political and commercial life, Siena more than 
any other Italian city was afflicted with municipal rivalries and intes- 
tine discords. To-day the nobles triumphed and hurled the commons 
from power ; to-morrow the people took a bloody revenge and ban- 
ished every patrician from the city. Every change of administration 
was accompanied by ostracism, by violence, by public tumults, by 
continual upheavals;" and these feuds of families, of parties, and of 
classes were fostered and perpetuated by the warring ambitions of 
the popes and emperors. From the first, Siena was Ghibelline and 
for the emperors, and it is odd that one of her proudest victories 
should have been won against Henry the son of Barbarossa. When 
that emperor threatened the free cities with ruin, Siena was the only 
one in Tuscany that shut her gates against him ; and when Henry 
laid siege to her, her people sallied out of Fontebranda and San 
Marco, and fell upon his (Jermans and put them to flight. 

The Florentines., as we have seen, were of the pope's politics ; or, 
rather, they were for their own freedom, which they thought his 
poUtics favored, and the Sienese were for theirs, which they believed 
the imperial success would establish. They never could meet upon 
the common ground of their common love of liberty, but kept 
battling on through four centuries of miserable wars till both were 
enslaved. Siena had her shameful triumph when she helped in the 
great siege that restored the Medici to Florence in 1530, and Flor- 
ence had her cruel revenge when her tyrant Cosimo T. entered Siena 
at the head of the imperial forces fifteen years later. The Floren- 
tines met their first great defeat at the hands of the Sienese and of 
their own Ghibelline exiles at Montaperto (twelve miles from Siena) 
in 1260, when the slaughter was so great, as Dante says, " che fece 
TArbia colorata in rosso ; " and in 1269 the Sienese were routed 
by their own Guelph exiles and the Florentines at CoUe di Val 
d'FJsa. 



132 TUSCAN CITIES. 

A story is told of an official of Siena to whom the Florentines 
sent in 1860 to invite his fellow-citizens to join them in celebrating 
the union of Tuscany with the kingdom of Italy. He said, Yes, they 
would be glad to send a deputation of Sienese to Florence, but would 
the Florentines really like to have them come ? " Surely ! Why 
not?" " Oh, that affair of Montaperto, you know," — as if it were 
of the year before, and must still, after six hundred years, have been 
rankling in the Florentine mind. But perhaps in that time it had 
become confused there with other injuries, or perhaps the Florentines 
of 1860 felt that they had sufficiently avenged themselves by their 
victory of 1269. This resulted in the triumph of the Guelphs in 
Siena, and finally in the substitution of the magistracy of the Nine 
for that of the Thirty. These Nine, or the Noveschi, ruled the city 
for two hundred and fifty years with such unscrupulous tyranny and 
infamous corruption that they " succeeded in destroying every gener- 
ous sentiment, in sapping the noble pride of character in the Sienese 
population, and if not in extinguishing, at least in cooling, their ar- 
dent love of liberty," and preparing them for the rule of the ever- 
dreaded one-man power, which appeared in the person of Pandolfo 
Petrucci in 1487. He misruled Siena for twenty-five years, playing 
there, with less astuteness and greater ferocity, the part which Lorenzo 
de' Medici had played a century earlier in earlier rotten Florence. 
Petrucci, too, like Lorenzo, was called the Magnificent, and he, 
too, passed his life in sensual debauchery, in political intrigues 
ending in bloody revenges and reprisals, and in the protection 
of the arts, letters, and religion. Of course he beautified the 
city, and built palaces, churches, and convents with the money 
he stole from the people whom he gave peace to prosper in. 
He, too, died tranquilly of his sins and excesses, his soul reeking 
with treasons and murders like the fascinating Lorenzo's; and 
his sons tried to succeed him like Lorenzo's, but were deposed 
like Pietro de' Medici and banished. One of his pleasing family 
was that Achille Petrucci who, in the massacre of St. Barthol- 
omew at Paris, cut the throat of the great Protestant admiral, 
Coligny. 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 133 

After them, the Sienese enjoyed a stormy and intermittent lib- 
erty within and varying fortunes of war without, till the Emperor 
Charles V., having subdued Florence, sent a Spanish garrison to 
Siena with orders to build him a fort in that city. The Spaniards 
were under the command of Don Hurtado de Mendoza, who was 
not only, as my "New Guide" describes him, "ex-monk, astute, 
subtle, fascinating in address, profound dissimulator," but also the 
author of the " History of the War of Granada," and of one of the 
most delightful books in the world, namely, " The Life of Lazarillo 
de Tormes," Spanish rogue and b^gar, for whose sake I freely for- 
give him on my part all his sins against the Sienese; especially 
as they presently drove him and his Spaniards out of the city and 
demolished his fort. 

The Sienese had regained their freedom, but they could hope to 
keep it only by the help of the French and their allies the Florentine 
exiles, who were plotting under the Strozzi against the Medici The 
French friendship came to little or nothing but promises, the exiles 
were few and feeble, and in 1554 the troops of the Emperor and of 
Duke Cosimo — him of the terrible face and the blood-stained soul, 
murderer of his son, and father of a family of adulteresses and assas- 
sins — came and laid siege to the doomed city. The siege lasted 
eighteen months, and until the Sienese were wasted by famine and 
pestilence, and the women fought beside the men for the city which 
was their country and the last hope of liberty in Italy. When the 
famine began they drove out the useless mouths (bocche inutili), the 
old men and women and the orphan children, hoping that the enemy 
would have pity on these hapless creatures ; the Spaniards massacred 
most of them before their eyes. Fifteen hundred peasants, who tried 
to bring food into the city, were hung before the walls on the trees, 
which a Spanish writer says "seemed to bear dead men." The 
country round about was laid waste; a hundred thousand of its 
inhabitants perished, and the fields they had tilled lapsed into pesti- 
lential marshes breathing fever and death. The inhabitants of the 
city were reduced from forty to six thousand ; seven hundred fami- 
lies preferred exile to slavery. 



134 TUSCAN CITIES. 

Charles V. gave Siena as a fief to his son, Philip II., who ceded it 
to Cosimo I., and he built there the fort which the Spaniards had 
attempted. It remained under the good Lorrainese dukes till Napo- 
leon made it capital of his Department of the Ombrone, and it 
returned to them at his fall. In 1860 it was the first Tuscan city to 
vote for the union of Italy under Victor Emmanuel, — the only 
honest king known to history, says my " New Guida" 

III. 

It is a " New Guide " full of the new wine of our epoch, and it 
brags not only of the warriors, the saints, the popes, the artists, the 
authors, who have illustrated the Sienese name, but of the two great 
thinkers in religion and politics who have given her truer glory. The 
bold pontiff Alexander III., who put his foot on the neck of the Em- 
peror at Venice, was a Sienese ; the meek, courageous St. Catherine, 
daughter of a dyer, and the envoy of popes and princes, was a Sie- 
nese; Sallustio Bandini, the inventor of the principle of Free Trade in 
commerce, was a Sienese ; and Socinus, the inventor of Free Thought 
in religion, was a Sienese. There is a statue to Bandini in one of the 
chief places of Siena, but when my " New Guide " was written there 
was as yet no memorial of Socinus. "The fame of this glorious 
apostle," he cries bitterly, "who has been called the father of 
modem rationalism, is cherished in England, in France, in Italy, in 
Switzerland, in Holland, in Poland, in America. Only Siena, who 
should remember with noble pride her most illustrious son, has no 
street named for him, no bust, no stone. Eightly do the strangers 
who visit our city marvel at neglect which denies him even a com- 
memorative tablet in the house where he was born, — the Casa 
Sozzini, now Palazzo Malavolta, 21 Via EicasolL" The justness of 
this censure is not impugned by the fact that the tablet has since 
been placed there ; perhaps it was the scorn of my " New Guide '* 
which lashed the Sienese to the act of tardy recognition. This has 
now found stately utterance in the monumental Italian which is 
the admiration and despair of other languages : — 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 135 

<< In the fiiBt Half of the 16th Centoiy 

Were bum in this House 

Lelio and Fausto Sozzini, 

Scholars, Philosophers, Phikuthropists. 

Strenuous Champions of the Libeity of Thought, 

Defenders of Human Reason against the Supernatural, 

They founded the celebrated Socinian School, 

Forecasting by three Centuries 

The doctrine of Modem Rationalism. 

The Sienese Liberals, Admiring, Reverent, 

Placed this Memorial. 

1877." 

• I wandered into the court of the old palace, now involuntarily 
pea-green with mould and damp, and looked out from the bow-shaped 
terrace bulging over the garden behind, and across the olive orchards 
— But I forgot that I was not yet in Siena. 



IV. 

Before our arrival I had time to read all the " New Guide " had 
to say about the present condition of this city. What it was socially, 
morally, and personally I knew already, and what it was industri- 
ally and commerciaUy I learned with regret- The prosperity of 
Siena had reached its height in the thirteenth century, just before 
the great pest appeared. Her people then numbered a hundred 
thousand from which they were reduced by the plague to twenty 
thousand. Whole districts were depopulated vrithin the walls ; the 
houses fell down, the streets vanished, and the plough passed over 
the ruins ; wide gardens, olive orchards, and vineyards still flourish 
where traffic was busy and life was abundant The " New Guide " 
does not say so, but it is true that Siena never fully recovered from 
this terrible stroke. At the time of the great siege, two hundred 
years after the time of the great pest, she counted only forty thou- 
sand souls within her gates, and her silk and wooUen industries, 
which still exist, were vastly shrunken from their old proportions. 
The most evident industry in Siena now is that of the tanners, which 
hangs its banners of leather from all the roofs in the famous r^ion 



136 TUSCAN CITIES. 

of Fontebranda, and envelops the birthplace of St Catherine in au 
odor of tan-bark. There is also a prosperous fabric of iron furniture, 
principally bedsteads, which is noted throughout Italy ; this, with 
some cotton-factories and carpet-looms on a small scale, and some 
agricultural implement works, is nearly aU that the " New Guide " 
can boast, till he comes to speak of the ancient marchpane of Siena, 
now called Panforte, whose honored name I have ventured to bestow 
upon these haphazard sketches of its native city, rather because of 
their chance and random associations of material and decorative 
character than because of any rivalry in quality to which they can 
pretend. I often saw the panforte in shop-windows at Florence, and 
had the best intention in the world to test its excellence, but to this 
day I know only of its merits from my " New Guide." " This spe- 
cialty, wholly Sienese, enjoys, in the article of sweetmeats, the pri- 
macy in Italy and beyond, and forms one of the principal branches of 
our industry. The panforte of Siena fears no competition or com- 
parison, either for the exquisiteness of its flavor or for the beauty of 
its artistic confection : its brown paste, gemmed with broken almonds, 
is covered in the panfortes dc hixe with a frosting of sugar, adorned 
with broideries, with laces, mth flowers, with leaves, with elegant 
figures in lively colors, and with artistic designs, representing usually 
some monument of the city." 

V. 

It was about dark when we reached Siena, looking down over her 
wall upon the station in the valley ; but there was still light enough 
to give us proof, in the splendid quarrel of two railway porters over 
our baggage, of that quickness to anger and readiness to forgive 
which demonstrates the excellence of heart in the Sienese. These 
admirable types of the local character jumped furiously up and down 
in front of each other, and then, without striking a blow, instantly 
exchanged forgiveness and joined in a fraternal conspiracy to get 
too much money out of me for handling my trunks. I willingly 
became a party to their plot myself in gratitude for the impassioned 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 139 

spectacle they had afiforded me ; and I drove up through the steeply 
winding streets of the town with a sense of nearness to the Middle 
Ages not excelled even in my first visit to Quebec. Of Quebec I still 
think when I think of Siena ; and there are many superficial points 
of likeness in the two cities. Each, as Dante said of one, " torregia e 
siede " (" sits and towers " is no bad phrase) on a mighty front of 
rock, round whose precipitous slopes she belts her girdling walL 
The streets within wander hither and thither at will ; in both they 
are narrow and hemmed in with the gray facades of the stone houses; 
without spreads a mighty vaUey, — watered at Quebec with the con- 
fluent St Lawrence and St Charles, and walled at the horizon with 
primevally wooded hills ; dry at Siena with almost volcanic drought, 
and shut in at the same far range by arid and sterile tops bare as the 
skies above them, yet having still the same grandeur and nobility of 
form. After that there is all the difference you will, — the difference 
of the North and South, the difference of the Old World and the 
New. 

I have always been a friend of the picturesqueness of the Cathedral 
Place at Quebec, and faithful to it in much scribbling hitherto, but 
nothing — not even the love of pushing a parallel — shall make me 
pretend that it is in any manner or degree comparable to the old and 
deeply memoried Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele at Sieua. This was 
anciently Piazza del Campo, but now they call it Piazza Vittorio Em- 
manuele, because, since the Unification, they want some piazza of 
that dear name in every Italian city, as I have already noted ; and I 
walked to it through the Via Cavour which they must also have, and 
how it was I failed to traverse a Via Garibaldi I do not understand. 
It was in the clearness that follows the twilight when, after the sud- 
den descent of a vaulted passage, I stood in the piazza and saw the 
Tower of the Mangia leap like a rocket into the starlit air. After 
all, that does not say it : you must suppose a perfect silence, through 
which this exquisite shaft forever soars. When once you have seen 
the Mangia, all other towers, obelisks, and columns are tame and 
vulgar and earth-rooted ; that seems to quit the ground, to be not a 
monument but a flight. The crescent of the young moon, at half its 




TUSCAN CITiSS. 

h«iglit, looked sparely ovct tlie hsttle- 
menU of Uii; I'akzzij Cominunale. from 
wbicli ibi! tower spranj;, npon the fronta 
of tliB beautiful oltl palaces whose semi- 
circle encloses the grand s^ix before 
it. and touched with ita silver the waters 
of the loveliest fountain in the world 
wlii»se statuex and bas-reliefs darkled 
above and around a silent pooL There 
were shopH in the basements of some 
of the ]>alace(i, and there were lamps 
urouud the piazza, hut there seemed no 
one in it but ourselves, and no figure 
broke the gentle slo])e iu which the 








PU»EA COMHn: 



PAN FORTE DI SIENA. 141 

ground shelves from three sides towards the Palazzo Communale, 
where I left the old republic in full possession when I went home 
through the thronged and cheerful streets to bed. 

I observed in the morning that the present Italian Government 
had taken occasion overnight to displace the ancient Sienese signory, 
and had posted a sentry at the palace door. There had also sprung 
up a picturesque cluster of wooden-roofed market-booths where peas- 
ant women sat before heaps of fruit and vegetables, and there was a 
not very impressive show of butter, eggs, and poultry. Now I saw 
that the brick-paved slope of the piazza was moss-grown in disuse, 
and that the noble Grothic and Renaissance palaces seemed half of 
them uninhabited. But there was nothing dilapidated, nothing ruin- 
ous in the place; it had simply a forsaken look, which the feeble 
stir of buying and selling at the market-booths scarcely affected. 
The old Palace of the Commonwealth stood serene in the morning 
light, and its Gothic windows gazed tranquilly upon the shallow cup 
before it, as empty now of the furious passions, the mediaeval hates 
and rivalries and ambitions, as of the other volcanic fires which are 
said once to have burned there. These, indeed, still smoidder beneath 
Siena, and every August a tremor of earthquake runs through her 
aged frame ; but the heart of her fierce, free youth is at peace f or- 
evermore. 

VI. 

We waited at the hotel forty-eight hours for the proverbially cor- 
dial reception of strangers which the "New Guide" had boasted in his 
Sienese. Then, as no deputation of citizens came to offer us the hospi- 
tality of the city, we set about finding a lodging for ourselves. At this 
distance of time I am a little at a loss to know how our search, before 
it ended, had involved the complicity of a vaiet de place ; a short, fat, 
amiable man of no definite occupation ; a barber ; a dealer in brica- 
brac ; a hunchbackling ; a mysterious facchino ; and a were-wolf. I 
only know that all these were actually the agents of our domicilia- 
tion, and that without their intervention I do not see how we could 
ever have been settled in Siena. The valet had come to show us th3 



142 TUSCAN CITIES, 

city, and no caricature of him could give a sufficient impression of 
his forlorn and anxious little face, his livid silk hat, his threadbare 
coat, his meagre body, and his evanescent legs. He was a terribly pa- 
thetic figure, and I count it no merit to have employed him at once. 
The first day I gave him three francs to keep away, and went myself 
in search of a carriage to drive us about in search of rooms. There 
were no carriages at the stand, but an old man who kept a bookstore 
let the lady of the party have his chair and his scaldino while I went 
to the stable for one. There my purpose somehow became known, 
and when the driver mounted the box, and I stepped inside, the 
were-wolf mounted with him, and all that morning he directed our 
movements with lupine persistence and ferocity, but with a wolfishly 
characteristic lack of intelligence. He had an awful face, poor fellow, 
but T suspect that his ravenous eyes, his gaunt cheeks, his shaggy 
hair, and his lurking, illusive looks, were the worst of him; and 
heaven knows what dire need of devouring strangers he may have 
had. He did us no harm beyond wasting our time upon unfurnished 
lodgings in spite of our repeated groans and cries for furnished ones. 
From lime to time I stopped the carriage and drove him down from 
the box ; then he ran beside us on the pavement, and when we came 
to a walk on some uphill street he mounted again beside the driver, 
whom he at last persuaded to take us to a low tavern darkling in 
a sunless alley. There we finally threw off his malign spell, and 
driving back to our hotel, I found the little valet de place on the 
outlook. He hopefully laid hold of me, and walked me ofiF to one 
impossible apartment after another, — brick-floored, scantily rugged, 
stoveless, husk-matressed, mountain-bedsteaded, where we should 
have to find our own service, and subsist mainly upon the view from 
the windows. This was always fine ; the valet had a cultivated eye 
for a prospect, and there was one of these lodgings which I should 
have liked to take for the sake of the boys playing mora in the old 
palace court, and the old lady with a single tooth rising like an 
obelisk from her lower jaw, who wished to let it. 

A boarding-house, or pension, whose windows commanded an en- 
chanting panorama of the Sienese hills, was provided with rather too 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 143 

much of the landscape in-doors ; and at another, which was cleanly 
and attractive, two obdurate young Englishmen were occupying the 
sunny rooms we wanted and would not vacate them for several days. 
The landlord conveyed a vivid impression of the violent character of 
these young men by whispering to me behind his hand, while he 
gently tried their door to see whether they were in or not, before he 
ventured to show me their apartment We could not wait, and then 
he tried to get rooms for us on the floor above, in an apartment 
belonging to a priest, so that we might at least eat at his table ; but 
he failed in this, and we resumed our search for shelter. It must 
have been about this time that the short fat man appeared on the 
scene, and lured us off to see an apartment so exquisitely unsuitable 
that he saw the despair and reproach in our eyes, and, without giving 
us time to speak, promised us a perfect apartment for the morrow, 
and vanished round the first comer when we got into the street In 
the very next barber's window, however, was a notice of rooms to let, 
and the barber left a lathered customer in his chair while he ran 
across the way to get the keys from a shoemaker. The shoemaker was 
at dinner, and his shop was shut ; and the barber having, with how- 
ever great regret, to go back to the customer left steeping in his 
lather, we fell into the hands of the most sympathetic of all brica- 
brac dealers, who sent us to the apartment of a French lady, — an 
apartment with a northern exposure as sunless as fireless, from which 
we retreated with the vague praises and promises of people swearing 
in their hearts never to be caught in that place again. The day went 
on in this vain quest, but as I returned to the hotel at dusk I was 
stopped on the stairs by a mysterious facchino in a blouse ; he had 
been waiting there for me, and he whispered that the priest, whose 
rooms the keeper of the pension had tried to get, now had an apart- 
ment for me. It proved that he had not quite this, when I went to 
visit him after dinner, but he had certain rooms, and a lady occu- 
pying an apartment on the same floor had certain others ; and with 
these and one more room which we got in the pension below, we 
really sheltered ourselves at last It was not quite a realization of 
the hereditary Sienese hospitality, but we paid almost nothing for 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



very comforUible quarters ; and I do not see how a party of five could 
be better housed and fed for twenty -five franca a day in the world, 

We must have been almost the first lodgers wliom our good eccle- 
siastic and his niece had ever had, their enterprise being so new ; the 
rooms were pretty aud fresh, and there was a comfortable stove in 
our little (larlor — a /m7iWtnrt(tt which, three days out of four, did 
not smoke — aud a lai'ge kerosene lamp for our table included in the 
price of two francs a day which we paid for our two rooms. We 
grieved a good deal that we could not get all our rooms of Don A., 
and he sorrowed with us, showing ua a jewel {giojcUo) of a room 
which he would have been so glad to give us if it were not already 
occupied by a young man of fashion aud his dog. As we stood look- 
ing at it, with its stove in the comer, its carpet, its chest of drawers, 
aud its other splendors, the good Don A. holduig Ids three-beaked 
classic lamp up for us to see better, and his niece behuid him lost in 
a passion of sympathy, which continually escaped in tender Obs and 
Ahs, we sighed again, "Yes, if we could only have this, too ! " 

Don A. nodded his head and compressed his HpR. " It would be 
a big thing!" ("Sardibe nn' affaronc .'") And then we all cast our 
eyes to lieaven, and were about to break into a common sigh, when 
we heard the key of the young man of fashion in the outer door; 
upon which, like a party of guilty conspirators, we shrank breath- 
lessly together for a moment, and then fled precipitately hito our 
own rooms. We parted for that night with many whispered vows 
of esteem, and we returned in the morning to take possession. It 
was in character with the whole aflair that on the way we should 
he met by the huuclibackling (whom I find described also in my 
notes as a wry-necked Inmb, prolmbly from some forcible contrast 
which he presented to the were-wolf) with a perfectly superb apart- 
ment, full of sun, in the Piazza Vittorio Eranuinucle, looking squarely 
iiimn the Palazzo Communale aud tlie Tower of the Mangia. I was 
forced to confess that I had engaged my rooms, 

" A pity for i/tm ! " cried the hunchliackling, passionately, 

" I have promised," I faltered, "' One must keep one's prom- 

s, no?" 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 145 

" Oh, you are right, you are right," said the hunchbacklmg, and 
vanished, and I never imw him more. Had he really the apartment 
to which he pretended ? 

VH 

No more, probably, than I had the virtue which I affected about 
keeping my promises. But I have never been sorry that I remained 
true to the word I had given Don A., and I do not see what harm 
there can be in saying that he was an ex-monk of the suppressed 
convent of Monte Olivetto, who was eking out the small stipend he 
received for his priestly offices in the next parish church by letting 
these lodgings. All the monks of Monte Olivetto had to be of noble 
family, and in one of our rooms the blessed candle and crucifix 
which hung on one side of the bed were balanced by the blazon of 
our host's arms in a frame on the other. Yet he was not above 
doing any sort of homely office for our comfort and convenience; 
I saw him with his priest's gown off, in his shirt-sleeves and knee- 
breeches, putting up a bedstead ; sometimes I met him on the stairs 
with a load of fire-wood in his arms, which I suspect he must have 
been sawing in the cellar. He bowed to me over it with unabashed 
courtesy, and he and Maddalena were so simply proud and happy at 
having filled all their rooms for a month, that one could not help 
sharinor their cheerfulness. Don A. was of a mechanical turn, and 
I heard that he also earned something by repairing the watches of 
peasants who could not or would not pay for finer surgery. Greater 
gentleness, sweeter kindliness never surrounded the inmates of hired 
lodgings than enveloped us in the manners of this good priest and 
his niece. They did together all the work of the apartment, serving 
us without shame and without reluctance, yet keeping a soft dignity 
withal that was extremely pretty. May no word of mine offend 
them, for every word of theirs was meant to make us feel at home 
with them ; and I believe that they will not mind this public recog- 
nition of the grace with which they adorned their gentle poverty. 
They never intruded, but they were always there, saluting our out- 
going and incoming, and watchful of our slightest wish. Often 

10 



146 TUSCAN CITIES. 

before we could get our key into the outer door Maddalena had run 
to open it, holding her lucema above her head to light us, and hailing 
us with a '' Buona sera Loro!'* (Good-evening to them — our lord- 
ships, namely) to which only music could do justice. 

But the landlord of the pension below, where we took our meals, 
was no less zealous for the comfort of his guests, and at that table of 
his, good at any price, and wonderful for the little they gave, he pre- 
sided with a hospitality which pressed them to eat of this and that, 
and kept the unstinted wine a-flowing, and communicated itself to 
Luigi, who, having cooked the dinner, hurled on a dress-coat of im- 
penetrable antiquity and rushed in to help serve it; and to Angiolina, 
the housekeeper, who affected a sort of Yankee old-maid's grumpiness, 
but was as sweet of soul as Maddalena herself. More than once has 
that sympathetic spirit, in passing me a dish, advised me with a fine 
movement of her clasping thumb which morsel to choose. 

We took our rooms in the belief that we were on the sunny side 
of the house ; and so we were ; the sun obliquely bathed that whole 
front of the edifice, and I never can understand why it should not 
have got in-doors. It did not ; but it was delightful in the garden 
which stretched from the rear of our palace across to the city wall 
Just under our windows — but far under, for we were in the fourth 
story — was a wide stone terrace, old, moss-grown, balustraded with 
marble, from which you descended by two curving flights of marble 
steps into the garden. There, in the early March weather, which 
succeeded a wind-storm of three days, the sun fell like a shining 
silence, amidst which the bent figure of an old gardener stirred, 
noiselessly turning up the earth. In the utmost distance the snow- 
covered Apennines glistened against a milky white sky growing pale 
blue above ; the nearer hills were purplish ; nearer yet were green 
fields, gray olive orchards, red plowed land, and black cypress-clumps 
about the villas with which the whole prospect was thickly sown. 
Then the city houses outside the wall began, and then came the 
beautiful red brick city wall, wandering wide over the levels and 
heights and hollows, and within it that sunny silence of a garden. 
While I once stood at the open window looking, brimful of content, 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 147 

tingling with it, a bugler came np the road without the wall, and 
gay ly, bravely sounded a gallant fanfart] purely, as it seemed, for 
love of it and pleasure in it 

I call our garden a garden, but it was mostly a succession of fields, 
planted with vegetables for the market, and closed round next the 
city wall with ranks of olive-trees. Still, next the palace there were 
flowers, or must have been in summer ; and on another morning, 
another heavenly morning, a young lady, doubtless of the ancient 
fomily to which the palace belonged, came out upon the terrace from 
the first floor with an elderly companion, and, loitering listlessly 
there a moment, descended the steps into the garden to a stone 
basin where some serving-women were washing. Her hair was ashen 
blonde ; she was slimly cased in black silk, and as she slowly walked, 
she pulled forward the skirt a little with one hand, while she drew 
together with the other a light shawl, falling from the top of her 
head, round her throat ; her companion followed at a little distance ; 
on the terrace lingered a large white Persian cat, looking after them. 

VIII. 

These gardens, or fields, of Siena occupy half the space her walls 
enclose, and the olives everywhere softly embower the borders of the 
shrivelled and shrunken old city, which once must have plumply 
filled their circuit with life. But it is five hundred years since the 
great pest reduced her hundred thousand souls to fifteen thousand ; 
generation after generation the plow has gone over the dead streets, 
and the spade has been busy obliterating the decay, so that now 
there is no sign of them where the artichokes stretch their sharp 
lines, and the tops of the olives run tangling in the wind. Except 
where the streets carry the lines of buildings to the ten gates, the 
city is completely surrounded by these gardens within its walls; 
they drop on all sides from the lofty ledge of rocks to which the 
edifices cling, with the cathedral pre-eminent, and cover the slopes 
with their herbage and foliage ; at one point near the Lizza, flanking 
the fort which Cosimo built where the Spaniards failed, a gaunt 



^^^^^^^^^^^f&Sc'AN ClTIsi ^^^^^^^^^^^H 






ravine — deep, louely, ^^H 
shailuwy — pushes it- ^^H 




1 




n-- 


self up into the heart ^^H 




uf the town. Once, ^^H 




'\:f- 


aud ouce only, so old ^^^| 






is the decay of Siena. ^^H 




WHi- 


I saw the crumbling ^^H 




fouudations of a house ^^H 




on a garden slope ; but ^^H 




again and again tlie ^^H 




■ Ifej'' 


houses break away. ^^H 
and the street wbieh ^^H 
you have been follow- ^^H 




;i^W'- ;• 


iug ceases in acreages ^^H 
of vegetation. Some- ^^H 




i' ^n99N . p-'^' 


times the varied and ^^H 




'■'.fM^; .- 'Sf 


ever-picturesquely ir- ^^H 




-.. ^Aji ^|r'' 


regular ground has the ^^H 




■ ''"TjiCH " i"'"'* 


effect of having fallen ^^H 




'W^' 


away from the pal- ^^H 




acesi the rear of a ^^H 




line of these, at one ^^| 




: ■ ^^:i 


point, rested on mas- ^^H 




sive arches, with but^ ^^H 
tresses sprung &fty or ^^H 
seventy-five feet from ^^H 
the lower level; and ^H 
on the lofty Ghoulders ^^| 


' '^^^^^K--' '^■' 




— ^j^g^^ 




-■'^'?^§^3l 


of the palaces, here ^^H 




^T^--— ^ 


and there, was caught ^^| 




-■- ■■^\ 


a hit of garden, and ^^^H 




rj^: 


lifted with its over- ^H 


1 




hanging hedge high ^^| 


^^^^p- 


into the sun. There ^^| 




are abundant evi- ^^| 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 



149 



dences of that lost be&nty and magnificence of Siena — she has 
kept enough of both — not only in the great thirteenth and four- 
teenth century structures in the Via Cavour, the Via del Capitano, 
and the neighborboud of the Palazzo Communale, but in many little 
wandering, darkling streets, where you come upon exquisite Gothic 
arches walled up in the fronts of now ordinary houses, which 'before 
some time of great calamity must have been the portals and windows 
of noble palaces. These gave their pathos to walks which were 
bewilderingly opulent in picturesqueness ; walks that took us down 
sharp declivities dropping under successive arches between the house- 
walls, and flashing out upon sunny prospects of gardens ; up steep 
thoroughfares climbing and crooking from the gates below, and 
stopping as if for rest in successive piazzas, till they reach the great 
avenue which stretches along the high spine of tlie city from Porta 
Caniollia to Porta Romana. Sharp turns everywhere bring your 
nose gainst some incomparable piece of architecture, or your eye 
upon some view astonishingly vast, and smiling or austere, but 
always enclianting. 

The first night we 
.ound the Via Cavour 
full of people, walking 
and talking together ; 
and there was always 
the effect of out-door 
hveliness in the ancient 
town, which is partly 
to be accounted for by 
the pungent strength of 
the good ait. This stirs -^*-. "^-"^ 

and sustains one like '' 

the Swiss air, and when a high breeze. 

not in too rapid motion 

it is delicious. In ^larch I will own that its motion was often too 
rapid. It swept cold from the Apennines, and one night it sifted the 
gray depths of the streets full of snow. The nest morning the sun 




150 TUSCAN CITIES. 

blazed out with that ironical smile which we know here as well as in 
Italy, and Via Cavour was full of people lured forth by his sarcastic 
glitter, though the wind blew pitilessly. "Marzo matio!" (Crazy 
March !) said the shopman, with a sympathetic smile and impressive 
shrug, to whom I complained of it ; and I had to confess that March 
was no better in America. The peasants, who took the whole breadth 
of Via Cavour with their carts laden with wine and drawn by wide- 
horned dun oxen, had their faces tied up against the blast, which 
must have been terrible on their hills; and it roared and blustered 
against our lofty eyry in Palazzo Bandini-Piccolomini with a force 
that penetrated it with icy cold. It was quite impossible to keep 
warm; with his back planted well into the fire-place blazing with 
the little logs of the country, and fenced about on the windward 
side with mattresses and sofa-pillows, a suffering novelist was able to 
complete his then current fiction only at the risk of freezing. 

But before this, and after it, we had weather in which the streets 
were as much a pleasure to us as to the Sienese; and in fact I do 
not know where I would rather be at this moment than in Via Cavour, 
unless it were on the Grand Canal at Venice — or the Lungarno at 
Florence — or the Pincio at Eome — or Piazza Brii at Verona. Any 

» 

of these places would do, and yet they would all lack the strictly 
mediaeval charm which belongs to Siena, and which perhaps you feel 
most when you stand before the Tolomei Palace, with its gray Gothic 
facade, on the richly sculptured porch of the Casino dei NobilL At 
more than one point the gaunt Eoman wolf suckles her adoptive 
twins on the top of a pillar ; and the olden charm of prehistoric fable 
mingles with the interest of the city's proper life, when her people 
fought each other for their freedom in her streets, and never trusted 
one another except in some fiery foray against the enemy beyond 
her gates. 

Let the reader not figure to himself any broad, straight level when 
I speak of Via Cavour as the principal street ; it is only not so nar- 
row and steep and curving as the rest, and a little more light gets 
into it ; but there is one level, and one alone, in all Siena, and that 
is the lizza, the public promenade, which looks very much like an 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 151 

artificial level It is planted with pleasant little bosks and trim 
hedges, beyond which lurk certain cafes and beer-houses, and it has 
walks and a drive. On a Sunday afternoon of February, when the 
military band played there, and I was told that the fine world of 
Siena resorted to the Lizza, we hurried thither to see it; but we 
must have come too late. The band were blowing the drops of 
distilled music out of their instruments and shutting them up, 
and on the drive there was but one equipage worthy of the name. 
Within this carriage sat a little refined-lookmg boy, — delicate, pale, 
the expression of an effete aristocracy ; and beside him sat a very 
stout, gray-mustached, side-whiskered, eagle-nosed, elderly gentleman, 
who took snuff out of a gold box, and looked like Old Descent in 
person. I felt, at sight of them, that I had met the Sienese nobility, 
whom otherwise I did not see; and yet I do not say that they may 
not have been a prosperous fabricant of panforte and his son. A 
few young bucks, with fierce trotting-ponies in two-seated sulkies, 
hammered round the drive ; the crowd on foot was mostly a cloaked 
and slouch-hatted crowd, which in Italy is always a plebeian 
crowd. There were no ladies, but many women of less degree, pretty 
enough, well-dressed enough, and radiantly smiling. In the centre 
of the place shone a resplendent group of officers, who kept quite to 
themselves. We could not feel that we had mingled greatly in the 
social gayeties of Siena, and we wandered off to climb the bastions 
of the old Medicean fort — very bold with its shield and pallc over 
the gateway — and listened to the bees humming in the oleander 
hedge beneath. 

This was toward the end of February ; a few days later I find it 
recorded that in walking half-way round the city outside the wall 
I felt the sun very hot, and heard the birds singing over the fields, 
where the peasants were breaking the clods with their hoes. The 
almond-trees kept blossoming with delicate courage all through 
February, like girls who brave the lingering cold with their spring 
finery ; and though the grass was green, with here and there daring 
dandelions in it, the landscape generally had a pathetic look of win- 
ter weariness, when we drove out into the country beyond the waU. 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



It is tUis wall with the color of ita red briuk which everywhere 
warms up the cold gray tone of Siena. It is like no other city wall 
that I know, except that of Ptaa, and is not supported with glacis on 




the inside, but rises sheer from tlie earth there ae on the outsida 
With its towers and noble gates it is beautiful always ; and near the 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 153 

railway station it obligingly abounds in repaired spots which look 
as if they had been holes knocked in it at the great siege. I hope 
they were. 

It is anywhere a study for a painter, — preferably a water-colorist, 
I should say, — and I do not see how an architect could better use 
his eyes in Italy than in perusing the excellent brick-work of certain 
of the smaller houses, as well as certain palaces and churches, both 
in the city and the suburbs of Siena. Some of the carved brick there 
is delightful, and the material is treated with peculiar character and 
feeling. 

IX, 

The ancient palace of the Eepubiic, the Palazzo CJommunale, is of 
brick, which allegorizes well enough the multitude of plebeian wills 
and forces that went to the constitution of the democratic state. No 
friend of popular rule, I suppose, can boast that these little mediaeval 
commonwealths of Italy were the homes of individual liberty. They 
were popular tyrannies; but tyrannies as they were, they were 
always better than the single-handed despotisms, the goveriw (Tun 
solo, which supplanted them, except in the one fact only that they 
did not give continuous civil peace. The crater of tlie extinct vol- 
cano before the Palazzo Communale in Siena was always boiling 
with human passions, and for four hundred years it vomited up and 
ingulfed innumerable governments and forms of government, now 
aristocratic and now plebeian. From those beautiful Gothic windows 
many a traitor has dangled head downwards or feet downwards, as 
the humor took the mob ; many a temporizer or usurper has hurtled 
from that high balcony ruining down to the stones below. 

Carlo Folletti-Fossati, a Sienese citizen of our own time, has made 
a luminous and interesting study of the "Costumi Senese" of the 
Middle Ages, which no reader of Italian should fail to get when he 
goes to Siena, for the sake of the light which it throws upon that 
tumultuous and struggling past of one of the bravest and doughtiest 
little peoples that ever lived. In his chapters on the "Daily Life" 
of the Sienese of those times, he speaks first of the world-wide diflfer- 



154 TUSCAN CITIES. 

ence between the American democracy and the mediaeval democra- 
cies. He has read his De Tocqueville, and he understands, as Mr. 
Matthew Arnold is banning to understand, that the secret of our 
political success is in the' easy and natural fit of our political govern- 
ment, the looseness of our social organization; and he shows with 
attractive clearness how, in the Italian republics, there was no con- 
ception of the popular initiative, except in the matter of revolution, 
which was extra-constitutionaL The government once established, 
no matter how democratic, how plebeian its origin, it began at once 
to interfere with the personal afifairs of the people. It regulated their 
household expenses; said what dishes and how many they might 
have at dinner ; clipped women's gowns, and forbade the braid and 
laces on their sleeves and stomachers ; prescribed the fashion of men's 
hats and cloaks ; determined the length of coats, the size of bricks, 
and the dimensions of letter-paper ; costumed the different classes ; 
established the hours of pleasure and business ; limited the number 
of those who should be of this or that trade or profession ; bothered 
in every way. In Siena, at a characteristic period, the signory were 
chosen every two months, and no man might decline the honor and 
burden of office except under heavy fine. The government must 
have been as great a bore to its officers as to its subjects, for, once 
elected, the signory were obliged to remain night and day in the 
public palace. They could not leave it except for some grave reason 
of state, or sickness, or marriage, or the death of near kindred, and 
then they could only go out two at a time, with a third for a spy 
upon them. Once a week they could converse with the citizens, but 
solely on public business. Then, on Thursdays, the signory — the 
Nine, or the Twelve, or the Priors, whichever they chanced to be — 
descended from their magnificent confinement in the apartments of 
state to the great hall of the ground floor, and heard the petitions of 
all comers. Otherwise, their official life was no joke : in the months 
of March and April, 1364, they consumed in their public labors 
eleven reams of paper, twenty-one quires of parchment, twelve 
pounds of red and green sealing-wax, five hundred goose-quills, and 
twenty bottles of ink. 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 155 

Besides this confinement at hard labor, they were obliged to suffer 
from the shrieks of the culprits, who were mutilated or put to death 
in the rear of the palace ; for in those days prison expenses were 
saved by burning a witch or heretic, tearing out the tongue of a 
blasphemer, striking off the right hand of a perjurer or bigamist, 
and the right foot of a highwayman. The Sienese in course of time 
became so refined that they expelled the mutilated wretches from 
the city, that they might not offend the eye, after the infliction of 
their penalties; but in the mean while the signory could not bear 
the noise of their agony, especially while they sat at dinner; and 
the execution-grounds were finally changed to a remote quarter. 

It is well enough for the tourist to give a thought to these facts 
and conditions of the times that produced the beautiful architecture 
of the Palazzo Communale and the wonderful frescos which illumine 
its dim-vaulted halls and chambers. The masters who wrought either 
might have mixed the mortar for their bricks, and the colors for their 
saints and angels, and allegories and warriors, with human blood, it 
flowed so freely and abundantly in Siena. Poor, splendid, stupid, 
glorious past! I stood at the windows of the people's palace and 
looked out on the space in the rear where those culprits used to dis- 
turb the signory at their meak, and thanked Heaven that I was of 
the nineteenth century. The place is flanked now by an immense 
modem prison, whose ample casements were crowded with captives 
pressing to them for the sim ; and in the distance there is a beautiful 
view of an insane asylum, the largest and most populous in Italy. 

I suppose the reader will not apprehend a great deal of comment 
from me upon the frescos, inexpre&sibly quaint and rich, from which 
certain faces and certain looks remain with me yet. The pictures 
figure the great scenes of Sienese history and fable. There are the 
battles in which the republic triumphed, to the disadvantage chiefly 
of the Florentines; there are the victorious encounters of her son 
Pope Alexander III. with Barbarossa ; there are allegories in which 
her chief citizens appear. In one of these — I think it is that repre- 
senting " Grood and Bad Government," painted by Lorenzetti in 1337 
— there is a procession of Sienese figures and faces of the most curi- 



156 TUSCAN CITIES. 

ous realistic interest, and above their heads some divine and august 
ideal shapes, — a Wisdom, from whose strange eyes all mystery looks, 
and a Peace and a Fortitude which, for an unearthly dignity and 
beauty, I cannot remember the like of. There is also, somewhere in 
those dusky halk, a most noble St. Victor by Sodoma; and I 
would not have my readers miss that sly rogue of a saint ("We are 
famous for our saints in Siena," said the sardonic custodian, with 
a shrug) who is represented in a time of interdict stealing a blessing 
from the Pope for his city by having concealed under his cloak a 
model of it when he appears before the pontiff! For the rest, there 
is an impression of cavernous gloom left from many of the rooms of 
the palace which characterizes the whole to my memory ; and as I 
look back into it, beautiful, mystical, living eyes glance out of it; 
noble presences, solemn attitudes, forms of grandeur faintly appear ; 
and then all is again a hovering twilight, out of which I am glad to 
emerge into the laughing sunshine of the piazza. 

X. 

A MOXUMEXT of the old magnanimity of Siena is that Capella di 
Piazza in front of the palace, at the foot of the tower, which the 
tourist goes to see for the sake of Sodoma's fresco in it, but which 
deserves to be also revered as the memorial of the great pest of 1348 ; 
it was built in 1352, and thrice demolished and thrice rebuilt before 
it met with })ublic approval. This and the beautiful Foiite Gaja — 
as beautiful in its way as the tower — make the piazza a place to 
linger in and come back to at every chance. The fountain was 
designed by Giacomo della Quercia, who was known thereafter as 
Giacomo della Fonte, and it was called the Gay Fountain in memory 
of the festivities with which the people celebrated the introduction 
of good water into their city in 1419. Seven years the artist wrought 
upon it, and three thousand florins of gold the republic paid for the 
work, which after four hundred years has been restored in all its 
first loveliness by Tito Sarocchi, an admirable Sienese sculptor of 
our day. 




Niiova has a small house atop of ite arches, where people t 
live- The arches are Oothic, and the delicate carved brick- work of 
Siena decorates their sharp spring. Below, in the bottom of the four- 
sided structure, is the clear pool from whose affluent pipes the neigh- 
borhood comes to draw its water (in buckets hammered from solid 
copper into antique form), and in which women seem to be always 
rinsing linen, or beating it with wooden paddles in the Latin fashion. 



Jk 



160 TUSCAN CITIES. 

Fonte Branda derives a world-wide celebrity from being mentioned 
by Dante and then having its honors disputed by a small stream of 
its name elsewhere. It, too, is a lovely Gothic shape, and whenever 
I saw it wash-day was in possession of it. The large pool which the 
laundresses had whitened with their suds is used as a swimming-vat 
in summer ; and the old fountain may therefore be considered in very 
active use still, so many years after Dante dedicated the new fountain 
to disputed immortality with a single word. It was one of those 
extremely well-ventilated days of March when I last visited Fonte 
Branda; and not only was the linen of all Siena blowing about 
from balconies and house-tops, but, from a multitude of galleries and 
casements, hides of leather were lustily flapping and giving out the 
pungent aroma of the tan. It is a region of tanneries, and some of 
them are of almost as august a presence as the Fonte Branda itself. 
We had not come to see either, but to pay our second visit to the 
little house of St. Catherine of Siena, who was bom and lived a child 
in this neighborhood, tlie good Contrada delF Oca, or Goose Ward, 
which took this simple name while other wards of Siena called them- 
selves after the Dragon, the Lion, the Eagle, and other noble beasts 
and birds. The region has therefore the odor of sanctity as well as 
of leather, and is consecrated by the memory of one of the best and 
bravest and meekest woman's lives ever lived. Her house here is 
much visited by the curious and devout, and across a chasmed and 
gardened space from the fountain rises high on the bluff the high- 
shouldered bulk of the church of San Domenico, in which Catherine 
was first rapt in lier beatific visions of our Lord, conversing with 
him, and giving him her heart for his in mystical espousals. 



PANFOBTE DI SIENA. 161 



XI. 




7 EW strangers in Siena fail to visit the houae 
where that great woman and saint, Cate- 
rina Eenincasa, was born in 1347. She 
was one of a family of thirteen or tour- 
teen children, that blessed the union of 
Giacomo and Lapa, who were indeed well- 
in-the-hoHse as their name is, being inter- 
preted; for with the father's industry as 
a dyer, and the mother's thrift, they lived 
not merely in decent poverty, but in suffi- 
cient ease ; and it was not from a need of 
her work nor from any want of piety in 
themselves that her parents at £rst opposed her religions inclina- 
tion, but because (as I learn from the life of her written by 
that holy man, G. B. Franceaia), hearing on every side the praises 
of her beauty and character, they hoped to make a splendid mar- 
riage for her. When she persisted in her prayers and devotions, 
they scolded and beat her, as good parents used to do, and made 
her the household drudge. But one day while the child was at 
prayer the father saw a white dove hovering over her head, and 
though she said she knew nothing of it, he was struck with awe 
and ceased to persecute her. She was now fourteen, and at this 
time slie began her penances, sleeping little on the hard floor where 
she lay, scourging herself continually, wearing a hair shirt, and 
lacerating her flesh with chains. She fell sick, and was restored 
to health only by being allowed to join s sisterhood, under the rule 
of St. Dominie, who were then doing many good works in Siena. 
After that our Lord b^an to appear to her in the Dominican 
church ; she was likewise tempted of the devil ; but Christ ended by 
making her his spouse. While her ecstasies continued she not only 
visited the sick and poor, but she already took an interest in public 
affairs, appealing first to the rival factions in Siena to mitigate their 
furies, and then trying to make peace between the Ghibellines ol 
11 



162 TUSCAN CITIES. 

that city and the Guelphs of Florence. She pacified many &mily 
feuds; multitudes thronged to see her and hear her; and the Pope 
authorized her to preach throughout the territory of Siena. While 
she was thus dedicated to the salvation of souls, war broke out 
afresh between the Sienese and Florentines, and in the midst of it 
the terrible pest appeared. Then the' saint gave herself up to 
the care of the sick, and performed miracles of cure, at the same 
time suffering persecution from the suspicions of the Sienese, among 
whom question of her patriotism arose. 

She now began also to preach a new crusade against the Saracens, 
and for this purpose appeared in Pisa. She went later to Avignon 
to beseech the Pope to remove an interdict laid upon the Florentines, 
and then she prevailed with him to remove his court to the ancient 
seat of St. Peter. 

The rest of her days were spent in special miracles ; in rescuing 
cities from the plague; in making peace between the different Italian 
states and between all of them and the Pope; in diflBcult journeys; 
in preaching and writing. "And two years before she died," says 
her biographer, " the truth manifested itself so clearly in her, that 
she prayed certain scriveners to put in writing what she should say 
during her ecstasies. In this manner there was soon composed the 
treatise on Obedience and Prayer, and on Divine Providence, which 
contains a dialogue between a Soul and God. She dictated as rapidly 
as if reading, in a clear voice, with her eyes closed and her arms 
crossed on her breast and her hands opened her limbs became so 
rigid that, having ceased to speak, she remained a long hour silent ; 
then, holy water being sprinkled in her face, she revived." She died 
in Home in 1380 ; but even after her death she continued to work 
miracles; and her head was brought amidst great public rejoic- 
ings to her native city. A procession went out to receive it, 
led by the Senate, the Bishop of Siena, and all the bishops of 
the state, with all the secular and religious orders. "That which 
was wonderful and memorable on this occasion," says the Diario 
Senese, "was that Madonna Lapa, mother of our Seraphic Com- 
patriot, — who had many years before restored her to life, and 



PANFORTE DI SIENA, 163 

liberated her from the pains of hell, — was led to the solemn 
encounter." 

It seems by all accounts to have been one of the best and strongest 
heads that ever rested on a woman's shoulders — or a man's, for the 
matter of that; apt not only for private beneficence, but for high 
humane thoughts and works of great material and universal moment; 
and I was willing to see the silken purse, or sack, in which it was 
brought from Rome, and which is now to be viewed in the little 
chamber where she used to pillow the poor head so hard. I do not 
know that I wished to come any nearer the saint's mortal part, but 
our Boman Catholic brethren have another taste in such matters, 
and the body of St Catherine has been pretty well dispersed about 
the world to supply them with objects of veneration. One of her 
fingers, as I learn from the Diario Senese of Girolamo Gigli (the most 
confusing, not to say stupefying, form of history I ever read, being 
the collection under the three hundred and sixty-five several days of 
the year of all the events happening on each in Siena since the time 
of Remus's son), is in the Certosa at Pontignano, where it has been 
seen by many, to their great advantage, with the wedding-ring of 
Jesus Christ upon it Her right thumb is in the church of the 
Dominicans at Camporeggi; one of her ribs i& in the cathedral at 
Siena; another in the church of the Company of St Catherine, 
from which a morsel has been sent to the same society in the city of 
Lima, in Peru ; her cervical vertebra and one of her slippers are 
treasured by the Nuns of Paradise ; in the monastery of Sts. Dominic 
and Sixtus at Rome is her right hand; her shoulder is in the convent 
of St Catherine at Magnanopoli ; and her right foot is in the church 
of San Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. In St Catherine at Naples are 
a shoulder-bone and a finger ; in other churches there are a piece of 
an arm and a rib; in San Bartolomeo at Salerno there is a finger; 
the Predicatori at Colonia have a rib ; the Canons of Eau-Court in 
Artois have a good-sized bone {psso di giusta grandezza) ; and the 
good Gigli does not know exactly what bone it is they revere in the 
Chapel Royal at Madrid. But perhaps this is enough, as it is. 



164 



TtrSCAN CITIES. 



XII. 

The arched and pillared front of St Catherine's houae is turned 
toward a street on the level of Fonte Branda, but we reached it from 
the level above, whence we 
clambered down to it by a de- 
chvity that no carriage could 
descend. It has been converted, 
up stairs and down, into a num- 
ber of chapels, and I suppose 
that the ornate fa(,ade dates 
from the ecclesiastic rather 
than the domestic occupation. 
Of a human home there are in- 
deed few signs, or none, in the 
house ; even the shop in which 
the old dyer, her father, worked 
at his trade has been turned 
into a chapel and enriched, like 
the rest, with gold and silver, 
gems and precious marbles. 
From tho house we went to the chui-ch of San Douieuico, hard by, 
and followed St. Catherine's history there through the period of her 
first ecstasies, in which she received the stigmata and gave her heart 
to her heavenly Spouse in exchange for his own. I do not know 
how it is with other Protestants, hut for myself I will confess that 
in the place where so many good souls for so many ages have stood 
in the devout faith that the miracles recorded really happened there, 
I could not feel otherwise than reverent. Illusion, hallucination as 
it all was, it was the error of one of the purest souls that ever Hved, 
and of one of the noblest minds, " Here," says the printed tablet 
appended to the wall of the chapel, " here she was invested with the 
habit of St. Dominic; and she was the first woman wlio up to tliat 
time had worn it. Here she remained withdrawn from the world, 
listening to the divine services of the church, and here continually 




THE RETURN FROH THE TODNTAIN. 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 165 

in divine colloquy she conversed familiarly with Jesus Christ, her 
Spouse. Here, leaning against this pilaster, she was rapt in frequent 
ecstasies ; wherefore this pilaster has ever since been potent against 
the infernal furies, delivering many possessed of devils." Here Jesus 
Christ appeared before her in the figure of a beggar, and she gave 
him alms, and he promised to own her before all the world at the 
Judgment Day. She gave him her robe, and he gave her an invisi- 
ble garment which forever after kept her from the cold. Here once 
he gave her the Host himself, and lier confessor, missing it, was in 
great terror till she told liim. Here the Lord took liis own heart from 
his breast and put it into hers. 

You may also see in this chapel, framed and covered with a grat- 
ing in the floor, a piece of the original pavement on which Christ 
stood and walked. The whole church is full of memories of her ; 
and there is another chapel in it, painted in fresco by Sodoma with 
her deeds and miracles, which in its kind is almost incomparably 
rich and beautiful It is the painter's most admirable and admired 
work, in which his genius ranges from the wretch decapitated in the 
bottom of the picture to the soul borne instantly aloft by two angels 
in response to St. Catherine's prayers. They had as much nerve as 
faith in those days, and the painter has studied the horror with the 
same conscience as the glory. It would be interesting to know how 
much he believed of what he was painting, — just as it would be 
now to know how much I believe of what I am writing : probably 
neither of us could say. 

What impresses St. Catherine so vividly upon the fancy that has 
once begun to concern itself with her is the double character of her 
greatness. She was not merely an ecstatic nun : she was a woman 
of extraordinary political sagacity, and so great a power among states- 
men and princes that she alone could put an end to the long exile of 
the popes at Avignon, and bring them back to Rome. She failed to 
pacify her country because, as the Sienese historian Buonsignore con- 
fesses, ** the germs of the evil were planted so deeply that it was 
beyond human power to uproot them." But, nevertheless, "she 
rendered herself forever famous by her civic virtues," her active 



166 TCSCAy CITIES. 

beneficence, her perpetual striring far the good of otheiB, all and 
singly ; and even so furious a free-thinker as the author of my " New 
Guide to Siena " thinks that, setting aside the marvels of legend, 
she has a right to the reverence of posterity, the veneration of her 
fellow-citizens. " St. Catherine, an honor to humanity, is also a lite- 
rary celebrity : the golden purity of her diction, the sympathetic and 
affectionate simplicity of expression in her letters, still arouse the 
admiration of the most illustrious writers. With the potency of her 
prodigious genius, the \'irgin stainlessness of her life, and her great 
heart warm with love of country and magnanimous desires, inspired 
by a sublime ideal even in her mysticism, she, bom of the people, 
meek child of Giacomo the dver, lifted herself to the summit of 
religious and jKilitical grandeur. . . . With an overflowing eloquence 
and generous indignation she stigmatized the crimes, the vices, the 
ambition of the popes, their temporal power, and the scandalous 
schism of the Roman Church." 

In the Communal Library at Siena I had the pleasure of seeing 
many of St. Catherine's letters in the MS. in which they were dic- 
tated : she was not a scholar like the great Socinus, whose letters I 
also saw, and she could not even write. 



XIIL 

A HUNDRED years after St. Catherine's death there was bom in 
the same " noble Ward of the Goose " one of the most famous and 
eloquent of Italian reformers, the Bernardino Ochino, whose name 
commemorates that of his native Contrada dell* Oca. He became a 
Franciscan, and through the austerity of his life, the beauty of his 
character, and the wonder of his eloquence he became the General of 
his Order in Italy, and then he became a Protestant. " His words 
could move stones to tears," said Charles V. ; and when he preached 
in Siena, no space was large enough for his audience except the great 
piazza before the Public Palace, which was thronged even to the 
house-tops. Ochino escaped by flight the death that overtook his 
sometime fellow-denizen of Siena, Aonio Paleario, whose book, "II 



PANFORTE Dl SIENA. 167 

Beneficio di Cristo," was very famous in its time and potent for re- 
form throughout Italy. In that doughty little Siena, in fact, there 
has been almost as much hard thinking as hard fighting, and what 
with Ochino and Paleario, with Socinus and Bandini, the Reforma- 
tion, Rationalism, and Free Trade may be said almost to have been 
invented in the city which gave one of the loveliest and sublimest 
saints to the Church. Let us not forget, either, that brave arch- 
bishop of Siena, Ascanio Piccolomini, one of the ancient family which 
gave two popes to Rome, and which in this archbishop had the 
heart to defy the Inquisition and welcome Gralileo to the protection 
of an inviolable roof. 

XIV. 

It is so little way off from Fonte Branda and St. Catherine's house, 
that I do not know but the great cathedral of Siena may also be in 
the " Ward of the Groose ; " but I confess that I did not think of this 
when I stood before that wondrous work. 

There are a few things in this world about whose grandeur one 
may keep silent with dignity and advantage, as St. Mark's, for in- 
stance, and Notre Dame, and Giotto's Tower, and the curve of the 
Amo at Pisa, and Niagara, and the cathedral at Siena. I am not 
sure that one has not here more authority for holding his peace than 
before any of the others. Let the architecture go, then : the inex- 
haustible treasure of the sculptured marbles, the ecstasy of Gothic 
invention, the splendor of the mosaics, the quaintness, the grotesque- 
ness, the magnificence of the design and the detail The photographs 
do well enough in suggestion for such as have not seen the church, 
but these will never have the fuU sense of it which only long look- 
ing and coming again and again can impart One or two facts, how- 
ever, may be imagined, and the reader may fancy the cathedral set 
on the crest of the noble height to which Siena clings, and from 
which the streets and houses drop all round from the narrow level 
expressed in the magnificent stretch of that straight line with which 
the cathedral-roof delights the eye from every distance. It has a pre- 
eminence which seems to me unapproached, and this structure, which 



TUSCAN CITIES. 

only partially realizes the vast design of its founlers, impresses one 
Willi the courage even more than the piety of the little republic, now 
so utterly extinct What a force was in men's hearts in those days I 
What a love of beauty must have exalted the vvliole community 1 

The Sieneae were at the height of their work on the great cathedral 
when the great pestilence smote them, and hroke them forever, leav- 
ing them a feeble phantom of their past glory and prosperity, " The 
infection," says Buonaignore, " spread not only from the sick, but from 
everything they touched, and the terror was such that selfisti frenzy 
mounted to the wildest excess ; not only did neighbor abandon 
neighbor, Meud forsake friend, but the wife her husband, parents 



J 



)?»»■■■ 



eiEKESE GARDENS. 



their children. In the general fear, all noble and endearing feel- 
ings were hushed. . . . Such was the helplessness into which the 
inbabitants lapsed that the stench exhaling from the wretched huts 
of the poor was the sole signal of death within. The dead were 
buried by a few generous persons whom an angelic pity moved to 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 



171 



the daty : their appeal w&s, ' Help to cany this body to the grave, 
that when we die others may bear us thither ! ' The proportion of 
the dead to the sick was frightfal ; oat of every five seized by the 
plague, scarcely one survived. Angelo di Tura tells us that at Sieua, 
in the months of May, June, July, and August of the year 1348, 
the pest carried off eighty thousand persona ... A hundred noble 
familes were extinguished." Throughout Italy, " three fourths of the 
population perished. The cities, lately flourishing, busy, industrious, 
full of life, had become squalid, deserted, bereft of the activity which 
promotes grandeur. In Siena the region of Fonte Branda was largely 
saved faom the infection by the odor of its tanneries. Other quarteis, 
empty and forsaken, were set on fire after the plague ceased, and the 
waste areas where they stood became the fields and gardens we now 




FTELOa WITHIX THS WALIS. 



see within the walls. . . . The work on the cathedral, which had 
gone forward for ten years, was suspended, . . . and when resumed, 
it was upon a scale adjusted to the diminished wealth of the city, 
and the plan was restricted to the dimensions which we now behold. 
. . . And if the fancy contemplates the grandeur of the original 



172 TUSCAN CITIES. 

project, divining it from the vestiges of the walls and the columns 
remaining imperfect, but still preserved in good condition, it must 
be owned that the republic disposed of resources of which we can 
form no conception ; and we must rest astounded that a little state, 
embroiled in perpetual wars with its neighbors, and in the midst of 
incessant party strife, should undertake the completion of a work 
worthy of the greatest and most powerful nations." 

" When a man," says Mr. Addison, writing from Siena in the spirit 
of the genteel age which he was an ornament of, " sees the prodigious 
pains and expense that our forefathers have been at in these bar- 
barous buildings, one cannot but fancy to himself what miracles of 
architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed 
in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much 
warmer than it is at present, and the riches of the people much 
more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money con- 
sumed ou tliese Gothic cathedrals as would have finished a greater 
variety of noble buildings than have been raised either before or 
since that time." And describing this wonderful cathedral of Siena 
in detail, he says that " nothing in the world can make a prettier 
show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to 
a noble and majestic simplicity." 

The time will no doubt come again when we shall prefer " noble 
and majestic simplicity," as Mr. Addison did; and I for one shall 
not make myself the mock of it by confessing how much better I 
now like "false beauties and affected ornaments." In fact, I am 
willing to make a little interest with it bv admitting? that the Tuscan 
fashion of alternate courses of black and white marble in architecture 
robs the interior of the cathedral of all repose, and that na\vhere else 
does the godless joke which nicknamed a New York temple "the 
Church of the Holy Zebra " insist upon itself so much. But if my 
business were iconoclasm, I should much rather smash the rococo 
apostolic statues which Mr. Addison doubtless admired, perching on 
their brackets at the base of the variegated pillars ; and I suspect they 
are greatly to blame for the distraction which the visitor feels before 
he loses himself in the inexhaustibly beautiful and delightful detail. 



PAN FORTE DI SIENA. 173 

Shall I attempt to describe this? Not I! Get photographs, get 
prints, dear reader, or go see for yourself ! Otherwise, trust me that 
if we had a tithe of that lavish loveliness in one structure in America, 
the richness of that one would impoverish the effect of all the other 
buildings on the continent I say this, not with the hope of impart- 
ing an idea of the beauty, which words cannot, but to give some 
notion of the wealth poured out upon this mere fragment of what 
was meant to be the cathedral of Siena, and to help the reader con- 
ceive not only of the piety of the age, but of the love of art then 
universally spread among the Italians. 

The day was abominably cold, of course, — it had been snowing 
that morning, — when we first visited the church, and I was lurking 
about with my skull-cap on, my teeth chattering, and my hands 
benumbing in my pockets, when the little valet de place who had 
helped us not find a lodging espied us and leaped joyously upon us, 
and ran us hither and thither so proudly and loudly that one of the 
priests had to come and snub him back to quiet and decorum. I do 
not know whether this was really in the interest of decency, or of 
the succession of sacristans who, when the valet had been retired to 
the front door, took possession of us, and lifted the planking which 
preserves the famous engraved pavement, and showed us the wonder- 
ful pulpit and the rich chapels, and finally the library all frescoed 
by Pinturicchio with scenes from the lives of the two Sienese Picco- 
lomini who were Popes Pius II. and III. 

This multiplicity of sacristans suffered us to omit nothing, and one 
of them hastened to point out the two flag-poles fastened to the two 
pillars nearest the high altar, which are said to be those of the great 
War Car of the Florentines, captured by the Sienese at Montaperto 
in 1260. "How," says my " Xew Guide," "how on earth, the 
stranger will ask, do we find here in the house of God, who shed 
his blood for all mankind, here in the temple consecrated to Mary, 
mother of every sweet afiection, these two records of a terrible car- 
nage between brothers, sons of the same countrj^ ? Does it not seem 
as if these relics from the field of battle stand here to render Divinity 
accomplice of the rage and hate and vengeance of men ? We know 



174 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



not bov to answer tliis question ; we must even add that the crucifix 

not far from the poles, in the chapel on the left of the transept, was 

borne by the Sienese, trusting for victory 

in the favor of God, upon the field of 

Montaperto." 

I make baste to say that I was not a 
stranger disposed to perplex my "New 
Guide" with any such question, and that 
nothing I saw in the cathedral gave me 
so much satisfaction as these fiag-polea. 
Ghibelline and Sienese as I liad become 
as soon as I turned my back on Gnelphic 
Florence, I exulted in these trophies of 
Montaperto with a joy which nothing 
matched except the pleasure I had in view- 
ing the fur-lined canopy of the War Car, 
which is preserved in the Opera del Duomo, 
and from which the custodian bestowed 
upon my devotion certain small tufts of the 
fur. I have no question but this canopy 
and the flag-poles are equally genuine, and 
I counsel the reader by all means to see 
them. 

There are many other objects to be seen in the curious museum of 
antique and mediieval art called the Opera del Uuomo, especially 
the or^naJ sculptures of the Fonte Gaia ; but the place is cluefly 
interesting as the outline, the colossal sketch in sculptured marble, 
of the cathedral as it was projected. The present structure rises 
amid the halting fragments of the medifeval edifice, which it lias 
included in itself, without exceeding their extent ; and from the roof 
there is an ineffable prospect of the city and the country, from wliich 
one turns again in still greater wonder to the church itself. 

I had an even deeper sense of its vastness, — the least marvellous 
of its facts, — and a renewed sense of the domestication of the Italian 
churches, when I went one morning to hear a Florentine monk. 




L 1IEDI£VAL SIEXESE. 



PANPORTE DI SIENA. 175 

bmed for his eloquence, preach in the cathedral An oblong canopy 
of coarse gray canvas had been stretched overhead in part of the 
great nave, to keep his voice from losing itself in the space around 
and above. The monk, from a pulpit built against one of the pillars, 
faced a dais, across the nave, where the archbishop sat in his chair 
to listen, and the planked floor between them jvas thronged with 
people sitting and standing, who came and went, as if at home, with 
. a continued clapping of feet and banging of doors. All the time 
service was going on at several side-altais, where squads of wor- 
shippers were kneeling, indifTerent 
alike to one another and to the 
sermon of the monk. Some of his 
listeners, however, wore a look of in- 
tense interest, and I myself was not 
without concern in his discourse, for 
I perceived that it was all in honor 
and compassion of the captive of the 
Vatican, and full of innuendo for the 
national government It gave me 
some notion of the difficulties with 
which that government has to con- 
tend, and impressed me anew with 
its admirable patience and forbearance, 
interests, prejudices, and ambitions ai 
unity. 

XV. 

OXE night we of the Pension T. made a sentimental pilgrimage to 
the cathedral, to see it by moonlight The moon was not so prompt 
as we, and at first we only had it on the baptistery and the campa- 
nile, — a campanile to make one almost forget the Tower of Giotta 
But before we came away one comer of the facade had caught the 
light, and hung richly bathed, tenderly etherealized in it What 
was gold, what was marble before, seemed transmuted to the lumi- 
nous substance of the moonlight itself, and rested there like some 




ODB or THE LI 



Italy is unified, but many 
still at war within her 



176 TUSCAN CITIES. 

translucent cloud that '' stooped from heaven and took the shape ** 
of clustered arch and finial. 

On the way home we passed the open portal of a palace, and made 
ourselves the guests of its noble court, now poured full of the moon, 
and dimly lighted by an exquisite lantern of beaten iron, which hung 
near a massive pillar at the foot of the staircase. The pillar divided 
the staircase, and lost its branchy, top in the vault overhead ; and 
there was something so consciously noble and dignified in the whole 
architectural presence that I should have been surprised to find that 
we had not stumbled upon an historic edifice. It proved to be the 
ancient palace of the Captain of the People, — and I will thank the 
reader to imagine me a finer name than Capitano del Popolo for 
the head of such a democracy as Siena, whose earliest government, 
according to Alessandro Sozzini, was popular, after the Swiss fashion. 
Now the palace is the residence and property of the Grattanelli fam- 
ily, who have restored it and preserved it in the medi-eval spirit, so 
that I suppose it is, upon the whole, the best realization of a phase 
of the past which one can see. The present Count Grattanelli — who 
may be rather a marquis or a prince, but who is certainly a gentle- 
man of enlightened taste, and of a due sense of his Sieua — keeps an 
apartment of the palace open to the public, with certain of the 
rooms in the original state, and store of armor and weapons in which 
the consequence of the old Captains of the People fitly masquerades. 
One must notice the beautiful doors of inlaid wood in this apartment, 
which are of the count's or marquis's or ])rince's own design; and 
not fail of two or three ceilings frescoed in dark colors, in dense, close 
designs and small panels, after what seems a fashion peculiar to 
Siena. 

Now tliat I am in Boston, where there are so few private palaces 
open to the public, I wonder that I did not visit more of them in 
Siena ; but I find no record of any such visits but this one in my 
note-books. It was not for want of inscriptional provocation to 
penetrate interiors that I failed to do so. They are tableted in Siena 
beyond almost anything I have seen. The villa outside the gate 
where the poet Manzoni once visited his daughter records the fact 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 177 

for the passing stranger; on the way to the station a house boasts 
that within it the dramatist Pietro Cossa, being there " the guest of 
his adored mother," wrote his Cecilia and the second act of his Sylla; 
in a palace near that of Socinus you are notified that Alfieri wrote 
several of his tragedies ; and another proclaims that he frequented it 
" holding dear the friendship " of the lady of the house ! In spite of 
all this, I can remember only having got so far as the vestibule and 
staircase — lovely and grand they were, too — of one of those noble 
Gothic palaces in Via Cavour ; I was deterred from going farther by 
learning it was not the day when uninvited guests were received. I 
always kept in mind, moreover, the Palazzo Tolomei for the sake of 
that dear and fair lady who besought the traveller through pur- 
gatory — 

** Ricoiditi di me, che son la Pia ; 
Siena mi f^ disfecemi Maremma," — 

and who was of the ancient name still surviving in Siena. Some say 
that her husband carried her to die of malaria in the marshes of the 
Maremma ; some, that he killed her with his dagger ; others, that he 
made his servants throw her from the window of his castle; and none 
are certain whether or no he had reason to murder her, — they used 
to think there could be a reason for murdering wives in his day ; 
even the good Gigli, of the Diario Senese, speaks of that " giusto 
motivo " Messer Nello may possibly have had. What is certain is 
that Pia was the most beautiful woman in Italy ; and what is still 
more certain is that she was not a Tolomei at all, but only the widow 
of a Tolomei. Perhaps it was prescience of this fact that kept me 
from visiting the Tolomei palace for her sake. At any rate, I did 
not visit it, though I often stopped in the street before it, and dedi- 
cated a mistaken sigh to the poor lady who was only a Tolomei by 
marriage. 

There were several other ladies of Siena, in past ages, who inter- 
ested me. Such an one was the exemplary Onorata de' Principi 
Orsini, one of the four hundred Sienese noblewomen who went out to 

meet the Emperor Frederick III. in 1341, when he came to Siena to 

12 



178 TUSCAN CITIES. 

espouse Leonora, Infanta of Portugal ; a column near Porta Cainollia 
still commemorates the exact spot where the Infanta stood to receive 
him. On this occasion the fair Onorata was, to the thinking of some 
of the other ladies, too simplj dressed; but she defended herself 
against their censure, at&rming that the " Sienese gentlewomen should 
make a pomp of nothing but their modesty, since in other displays 
and feminine adornments the matrons of other and richer cities could 
easily surpass them." And at a ball that night, being asked who 
was the handsomest gentleman present, she answered that she saw 
no one but her husband there. Is the estimable Onorata a trifle too 
sage for the reader s sympathy ? Let liim turn then to the Lady 
Battista Berti, wife of Achille Petrucci, who, at another ball in honor 
of the Emperor, spoke Latin with him so elegantly and with such 
spirit that he embraced her, and created her countess, and begged 
her to ask some grace of him ; upon which this learned creature, 
instead of requesting the Emperor to found a free public librar}', 
besought him to have her exempted from the existing law which 
prohibited the wearing of jewels and brocade dresses in Siena. The 
careful (xigli would have us think that by this reply I^dy Battista 
lost all the credit which her Latinity had won her ; but it appears to 
me that both of these ladies knew verv well what thev were almut, 
and each in her way perceived that the Em])eror could appreciate a 
delicate stroke of humor as well as another. If there were time, and 
not so many questions of our own day pressing, I should like to in- 
quire into all the imaginable facts of these cases ; and I commend 
them to the reader, whose fancy cannot be so hard-worked as mine. 

The great siege of Siena by the Florentines and Imi^erialists in 
1554-55 called forth high civic virtues in the Sienese women, who not 
only shared all the hardships and privations of the men, but often 
their labors, their dangers, and their battles. ** Never, Sienese ladies," 
gallantly exclaimed the brave Blaise de Montluc, Marshal of France, 
who commanded the forces of the Most Christian King in defence of 
the city, and who treats of the siege in his Commentaries, ** never 
shall I fail to immortalize your name so long as the book of Montluc 
shall live ; for in truth you are worthy of immortal praise, if ever 



PANFORTE Dl SIENA. 181 

women were so. As soon as the people took the noble resolution of 
defending their liberty, the ladies of the city of Siena divided them- 
selves into three companies: the first was led by Lady Fort^uerra, 
who was dressed in violet, and all those who followed her likewise, 
having her accoutrement in the fashion of a nymph, short, and show- 
ing the buskin; the second by Lady Piccolomini, dressed in rose- 
colored satin, and her troops in the same livery ; the third by Lady 
Livia Fausta, dressed in white, as was also all her following, and 
bearing a white ensign. On their flags they had some pretty devices ; 
I would give a good deal if I could remember them. These three 
squadrons were composed of three thousand ladies, — gentlewomen or 
citizenesses. Their arms were pickaxes, shovels, baskets, and fas- 
cines; and thus equipped, they mustered and set to work on the 
fortifications. Monsieur de Termes, who has frequently told me about 
it (for I had not then arrived), has assured me that he never saw 
in his life anything so pretty as that I saw the flags afterwards. 
They had made a song in honor of France, and they sang it in going 
to the fortifications. I would give the best horse I have if I could 
have been there. And since I am upon the honor of these ladies, 
I wish those who come after us to admire the courage of a young 
Sienese girl, who, although she was of poor condition, still deserves 
to be placed in the first rank. I had issued an order when I was 
chosen Dictator that nobody, on pain of being punished, should fail 
to go on guard in his turn. This girl, seeing her brother, whose turn 
it was, unable to go, takes his morion, which she puts on her head, 
his shoes, his buffalo-gorget ; and with his halberd on her shoulders, 
goes off with the corps de garde in this guise, passing, when the roll is 
called, under the name of her brother, and stands sentinel in his 
place, without being known till morning. She was brought home in 
triumph. That afternoon Signer Comelio showed her to me." 

I am sorry that concerning the present ladies of Siena I know 
nothing except by the scantiest hearsay. My chief knowledge of 
them, indeed, centres in the story of one of the Borghesi there, who 
hold themselves so very much higher than the Borghesi of Rome. 
She stopped fanning herself a moment while some one spoke of them. 



182 TUSCAN CITIES. 

" Oh, yes ; I have heard that a branch of our family went to Kome. 
But I know nothing about them." 

What glimpse we caught of Sienese society was at the theatre, — 
the lovely little theatre of the Accademia dei Rozzi. This is one of 
the famous literary academies of Italy ; it was founded in the time 
of Leo X., and was then composed entirely of workingmen, who con- 
fessed their unpolished origin in their title ; afterwards the Academies 
of the Wrapped-up, the Twisted, and the Insipid (such was the fan- 
tastic humor of the prevailing nomenclature) united with these Rude 
Men, and their academy finally became the most polite in Siena. 
Their theatre still enjoys a national fame, none but the best com- 
panies being admitted to its stage. We saw there the Rossi company 
of Turin, — the best players by all odds, after the great Florentine 
Stenterello, whom I saw in Italy. Commendatore Rossi's is an 
exquisite comic talent, — the most delicately amusing, the most 
subtly refined. In a comedy of Goldoni's ("A Curious Accident") 
which he gave, he was able to set the house in an uproar by simply 
letting a series of feelings pass over his face, in expression of the 
conceited, wilful old comedy-father's progress from facetious satis- 
faction in the elopement of his neighbor's daughter to a realization 
of the fact that it was his own daughter who had run away. Rossi, 
who must not be confounded with the tragedian of his name, is the 
first comedian who has ever been knighted in Italy, the theory being 
that since a comic actor might receive a blow which the exigency of 
the play forbade him to resent, he was unfit for knighthood. King 
Humbert seems somehow to have got over this prodigious obstacla 

The theatre was always filled, and between the acts there was 
much drama in the boxes, where the gentlemen went and came, 
making their compliments to the ladies, in the old Italian fashion. 
It looked very easy and pleasant ; and I wish Count Nerli, whose 
box we had hired one evening when he sent the key to the ticket- 
office to be let, had been there to tell us something of the people in 
the others. T wish, in fact, that we might have known something 
of the count himself, whom, as it is, I know only by the title boldly 
lettered on his box-door. The acquaintance was slight, but very 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 183 

agieeable. Before the evening was out I had imagined him in a 
dozen figures and cbaiacters ; and I still feel tliat I came very near 
knowing a Sienese count Some English people, who became English 
friends, in our pension, bod letters which took them into society, and 
they reported it very charming. Indeed, I heard at Florence, from 
others who knew it 
well, that it was pleas- 
antly characterized by 
the number of culti- 
vated people connected 
with the ancient uni< 
versity of Siena. 
Again, I heard that 
here, and elsewhere in 
Italy, husbands n^lect 
their wives, and leave 
them dismal at home, 
while they go out to 

spend their evenings at the clubs and cafes. Who knows? I 
will not even pretend to do so, though the temptation is great. 

A curious phase of the social life in another direction appeared in 
the notice which I found posted one day on the door of the church 
of Sao Cristoforo, inviting the poor girls of the jjarish to a competi- 
tive examinatiou for the wedding-portions to be supplied to the most 
deser^-ing from an ancient fund. They were ad\'Lsed that they must 
appear on some Sunday during Lent before the parish priest, with 
a petition certifying to these facts : — 




HURRriSO HOVE. 



"I. Poverty. 
" II. Good morals. 
" III. Ri-;ular attendiuice at church. 
" IV. Residence of sii monlhs in the pamh. 
" V. Age between 18 and 30 vean. 
" N. B. A girl who has won a dower in 
compete '' 



this or aD7 other puiah cannot 



184 TUSCAN CITIES. 



XVI. 



The churches are very rich in paintings of the Sienese school, and 
the gallerj' of the Belle Arti, though small, is extremely interesting. 
Upon the whole, I do not know where one could better study the 
progress of Italian painting, from the Byzantine period up to the 
great moment when Sodoma came in Siena. Oddly enough, there 
was a very lovely little Bellini in this collection, which, with a small 
Veronese, distinguished itself from the Tuscan canvases, by the 
mellow beauty of the Venetian coloring, at once. It is worse than 
useless to be specific about pictures, and if I have kept any general 
impression of the Sienese work, it concerns the superior charm of 
the earlier frescos, especially in the Public Palace. In the churches 
the best frescos are at San Domenico, where one sees the exquisite 
chapel of St. Catherine painted by Sodoma, which I have already 
mentioned. After these one must reckon in interest the histories 
with which Pinturicchio has covered the whole library of the cathe- 
dral, and which are surpassingly delightful in their quaint realism. 
For the rest, I have a vivid memory of a tendency in the Sienese 
painters to the more horrific facts of Scripture and legend ; they 
were terrible fellows for the Massacre of the Innocents, and treated 
it with a bloodier carefulness of detail than I remember to have 
noticed in any other school ; the most sanguinary of these slaughters 
is in the Church of the ServL But there is something wholesome 
and human even in the most butcherly of their simple-minded car- 
nages ; it is where the allegorists get hold of horror that it becomes 
loathsome, as in that choir of a church, which I have forgotten the 
name of, where the stalls are decorated with winged death's heads, 
the pinions shown dropping with rottenness and decay around the 
skulls. Yet this too had its effectiveness : it said what some people 
of that time were thinking ; and I suppose that the bust of a lady 
in a fashionable ruff, with a book in her hand, simpering at the bust 
of her husband in an opposite niche in San Vigilio, was once not so 
amusing as it now looks. I am rather proud of discovering her, for 
I found her after I had been distinctly discouraged from exploring 



PANFORTE DI SIENA, 185 

the church by the old woman in charge. She was civil, but went 
back eagerly to her gossip with another crone there, after saying : 
" The pictures in the roof are of no merit. They are beautiful, how- 
ever." I liked this church, which was near our pension, because it 
seemed such a purely little neighborhood afiiEiir; and I must have 
been about the only tourist who ever looked into it 

One afternoon we drove out to the famous convent of the Osser- 
vanza, which was suppressed with the other convents, but in which 
the piety of charitable people still maintains fifty of the monks. We 
passed a company of them, young and old, on our way, bareheaded 
and barefooted, as their use is, and looking ver}' fit in the landscape ; 
they saluted us politely, and overtaking us in the porch of the church, 
rang up the sacristan for us, and then, dropping for a moment on one 
knee before the door, disappeared into the convent. The chapel is 
not very much to see, though there is a most beautiful Delia Eobbia 
there, — a Madonna and St. Thomas, — which I would give much to 
see now. When we had gone the round of the dififerent objects, our 
sacristan, who was very old and infirm, and visibly foul in the brown 
robes which are charitable to so much dirt, rose from the last altar 
before which he had knelt with a rheumatic's groans, and turning to 
the ladies with a malicious grin, told them that they could not be 
admitted to the cloisters, though the gentlemen could coma We 
followed him through the long, dreary galleries, yawning with hun- 
dreds of empty cells, and a sense of the obsoleteness of the whole 
afiFair oppressed me. I do not know why this feeling should have 
been heightened by the smallness of the gardened court enclosed by 
the cloisters, or by the tinkle of a faint old piano coming from some 
room where one of the brothers was practising. The whole place 
was very bare, and stared with fresh whitewash ; but from the per- 
vading smell 1 feared that this venerable relic of the past was not 
well drained, — though T do not know that in the religious ages they 
valued plumbing greatly, anywhere. 



TUSCAN CITIES. 




In this and other drives about Siena the peciihar character of the 
volcanic laudscape made itself contimially felt. There is a desolation 
in the troeleas hills, and a wildnesa and strangeness in thuir forms, 
which I can perhaps best suggest by repenting that they have been 
constantly reproduced by the Tuscan painters in their backgroiinils, 
and that most Judean landscapes in their pictures are faithful stiidies 
of such naked and lonely hills as billow round Siena. The soil is 
red, and but for the wine and oil with which it flows, however re- 
luctantly, I should say that it must be poor. Some of the hills look 





mere heaps of clay, such as mighty geysers might hnve cost up until 
at last they hid themselves under the accumulation ; and this s 
to be the nature of the group amidst which the battle of Montaperto 
was fought I speak from a very remote inspection, for though we 
started to drive there, we considered, after a mile or two, that we 
bad no real interest in it now. either as Florentines or Sienese, and 



PANFORTE DI SIENA. 189 

contented ourselves with a look at the Arbia, which the battle " col- 
ored red/' but which had long since got back its natural complexion. 
This stream — or some other which the driver passed off on us for 
it — flowed down through the uplands over which we drove, with 
a small volume that seemed quite inadequate to slake the wide 
drought of the landscape, in which, except for the cypresses about 
the villas, no tree lifted its head. There were not even olives ; even 
the ^^neyards had vanished. The fields were green with well-started 
wheat, but of other husbandry there was scarcely a sign. Yet the 
peasants whom we met were well dressed (to be sure it was Sunday), 
and there was that air of comfort about the farmsteads which is 
seldom absent in Tuscany. All along the road were people going to 
vespers ; and these people were often girls, young and pretty, who, 
with their arms about one another's waists, walked three and four 
abreast, the wide brims of their straw hats lifting round their faces 
like the disks of sunflowers. A great many of them were blonde ; 
at least one in ten had blue eyes and red hair, and they must have 
been the far-descended children of those seigneurs and soldiers among 
whom Charlemagne portioned his Italian lands, marking to this day 
a clear distinction of race between the citizens and the contadinL 
By and by we came to a little country church, before which in the 
grassy piazza two men had a humble show of figs and cakes for sale 
in their wagon-beds, and another was selling wine by the glass from 
a heap of flasks on his stand. Here again I was reminded of Quebec, 
for the interior of this church was, in its bareness and poverty, quite 
like the poor little Huron village church at the Falls of Lorette. 

Our drive was out from the Porta Pispini southward, and back to 
the city through the Porta Bomana ; but pleasure lies in any course 
you take, and perhaps greater pleasure in any other than this. The 
beauty of the scenery is wilder and ruggeder than at Florence. In 
the country round Siena all is free and open, with none of those high 
garden walls that baffle approach in the Florentine neighborhood. 
But it seems to have been as greatly loved and as much frequented, 
and there are villas and palaces everywhere, with signs of that per- 
sonal eccentricity in the architecture and inscriptions for which the 



190 TUSCAN CITIES. 

Italians ought to be as famous as the English. Out of the Porta 
Camollia, in the Palazzo del Diavolo, which was the scene of stirring 
facts during the great siege, when the Sienese once beat Duke Cosimo's 
Florentines out of it, the caprice of the owner has run riot in the 
decoration of the brick front, where heads of Turks and Saracens ^re 
everywhere thrusting out of the frieze and cornice. At Poggio Pini 
an inscription on the porter's lodge declares : " Count Casti de' 
Vecchi, jealous conservator of the ornaments of the above-situated 
villa Poggio Pini, his glory, his care, placed me guardian of this 
approach." 

The pines thus tenderly and proudly watched would not strike the 
American as worthy so much anxiety ; but perhaps they are so in a 
country which has waited its whole patrimony of trees, as we are 
now so wickedly wasting ours. The variety of timber which one 
sees in Tuscany is very small : pines, poplars, oaks, walnuts, chest- 
nuts, — that is the whole story of the forest growth. Its brevity 
impressed us particularly in our long drive to Belcaro, which I 
visited for its interest as the quarters of the Marquis of Marignano, 
the Imperialist general during the siege. Two cannon-balls imbedded 
in its walls recall the fight, with an appropriate inscription; but 
whether they were fired by Marignano while it was occupied by the 
Sienese, or by the Sienese after he took it, I cannot now remember. 
I hope the reader will not mind this a great deal, especially as I am 
able to ofifer him the local etymology of the name of Belcaro : bel be- 
cause it is so beautiful, and caro because it cost so much. It is now 
owned by two brothers, rich merchants of Siena, one of whom lives 
in it, and it is approached through a landscape wild, and sometimes 
almost savage, like that all around Siena, but of more fertile aspect 
than that to the southward. The reader must always think of the 
wildness in Italy as different from our primeval wildness ; it is the 
wildness of decay, of relapse. At one point a group of cypresses 
huddling about the armless statue of some poor god thrilled us with 
a note, like the sigh of a satyr's reed, from the antique world ; at 
another, a certain wood-grown turn of the road, there was a brick 
stairway, which had once led to some pavilion of the hoop and 



Pj{NFORTE DI SIENA. 



191 



bag-wig age, and now, grown with thick moss and long grasses, had 
a desolation more exquisite than I can express. 

Belcaro itself, however, when we came to it, was in perfectly good 
repair, and afforded a satisfying image of a mediseyal castle, waUed 
and fossed about, and lifting its mighty curtains of masonry just 
above the smooth leVel of the ilex-tops that hedged it loftily in. 
There was not very much to see within it, except the dining-hall, 
painted by Peruzzi with the Judgment of Paris. After we had ad- 
mired this we were shown across the garden to the little lodge which 
the same painter has deliciously frescoed with indecenter fables than 
any outside of the Palazzo del T^ at Mantua. Beside it is the chapel 
in which he has indifferently turned his hand, with the same brilliant 
facility, to the illustration of holy writ and legend. It was a curi- 
ous civilization. Both lodge and chapel were extraordinarily bright 
and cheerful. 

From these works of art we turned and climbed to the superb 
promenade which crowns the wide wall of the castle. In the garden 
below, a chilly bed of anemones blew in the March wind, and the 
top where we stood was swept by a frosty blast, while the waning 
sunshine cast a sad splendor over the city on her hill seven miles 
away. A delicate rose-light began to bathe it, in which the divine 
cathedral looked like some perfect shape of cloudland; while the 
clustering towers, palaces and gates, and the wandering sweep of the 
city wall seemed the details of a vision too lovely for waking eyes. 




GOING TO MARRET. 



PITILESS PISA. 



PITILESS PISA. 



AS Pisa made no comment on the little changes she may have 
observed in me since we had last met, nineteen years before, 
I feel bound in politeness to say that I found her in April, 1883, 
looking not a day older than she did in December, 1864 In fact she 
looked younger, if anything, though it may have been the season that 
made this difference in her. She was in her spring attire, freshly, 
almost at the moment, put on ; and that counts for much more in 
Pisa than one who knew her merely in the r^on of her palaces and 
churches and bridges would believe. She has not, indeed, quite that 
breadth of orchards and gardens within her waUs which Siena has, 
but she has space enough for nature to flourish at ease there ; and 
she has many deserted squares and places where the grass was 
sprouting vigorously in the crevices of the pavement All this made 
her perceptibly younger, even with her memories running so far back 
of Roman times, into twilights whither perhaps a less careful modem 
historian than myself would not follow theuL But when I am in a 
town that has real claims to antiquity, I like to allow them to the 
uttermost ; and with me it is not merely a duty, it is a pleasure, to 
remind the reader that Pisa was founded by Pelops, the grandson of 
Jove, and the son of Tantalus, king of Phrygia. He was the same 
who was slain by lus father, and served in a banquet to the gods, to 
try if they knew everything, or could be tricked into eating of the 
hideous repast; and it was after this curious experience — Ceres 
came in from the field, veiy tired and hungry, and popped down and 



196 TUSCAN CITIES. 

tasted a bit of his shoulder before they could stop her — that, being 
restored to life by his grandfather, he visited Italy, and, liking the 
situation at the mouth of the Amo, built his city there. This is the 
opinion of Pliny and Solinus, and that generally adopted by the Pisan 
chroniclers ; but the sceptical Strabo would have us think that Pisa 
was not founded till much later, when Nestor, sailing homeward after 
the fall of Troy, was cast away on the Etruscan shore at this point 
There are some historians who reconcile the accounts by declaring 
that Nestor merely joined the Phrygians at Pisa, and could never 
have pretended to found the city. I myself incline to this notion ; 
but even if Pisa was not built till after the fall of Troy, the reader 
easily perceives that a sense of her antiquity might aflfect an Ohio 
man, even after a residence in Boston. A city founded by Pelops or 
Nestor could not be converted to Christianity by a less person than 
St. Peter, who, on his way to Rome, was expressly wrecked on the 
Pisan coasts for that purpose. Her faith, like her origin, is as an- 
cient as possible, and Pisa was one of the first Italian communities 
to emerge from the ruin of the Roman Empire into a vigorous and 
splendid life of her own. Early in the Middle Ages she had, with the 
arrogance of long-established consequence, superciliotisly explained 
the Florentines, to an Eastern potentate who had just heard of them, 
as something like the desert Arabs, — a lawless, marauding, barbar- 
ous race, the annoyance of all respectable and settled communities. 
In those days Pisa had not only commerce with the East, but wars ; 
and in 1005 she famously beat back the Saracens from their con- 
quests in the northern Mediterranean, and, after a struggle of eigh- 
teen years, ended by carrying the war into Africa and capturing 
Carthage with the Emir of the Saracens in it. In the beginning of 
this war her neighbor Lucca, fifteen miles away, profited by her pre- 
occupation to attack her, and this is said to have been one of the 
first quarrels, if not the first, in which the Italian cities asserted their 
separate nationality and their independence of the empire. It is sup- 
posed on that account to have been rather a useful event, though it 
is scarcely to be praised otherwise. Of course the Pisans took it out 
of the Lucchese afterwards in the intervals of their more important 



PITILESS PISA. 197 

wars with the Grenoeae by sea and the Florentines by land Theie 
most have been fighting pretty well all the time, back and forth 
across the vineyards and olive orchards that stretch between the 
two cities ; I have counted up eight distinct wars, bloody and tedi- 
ous, in which they ravaged each other's territory, and I dare say 
I have missed som& Once the Pisans captured Lucca and sacked 
it, and once the Lucchese took Pisa and sacked it ; the Pisans were 
Ghibelline, and the Lucchese were Guelph, and these things had to 
be. In the mean time, Pisa was waging, with varying fortune, seven 
wars with Genoa, seven other with Florence, three with Venice, and 
one with Milan, and was in a spirited state of continual party strife 
within herself ; though she found leisure to take part in several of 
the crusades, to break the naval supremacy of the Saracens, and to 
beat the Greeks in sea-fights under the walls of Constantinopla The 
warlike passions of men were tightly wound up in those days, and 
Pisa was set to fight for five hundred years. Then she fell at last, 
in 1509, under the power of those upstart Florentines, whom she had 
despised so long. 

Almost from the b^inning of their rivalry, some three or four 
hundred years before, the triumph of Florence was a forgone conclu- 
sion. The serious historians are rather ashamed of the incident that 
kindled the first hostilities between the two cities but the chroniclers, 
who are still more serious, treat it with perfect gravity ; and I, who 
am always with the chroniclers, cannot offer it less respect The 
fact is, that one day, at the time of the coronation of the Emperor 
Frederick IT. in Rome, the Florentine ambassador, who was dining 
with a certain cardinal, either politely or sincerely admired the cardi- 
nal's lapdog so much that the cardinal could not help making him 
a present of the dog, out of hand. The Florentine thought this ex- 
tremely handsome of the cardinal, and the cardinal forgot all about 
it ; so that when the Pisan ambassador came to dine with him the 
next day, and professed also to be charmed with this engaging lap- 
dog, the cardinal promptly bestowed it upon him in his turn ; noth- 
ing could equal the openhandedness of that cardinal in the matter of 
lapdogs. He seems to have forgotten his gift to the Pisan as readily 



198 TUSCAN CITIES, 

as he had forgotten his present to the Florentine ; or possibly he 
thought that neither of them would have the ill manners to take him 
in earnest ; very likely it was the custom to say to a guest who ad- 
mired your dog, " He is yours," and then think no more about it. 
However, the Florentine sent for the dog and got it, and then the 
Pisan sent, and got the poor cardinal's best excuses ; one imagines 
the desolated smiles and deprecating shrugs with which he must 
have made them. The affair might have ended there, if it had not 
happened that a party of Florentines and a party of Pisans met 
shortly afterwards in Rome, and exchanging some natural jeers and 
taunts concerning the good cardinal's gift, came to blows about it 
The Pisans were the first to begin this quarrel, and all the Floren- 
tines in Rome were furious. Oddo di Arrigo Fifanti, whom the dili- 
gent reader of these page^ will remember as one of the Florentine 
gentlemen who helped cut the throat of Buondelmonte on his wed- 
ding day, chanced to be in Rome, and put himself at the head of 
the Florentines. He was not the kind of man to let any sort of 
quarrel sufifer in his hands, and he led the Florentines on to attack 
the Pisan legation in the street. 

When the news of this outrage came to Pisa, it set the hot little 
state in a flame. She was glad of a chance to break with Florence, 
for the Pisans had long been jealous of the growing power of the 
upstart city, and they hastened to make reprisal by seizing all the 
Florentine merchandise within their borders. Florence still remained 
in such awe of the old-established respectability of Pisa, and of her 
supremacy by land and sea, lately illustrated in her victorious wars 
with the Genoese and Saracens, that she was willing to offer any 
reasonable reparation ; and her consuls even sent to pay secretly the 
price of the confiscated goods, if only they could have them back, 
and so make an appearance of honorable reconciliation before their 
people. The Pisan authorities refused these humble overtures, and 
the Florentines desperately prepared for war. The campaign ended 
in a single battle at Castel del Bosco, where the Florentines, sup- 
ported by the Lucchese, defeated the Pisans with great slaughter, 
and conquered a peace that left them masters of the future. After 



PITILESS PISA. 199 

that Pisa was in league with Florence, as she had been in league 
with her before that, against the encroachments of the emperors 
upon the liberties of the Tuscan cities, and she was often at war 
with her, siding with the Sienese in one of their famous defeats at 
the hands of the Florentines, and generally doing what she could to 
disable and destroy her rival. She seems to have grown more and 
more incapable of governing herself ; she gave herself to this master 
and that; and at last, in 1406, after a si^ of eight months, she was 
reduced by the Florentines. Her women had fought together with 
lier men in her defence ; the people were starving, and the victors 
wept at the misery they saw within the fallen city. 

The Florentines had hoped to inherit the maritime greatness of 
Pisa, but this perished with her ; thereafter the ships that left her 
famous arsenal were small and few. The Florentines treated their 
captive as well as a mediaeval people knew how, and addressed 
themselves to the restoration of her prosperity ; but she languished 
in their hold for nearly a hundred years, when Pietro de' Medici, 
hoping to make interest for himself with Charles VIII. of France 
(who seems to have invaded Italy rather for the verification of one 
of Savonarola's propliecies than for any other specific purpose), 
handed over Pisa with the other Florentine fortresses to the French 
troops. When their commandant evacuated the place, he restored 
it not to the Florentines but to the Pisans. The Florentines set 
instantly and actively about the reconquest, and after a siege and 
a blockade that lasted for years, they accomplished it. In this siege, 
as in the other great defence, the Pisari women fought side by side 
with the men ; it is told of two sisters working upon the fortifica- 
tions, that when one was killed by a cannon-shot the other threw 
her body into a gabion, covered it with earth, and went on with her 
work above it Before Pisa fell people had b^un to drop dead of 
famine in her streets, and the Florentines, afraid that they would 
destroy the city in their despair, offered them terms far beyond their 
hopes, after a war of fifteen years. 



200 TVSCAM cniES. 

IL 

Wmat m fAd m t^ laasuxj fd Hn b tSisA fm ham proft Int one 
noK: ti> efMoofjnt rsxmmbcaii/i^ Hot pvospecdrf wv» cadif sod puift^ 
and ber pi^jipfe empfej-ai it en tht esIfiffv&Bm of aH t!ie srtss; j«it 
Afidnm afid Xkf»{i^> F^aaaoA* are alnoct die only iznssts wbose fuae* » 
aM0oeial«d whh tkat of tlezr nttdre oCt. She w«» (icriicCialtT at 
war I17 i^a and bj land, jet ber admrratf and gsaaakh aie vnknoivii 
to the WfoiA. Her mkirefaFitj » one of the oUeat and DK»t l<«^^M»ii 
in Italy, yet ibe prodoced no eminent scitolais or poetSy and one 
hardly realizes that the great Galileo, who came a centnij after the 
fall f4 Im coiaDtrT, waji not a Florentine bat a Pisan bj birth ; he was 
MCtnMj r/f a Florentine iamilj settled in Pisi. When one thinks of 
Florence, one thinki (d Dante, of Giotto, of Cimaboe, of Bmnelleschi, 
of Mk;heIangelo, (A Savonarola, and of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X, 
of lVx:caccio and Pulci and Politian, of MachiaTelli, of Giovanni delle 
Bangle Nere and Gino Capponi, of Gnido Cavakanti, of Amerigo Yes- 
pocci, of lienvennto Cellini, and Masaccio and Botticelli, and all 
the rent When one thinks of Siena, one thinks of St Catharine, 
and f>:;h]no9 and Socinus, and the Piccolomini, and Bandini, and 
Hoiloma ; Imt when one thinks of Pisa, Ugolino is the sole name that 
corm^s int^i one s mind 1 am not at all sure, however, that one ought 
to rli;spise Pisa for her lack of celebrities; I am rather of a contrary 
o|iifiion. It is certain that such a force and splendor as she was for 
five tiundnsd years could have been created only by a consensus of 
mi^lity wills, and it seems to me that a very pretty case might be 
ffimlfj riut in Ixjlialf of the democracy whose level was so high that 
no one head could be seen above it Perhaps this is what we are 
(timing U) in our own civilization, and I am disposed to take heart 
from tlic heroless history of Pisa when I look round over the vast 
plain of our ecjuality, where every one is as great as every other. 

I wish, if this is the case, we might come finally to anything as 
(ihjiin and rcjHtful and lovely as I found Pisa on the day of my arrival; 
liut of courwj that would be much more difl&cult for a continent than 
for a city, and probably our last state will not be so pleasant On 



PITILESS PISA. 201 

our way down from Florence, through much the same landscape as 
that through which we had started to Siena, the peach-trees were 
having their turn in the unhurried Italian spring's succession of 
blossoms, and the fields were lit with their pathetic pink, where 
earlier the paler bloom of the almond had prevailed. As I said, 
Pisa herself was in her spring dress, and it may be that the season 
had touched her with the langour which it makes the whole world 
feel, as she sat dreaming beside her Amo, in the midst of the gardens 
that compassed her about within her walls. I do not know what 
Pisa had to say to other tourists who arrived that day, but we were 
old friends, and she regarded me with a frank, sad wonder when she 
read in my eyes a determination to take notes of her. 

" Is it possible ? " she expressed, with that mute, melancholy air 
of hers. " You, who have lived in Italy, and ought to know better ? 
You, who have been here, before? Sit down with me beside the 
Amo!*' and she indicated two or three empty bridges, which I was 
welcome to, or if I preferred half a mile or so of that quay, which 
has the noblest sweep in the world, there it was, vacant for me. I 
shrugged my excuses, as well as I could, and indicated the artist at 
my side, who with his etching-plate under his arm, and his hat in 
his hand, was making his manners to Pisa, and I tried to explain 
that we were both there under contract to produce certain illustrated 
papers for The Century.* 

'* What papers ? What Century ? " she murmured, and tears came 
into the eyes of the beautiful ghost ; and she added with an inex- 
pressible pathos and bitterness, " I remember no century, since the 
fifteenth, when — I — died." 

She would not say, when she fell under the power of her enemy, 
but we knew she was thinking of Florence ; and as she bowed her 
face in her hands, we turned away with our hearts in our throat 

We thought it well not to go about viewing the monuments of her 
fallen grandeur at once, — they are all kept in wonderful repair, — 
and we left the Amo, whose mighty curve is followed on either side 
by lines of magnificent palaces, and got our driver to carry us out to 

* The MagtziDe in which these sketches were firet printed. 



TUSCAN CITIES, 



the streets that dwindled into lanes beside the gardecia feuced in oy 
the red brick city walls. At une point a long stretch of the wall 
seemed trellised for yellow roses which covered acres of it with their 
golden multitude ; hut when we got down and walked nearer, with 




the permission of the peasant, whose field we passed through, we 
found they were lemons. He said they grew very well in that shel- 
ter and exposure, aud his kind old weather-beaten, friendly face was 
almost the color of one. He bade us go anywhere we lilted in his 
garden, and be invited us to drink of the water of his well, which he 



PITILESS PISA, 203 

said never went dry in the hottest weather. Then he returned to his 
fat old wife, who had kept on weeding, and bent down beside her and 
did not follow us for drink-money, but returned a self-respectful adieu 
from a distance, when we called a good-by before getting into our 
carriage. We generalized from his behavior a manly independence of 
cliaracter in the Pisan people, and I am sure we were not mistaken 
in the beauty of the Pisan women, who, as we met them in the 
street, were all extremely pretty, and young, many of them, even 
after five hundred years. One gets over expecting good looks in 
Tuscany ; and perhaps this was the reason why we prized the loveli- 
ness of the Pisans. It may have been comparative, only, though I 
am inclined to think it was positiva At any rate, there can be no 
doubt about the landscape outside the walls, which we drove into a 
little way out of one of the gates, to return by another. It was a 
plain country, and at this point a line of aqueduct stretched across 
the smiling fields to the feet of the arid, purple hills, that propped 
the blue horizon. There was something richly simple in the elements 
of the picture, which was of as few tones as a landscape of Titian 
or Baphael, and as strictly subordinated in its natural features to 
the human interest, which we did our best to represent. I dare 
say our best was but poor. Every acre of that plain had been 
the theatre of a great tragedy ; every rood of ground had borne its 
hero. Now, in the advancing spring, the grass and wheat were long 
enough to flow in the wind, and they flowed like the ripples of a 
wide green sea to the feet of those purple hills, away from our feet 
where we stood beside our carriage on its hither shore. The warmth 
of the season had liberated the fine haze that dances above the sum- 
mer fields, and this quivered before us like the confluent phantoms 
of multitudes, indistinguishably vast, who had fallen there in im- 
memorial strife. But we could not stand musing long upon this 
fact; we had taken that carriage by the hour. Yet we could not help 
loitering along by the clear stream that followed the road, till it 
brought us to a flour-whitened mill, near the city wall, slowly and 
thoughtfully turning its huge undershot wheel ; and I could not re- 
sist entering and speaking to the miller, where, leaning upon a sack 



204 TUSCAN CITIES, 

of wheat, he dimly loomed through the powdered air, in the exact 
attitude of a miller I used to know in a mill on the Little Miami, in 
Ohio, when I was a boy. 

III. 

I TRY to give the reader a true impression of the sweet confusion 
of travel in those old lands. In the phrases that come out of the 
point of the pen, rather than out of the head or the heart, we talk 
about losing ourselves in the associations of the past ; but we never 
do it. A prime condition of our sympathy with it, is that we always 
and every instant and vividly find our dreary, tiresome, unstoried, 
unstoriable selves in it ; and if I had been less modern, less recent, 
less raw, I should have been by just so much indifterent to the an- 
tique charm of the place. In the midst of my reverie of the Pisan 
past, I dreamily asked the miller about the milling business in the 
Pisan present. I forget what he said. 

The artist outside had begun an etcliing, — if you let that artist out 
of your sight half a second he began an etching, — and we got back 
by a common effort into the town again, where we renewed our im- 
pression of a quiet that was only equalled by its cleanliness, of a 
cleanliness that was only surpassed by its quiet. I think of certain 
dim arcaded streets ; of certain genial, lonely, irregular squares, more 
or less planted with pollarded sycamores, just then woolily tufted 
with their leaf -buds ; and I will ask the reader to think of such 
white light over all as comes in our own first real spring days; 
for in some atmospheric qualities and effects the spring is nowhere 
so much alike as in America and Italy. In one of these squares 
the boys were playing ball, striking it with a small tambourine 
instead of a bat ; in another, some young girls sat under a syca- 
more with their sewing ; and in a narrow street running out of 
this was the house where Galileo was bom. He is known to 
have said that the world moves ; but I do not believe it has moved 
much in that neighborhood since his time. His natal roof is 
overlooked by a lofty gallery leading into Prince Corsini's gar- 
den ; and I wish I could have got inside of that garden ; it must 



PITILESS PISA. 



205 



have been plea&anter than the street in which Qalileo waa bom, aod 
which more Dearly approaclied squalor in its condition than any 
other sb^et that I remember ia Pisa. It had fallen from no better 
state, and must always have witnessed to the poverty of the decayed 
Florentine fam- 
ily from which 
Galileo sprang. 
I left the ai^ 
tist there — be- 
ginning an etch- 
ing as usual — 
and wandered 
back to our ho- 
tel; for it was 
then in the 
drowsy heart of 
the late after- 
noon, and I be- 
lieved that Pisa 
had done all 
that she could 
for me in one 
day. But she 
had reserved a 
little surprise, 
quaint and un- 
imagi nable 

enough, in a small chapel of the Chiesa Evan- 
gelica Metodista Italiana, which c>he suddenly showed me in a re- 
tired street I wandered through. This Italian EvangeUcal Method- 
ist Church was but a tiny structure, and it stood back from the street 
in a yard, with some hollies and myrtles before it, — simple and plain, 
like a little Methodist church at home. It had not a frequented 
look, and I was told afterwards that the Methodists of Pisa were in 
that state of arrest which the whole Protestant movement in Italy 




206 TUSCAN CITIES, 

has fallen into, after its first vigorous imp^lse. It has not lost ground, 
but it has not gained, which is also a kind of loss. Apparently the 
Protestant church which prospers best in Italy is the ancient Italian 
church of the Waldenses. This presents the Italians a Protestantism 
of their own invention, while perhaps the hundred religions which 
we offer them are too distracting, if imaccompanied by our one gravy. 
It is said that our missionaries have unexpected diflSculties to en- 
counter in preaching to the Italians, who are not amused, as we 
should be, by a foreigner's blunder, in our language, but annoyed and 
revolted by incorrect Italian from the pulpit. They have, moreover, 
their intellectual pride in the matter : they believe that if Protestant- 
ism had been the wiser and better thing we think it, the Italians 
would have found it out long ago for themselves. As it is, such 
proselytes as we make are among the poor and ignorant; though that 
is the way all religions begin. 

After the Methodist church it was not at all astonishing to come 
upon an agricultural impflement warehouse — alongside of a shop 
glaring with alabaster statuary — where the polite attendant oflTered 
me an American pump as the very best thing of its kind that I could 
use on my podcrc. When I explained that 1 and his pump were 
fellow-countrymen, I could see that we both rose in his respect. 
A French pump, he said, was not worth anything in comparison, 
and I made my own inferences as to the relative inferiority of a 
French man. 

IV. 

When I got to the hotel I asked for the key to my room, which 
opened by an inner door into the artist's room, and was told that the 
artist had it. He had come out by that door, it appeared, and car- 
ried off the key in his pocket. 

" Very well," I said, *' then let us get in with the porter's key." 

They answered that the porter had no key, and they confessed 

that there was no other key than that which my friend had in his 

pocket. They maintained that for one door one l^ey was enough, and 

they would not hear to the superiority of the American hotel system 



PITILESS PISA, 207 

of several keys, which I, flown with pride by the lately acknowledged 
pre-eminence of American pumps, boasted for their mortification. I 
leave the sympathetic reader of fortynsix to conceive the feelings of 
a man whose whole being had set nap-wards in a lethal tide, and 
who now found himself arrested and as it were dammed up in in- 
evitable vigils. In the reading-room there were plenty of old news- 
papers that one could sleep over ; but there was not a lounge, not 
an arm-chair. I pulled up one of the pitiless, straightbacked seats 
to the table, and meditated upon the lost condition of an artist who, 
without even meaning it, could be so wicked ; and then I opened the 
hotel roister in which the different guests had inscribed their names, 
their residences, their feelings, their opinions of Pisa and of the Hotel 
Minerva. 

" TUs," I said to my bitter heart, " will help a man to sleep, stand- 
ing upright." 

But to my surprise I presently found myself interested in these 
predecessors of mine. They were, in most unexpected number, South 
Americans, and there were far more Spanish than English names 
from our hemisphere, though I do not know why the South Ameri- 
cans should not travel as well as we of the Northern continent. 
There were, of course, Europeans of all races and languages, con- 
spicuous among whom for their effusion and expansiveness were the 
French. I should rather have thought the Germans would be 
foremost in this sort, but these French bridal couples — they all 
seemed to be on their wedding journeys — let their joy bubble 

frankly out in the public record. One Baron declared that he 

saw Pisa for the second time, and " How much more beautiful it is," 
he cries, " now when I see it on my bridal tour ! " and his wife writes 
fondly above this, — one fancies her with her left arm thrown round 
his neck while they bend over the book together, — " Life is a jour- 
ney which we should always make in pairs." On another page, 

" Cecie and Louis , on their wedding journey, are very content 

with this hotel, and still more with being together." 

Who could they have been, I wonder ; and are they still better sat- 
isfied with each other's company than with the hotels they stop at ? 



208 TUSCAN CITIES, 

The Minerva was a good hotel ; not perhaps all that these Gallic 
doves boasted it, but very fair indeed, and the landlord took off a charge 
for two pigeons when we represented that he had only given us one 
for dinner. The artist came in, after a while, with the appetite of a 
good conscience, and that dinner almost starved us. We tried to eke 
out the pigeon with vegetables, but the cook's fire had gone down, 
and we could get nothing- but salad. There is nothing I hate more, 
under such circumstances, than a giardinetto for dessert, and a garden- 
ette was all we had ; a little garden that grew us only two wizened 
pears, some dried prunes, and two slices of Gruy^re cheese, fitter for 
a Parisian bridal pair than for us. If my memory serves me right 
we had to go out to a caf^ for our after-dinner coffee. 

At any rate we went out, and walked up to look at the Amo under 
the pale moon. We found the river roughed by the chill wind that 
flared the line of lamps defining the curve of the quay before the 
shadowy palaces, and swept through the quiet streets, and while we 
lounged upon the parapet, a poor mountebank — of those that tumble 
for centesimi before the caf^s — came by, shivering and shrinking in 
his shabby tights. His spangled breech-cloth emitted some forlorn 
gleams ; he was smoking a cigarette, and trying to keep on by a 
succession of shrugs the jacket that hung from one of his shoulders. 
I give him to the reader for whatever he can do with him in an 
impression of Pisa. 

V. 

One of our first cares in Pisa was of course to visit the Four 
Fabrics, as the Italians call, par excellence, the Duomo, the Leaning 
Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo. I say cares, for to me 
it was not a great pleasure. I perceive, by reference to my note- 
book, that I found that group far less impressive than at first, and 
that the Campo Santo especially appeared conscious and finicking. I 
had seen those Orgagna frescos before, and I had said to myself 
twenty years ago, in obedience to whatever art-critic I had in my 
pocket, that here was the highest evidence of the perfect sincerity in 
which the early masters wrought, — that no one could have painted 



PITILESS PISA. 209 

those horrors of death and torments of hell who had not thoroughly 
believed in them. But this time I had my doubts, and I questioned 
if the painters of the Campo Santo might not have worked with 
almost as little faith and reverence as so many American humorists. 
Why should we suppose that the men who painted the Vergognosa 
peeping through her fingers at the debauch of Noah should not be 
capable of making ferocious fun of the scenes which they seemed to 
depict seriously ? There is, as we all know, a modern quality in the 
great minds, the quickest wits, of all ages, and I do not feel sure these 
old painters are always to be taken at their word. Were they not 
sometimes making a mock of the devout clerics and laics who em- 
ployed them ? It is bitter fun, I allow. The Death and the Hell of 
Orgagna are atrocious — nothing less. A hideous fancy, if not a gro- 
tesque, insolent humor, riots through those scenes, where the damned 
are shown with their entrails dangling out (my pen cannot be half so 
plain as his brush), with their arms chopped off, and their tongues 
torn out by fiends, with their women's breasts eaten by snakes. I 
for one will not pretend to have revered those works of art, or to 
have felt anything but loathing in their presence. If I am told that 
I ought at least to respect the faith with which the painter wrought, 
I say that faith was not respectable; and I can honor him more if I 
believe he was portraying those evil dreams in contempt of them, — 
doing what he could to make faith in them impossible by realizing 
them in all the details of their filthy cruelty. It was misery to look 
upon them, and it was bliss to turn my back and give my gaze to the 
innocent wilding flowers and weeds, — the daisies that powdered the 
sacred earth brought from the Holy Land in the Pisan galleys of old, 
for the sweeter repose of those laid away here to wait the judgment 
day. How long they had been sleeping already ! But they do not 
dream ; that was one comfort. 

I revisited the Baptistery for the sake of the famous echo which 
I had heard before, and which had sweetly lingered in my sense all 
these twenty years. But I was now a little disappointed in it, — 
perhaps because the custodian who had howled so skilfully to evoke 
it was no longer there, but a mere tyro intent upon lus half franc> 

14 



210 TUSCAN CITIES. 

with no real feeling for ululation as an art Guides and custodians 
of an unexampled rapacity swarmed in and all about the Four Fab- 
rics, and beggars, whom we had almost forgotten in Florence, were 
there in such number that if the Leaning Tower were to fall, as it 
still looks capable of doing at any moment, it would half depopulate 
Pisa. I grieve to say that I encouraged mendicancy in the person 
of an old woman whom I gave a franc by mistake for a soldo. She 
had not the public spirit to refuse it; without giving me time to 
correct the error, her hand closed upon it like a talon of a vulture, 
and I had to get what consolation I could out of pretending to have 
meant to give her a franc, and to take lightly the blessings under 
which I really staggered. 

It may have been this misadventure that cast a malign light upon 
the cathedral, which I found, after that of Siena, not at all estimabla 
I dare say it had its merits ; but I could get no pleasure even out of 
the swinging lamp of Galileo ; it was a franc, large as the full moon, 
and reproachfully pale, that waved to and fro before my eyes. This 
cathedral, however, is only the new Duomo of Pisa, being less than 
eight hundred years of age, and there is an old Duomo, in another 
part of the city, which went much more to my heart. I do not pre- 
tend that I entered it ; but it had a lovely fayade of Pisan gothic, 
mellowed through all its marble by the suns of a thousand summers, 
and weed-grown in every neglected niche and nook where dust and 
seeds could be lodged; so that I now wonder I did not sit down 
before it and spend the rest of my life there. 

VI. 

The reader, who has been requested to imagine the irregular form 
and the perpetually varying heights and depths of Siena, is now set 
the easier task of supposing Pisa shut within walls almost quadran- 
gular, and reposing on a level which expands to the borders of the 
hills beyond Lucca, and drops softly with the Amo towards the sea. 
The river divides the southward third of the city from the rest, to 
which stately bridges bind it again. The group of the Four Fabrics, 



PITILESS PISA, 211 

to which we have paid a devoir tempered by modem misgiving, rises 
in aristocratic seclusion in the northwestern comer of the quad- 
rangle, and the outer wall of the Campo Santo is the wall of the 
city. Nothing statelier than the position of these edifices could be 
conceived ; and yet their isolation, so favorable to their reproduction 
in small alabaster copies, costs them something of the sympathy of 
the sensitive spectator. He cannot withhold his admiration of that 
grandeur, but his soul turns to the Duomo in the busy heart of 
Florence, or to the cathedral, pre-eminent but not solitary in the crest 
of Siena. The Pisans have put their famous group apart from their 
streets and shops, and have consecrated to it a r^on which no 
business can take them to. In this they have gained distinction 
and effect for it, but they have lost for it that character of friendly 
domesticity which belongs to all other religious edifices that I know 
in Italy. Here, as in some other things not so easily definable, the 
people so mute in all the arts but architecture — of which they were 
the origin and school in Italy — seem to have expressed themselves 
mistakenly. The Four Fabrics are where they are to be seen, to be 
visited, to be wondered at ; but they are remote from human society, 
and they fail of the last and finest effect of architecture, — the per- 
fect adaptation of houses to the use of men. Perhaps also one feels 
a want of unity in the group ; perhaps they are too much like dishes 
set upon the table : the Duomo a vast and beautiful pudding ; the 
Baptistery a gigantic charlotte russe ; the Campo Santo an exquisite 
structure in sugar ; the Leaning Tower, a column of ice-cream which 
has been weakened at the base by too zealous an application of 
hot water to the outside of the mould." But I do not insist upon 
this comparison ; I only say that I like the ancient church of 
St Paul by the Amo. Some question whether it was really the 
first cathedral of Pisa, maintaining that it was merely used as such 
while the Duomo was in repair after the fire from which it suffered 
shortly after its completion. 

One must nowadays seem to have some preference in all aesthetic 
matters, but the time was when polite tourists took things more 
easily. In the seventeenth centur}% "Richard Lassels, Gent who 



212 TUSCAN CITIES. 

Travelled through Italy five times as Tutor to several of the English 
Nobility and Grentry,'* says of the Pisan Duomo that it " is a neat 
Church for structure, and for its three Brazen Doors historied with 
a fine Basso rilievo. It *s built after La maniera TedescJia, a fashion 
of Building much used in Italy four or five hundred years ago, and 
brought in by Germans or Tedeschi, saith Vasari. Near to the Domo 
stands (if leaning may be called standing) the bending Tower, so arti- 
ficially made, that it seems to be falling, and yet it stands firm. . . . 
On the other side of the Domo, is the Campo Santo, a great square 
cloistered about with a low cloister curiously painted." 

Here is no trouble of mind about the old masters, either architects 
or painters, but a beautiful succinctness, a tranquil brevity, which no 
concern for the motives, or meanings, or aspirations of either pene- 
trates. We have taken upon ourselves in these days a heavy burden 
of inquiry as to what the mediaeval masters thought and felt; but 
the tourist of the seventeenth century could say of the Pisan Duomo 
that it was **a neat church for structure," and of the Campo Santo 
that it was " curiously painted," and there an end. Perhaps there 
was a relief for the reader also in this method. Master Lassels 
vexed himself to spell his Italian correctly no more than he did 
his English. 

He visited, apparently with more interest, the Church of the 
Knights of St. Stephen, which indeed I myself found full of unique 
attraction. Of these knights he says : " They wear a Eed Cross of 
Satin upon their Cloaks, and profess to fight against the Turks. For 
this purpose they have here a good House and Maintainance. Their 
Church is beautified without with a handsome Faciata of White 
Marble, and within with Turkish Ensigns and divers Lanterns of 
Capitanesse Gallies. In this House the Knights live in common, 
and they are well maintained. In their Treasury they shew a great 
Buckler of Diamonds, won in a Battle against the Turks. . . . They 
have their Cancellaria, a Catalogue of those Knights who have done 
notable service against the Turks, which serves for a powerful exhor- 
tation to their Successors, to do, and die bravely. In fine, these 
Knights may marry if they will, and live in their own particular 



PITILESS PISA. 213 

houses, but many of them choose celibate, as more convenient for 
brave Soldiers ; Wives and Children being the true impedimenta 
exercitus" 

The knights were long gone from their House and Maintenance in 
1883, and I suspect it is years since any of them even professed to 
fight the Turks. But their church is still there, with their trophies, 
which I went and admired ; and I do not know that there is any- 
thing in Pisa which gives you a more vivid notion of her glory in 
the past than those flags taken from the infidels and those carvings 
that once enriched her galleys. These and the ship-yards by the 
Arno, from which her galleys were launched, do really recall the 
majesty and dominion of the sea which once was hers — and then 
Grenoa's, and then Venice's, and then the Hanseatic Cities', and then 
Holland's, and then England's ; and shall be ours when the Moral 
Force of the American Navy is appreciated. At present Pisa and 
the United States are equally formidable as maritime powers, unless 
indeed this conveys too strong an impression of the decay of Pisa. 

VIL 

Issuing from the Church of the Cavaliers I found myself in the 
most famous spot in the whole city: the wide dusty square where 
the Tower of Famine once stood, and where you may still see a 
palace with iron baskets swung from the comers of the fac^ade, in 
which it is said the wicked Archbishop Ruggieri used to put the 
he^ds of traitors. It may not be his palace, and the baskets may 
not have been used for this purpose ; but there is no doubt that this 
was the site of the tower, which was not demolished till 1655, and 
that here it was that Ugolino and his children and grandchildren 
cruelly perished. 

The writer of an excellent little local guide to Pisa, which I 
bought on my first visit, says that Dante has told the story of Count 
Ugolino della Gherardesca, and that ''after Dante, God alone can 
repeat it." Yet I fancy the tragedy will always have a fascination 
to the scribbler who visits Pisa, irresistibly tempting him to lecall 



214 TUSCAN CITIES. 

it to his reader. I for my part shall not do less than remind him 
that Ugolino was Captain of the People and Podesti of Pisa at the 
time of her great defeat by Genoa in 1284, when so many of her 
best and bravest were carried off prisoners that a saying arose, " If 
you want to see Pisa, go to Genoa." In those days they had a short 
and easy way of accounting for disaster, which has been much prac- 
tised since down even to the date of our own civil war ; they attrib- 
uted it to treason, and in this case they were pretty clear that 
Count Ugolino was the traitor. He sailed away with his squadron 
before his critics thought the day lost ; and after the battle, in his 
negotiations with Florence and Genoa they declared that he behaved 
as only a man would who wished to ruin his country in order to rule 
her. He had already betrayed his purpose of founding an hereditary 
lordship in Pisa, as the Visconti had done in Milan and the Scaligeri 
in Verona, and to this end had turned Guelph from being ancestrally 
Ghibelline ; for his name is one of the three still surviving in Tus- 
cany of the old German nobility founded there by the emperors. He 
was a man of furious and ruthless temper ; he had caused one of his 
nephews to be poisoned, he stabbed another, and when the young 
man's friend, a nephew of the Archbishop, would have defended him, 
Ugolino killed him with his own hand. The Archbishop, as a Ghi- 
belline, was already no friend of Ugolino's, and here now was blood- 
shed between them. " And what happened to Count Ugolino a little 
after,'* says the Florentine chronicler, Villani, "was prophesied by 
a wise and worthy man of the court, Marco Lombardo ; for when 
the count was chosen by all to be Lord of Pisa, and when he was in 
his highest estate and fehcity, he made liimself a splendid birthday 
feast, where he had his children and grandchildren and all his line- 
age, kinsmen and kinswomen, with great pomp of apparel, and orna- 
ment, and preparation for a rich banquet. The count took this 
Marco, and went about showing him his possessions and splendor, 
and the preparation for the feast, and that done, he said, * What do 
you think of it, Marco ? ' The sage answered at once, and said, * You 
are fitter for evil chance than any baron of Italy.* And the count, 
afraid of Marco's meaning, asked, 'Why?* And Marco answered, 



PITILESS PISA. 215 

* Because you kck nothing but the wrath of GroA' And surely the 
wrath of Grod quickly fell upon Mm, as it pleased Grod, for his sins and 
treasons ; for as it had been intended by the Archbishop of Pisa and 
his party to drive out of Pisa Nino and his followers, and betray 
and entrammel Ugolino, and weaken the Guelphs, the Archbishop 
ordered Count Ugolino to be undone, and immediately set the people 
on in their fury to attack and take his palace, giving the people to 
understand that he had betrayed Pisa, and surrendered their castles 
to the Florentines and Lucchese ; and finding the people upon him, 
without hope of escape, Ugolino gave himself up, and in this assault 
his bastard son and one of his grandchildren were killed ; and Ugo- 
lino being taken, and two of his sons and two of his son's sons, they 
threw them in prison, and drove his family and his followers out of 
Pisa. . . . The Pisans, who had thrown in prison Ugolino and his 
two sons, and two sons of his son Count Guelfo, as we have before 
mentioned, in a tower on the Piazza d^li Anziani, caused the door 
of the tower to be locked and the keys to be thrown into the Amo, 
and forbidding these captives all food, in a few days they perished of 
hunger. But first, the count imploring a confessor, they would not 
allow him a friar or priest that he might confess. And all five 
being taken out of the tower together, they were vilely buried ; and 
from that time the prison was called the Tower of Famine, and will 
be so always. For this cruelty the Pisans were strongly blamed by 
the whole world, wherever it was known, not so much for the count, 
who for his crimes and treasons was perhaps worthy of such a death, 
but for his sons and grandsons, who were young, boys, and innocent ; 
and this sin, committed by the Pisans, did not remain unpunished, 
as may be seen in after time." 

A monograph on Ugolino by an English writer states that the vic- 
tims were rolled in the matting of their prison floor and interred, 
with the irons still on their limbs, in the cloister of the church of 
San Francesco. The grave was opened in the fourteenth century, 
and the irons taken out ; again, in 1822, the remains were found and 
carelessly thrown together in a spot marked by a stone bearing the 
name of VannuchL Of the prison where they suffered, no more 



216 TUSCAN CITIES. 

remains now than of the municipal eagles which the Sepublic put 
to moult there, and from wliich it was called the Moulting Tower 
before it was called the Tower of Famine. 



VIII. 

The memory of that curious literary conjunction which once took 
place at Pisa, when Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt met there to 
establish an English review on Italian ground, imparts to the old 
city an odor, faint now and very vague, of the time when Romance 
was new enough to seem immortal ; but I could do little with this 
association, as an element of my impression. They will point you 
out, if you wish, the palace in which Byron lived on the Lung' Amo, 
but as I would not have gone to look at a palace with Byron alive in 
it, I easily excused myself for not hunting up this one of the resi- 
dences with which he left Italy swarming. The Shelleys lived first 
in a villa, four miles off imder the hills, but were washed out of it in 
one of the sudden inundations of the country, and spent the rest of 
their sojourn in the city, where Shelley alarmed his Italian friends 
by launching on the Amo in a boat he had contrived of pitched can- 
vas and lath. His companion in this perilous navigation was that 
Mr. Williams with whom he was afterwards drowned in Spezzia Bay. 
" Once," writes Mrs. Shelley, " I went down with him to the mouth 
of the Arno, where the stream, then high and swift, met the tideless 
sea and disturbed its sluggish waters. It was a waste and dreary 
scene ; the desert sand stretched into a point surrounded by waves 
that broke idly but perpetually around." 

At Pisa there is nothing of this wildness or strife in the Amo, not 
so much as at Florence, where it rushes and brawls down its channel 
and over its dams and ripples. Its waters are turbid, almost black, 
but smooth, and they slip oilily away with many a wreathing eddy, 
round the curve of the magnificent quay, to which my mind recurs 
still as the noblest thing in Pisa ; as the noblest thing, indeed, that 
any city has done with its river. But what quick and sensitive 
allies of Nature the Italians have always shown themselves! No 



PITILESS PISA. 



217 



suggestion of hers has been thrown away on them ; they have made 
the most of her lavish kindness, and transmuted it into the glory and 
the charm of art Our last moments of sight-seeing in Pisa were 
spent in strolling beside the river, in hanging on the parapet and 
delighting in the lines of that curve. 

At one end of the city, before this b^ins, near a spick-and-span 
new iron bridge, is the mediaeval tower of the galley prison, which 
we found exquisitely picturesque in the light of our last morning ; 
and then, stretching up towards the heart of the town from this 
tower, were the ship-yards, with the sheds in which the old republic 
built the galleys she launched on every sea then known. They are 
used now for military stables; they are not unlike the ordinary 
horse-car stables of our civilization ; and the grooms, swabbing the 
legs of the horses and combing their manes, were naturalized to our 
homesick sympathies by the homely community of their functions 
with those I had so often stopped to admire in my own land. There 
is no doubt but the toilet of a horse is something that interests every 
human being. 



BEtlEP FROM PIAZZA DELLA SIGNOBIA. 




INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 



INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 



I. 

WITH rather less than the ordinary stupidity of tourists, wretched 
slaves of routine as they are, we had imagined the possibility 
of going to Lucca overland ; that is, of driving fifteen miles across 
the country instead of taking the train. It would be as three hours 
against twenty minutes, and as fifteen francs against two ; but my 
friend was young and I was imprudent, and we boldly ventured upon 
the expedition. I have never regretted it, which is what can be said 
of, alas, how few pleasures ! On the contrary, it is rapture to think 
of it stilL 

Already, at eight o'clock of the April morning, the sun had filled 
the city with a sickening heat, which intimated pretty clearly what 
it might do for Pisa in August ; but when we had mounted superbly 
to our carriage-seats, after pensioning all the bystanders, and had 
driven out of the city into the green plain beyond the walls, we 
found it a delicious spring day, warm, indeed, but full of a fervent 
life. 

We had issued from the gate nearest the Four Fabrics, and I ad- 
vise the reader to get that view of them if he can. To the backward 
glance of the joumeyer toward Lucca, they have the unity, the en- 
semble, the want of which weakens their effect to proximity. Beside 
us swept the great level to the blue-misted hills on our right ; before 
us it stretched indefinitely. From the grass, the larks were quiver- 
ing up to the perfect heaven, and the sympathy of Man with the 
tender and lovely mood of Nature was expressed in the presence of 



222 TUSCAN CITIES. 

the hunters with their dogs, who were exploring the herbage in quest 
of something to kilL 

Perhaps I do man injustice. Perhaps the rapture of the blameless 
litterateur and artist, who drove along crying out over the exquisite 
beauty of the scene, was more justly representative of our poor race. 
I am vexed now, when I think how brief this rapture was, and how 
much it might have been prolonged if we had bargained with our 
driver to go slow. We had baigained for everything else ; but who 
could have imagined that one Italian could ever have been fast 
enough for two Americans ? He was even too fast. He had a just 
pride in his beast, — as tough as the iron it was the color of, — and 
when implored, in the interest of natural beauty, not to urge it on, 
he misunderstood ; he boasted that it could keep up that pace all 
day, and he incited it in the good Tuscan of Pisa to go faster yet. 
Ah me ! What enchanting villas he whirled us by ! What gray 
chateaux ! What old wayside towers, hoary out of all remembrance I 
What delightfully stupid-looking little stony picturesque villages, in 
every one of which that poor artist and I would have been glad to 
spend the whole day ! But the driver could not snatch the broad 
and constant features of the landscape from us so quickly ; these we 
had time to peruse and imprint forever on our memories : the green 
expanses, the peach-trees pink in their bloom; the plums and cherries 
putting on their bridal white; the gray road, followed its whole 
length by the vines trained from trees to tall stakes across a space 
which they thus embowered continuously from field to field. Every- 
where the peasants were working the soil ; spading, not plowing 
their acres, and dressing it to the smoothness of a garden. It looked 
rich and fertile, and the whole land wore an air of smiling prosperity 
which 1 cannot think it put on expressly for us. 

Pisa seemed hardlv to have died out of the horizon before her 
ancient enemy began to rise from the other verge, beyond the little 
space in which they used to play bloodily at national hostilities. 
The plain narrowed as we approached, and hills hemmed us in on 
three sides, with snow-capped heights in the background, from which 
the air blew cooler and cooler. It was only eleven o'clock, and we 



INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 223 

would gladly have been all day on the road. But we pretended 
to be pleased with the mistaken zeal that had hurried us; it was 
so amiable, we could not help it ; and we entered Lucca with the 
smiling resolution to make the most of it. 



II. 

Lucca lies as flat as Pisa, but in shape it is as r^ularly oblong as 
that is square, and instead of the brick wall, which we had grown 
fond of there and in Siena, it has a girdle of gray stone, deeply 
moated without, and broadly levelled on top, where a lovely driveway 
winds round the ancient town. The wall juts in a score of angles, 
and the projecting spaces thus formed are planted with groups of 
forest trees, lofty and old, and giving a charm to the promenade 
exquisitely wild and rare. 

To our approach, the clustering city towers and roofs promised 
a picturesqueness which she kept in her own fashion when we drove 
in through her gates, and were set down, after a dramatic rattling 
and banging through her streets, at the door of the Universo, or the 
Croce di Malta, — I do not really remember which hotel it was. But 
I remember very well the whole domestic force of the inn seemed to 
be concentrated in the distracted servant who gave us our rooms, 
and was landlord, porter, accountant, waiter, and chambermaid all 
in one. It was an inn apparently very little tainted by tourist 
custom, and Lucca is certainly one of the less discovered of the 
Tuscan cities. At the table cThSte in the evening our commensals 
were all Italians except an ancient English couple, who had lived 
so long in .that region that they had rubbed ofif everything English 
but their speech. I wondered a good deal who they could be ; they 
spoke conservatively — the foreigners are always conservative in 
Italy — of the good old ducal days of Lucca, when she had her own 
mild little despot, and they were now going to the Baths of Lucca to 
place themselves for the summer. They were types of a class which 
is numerous all over the continent, and which seems thoroughly 
content with expatriation. The Europeanized American is always 



224 TUSCAN CITIES. 

apologetic ; he says that America is best, and he pretends that he is 
going back there ; but the continentalized Englishman has apparently 
no intention of repatriating himself. He has said to me frankly in 
one instance that England was beastly. But I own I should not like 
to have said it to him. 

In their talk of the ducal past of Lucca these English people 
struck again the note which my first impression of Lucca had 
sounded. Lucca was a sort of republic for nearly a thousand years, 
with less interruption from lords, bishops, and foreign dominions 
than most of her sister commonwealths, and she kept her ancient 
liberties down to the time of the French revolution — four hundred 
years longer than Pisa, and two hundred and fifty years longer than 
Florence and Siena ; as long, in fact, as Venice, which she resembled 
in an arbitrary change eflfected from a democratic to an aristocratic 
constitution at the moment when the change was neceissary to her 
existence as an independent stat«. The duchy of Lucca created by 
the Congress of Vienna, 1817, and assigned to the Bourbons of 
Parma, lasted only thirty years, when it was merged by previous 
agreement in the grand duchy of Tuscany, the Bourbons going back 
to Parma, in which Napoleon's Austrian widow had meantime 
enjoyed a life interest. In this brief period, however, the old repub- 
lican city assumed so completely the character of a little principality, 

• 

that in spite of the usual Via Garibaldi and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 
I could not banish the image of the ducal state from my mind. Yet 
I should be at a loss how to impart this feeling to every one, or to 
say why a vast dusty square, planted with pollarded sycamores, and 
a huge, ugly palace with but a fairish gallery of pictures, fronting 
upon the dust and sycamores, should have been so expressive of a 
ducal residence. There was a statue of Maria Louisa, the first ruler 
of the temporary duchy, in the midst of these sycamores, and I had 
a persistent whimsey of her reviewing her little ducal army there, 
as I sat and looked out from the open door of the restaurant where 
my friend and I were making the acquaintance of a number of 
strange dishes and trying our best to be friends with the Lucchese 
conception of a beefsteak. 



INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 



225 



It was not because I had no other periods to choose from ; in Lucca 
you can be overwhelmed with them. Her chronicles do not indeed 
go back into the mists of fable for her origin, but they boast an 
Etruscan, a Boman antiquity which is hardly less formidabla Here 










who should rule in Borne. 



BSETCB IS LUCCA. 

in A- u. 515 there was fixed a col- 
ony of two thousand citizens; here 
in 698 the great Caesar met with 
Pompey and Crassus, and settled 
After the Romans, she knew the Goths, 
the Lombards, and the Franks \ then she had her own tyrante, and 
in the twelfth century she b^an to have her own consuls, the magis- 
trates of her people's choice, and to have her wars within and without, 
to be torn with faction and menaced with conquest in the right Italian 
fashion. Once she was sacked by the Pisans under the terrible 
Uguccione della Fa^inola, in 1314; and more than once she was 
sold. She was sold for thirty-five thousand florins to two ambi- 
tious and enterprising gentlemen, the Boss! brothers, of Parma, who, 
15 



226 TUSCAN CITIES, 

however, were obliged to relinquish her to the Scaligeri of Verona. 
This was the sorrow and shame that fell upon her after a brief fever 
of conquest and glory, brought her by the greatest of her captains, the 
famous Castruccio Castracani, the condottiere, whose fierce, death- 
white face, bordered by its pale yellow hair, looks more vividly out 
of the history of his time than any other. For Castruccio had been 
in prison, appointed to die, and when the rising of the Lucchese 
delivered him, and made him Lord of Lucca, Uguccione's fetters 
were still upon him. He was of the ancient Ghibelline family of the 
Antelminelli, who had prospered to great wealth in England, where 
they spent a long exile and where Castruccio learned the art of war. 
After his death one of his sons sold his dominion to another for 
twenty-two thousand florins, from whom his German garrison took 
it and sold it for sixty thousand to Gherardo Spinola ; he, in turn, 
disposed of it to the Rossi, at a clear loss of thirty-eight thousand 
florins. The Lucchese sufiered six years under the Scaligeri, who 
sold them again — the market price this time is not quoted — to the 
Florentines, whom the Pisans drove out. These held her in a servi- 
tude so cruel that the Lucchese called it their Babylonian captivity, 
and when it was ended after twenty years, through the intervention 
of the Emperor Charles IV., in 1369, they were obliged to pay the 
(Jerman a hundred thousand florins for their liberty, which had been 
sold so many times for far less money. . 

An ancient Lucchese family, the Guanigi, whose Gothic palaces are 
still the most beautiful in the city, now rose to power, and held it 
till 1430 ; and then the city finally established the republican gov- 
ernment, which in its democratic and oligarchic form continued 
till 1799. 

The noblest event of this long period was the magnanunous at- 
tempt of the gonfaloniere, Francesco Burlamacchi, who in 1546 
dreamed of driving the Medici from power and re-establishing the 
republic throughout Tuscany. Burlamacchi was of an old patrician 
family, but the love of freedom had been instilled in him by his 
uncle, Fihppo Burlamacchi, that Fra Pacifico who wrote the first 
life of Savonarola and was one of his most fervent disciples. The 



INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 227 

gonfaloniere's plot was discovered ; and he was arrested by the timid 
Lucchese Senate, which hastened to assure the ferocious Cosimo L 
that they were guiltless of complicity. The imperial commissioner 
came from Milan to preside at his trial, and he was sentenced to 
suffer death for treason to the empire. He was taken to Milan and 
beheaded ; but now he is the greatest name in Lucca, and his statue 
in the piazza, fronting her ancient communal palace, appeals to all 
who love freedom with the memory of his high intent. He died in 
the same cause which Savonarola laid down his life for, and not less 
generously. 

Poor little Lucca had not even the courage to attempt to save him; 
but doubtless she would have tried if she had dared. She was under 
the special protection of the emperors, having paid Maximilian and 
then Charles V. good round sums for the confirmation of her early 
liberties ; and she was so anxious to be well with the latter, that 
when she was accused to him of favoring the new Lutheran heresy 
she hastened to persecute the Protestants with the same cowardice 
that she had shown in abandoning BurlamacchL 

It cost, indeed, no great effort to suppress the Protestant congr^a- 
tion at Lucca. Peter Martyr, its founder, had fled before, and was 
now a professor at Strasburg, whence he wrote a letter of severe 
upbraiding to the timorous flock who suffered themselves to be fright- 
ened back to Rome. Some of them would not renounce their faith, 
preferring exile, and of these, who emigrated by families, were the 
Burlamacchi, from whom the hero came. He had counted somewhat 
upon the spirit of the Reformation to help him in his design against 
the Medici, knowing it to be the spirit of freedom, but there is no 
one evidence that he was himself more a Protestant than Savonarola 
was. 

Eight years after his death the constitution of Lucca was changed, 
and she fell under the rule of an aristocracy nicknamed the Lords of 
the Little Ring, from the narrow circle in which her senators suc- 
ceeded one another. She had always been called Lucca the Indus- 
trious ; in her safe subordination, she now worked and throve for two 
hundred and fifty years, till the French republicans came and toppled 



228 TUSCAN CITIES. 

her oligarchy over at a touch. James Howell, writing one of his 
delightful letters from Florence in 1621, gives us some notion of 
Lucca as she appeared to the polite traveller of that day. 

"There is a notable active little Eepublic towards the midst of 
Tuscany," he says, " called Lucca, which, in r^ard she is under the 
Emperour*s protection, he dares not meddle with, though she lie as 
a Partridg under a Faulcon's wings, in relation to the grand Duke ; 
besides there is another reason of the State why he meddles not with 
her, because she is more beneficial unto him now that she is free, and 
more industrious to support this freedom, than if she were become 
his vassal ; for then it is probable she would grow more careless and 
idle, and so would not vent his comodities so soon, which she buys 
for ready mony, wherein most of her wealth consists. There is 
no State that winds the peny more nimbly and makes a quicker 
return." 

Lasells, who visited Lucca a little earlier, tells us that it "hath 
thirty thousand Muskets or half Muskets in its Arsenal, eight thou- 
sand Pikes, two thousand Brest Pieces of Musket proof, and store of 
great Artillery. The whole State, for a need, can arm eighteen thou- 
sand men of service ; " but Lucca appears to have become the joke 
and by- word of her neighbors more and more as time went on. At 
Florence they told of a prima-donna who, when she gesticulated in 
opera at Lucca, flung her arms beyond the borders of the republic. 
An ignominious peace, timid, selfish, prudent, was her condition from 
the time the aristocratic change took place. For two centuries she 
was preparing for that Bourbon despotism which characterized her 
even physically to my fancy. " An absolute government," says my 
Lucchese guide-book, " but of mild temper, which might have been 
more beneficent if it had been inspired by views less narrow. Yet it 
was a notable period of our history for municipal activity and for 
public works, which in proportion to the smallness of the country 
may also be called great ; the city secured by vast and well-planned 
defences against the inundations of the Serchio; the country trav- 
ersed in every direction by carriage-roads ; abundance of the best 
water for use and beauty brought to the city by a monumental work 



INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 229 

of ait; an ample highway across the Apennines, to communicate 
with Modena and Lombardy ; bridges, ornamental and convenient, 
of stone and iroD." 



IIL 

Of mediaeval Lucca I have kept fresh- 
est the sense of her Gothic church archi- 
tecture, with its delicate difference from 
that of Pisa, which it resembles and 
excels. It is touched with the Lom- 
hardic and Byzantine character, while 
keeping its own ; here are the pillars 
resting on the backs of lions and leop- 
ftlds ; here are the quaint mosaics in the 
facades. You see the former in the 
cathedral, which is not signally remark- 
able, like that of Florence, or Siena, or 
Pisa, and the latter in the beautiful old 
church of San Frediano, an Irish saint 
who for some reason figured in Lucca; 
he was bishop there in the fifth century, 
and the foundation of bis church dates 
only a century or two later. San Michele 
is an admirable example of Lucchese 
gothic, and is more importantly placed 
than any other church, ia the very heart 
of the town opposite the Palazzo Pietorio. 
This structure was dedicated to the occu- 
pation of the Podest^ of Lucca, in pur- 
suance of the republic's bigb-languaged 
decree, recognizing the fact that " among 
the ornaments with which cities embel- 
lish themselves, the greatest expenditure 
should always be devoted to those where 
the deities are worshipped, the magistracy 




#«:, 




j»x 



THB CLOCK TOWGB OF LOCCA. 



230 TUSCAN CITIES. 

administers justice, and the people convenes." The Palazzo Pretorio 
is now the repository of a public archaeological collection, and the 
memory of its original use has so utterly perished that the com- 
bined intellects of two policemen, whom we appealed to for infor- 
mation, could not assign to it any other function than that of 
lottery office, appointed by the late grand duke. The popular in- 
tellect at Lucca is not very vivid, so far as we tested it, and though 
wUling, it is not quick. The caffeticra in whose restaurant we 
took breakfast, under the shadow of the Pretorian Palace walls, 
was as ignorant of its history as the policemen ; but she was very 
amiable, and she had three pretty daughters in the bon-bon de- 
partment, who looked the friendliest disposition to know about it 
if they could. 

I speak of them at once, because I did not think the Lucchese 
generally such handsome people as the Pisans, and I wish to 
be generous before I am just. Why, indeed, should I be severe 
with the poor Lucchese in any way, even for their ignorance, 
when the infallible Baedeker himself speaks of the statue in the 
Piazza S. Michele as that of "S. Burlamacchi " ? The hero thus 
canonized stood frowning down upon a grain and seed market when 
we went to ofifer him our homage, and the peasants thought we had 
come to buy, and could not understand why we should have only a 
minor curiosity about their wares. They took the wheat up in their 
brown hands to show us, and boasted of its superior quality. We 
said we were strangers, and explained that we. had no intention of 
putting in a crop of that sort; but they only laughed blankly. In 
spite of this prevailing ignorance, penetrating even to the Baedeker 
in our hands, Lucca was much tableted to the memory of her celeb- 
rities, especially her literary celebrities, who need tablets as greatly 
as any literary celebrities I know. There was one literary lady 
whose tablet I saw in a church, and whom the local Scientific and 
Literary Academy proclaimed " the marvel of her age " for her learn- 
ing and her gifts in improvisation. The reader will readily identify 
her from this ; or if he cannot, the greater shame to him ; he might 
as well be a Lucchese. 



INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 231 

*^ All there are barrators, except Bontnra ; 
No into yes for money there is changed," 

says Dante of this Lucca in which I found an aspect of busy 
commonplace, an air of thrift and traffic, and in which I only feign 
to have discovered an indifference to finer things. I dare say Lucca 
is full of intelligence and polite learning; but she does not imbue 
her policemen and caffetieras with it, as Boston does. Yet I would 
willingly be at this moment in a town where I could step out and see 
an old Roman amphitheatre, built bodily up into the modem city, 
and showing its mighty ribs through the houses surrounding the 
market-place, — a market-place quaint beyond any other, with its 
tile-roofed stands and booths. There is much more silk in Lucca 
than in Boston, if we have the greater culture ; and the oil of Lucca 
is sublime; and — yes, I will own it! — Lucca has the finer city 
walL The town showed shabby and poor from the driveway along 
the top of this, for we saw the backyards and rears of the houses ; 
but now and then we looked down into a stiff, formal, delicious 
palace garden, full of weather-beaten statues, old, bad, ridiculous, 
divinely dear and beautiful! 

I cannot say that I have been hardly used, when I remember that 
I have seen such gardens as those ; and I humbly confess it a privi- 
lege to have walked in the shadow of the Guanigi palaces at Lucca, 
in which the gothic seems to have done its best for a stately and 
lovely effect. I even climbed to the top of one of their towers, which 
I had wondered at ever since my first sight of Lucca because of the 
little grove it bore upon its crest I asked the custodian of the 
palace what it was, and he said it was a little garden, which I sus- 
pected already. But I had a consuming desire to know what it 
looked like, and what Lucca looked like from it ; and I asked him 
how high the tower was. He answered that it was four hundred 
feet high, which I doubted at first, but came to believe when I had 
made the ascent. I hated very much to go up that tower ; but when 
the custodian said that an English lady eighty years old had gone up 
the week before, I said to myself that I would not be outdone by any 
old lady of eighty, and I went up. The trees were really rooted in 



232 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



little beds of earth up there, and had been growing for ten years ; the 
people of the house sometimes took tea under them in the summer 
evenings. 

This tower was one of three hundred and seventy in which Lucca 
abounded before the Cruaoigi levelled them. They were for the con- 




TRE (3CAMK3I TOWER. 



venience of private warfare ; the custodian showed me a little chamber 
near the top, where he pretended the garrison used to stay. I en- 
joyed his statement as much as if it were a fact, and I enjoyed still 



rvDOsmrorrs ztrccA. 



33S 



more the magnificent prospect of ttie city and countrj- from the 
towers ; the fertil«s plain with the hills all round, and distant moun- 
tains snow-crowued except to the south where the valley widened 
toward Florence ; the multitudinous roofs and bell-towers of the city, 
which hlled its walls full of human habitations, with no breadths of 
orchard and field as at Pisa and Siena. 

The present Count Guanigi. so the custodian pretended, lives in 
another palace, and lets this in apartments ; you may have the finest 




r 

^^^1 for seventy-five dollars a year, with privilege of sky-garden. I did 

^^^1 not think it dear, and I said so, though I did not %-isit any of 

^^H the interiors and do not know what state the finest of them may 

^^H^ he in. 



234 TUSCAN CITIES. 

We did, however, see one Luccheae palace throughout ; the Palazzo 
Mansi, ia which there is aD admirable gallery of Dutch pictures 
inherited by the late marquis through a Dutch marriage made by 
one of his ancestors. The portrait of this lady, a gay, exuberant, 
e^hteenth-century blonde, ornaments the wall of one of the gilded 
and tapestried rooms which form two sides of the palace court. 
From a third, standing in an arcaded passage, you look across this 
court, gray with the stone of which the edifice is built, to a rich 
brown mass of tiled roofs, and receive a perfect impression of the 
pride and state in which life was lived in the old days in Lucc&. 
It is a palace in the classic taste ; it is excellent in its way, and it 
expresses as no other sort of edifice can the splendors of an aris- 
tocracy, after it has ceased to be feudal and barbaric, and become 
el^ant and municipal What laced coats and bag-wigs, what hoops 
and feathers had not alighted from gilt coaches and sedan-chaira in 
that silent and empty court ! I am glad to be plebeian and Ameri- 
can, a citizen of this enormous democracy, but if I were strictly cross- 
examined, would I not like also to be a Lord of the Little King in 
Lucca, a marquis, and a Mansi? 




PISTOJA, PR A TO, AND FIESOLE, 



PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 



I. 

It was on the last day of March, after our retom from Siena, that 
I ran out to Pistoja with my friend the artist There were now 
many signs of spring in the landscape, and the gray olives were a 
less prevalent tone, amid the tints of the peach and pear blossoms. 
Dandelions thickly strewed the railroad-sides; the grass was pow- 
dered with the little daisies, white with crimson-tipped petals ; the 
garden-borders were full of yellow flowering seed-turnips. The 
peasants were spading their fields ; as we ran along, it came noon, 
and they b^an to troop over the white roads to dinner, past villas 
frescoed with false balconies and casements, and comfortable brown- 
ish-gray farmsteads. On our right the waves of distant purple hills 
swept all the way to Pistoja. 

I made it part of my business there to look up a young married 
couple, Americans, journeying from Venice to Florence, who stopped 
at Pistoja twenty years before, and saw the gray town in the gray 
light of a spring morning between four and six o clock. I remem- 
bered how strange and beautiful they thought it, and from time to 
time I started with recognition of dififerent objects — as if I had been 
one of that pair ; so young, so simple-heartedly, greedily glad of all 
that eld and story which Italy constantly lavished upon them. I 
could not find them, but I found phantom traces of their youth in 
the ancient town, and that endeared it to me, and made it lovely 
through every hour of the long rainy day I spent there. To other 
eyes it might have seemed merely a stony old town, dull and cold 



238 



TVSCAN crrrss. 



uDfier the lowering fiky. with a locked-up cathedml. a l^are baptis- 
terj-, and a mediieval public palace, and a history early merged in 
that of Florence; but to me it must always have the tender interest 
of the pleasure, pathetically intense, which that young couple took 

in it They 
were very hun- 
gry, and they 
L'ltitld get no 
brbukfast in the 
drowsy town, 
not even a cup 
of coffee, but 
they did not 
itiindthat; they 
wandered about, 
faiuiahed but 
blest, and bv 
oneof the happy 
accidents that 
usually be- 
friended them, 
tliBj- found their 
way up to the 
Piazza del Duo- 
nio and saw the 
Communal Palace so thoroughly, in all its gothic fulness and medite- 
val richness of detail, that I seemed never to have risen from the 
stone benching around the interior of the court on which they snt 
to study the escutcheons carven and painted on the walls. I could 
swear that the bear on the arms of Pistoja was tlie same that 
they saw and noted with the amusement which a bear in a check- 
ered tabard must inspire in ignorant minds; though T am now 
able to inform the reader that it was put there because Pistoja was 
anciently infested with bears, and this was the last bear left when 
they were exterminated. 




ARUORIAL BEARIMOB Or THE PODRSTXb 1 



PISTOJA, PRATO, AXD FIESOLE, 239 

We need not othen^'ise go deeply into the history of Pistoja. We 
know already how one of her family feuds introduced the factions of 
the Bianchi and Neri in Florence, and finally caused the exile of 
Dante; and we may inoflfensively remember that Cataline met his 
defeat and death on her hills A. u. 691. She was ruled more or less 
tumultuously by princes, popes, and i)eople till the time of her great 
siege by the Lucchese and Florentines and her own Guelph exiles in 
1305. Famine b^an to madden the besi^ed, and men and women 
stole out of the city through the enemy's camp and scoured the 
country for food. When the Florentines found this out they lay in 
wait for them, and such as they caught they mutilated, cutting off 
their noses, or arms, or legs, and then exposing them to the sight of 
those they had gone out to save from star\'ation. After the city fell 
the Florentine and Lucchese leaders commanded such of the wounded 
Pistojese as they found on the field to he gathered in heaps upon the 
demolished walls, that their fathers, brothers, and children might see 
them slowly die, and forbade any one, under pain of a like fate, to 
succor one of these miserable creatures. 

Pistoja could not endure the yoke fastened upon her. A few years 
later her whole people rose literally in a frenzy of rebellion against 
the Lucchese governor, and men, women, children, priests, and monks 
joined in driving him out. After the heroic struggle they re-estab- 
lished their own republic, which presently fell a prey to the feud of 
two of her families, in whose private warfare she sufifered almost as 
much as from her foreign enemies. Between them the Cancellieri 
and the Panciatichi burned a thousand houses within her walls, not 
counting those without, and the latter had plotted to deliver over 
their countr}- to the Visconti of Milan, when the Florentines inter- 
vened and took final possession of Pistoja. 

We had, therefore, not even to say that we were of the Cancellieri 
party in order to enter Pistoja, but drove up to the Hotel di Londra 
without challenge, and had dinner there, after which we repaired to 
the Piazza del Duomo ; and while the artist got out a plate and b^an 
to etch in the rain, the author bestirred himself to find the sacristan 
and get into the cathedral. It was easy enough to find the sacristan. 



240 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



but wbeu be bad been mBde to put bis bead out of tbe fiftb-stoiy 
window he anawered, with a want of eaterprise aud boepttalit; which 
I bad never before met in Italy, that tbe cathedral was always opea 
at three o'clock, and be would 
not come down to open it 
At that hour I re- 
venged myself upon him by 
not finding it very interesting, 
though I think now the fault 
must have been in me. There 
is enough estimable detail of 
art, especially the fourteenth- 
century monument to tbe 
great lawyer and lover, Cino 
da Pistoja, who is represented 
lecturing to Petrarch among 
; -^ ' ^1 eight other of his pupils. 

"^^ Tlie lady in 

the group is 
the SelvHggia 
whom he im- 
mortalized in 
his sulitlt' aud metaphysical 
iS ; she was the daugh- 
ter of P'ilippo Vei^iolesi, tbe 
leader of the Ghibellines in 
Pistoja, and she died of hope- 
'/^'^ less love for Cino, when the 
"°^ calamities of their country 
drove him into exile at tbe time of the siege. He remains the most 
tangible if not the greatest name of Pistoja ; be was the first of those 
who polished the Tuscan speech ; be was a wonder of jurisprudence 
in his time, restoring the Roman law and commenting nine books of 
the Code ; and the wayfarer, whether grammarian, attorney, littera- 
teur, or young lady may well look on his monument with sympathy. 




PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 241 

But I brought away no impression of pleasure or surprise from the 
cathedral generally, and in fact the works of art for which one may 
chiefly, if not solely, desire to see Pistoja again, are the Delia Robbias, 
which immortally beautify the Ospedale del Ceppo. They represent 
with the simplest reality, and in the proportions of life, the seven works 
of mercy of St Andrea Franchi, bishop of Pistoja, in 1399. They form 
a frieze or band round the edifice, and are of the glazed terra cotta in 
which the Delia Robbias commonly wrought The saint is seen 
visiting " The Naked," " The Pilgrims," " The Sick," " The Impris- 
oned," " The Dead," " The An Hungered," " The Athirst ; " and be- 
tween the tableaux are the figures of " Faith," " Charity," " Hope," 
" Prudence," and " Justica" There is also " An Annunciation," " A 
Visitation," " An Assumption ; " and in three circular reliefs, adorned 
with fruits and flowers after the Delia Robbia manner, the arms of 
the hospital, the city, and the Medici ; but what takes the eye and 
the heart are the good bishop's works of mercy. In these color is 
used as it must be in that material, and in the broad, unmingled 
blues, reds, yellows, and greens, prima ly, sincere, you have satisfying 
actuality of eflfect I believe the critics are not decided that these 
are the best works of the masters, but they gave me more pleasure 
than any others, and I remember them with a vivid joy still. It is 
hardly less than startling to see them first, and then for every suc- 
ceeding moment it is delightfuL Giovanni della Robbia and his 
brother, the monk Frate Ambrogio, and Andrea and his two sons, 
Luca and Girolomo, are all supposed to have shared in this work, 
which has, therefore, a peculiar interest, though it is not even men- 
tioned by Vasari, and seems to have sufiered neglect by all the earlier 
connoisseurs. It was skilfully restored in 1826 by a Pistojese archi- 
tect, who removed the layer of dust that had hardened upon the 
glaze and hid the colors ; and in 1839 the French Government asked 
leave to reproduce it in plaster for the Beaux Arts ; from which copy 
another was made for the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. It is, by all 
odds, the chiefest thing in Pistoja, where the reader, when he goes 
to look at it, may like to recall the pretty l^end of the dry tree- 
stump (jceppo) breaking into bud and leaf, to indicate to the two good 

16 



242 



TUSCAN CITIES. 



Pistojese of six hundred years ago where to found the boepital wbicli 
this lovely frieze adoros. 

Apparently, however, Pistoja does uot expect to be visited for this 
or any other reason. I have already held up to obloquy the want of 
public spirit in the sacristan of the pathedral, and I have now to 
report an equal indifTerence on the part of the owner of a beautiful 




show-villa which a cabman persuaded me drive some milea out of 
tho town through the rain to see. When we reached its gate, we 
wen.' tuld that the villa \>-as closed; simply that — cloeed. But I 
was nut wholly a loser, for in celebration of my sup^x<6ed disappoint- 
mout niy ilriver dramatized a grief which was as due a theatrical 
apectttcle as I have seen. 



PISTOJA, PR A TO, AND FIE SOLE. 243 

Besides, I was able to stop on the way back at the ancient church 
of Sant' Andrea, where I found myself as little expected, indeed, as 
elsewhere, but very prettily welcomed by the daughter of the sacris- 
tan, whose father was absent, and who made me free of the church. 
I thought that I wished to see the famous pulpit of Giovanna da 
Pisa, son of Niccol6« and the little maid had to light me a candle to 
look at it with. She was not of much help otherwise ; she did not 
at all understand the subjects, neither the Nativity, nor the Adoration 
of the Magi (" Who were the three Magi Kings?" she asked, and was 
so glad when I explained), nor the Slaughter of the Innocents, nor the 
Crucifixion, nor the Judgment These facts were as strange to her 
as the marvellous richness and delicacy of the whole work, which, 
for opulence of invention and perfect expression of intention, is surely 
one of the most wonderful things in all that wonderland of Italy. 
She stood by and freshly admired, while I lectured her upon it as if 
I had been the sacristan and she a simple maid from America, and 
got the hot wax of the candle all over my fingers. 

She affected to refuse my fee. " Le pare ! " she said, with the 
sweetest pretence of astonishment (which, being interpreted, is some- 
thing like " The idea ! " ) ; and when I forced the coin into her un- 
willing hand, she asked me to come again, when her father was at 
home. 

Would I could ! There is no such pulpit in America, that I know 
of; and even Pistoja, in the rain and mud, nonchalant, unenter- 
prising, is no bad placa 

I had actually business there besides that of a scribbling dille- 
tante, and it took me, on behalf of a sculptor who had some medal- 
lions casting, to the most ancient of the several bronze foundries in 
Pistoja. This foundry, an irregular group of low roofs, was enclosed 
in a hedge of myrtle, and I descended through flowery garden-paths 
to the office, where the master met me with the air of a host, instead 
of that terrifying no-admittance-except-on-business address, which 
I have encountered in my rare visits to foundries in my own coun- 
try. Nothing could have been more fascinating than the interior of 
the workshop, in which the bronze figures, groups, reliefs, stood about 



244 TUSCAN CITIES, 

in every variety of dimension and all stages of finish. When I con- 
fessed my ignorance, with a candor which I shall not expect from 
the reader, of how the sculpturesque forms to their last fragile and 
delicate detail were reproduced in metal, he explained that an exact 
copy waa first made in wax, which was painted with successive coats 
of liquid mud, one dried upon another, till a suflScient thickness 
was secured, and then the wax was melted out, and the bronze was 
poured in. 

I said how very simple it was when one knew, and he said, yes, 
very simple ; and I came away sighing for the day when our foun- 
dries shall be enclosed in myrtle hedges, and reached through garden- 
paths. I suppose I shall hardly see it, however, for it had taken 
almost a thousand years for that foundry in Pisa to attain its idyllic 
setting. Patience ! 

n. 

On my way home from Lucca, I stopped at Prato, whither I had 
been tempted to go all winter by the steam-tramway trains snuffling 
in and out of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. I found 
it a flat, dull, commonplace-looking town at first blush, with one 
wild, huge, gaimt piazza, planted with straggling sycamores, and 
banged all round by copper-smiths, whose shops seemed to alternate 
with the stables occupying its arcades. Multitudinous hanks of new- 
dyed yarn blew in the wind imder the trees, and through all the 
windows and open doors I saw girls and women plaiting straw. This 
forms the chief industry of Prato, where, as a kind little priest with 
a fine Eoman profile, in the railway carriage, assured me between the 
prayers he kept saying to himself, there was work for all and all 
were at work. 

Secular report was not so flattering to P^to. I was told that 
business was but dull there since the death of the English gentleman, 
one Mr. Askew, who has done so much for it, and who lies buried in 
the odor of sanctity in the old Carmelite convent. I saw his grave 
there when I went to look at the frescos, under the tutelage of an 



PISTOJA, PBATO, AND FIESOLE. 245 

old, sleek, fat monk, roundest of the round dozen of brothers remain- 
ing since the suppression. I cannot say now why I went to see these 
frescos, but I must have been told by some local guide they were 
worthy to be seen, for I find no mention of them in the books. My 
old monk admired them without stint, and had a particular delight 
in the murder of St Martin, who was stabbed in the back at the 
altar. 

He rubbed his hands gleefully and pointed out the flying acolyte : 
" Stmpre scappa, ma i sempre Id!" (Always running, but always 
there I) And then he burst into a childish, simple laugh that was 
rather grewsome, considering its inspiration and the place. 

Upon the whole, it might have been as well to suppress that 
brother along with the convent; though I was glad to hear his 
praises of the Englishman who had befriended the little town so 
wisely ; and I was not troubled to learn that this good man was a 
convert to the religion of his beneficiaries. 

All that I ever knew of him I heard from the monk and read 
from his gravestone ; but until he came nothing so definite had been 
done, probably, to mend the prosperity of Prato, broken by the sack 
in 1512, when the Spaniards, retiring from their defeat at Savenna 
by Gaston de Foix, sat down before the town and pounded a hole in 
its undefended wall with their cannon. They were the soldiers of 
that Holy League which Pope Julius 11. invented, and they were 
marching upon Florence to restore the Medici They were very 
hungry, and as fearless as they were pitiless ; and when they had 
made a breach in the wall, they poured into the town and b^an to 
burn and to kill, to rob and to ravish. 

"Five thousand persons," says a careful and temperate history, 
" without resisting, without defending themselves, without provocation, 
were inhumanly slaughtered in cold blood ; neither age nor sex was 
spared, nor sanctity respected ; every house, every church, every con- 
vent was pillaged, devastated, and brutally defiled. Only the cathe- 
dral, thanks to the saf^uard posted there by the Cardinal L^ate 
Giovanni de Medici, was spared, and this was filled with women, 
gathered there to weep, to pray, to prepare for death. For days the 



246 TUSCAN CITIES. 

barbarous soldiery rioted in the sack of the hapless city, which, with 
its people decimated and its territory ravaged, never fully rose again 
from its calamity ; more than three centuries passed before its popu- 
lation reached the number it had attained before the siege." 

At that time Prato had long been subject to Florence, but in its 
day Prato had also been a free and independent republic, with its 
factions and its family feuds, like another. The greatest of its fami- 
lies were the Guazziolitri, of Guelph politics, who aspired to its sove- 
reignty, but were driven out and all their property confiscated. They 
had built for their palace and fortress the beautiful old pile which 
now serves the town for municipal uses, and where there is an inter- 
esting little gallerj^ though one ought rather to visit it for its own 
sake, and the stately image it keeps in singular perfection of a gran- 
deur of which we can now but dimly conceive. 

I said that Prato was dull and commonplace, but that only shows 
how pampered and spoiled one becomes by sojourn in Italy. Let 
me explain now that it was only dull and commonplace in compari- 
son with other towns I had been seeing. If we had Prato in America 
we might well visit it for inspiration from its wealth of pictur- 
esqueness, and history, and of art. We have, of course, nothing to 
compare with it ; and one ought always to remember, in reading the 
notes of the supercilious American tourist in Italy, that he is sneering 
with a mental reservation to this effect. More memory, more art, 
more beauty clusters about the Duomo at Prato than about — I do 
not wish to be extravagant — the New Old South in Boston or Grace 
Church in New York. 

I am afraid, indeed, we should not find in the interior even of 
these edifices such frescos as those of Lippo Lippi and Ghirlandajo 
in the cathedral at Prato ; and as for the Delia Eobbia over the door 
and the pulpit of Donatello on the comer without, where they show 
the Virgin's girdle on her holiday, what shall one say ? We have 
not even a girdle of the Virgin 1 These are the facts that must still 
keep us modest and make us beg not to be taken too positively, when 
we say Prato is not interesting. In that pulpit, with its " marble 
brede" of dancing children, one sees almost at his best a sculptor 



PISTOJA, PR A TO, AND FIE SOLE. 247 

whose work, after that of Mino da Fiesole, goes most to the heart of 
the beholder. 

I hung about the piazza, delighting in it, till it was time to take 
the steam-tramway to Florence, and then I got the local postman to 
carry my bag to the cars for me. He was the gentlest of postmen, 
and the most grateful for my franc, and he explained as we walked 
how he was allowed by the Government to make what sums he could 
in this way between his distributions of the maiL His salary was 
fifty francs a month, and he had a family. 

I dare say he is removed by this time, for a man with an income 
like that must seem an Offensive Partisan to many people of opposite 
politics in Prato. 

The steam-tramway train consisted of two or three horse-cars 
coupled together, and drawn by the pony-engine I was familiar with 
in our Piazza. This is a common means of travel between all laige 
Italian cities and outlying small towns, and I wonder why we have 
not adopted it in America. We rattled pleasantly along the level of 
the highway at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and none 
of the horses seemed to be troubled by us. They had probably been 
educated up to the steam-tram, and I will never believe that Ameri- 
can horses are less capable of intellectual development than the 
Italian. 

IlL 

We postponed our visit to Fiesole, which we had been meaning to 
make all winter, until the last days of our Florentine sojourn, and it 
was quite the middle of April when we drove up to the Etruscan 
city. 

" Go by the new road and come back by the old," said a friend 
who heard we were really going at last " Then you will get the 
whole thing." 

We did so ; but I am not going to make the reader a partner of all 
of our advantages ; I am not sure that he would be grateful for 
them ; and to tell the truth, I have forgotten which road Boccaccio's 
villa was on and which the villa of the MedicL Wherever they are 



248 



TtrSCAN CTTIBS. 



they are charming. The villa of Boccaccio is now the Villa Palmieri; 
I stiU Bee it fenced with cypresses, and its broad terrace peopled 
with weather-beaten statues, which at a distance I could not have 
sworn were not the n:i\ iLKlies and L'eutk'iiieii who met there and 





told their merry tales while the plague raged in Florence, It is not 
only famous as the supposed scene of the Decamerone, hut it takes 
its name from a learned gentleman who wrote a poem there, in which 
he maintained that at the time of Satan's rebellion the angels who 
remained neutral became the souls now inhabiting our bodies. For 



PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLB. 



249 



this uncomfortable doctrine hia poem, though never printed, wa8 con- 
demned by the Inquisition — and justly. The Villa Medici, once 
Villa Mozzi, and now called Villa Spence, after the English gentle- 
man who inhabits it, was the favorite seat of Lorenzo before he 




A FU>BENTi:(B VILLA. 



placed himself at Villa Carreggi ; hither he resorted with liia wits, 
his philosophers, his concubines, buffoons, and scholars ; and here 
it was that the Pazzi hoped to have killed him and Giuliano at 
the time of their ill-starred conspiracy. You come suddenly upon 
it, deeply dropped amidst its gardens, at a turn of the winding slopes 
, which make the ascent to Fiesole a constantly changing delight and 
wonder. 

Fiesole was farther than she seemed in the fine, high air she 
breathes, and we had some long hours of sun and breeze in the ex- 
quisite spring morning before the first Etruscan emissaries met us 
with the straw fans and parasols whose fabrication still employs their 
remote antiquity. They were pretty children and young girls, and 



TUSCAN CITIES. 

they were preferable to the mediseval beggars who had swarmed upon 
us at the tirat town outside the Florentine limits, whither the Pia 
Caaa di Eecovero could uot reach them. From everj' point the 
world-old town, fast seated on its rock, looked like a fortress, inex- 
pugnable and picturesque ; but it kept neither promise, for it yielded 
to ua without a struggle, and then was rather tame and common- 
place, — commonplace and tame, of course, comparatively. It ia not 




A COCRTTARD, rtBaOLB, 



everywhere that you have an impressive Etruscan wall ; a grass- 
grown Roman amphitheatre, lovely, silent ; a museum stocked with 
classic relics and a custodian with a private store of them for sale, ^ 
not to speak of a cathedral hegun by t!ie Florentines just after they 
destroyed Fiesole in 1000. Fiesole certainly does not, however, in- 
vite one by its modem aspect to think of the Etruscan capital which 
Cicero attacked in the Roman Senate for the luxury of its banquets 
and the lavish display of its inhabitants. It was but a plain and 
simple repast that the Cafi5 Aurora afforded ua, and the Fiesolaus 



PISTOJA, PHATO, AND FIESOLE. 251 

seemed a plain and simple folk ; perhaps in one of them who was 
tipsy an image of theii: classic corruptions suivived. 

The only excitement of the place we seemed to have brought with 
U6 ; there had, indeed, been an election some time before, and the 
dead walls — it seems odd that all the walls in Fiesole shoald not 
be dead by this time — were still placarded with appeals to the 
enlightened voters to cast their ballote for Pemzzi, candidate for 
the House of Deputies and a name almost as immemorial as their 
town's. 

However luxurious, the Fiesolans were not proud ; a throng of 
them followed us into the cathedral, where we went to see the beau- 
tiful monument of Bishop Salutali by Miuo da Fiesole, and allowed 
me to pay the sacristan for them all There may have been a sort 
of justice in this ; they must have seen the monument so very often 
befoi-e \ 

They were sociable, but not obtrusive, not even at the point called 
the Belvedere, where, having seen that we were already superabund- 
antly supplied with straw fans and parasols, they stood sweetly aside 
and enjoyed our pleasure in the views of Florence. This ineffable 
prospect — 

But let me rather stand asi<ie with the Fiesolans, and leave it to 
the reader! 




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