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BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

TUSCAN CITIES

BY

WILLIAM D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OK "VENETIAN LIFE," "ITALIAN JOURNEYS," ETC.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIX AND COMPANY

•Clir luUcrBtDc press, CambriOge
1894

734

Copyright, 1884 and 1885,
BY WILLIAM D. HO WELLS

All rights reserved.

V

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

fll

PREFACE.

THE wish to see this book in the same size and
shape as Venetian Life and Italian Journeys was the
motive on the author's part which prompted the pub-
lishers to the present edition. A score of years had
elapsed between the writing of those books and the
writing of this, and yet he felt a kind of unity in all
three which he hoped might be appreciable to the
reader in the uniformity aimed at.

Perhaps it is not indiscreet here to confess another
hope of his : that it might be more apparent in the
unpictured text, than in the illustrated pages of the
former editions, that each of these studies offered to
the reader an historical view, however cursory, of
those famous Tuscan Cities, which it would not be so
easy otherwise for him to find. It was part of the
author's pleasure, in visiting them, to arrange a hasty
perspective of this sort, which seemed to him essential
to a right sense of their modern qualities and condi-
tions ; and he trusts that he does not value it too much
because of the difficulty he had in contriving it. The
reader at least will be spared his difficulty.

TUSCAN CITIES.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC.

ALL the way down 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 remem-
bered in America, but a snow picturesque, spectacular,
and no colder or bleaker to the eye from the car- win-
dow 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 mer-
chant in our carriage said it was now the season.

But the snow grew thinner as the train drew south-
ward, and about Bologna the ground showed through
it in patches. Then the night came on, and when 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 con-

2 TUSCAN CITIES.

ccssive softness with some such sense of escape as
must come to one who has left moral obligations
behind ; and then our penalty began. If we walked
half a mile away from our hotel, we despaired of get-
ting 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 dinner table 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 transition 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 con-
sidered 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 phenomena, and
the total absence of final wisdom on any point, which
I hope he will be able to detect throughout these

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 3

II.

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 cour-
age; 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 in Flor-
ence in the ordinary way. I do not know that any-
thing very historical ever happened there ; but tliat 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
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 t>f 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 tlmv
horse-cars linked together was perpetually 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

4 TUSCAN CITIES.

intolerable convictions of a woodchuck under it. From
time to time the conductor blew a small horn of a
feeble, reedy note, like that of the horns which the
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 woodchuck
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.

m.

ONE of these was the passage of troops, infantry or
cavalry, who were always going to or from that 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 democ-
racy of good looks which one sees in no other land.
They march with a lounging, swinging step, under a
heavy burden of equipment, and with the sort of quiet

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 5

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 officers in their statuesque cloaks,
with the gleam of their swords beneath the folds,
striding across the piazza in twos or threes, the com-
mon soldiers straggling loosely over its si>ace 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 there
was a friendliness in their relations with the popula-
tion 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
interest 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 window-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

6 TUSCAN CITIES.

piazza, with a pomp of military mourning ; but that
was no more effective than the merely civic 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 for-
ward with a slow processional movement, and chant-
ing 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 indiffer-
ent 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 transact itself without their per-
sonal 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 7

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 tassellcd 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 pre-
liminary 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.

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 un-
naturally 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 ef-
fervescence of expectation, flashing his equipage 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

8 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 paste-
board, 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. There1
is no describing the zeal and vigilance 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 off in
his hand and hung dangling. Another driver saw the
situation, 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 con-
firmed o-ar subjection. After that we pretended once
thr.t OUT little man had cheated us ; but with respect-
ful courage he contested the fact, and convinced us
that we were wrong ; he restored a gold pencil which

A FLORENTINB MOSAIC. 9

he had found in 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
frdm his perch. " I, too, am a father I n

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 bo shouldered aside by physical
and intellectual brutality. I hope it may come so
soon that the Italians will not have learned bad man-
ners from tho rest of us. As yet, they seem uncon-
taminatcd, 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 is as
graciously forgiving, as they could have been under
any older regime.

But probably the Italians could njt change if they

10 TUSCAN CITIES.

would. They may fancy changes in themselves and
in one another, but the barbarian who returns to them
after a long absence cannot see that they are person-
ally 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 recog-
nizable thing in Italy, and I was constantly pausing in
my languid strolls, confronted by some dramatic epi-
sode so bewilderingly familiar that it seemed to me I
must have already attempted to write about it. One
day, on the narrow sidewalk beside the escutcheoned
cloister-wall of the church, two young and handsome
people stopped me while they put upon that public
stage the pretty melodrama of their feelings. The
bare-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 gestic-
ulating, while he explained or expostulated, with
his eyes not upon her, but 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 both quite unconscious,
and were merely obeying the histrionic instinct of their
race. • So was the school-boy in clerical robes, when,
goaded by some taunt, pointless to the foreign by.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 11

slander, he flung himself into an attitude of deadly
scorn, and defied the tormenting gamins ; so were the
vender of chestnut-paste and his customer, as they de-
bated over the smoking viand the exact quantity and
quality which a soldo ought to purchase, in view of
the state of the chestnut market and the price de-
manded elsewhere ; so was the little woman who
deplored, in impassioned accents, the non-arrival of
the fresh radishes we liked with our 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
magnanimity to give me the change I had forgotten,
after beating him down from a franc to seventy cen-
times on a dozen of mandarin oranges. The sweet-
ness 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 integrity in
the teeth of the person whom we deal fairly with ; but
when the Italian makes up his mind to be just, it is in
no ungracious spirit. It was their lovely ways, far
more than their monuments of history and art, that
made return to the Florentines delightful. I would
rather have had a perpetuity of the cameriere'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 face of Santa
Maria Novella.

12 TUSCAN CITIES.

*

VI.

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 lumin-
ous 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 architecture, 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
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 remember 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, equal in degree, if not in kind.
While the languor of these first days was still heavy
upon me, I crept into the church for a look at the
Ghirlandajo frescos behind the high altar, the Virgin
of Cimabue, and the other objects which one is advised
to see there, and had such modest satisfaction in them
as may come to one who long ago, once for all, owned

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 13

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 over-
come 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 No-
vella. 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 off to see the paintings ; and I was careful to
identify the portraits of Poliziano and the other Flor-
entine gentlemen and ladies in the frescos. I cannot
say that I was immediately sensible of advantage in
this achievement ; yet I experienced a present delight
in the Spanish chapel at finding not only Petrarch and
Laura, but Boccaccio and Fiammetta, in the groups
enjoying 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 luster on their creeds ; but
the confusion is an agreeable one, and I enjoyed it as
much as when it first overcame uie iu Italy.

14 TUSCAN CITIES.

VII.

THE cicerone who helped me with 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 mili-
tary college and a children's school. It was noon, and
the corridors and the court were full of boys at their
noisy games, on whom the young father smiled pa-
tiently, 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 meas-
ure, and I now 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 un-
comfortable thing about any institution which has sur-
vived 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 cumbered the ground ;
but when it came to a question of sweeping them
away, it meant sorrow and exile and dismay to thous-
ands 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 pity of certain faithful who,
throughout Italy, still maintain a dwindling number
of monks and nuns in their old cloisters wherever the
convent happened to be the private property of the
order. I cannot say that they thus quite consoled the
sentimentalist who would not have the convents re-es-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 15

tablished, even while suffering a poignant regret for
their suppression ; but I know from myself that this
sort of sentimentalist is very difficult, and perhaps he
ought not to be too seriously regarded.

VIIL

»

THE sentimentalist is very abundant in Italy, and
most commonly he is of our race and religion, though
he is rather English than American. The Englishman,
so chary of his sensibilities at home, abandons himself
to them abroad. At Rome he already regrets the good
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 restoration of the Ducal
Palace and the church of St. Mark; and he has no
language in which to speak of the little steamers on
the Grand Canal, which the Venetians find so conven-
ient. In Florence, from time to time, he has a panic
prescience that they are going to tear down the Ponte
Vecchio. I do not know how he gets this, but he has
it, and all the rest of us sentimentalists eagerly share
it with him when he conies in to luncheon, puts
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 re-
solved to visit the Ponte Vecchio with no more delay,
lest they should be going to tear it down that after-
noon. It was not that I cared a great deal for the

16 TUSCAN CITIES.

bridge itself, but my accumulating impressions of
Florentine history had centered 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
Ghibelline 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 Arno, or obliged to go round and
come in on some other bridge without regard to the
fact ; and at some personal inconvenience I hurried off
to the Ponte Vecchio. T could not see that the prep-
arations for its destruction had begun, and I believe
they are still threatened only in the imagination of
sentimental Anglo-Saxons. The omnibuses were fol-
lowing each other over the bridge in the peaceful
succession of so many horse-cars to Cambridge, and
the ugly- little 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
slightest tremor to the heel clandestinely stamped up-
on it for a final test of its stability.

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
\

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 17

farts, 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 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 modern 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 emo-
tion ; at moments the illustrious or pathetic figures of
other days will seem to walk before him unmocked 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 Florence. One of the advan-
tages 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 with all the sensibilities of our own time. Per-
haps 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 confess it. I went quite back with them
to the lilies that tilted all over the plain where they
B

18 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 mart they held by
the Arno for the convenience 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 through that dim turmoil of wars, martyrdoms,
pestilences, heroisms, and treasons for a thousand
years, feeling their increasing purpose of municipal
freedom and hatred of the one-man power (il governo
cTun solo) alike under Romans, Huns, Longobards,
Franks, and Germans, till in the eleventh century they
marched up against their mother city, and destroyed
Fiesole, leaving nothing standing but the fortress, the
cathedral, and the Gaffe 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 warfare, even if it lasted, as at one time, for

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 19

forty years. I was as much opposed as Dante him-
self to the extension of the national limits, though I
am not sure now that our troubles came from acquir-
ing territory three miles away, beyond the Emo, 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 Geulph and
Ghibelline, and subdivided again into Bianchi and
Neri, I was always with 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, perhaps 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 deluded
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 Mag-
nificent 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 them. When our dissolute youth
went singing his obscene songs through the moonlit
streets, I shuddered with a good Piagnone's abhor-
rence ; and I heard one morning with a stern and sol-
emn joy that the great Frate had refused absolution to

20 TUSCAN CITIES.

the dying despot who had refused freedom to Florence.
Those were high 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 ter-
rible, when the Frate paid for his good-will to us with
his life, and suffered by the Republic which he had
restored. Then the famous siege came, the siege of
fifteen months, when Papist and Lutheran united un-
der 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
entered 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 in-
telligently through all till that ; but then, what sud-
denly became of that burning desire for 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 peo-
ple can be broken ; but this is what seems again and
again to happen in history, though never so signally,
so spectacularly, as in Florence when the Medici were
restored. After that there were conspiracies and at-
tempts of individuals to throw off the yoke ; but in
the great people, the prostrate body of the old de-
mocracy, not a throe of revolt. Had they outlived
the passion of their youth for liberty, or were they

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 21

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 under
tlic 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 perhaps, but the most languid. They
say of themselves, " We lack initiative ; " and the for-
eigner 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, excel them in industrial enter-
prise, 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 University of Florence. These are not
all Florentines, but they live in Florence, where almost
any one would choose to live if ho did not live in
London, 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 inter-
est' the reader. Even the lack of initiative in a people
who conceal their adversity under good clothes, and
have abolished beggary, cannot be made the subject of
a graphic sketch ; oue must go to their past for that.

22 TUSCAN CITIES.

X.

YET if the reader had time, I would like to linger a
little on our way down to the Via Borgo Santi Apos-
toli, where it branches off into the Middle Ages out
of Via Tornabuoni, not far from Vieusseux's Circulat-
ing Library. For Via Tornabuoni is charming, and
merits to be observed for the ensemble it offers of
the contemporary Florentine expression, with its allur-
ing shops, its confectioners and caffe, 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, tremen-
dously impressive of the days when really a man's
house was his castle. Everywhere in Florence the
same sort of contrast presents itself in some degree ;
but nowhere quite so dramatically as here, where it
seems expressly contrived for the sensation of the
traveler when he arrives at the American 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 the street of the tourists, who are always
haunting 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 through 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 jeweller's windows. There is not

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 28

here the glitter of mosaics which fatigues the eye on
the Lungarno or in Via Borgognissanti, nor the white
glare of new statuary — or statuettary, rather — which
renders 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
out-door lounging which Italian leisure loves, and you
must go to the Cascine for much Florentine fashion if
you want it ; but something 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 lily-like
disoccupation and the same sweetness of aspect which
made the Procuratie 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 Tornabuoni, and whom I afterwards saw aiming
with uncertain eye a boutonniere 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 sphinx-like in her mystery from a cushioned
corner at Florian's; and the officers went by with
tinkling spurs and sabres, and clicking boot-heels

24 TUSCAN CITIES.

differing in nothing but their Italian uniforms and
complexions from the blonde Austrian military of those
far-off days. I often wondered who or what those
beautiful swells might be, and now I rather wonder
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 conscien-
tious 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 Doney's famous caffe were
both, if 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
class, 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 outside 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. Yet
if that sort of self-sacrifice goes on in there, I do not
object ; it continues the old Latin tradition of splen-
dor and hunger which runs through, so many pleasant
books, and is as good in its way as a beggar 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 25

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 anem-
ones,— 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 ham-
mer or chisel.

XI.

THE human passions were wrought almost as prim-
tive into the civic structure of Florence, down in the
thirteenth century, which you will find with me at the
bottom of the Borgo Santi Apostoli, if you like to
come. There and thereabouts dwelt the Buondel-
monti, the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti, and other
noble families, in fastnesses of stone and iron as for-
midable as the castles from which their ancestors were
dislodged when the citizens went out into the country
around Florence, and destroyed their strongholds and
obliged them to come into the city ; and thence from
their casements and towers they carried on their pri-
vate wars as conveniently as ever, descending into the
streets, and battling about among the peaceful indus-
tries 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 under
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

26 TUSCAN CITIES.

water 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 going
about these houses for any who did not belong to it.
A whole quarter, covering the space of several Amer-
ican city blocks, would be given up to the palaces of
one family and its adherents, in a manner 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 edifice ; 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, Gherar-
dini, 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
buffoon 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' Infangati, who had come with
Buondelmonte, at which Buondelmonte became

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 27

furious, and resented the insult tolas 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 in-
censed 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 ven-
geance. But a temperate spirit prevailed in this sen-
ate, and it was decided that Buondelmonte, instead of
dying, should marry Oddo's niece, Reparata degli
Amidei, differently described by history as a plain
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 cav-
alier, but a weak will, as appears from all that hap-
pened, agreed to this, and everything was happily
arranged, till one day when he was riding by the
house of Forese Donati. Monna Gualdrada Donati
was looking out of the window, and possibly expect-
ing 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

28 TUSCAN CITIES.

was, we may suppose, that she hinted those things she
is said to have insinuated against Reparata's looks and
her fitness otherwise for a gentleman like Buondel-
monte. " If I had known you were in such haste to
marry — but God's will be done ! We cannot have
things as we like in this. world!" And Machiavelli
says that the thing Monna Gualdrada had set her
heart upon was Buondelmonte's marriage with her
daughter, " but either through carelessness, or because
she thought it would do any time, she had not men-
tioned 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 Reparata. 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 Buondelmonte 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 by that solemn promise to the Ami-
dei;" and Monna 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 mar-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 29

rii-tl. Thru the Amidci, the Uberti, the Lamberti,
and tlie Fifanti, and others who were outraged in their
cousinship or friendship by this treachery and insult
t > lie para ta, assembled in the church of Santa Maria
sopra Porta to take counsel again for vengeance.
Some were of opinion that Buondelmonte 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 fatta
capo ha!" With which saying he advised 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
Buondelraonte when he should come to fetch home
his bride. On Easter morning, 1215, they were wait-
ing for him in the house of the Amidei, at the foot
of the Ponte Vecchio ; and when they saw him come
riding, 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 he 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
from his palfrey. Then Oddo di Arrigo, whom he
stabbed, and Mosca Lamberti, who pronounced his
sentence, and Lambertaccio Amidei, "and one of
the Gangolandi," ran up and cut his throat.

80 TUSCAN CITIES.

There arose a terrible tumult in the city, and the
girl whose fatal beauty had wrought this horror, gov-
erning 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.

From that hour, they tell us, the factions that had
long tormented Florence took new names, and those
who had sided with the Buondelmonti and the Donati
for the Pope against the Emperor became Guelphs,
while the partisans of the Amidei and the Empire be-
came Ghibellines, and began that succession of recip-
rocal 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 sim-
ple 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
moved through. From the first the Florentines were
able to hit each other off with an accuracy which
comes of the southern habit of living much together
in public, and one cannot question these lineaments.
Buondelmonte, Mosca Lainberti, Monna Gualdrada,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 81

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 Buon-
dehnonti 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 archi-
tectural 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 beautifully
carved by Donatello, as you may still see ; and in a
lofty angle 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 medueval structures
the sun never struck, and the point of the mediaeval
nose must always have been very cold from the end
of November till the beginning of April.

32 TUSCAN CITIES.

The tradition of an older life continues into the
present everywhere ; 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 Buondel-
monte 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 corner, 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 modern Florentine crowd, swollen
by a vast number of English and American tourists,
who at this season begin to come up from Rome.
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.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 83

XIII.

ONE of the furious Ghibellinc houses of this quar-
ter were the Gherardini, who are said to have become
the Fitzgeralds of Ireland, whither they went in their
exile, and where they enjoyed their fighting privileges
long after those of their friends and acquaintances re-
maining in Florence had been cut off. 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 Ghibel-
lines, 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 Tus-
cany to Corsica, where they changed their name to
Buonaparte, and from them came the great Napoleon.
As to that " one of the Gangolandi," 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 me. The Donati afterward made a
marriage which brought them into as lasting remem-
brance 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 born, the little Piazza Donati, which you
reach by going up the Corso to the Borgo degli Al-
bizzi, 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
C

34 TUSCAN CITIES.

in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crim-
son, garlanded and adorned in such wise as befitted
her very youthful age." The palace of the Salviati
— in which Cosimo I. was born, and in which his
father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, taught the child
courage by flinging 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, what-
ever 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 peas-
ants with stabling. On a day when I was there, a
wash stretched fluttering 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 sang in cages all
round the piazza; a wrinkled peasant with a faded
green cotton umbrella under his arm gave the place
an effect of rustic sojourn ; and a diligence that two
playful stable-boys were long in hitching up drove
jingling out, with its horses in brass-studded head-
stalls, past where I stood under the fine old arches of
the gateway. I had nothing to object to all this, nor
do I suppose that this last state of his old neighbor-
hood much vexes the poet now. It was eminently
picturesque, with a sort of simple cheerfulness of as-
pect, the walls of the houses in the little piazza being

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. :'.">

of different shades of buff, with window-shutters in
light green opening back upon them from those case-
ments where the shrieking canaries hung. The place
had that tone which characterizes so many city per-
spectives in Italy, and especially Florence, — which
makes the long stretch of Via Borgognissauti so
smiling, and bathes the sweep of Lungarno in a sunny
glow wholly independent of the state of the weather.
As you stroll along one of these light-yellow avenues
you say to yourself, " Ah, this is Florence ! " And
then suddenly you plunge into the gray-brown gloom
of such a street as the Borgo degli Albizzi, with lofty
palaces climbing in vain toward the sun, and frowning
upon the streets below with fronts of stone, rude or
sculptured, but always stern 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 serene, sunny commonplace of the Lorrainese
duchy.

I was not sorry to find this the tone of Piazza
Donati, into which I 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 avenues to the Mercato Vecchio, where the
vista is broken by innumerable pent-roofs, balconies,
and cornices ; and a throng of operatic figures in
slouch hats and short cloaks are so very improbably
bent on any realistic business, that they seem to be
masquerading there in the mysterious fumes of the

36 TUSCAN CITIES.

cook-shops. Yet I should be loath, for no very tan-
gible reason, to have Piazza Donati like one of these
avenues or in any wise different from what it is ;
certainly I should not like to have the back of Dante's
house smartened up like the front, which looks into
Piaaza San Martino. I do not complain that the res-
toration is bad ; it is even very good, for all that I
know ; but the unrestored back is better, and I have a
general feeling that the past ought to be allowed to
tumble down in peace, though I have no doubt that
whenever this happened I should be one ^of the first
to cry out against the barbarous indifference that suf-
fered it. I dare say that in a few hundred years, when
the fact of the restoration is forgotten, the nineteenth-
century mediaevalism of Dante's house will be accept-
able to the most fastidious tourist. I tried to get into
the house, which is open to the public at certain hours
on certain 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 content myself with the
interior of the little church of San Martino, where
Dante was married, half a stone's-cast from where he
was born. The church was closed, and I asked a cob-
bler, who had brought his work to the threshold of
his shop hard by, for the sake of the light, where the
sacristan lived. He answered me unintelligibly, with-
out leaving oif for a moment his 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 in a fruit-stall next door had pity on me,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 37

knowing doubtless that I was interested in San Mar-
tino on account of the wedding, and sent me to No. 1.
But No. 1 was a house so improbably genteel that I '
had not the courage to ring; and I asked the grocer
alongside for a better direction. He did not know
how to give it, but he sent ine to the local apothecary,
who in turn sent me to another number. Here an-
other shoemaker, kindlier or idler than the first, left
off gossiping with some friends of his, and showed me
the right door at last in the rear of the church. My
pull at the bell shot the sacristan's head out of the
fourth-story window in the old way that always de-
lighted me, and I perceived even at that distance that
he was a man perpetually fired with zeal for his church
by the curiosity of strangers. I could certainly see
the church, yes; he would come down instantly and
open it from the inside if I would do him the grace to
close his own 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 cora-
monplaceness, it is as well to stand as any other spot
on earth. It is a very little place, with one-third of the
space divided from the rest by an iron-tipped wooden
screen. Behind this is the simple altar, and here
Dante Alighieri and Gemma Donati were married. In
whatever state the walls were then, they are now
plainly whitewashed, though in one of the lunettes
forming a sort of frieze half round the top was a fresco
said to represent the espousals of the poet. The

38 TUSCAN CITIES.

church was continually visited, the sacristan told me,
by all sorts of foreigners, English, French, Germans,
Spaniards, even Americans, but especially Russians,
the most impassioned of all for it. One of this nation,
one Russian eminent even among his impassioned race,
spent several hours in looking at that picture, taking his
stand at the foot of the stairs by which the sacristan
descended from his lodging into the church. He
showed me the very spot ; I do not know why, unless
he took me for another Russian, and thought my pride
in a compatriot so impassioned might have some effect
upon the fee I was to give him. He was a credulous
sacristan, and I cannot find any evidence in Miss Hor-
ner's faithful and trusty " Walks in Florence " that
there is a fresco in that church representing the es-
pousals 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 for the
relief of such shame-faced poor as were unwilling to
ask alms. Prince Strozzi and other patricians of
Florence 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, successively guaranteed by four
popes, of twenty-four hundred years ; which seemed
really to make it worth one's while.

XIV.

IN vis-ting these scenes, one cannot but wonder at
the small campass in which the chief facts of Dante's

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 39

young life, suitably to the home-keeping character of
the time and race, occurred. There he was born,
there he was bred, and there he was married to Gem-
ma Donati after Beatrice Portinari died. Beatrice's
father lived just across the way from the Donati
houses, and the Donati houses adjoined 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 rest-
less and unhappy life, being a fretful and foolish
woman, by the accounts.

One realizes all this there with a distinctness which
the clearness of the Italian atmosphere permits. In
that air events do not seem to age any more than edi-
fices; a life, like a structure, of six hunderd y^ars
ago seems of yesterday, and one feeFs toward the Do-
nati 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 sentence 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 tluit ended in his banishment. Nothing could
apparently have been more remote from him, than that
quarrel of a Pistoja family, in which the children of
Messer Cancellicre's first wife, Bianca, called them-

40 TUSCAN CITIES.

selves 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 Cancellieri of Pistoja falls into a quarrel
with another and wounds him with his sword. They are
both boys, or hardly more, and the father of the one
who struck the blow bids him go to his kinsmen and
beg their forgiveness. But when he comes to them
the father of the offended 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 your father
and tell him that hurts are healed with iron, not with
words."

The news of this cruel deed throws all Pistoja into
an incomprehensible mediaeval 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 generation in exile.
But the Neri take up the Ghibelline part of invok-
ing foreign intervention, with Corso Donati at their
head, — a brave man, but hot, proud and lawless.
Dai;te is of the Bianchi party, which is that of the
liberals and patriots, and in this quality he goes to
Rome 10 plead with the Pope to use his good offices
for the peace and freedom of Florence. In his ab-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 41

sence 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 Ghibelline.

I walked up from the other Donati houses through
the Via Borgo degli Albizzi to the Piazza San Pier
Maggiore to look at the truncated 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 embattled the whole neighbor-
hood, galling his beseigers in the streets below with
showers of stones and arrows. They set fire to his
fortress, 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 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

42 TUSCAN CITIES.

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
Piccarda, 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 Rosellino 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-smell-
ing, and two frowzy girls picking chickens. In the
wall there is a tablet signed by the Messer Capitani of

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 43

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

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

XV.

FOR my part, I find it hard to be serious about the
tragedy of a people who seem, as one looks back at
them in their history, to have lived in such perpetual
broil as the Florentines. They cease to be even pa-
thetic ; they become absurd, and tempt the observer to
a certain mood of trivially, by their indefatigable an-
tics in cutting and thrusting, chopping off heads,
mutilating, burning, and banishing. But I have often
thought that we must get a false impression of the
past by the laws governing perspective, in which the
remoter objects are inevitably pressed together in their
succession, 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 remain for the reader to revise his impressions,
and rearrange them, so as to give some value to con-
ditions as well as to occurences. It looks very much,
at first glance, as if the Florentines had no pe;ici' from
the domination of the Romans to the domination of the
Medici. But in all that time they had la-en growing
in wealth, power, the arts and letters, and were con-
stantly striving to realize in their state the ideal which
is still our only political aim, — " a government of the

44 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 history, but for a
measure of success in the realization of her political
ideal. The feudal nobles, forced into the city from
their petty sovereignties beyond its gates; the rich
merchants and bankers, creators and creatures of its
prosperity, the industrious and powerful guilds of ar-
tisans, 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 there was no upheaval, though it must be
owned that these generations seem few. A life of the
ordinary compass witnessed so many atrocious scenes
that Dante, who peopled his Inferno with his neigh'
bors 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 ti^e Palazzo Vecchio, where he had taken

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 45

refuge, and demanded certain of his bloody minions ;
and when his soldiers thrust one of these out among
them, they 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 integument 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 suffrage being
a thing as yet imperfectly understood and only sec-
ondarily exercised. Yet the peacefulest and appar-
ently 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 office, and punished not only in
their own person, but in kith and kin, for offenses
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 condition that they must
not aspire to office for five years, and that if any of
them killed or grieviously wounded a plebeian, he
should be immediately and hopelessly re-ennobled;
which sounds like some fantastic invention of Mr.

46 TUSCAN CITIES.

Frank R. Stockton's, and only too vividly recalls
Lord Tolloller's appeal in Mr. Gilbert's opera of
" lolanthe : "—

" Spurn 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 trying 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 hun-
dred thousand of the people died, and the rest, demor-
alized by the terror and enforced idleness in which
they had lived, abandoned themselves to all manner 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 intro-
duction 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 47

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 miseries that pres-
ently followed. But few of us are ever sufficiently in
the divine confidence to be able to say just why this
or that thing happens, and we are constantly growing
more modest about assuming to know. What is
certain is that the one-man power, foreboded and re-
sisted 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 Florence. 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 Avc-
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.

XVIL

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 imagination

.48 TUSCAN CITIES.

there, and I could not have helped going for their
sake to the Piazza of the Mercato 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 win-
ter's day in Florence spreads over me, and I seem to
stand in the midst of the old square, with its mould-
ering colonade on one side, and on the other its low,
irregular roofs, their brown tiles thinly tinted wi£h 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 bal-
cony to balcony, as if it had fancied trying to hide its
forlornness in them. Around me are peasants and
donkey-carts and Florentines of all sizes and ages ; ray
ears are filled with the sharp din of an Italian crowd,
and my nose with the smell of immemorial, innumer-
able market days, and the rank, cutting savor of frying
fish and cakes from a score of neighboring 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 ma-
donnas— under a sagging pent-roof, I entered a large
court, like Piazza Donati. Here the Medici, among
other great citizens, had their first houses ; and in the
harrow street opening out of this court stands the

\

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 49

little church which was then the family chapel of the
Medici, after the fashion of that time, where all their
marriages, christenings, and funerals took place. In
time this highly respectable quarter suffered the sort
of social decay which so frequently and so capri-
ciously affects 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 condition that they would not ask
more than twenty per cent interest. How much more
had been taken by the Christians one can hardly im-
agine ; 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 forlornest 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
worst classes seem to be everywhere, — I do not know
why, — and the air was full of the clatter of their feet
D

50 TUSCAN CITIES.

and tongues, intolerably reverberated from the high
mauy-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 prob-
lems 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 Buondelmonti ; and, disliking
them as I did, I was glad to see it in the possession
of that squalor, so different from the cheerful and in-
dustrious 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 development, from lower to
higher, the Providence which rules the affairs of men
permitted them supremacy ; and it is easy to under-
stand 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 physi-
cians, together with the only appellation by which
history knows their lineage, were agreeable to none
who wished their country well. From the first Med-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 51

ici 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 common-
wealth.

" 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 submit to the Medicean domination , tranquillity
and calm were everywhere. Feasting, dancing, public
shows, and games amused the Florentine people, who,
once so jealous of their rights, seemed to have forgot-
ten even the name of liberty. Lorenzo, who took
part in all these pleasures, invented new ones every
day. But among all his inventions, the most famous
was that of the carnival songs (canti carnnscialeschi),
of which he composed the first, and which were meant
to be sung in the masquerades of carnival, when tl»e
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 time far better than any other dis-
cription. To-day, not only the youthful nobility, but
the basest of the populace, would hold them in loath-
ing, and to go singing them through the city would
be an offence to public decency which could not fail

52 TUSCAN CITIES.

to be punished. These things were the favorite rec-
reation 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 explicitly 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 do-
minion unjustly acquired by him and his ; the disorder
wrought in the commonwealth ; the theft of the pub-
lic treasure to supply his profligate waste ; the shame-
less 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, politi-
cians, nobles, and plebeians were rotten at heart, lack-
ing 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 53

asserted itself in their souls. A cold indifference to
every principle prevailed, and those visages full of
guile and subtlety wore a smile of chilly superiority
and compassion at any sign of enthusiam for noble
and generous ideas. They did not oppose these 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 became 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 destruc-
tion, 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
discussed 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 Politian, 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 this variety
of life they cannot cite a solitary act of real gentT»-itv
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 in-
herited from Cosimo all that subtlety by which, with-

54 TUSCAN CITIES.

out being a great statesman, he was prompt in cunning
subterfuges, full of prudence and acuteness, skillful
in dealing with ambassadors, most skillful in extin-
guishing his enemies, bold and cruel when he believed
the occasion permitted. . . . His face reveals his
character ; there was something sinister and hateful
in it ; the complexion was greenish, the mouth very
large, the nose flat, and the voice nasal ; but his eye
was quick and keen, his forehead was high, and his
manner had all of gentleness that can be imagined
of an age so refined and elegant as that ; his conversa-
tion was full of vivacity, of wit and learning; those
who were admitted to his familiarity were always fas-
cinated by him. He seconded his age in all its
tendencies ; corrupt as it was, he left it corrupter 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 delirium."

XVIII.

THIS is the sort of being whom human nature in
self-defense ought always to recognize as a devil, and
whom no glamour of circumstance or quality should be
suffered to disguise. It is success like his which, as
Victor Hugo says of Louis Napoleon's similar success,
"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 ex-
tinction of public liberty, but the control of private
life in all its relations. He made this marriage and
he forbade tliat among the principal families, as it

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 55

suited his pleasure ; he decided employment 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 smouldering 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 t 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 pre-
ferred the latter setting. To tell the truth, the Duo-
mo at Florence is a temple to damp the spirit, dead
or alive, by the immense impression of stony bareness,
or drab vacuity, which one receives from its interior,
unless it is filled with people. Outside it is magnifi-
cently imposing, in spite of the insufficiency and ir-
regularity of its piazza. In 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 be-
ing almost crowded upon by the surrounding shops
and caffe 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

56 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 vis-
ible 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, choristers, aco-
lytes, 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 incom-
parable 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 to-
gether at Lorenzo's villa, the conspirators transfer the
scene to the cathedral ; the moment 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 office ! 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 bot-
tom of the heart of one conspirator lingers a medieval

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 57

compunction, and though not unwilling to kill a man,
this soldier does not know about killing one in a church.
Very well, then, give up your dagger, you 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 famil-
iarly 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 caffe 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, — hapless,
kindly youth, whom we have nothing against except
that he is of that cursed race of the Medici, — and now
at last the priest elevates 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 Ban-
dini plunges his short dagger through the boy, who
drops dead upon his face, and Francesco Pazzi flings

58 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 unprac-
ticed 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.
Fury ! Infamy ! Malediction ! Pick yourself up,
Francesco Pazzi, and get home as you may ! There
is no mounting 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 59

world was like Florence at that time in its bloody
cruelty ; the wonder is that Florence, being what she
otherwise was, should be like all the world in that.
One should take the trouble also to keep constantly in
mind the smallncss of the theatre in which these
scenes were enacted. Compared with modern 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
insufferable 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 Careggi, 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 docs not matter, since if you do
not come to the Villa Careggi when you go to look
for it, you come to something else equally memorable,
by ways as beautiful and 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 of spring in the at-
mosphere, 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 con-

60 TUSCAN CITIES.

valescent. The mountains were white with snow
beyond Fiesole, but that was perhaps to set off to
better advantage the nearer hill-sides, studded with
villas gleaming 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 irregu-
lar slopes, over which wandered a tangle of 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 high, 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 through every break in their foliage;
but near the house was a formal 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.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 61

As to the interior of the villa, everyone 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 sepul-
chral 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'Arno, and glimpsing the
tower of Giotto and the dome of Brunelleschi. 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 act-
uality. 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 de-
bauchery, and he drew near his end cheerfully enough,
and very much as he had always lived, now reasoning
high of philosophy and poetry with Pico della Miran-
dola 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 say-
ing, none had ever dared to 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 ;

62 TUSCAN CITIES.

and Savonarola, who had never yielded to his 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 picture 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 heavy on his soul three crimes :
the cruel sack of Voltcrra, 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 Savon-
arola to quiet him kept repeating ' 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
children to restore it for you.' Lorenzo looked sur-
prised and troubled ; but he forced himself to compli-
ance, and nodded his head in sign of 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.' Lorenzo, summoning all his
remaining strength, disdainfully turned his back ; and
without uttering a word, Savonarola departed without
giving him absolution."

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 63

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 rae the vividest event in Florentine history,
and Villari has no need, for nae 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 ab-
solution, 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 unerringly. 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 re-
turned from that 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 reluctance, that I should have liked Loren-
zo's company much better, and that I, too, should
have felt to its last sweetness the charm of his manner.

64 TUSCAN CITIES.

I confess that I think I should have been bored — it is
well to be honest with one's self in all tilings — 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
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, or
their thoughts turned to God. Puerility and vulgarity
of a sort to set one's teeth on edge marked the ex-
cesses which Savanarola 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 had ever burdened it.
For the reality would have been totally different from
the ideal. So far as we ban 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 !

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 65

—Lorenzo know the Florentines better than he when
he turned his face away and died unshrivcn rather
than give them hack 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 memory of
his; but now we see, far more clearly than if the / rate
had founded his free state upon the ruins of the mag-
nijicos tyranny, that the one willed only good to
others, and the other willed it only to himself. All
history, like each little individual experience, enforces
nothing but this lesson of altruism ; and it is because
the memory which consecrates the church of San Mar-
co teaches it in a supreme degree that one stands
before it with a swelling heart.

In itself the church is nowise interesting or impos-
ing, with that ugly and senseless classicism of its
front, — which associates itself with 'Spain rather than
Italy, and the stretch of its plain, low convent 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 center. But when you are within the
convent gate, all is Italian, all is Florentine again ; for
there is nothing more Florentine hi Florence than
E

66 TUSCAN CITIES.

these old convent courts into 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 has 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 up stairs
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 bne place he has left his own por-
trait in a saintly company, looking on at an Annunci-
ation : a very haudsome 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 dis-
cernible detail, with more or less care, according to

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 67

one's real or att9mpted delight in them, and then
suddenly comes to the cell of Savonarola ; and all the
life goes out of these remote histories and allegories,
and pulses in an agony of baffled good in this mar-
tyrdom. 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 suffering flesh the more ; here is a bit of
charred wood gathered from the fire in which he ex-
piated his love for the Florentines by a hideous death
at their hands. It rends the heart to look at them !
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 conceive 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 wit-
nesses, 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 af-
ter 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 fore-
boding the murmurs of the crowd when they arc
balked of their spectacle by that question between the

68 TUSCAN CITIES.

Dominicans and the Franciscans about carrying the
host through the flames ; I return with him heavy 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 be-
tween 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 at-
tacks the convent, and the monks, shaking oS his
meek control, reply with musket shots from their cells;
I am with him when the signory sends to lead him a
prisoner to the Bargello ; I am there when they
stretch upon the rack that frail and delicate body,
which fastings and vigils and the cloistered life have
wrought up to a nervous sensibility as keen as a wo-
man's; I hear his confused and uncertain replies under
the torture when they ask him whether he claims now
to have prophesied from God ; I climb with him, for
that month's respite they allow him before they put
him to 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 some-
thing 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,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 69

before they lead him between the two monks who are
to suffer witli him ; and once more I stand among the
pitiless multitude in the piazza. 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 hang-
man thrusts him from the scaffold, where the others
hang dangling in their chains over the pyre that is to
consume their bodies. " Prophet ! " cries an echo of
the mocking voice on Calvary, " now is 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 Sa-
vonarola while he is still alive. A wind rises and
blows the flame away. The crowd shrinks back terri-
fied : " A miracle ! a miracle 1 " But the wind falls
again, and the bodies slowly burn, 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 Piagnoni fall sobbing and groan-
ing 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 Savonarola, who, though surely
no Protestant, was one of the precursors of the Re-
formation, stood a northern priest, chief perhaps of
those who would lead us back to Rome, appealing to
us in the harsh sibilants of our English, where the
Dominican had rolled the organ harmonies of his im-

70 TUSCAN CITIES.

passioned 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 cur-
tain 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-sunk dreamy eyes, and he preached with singular
vigor and point to a congregation 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 ex-
quisite 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 God in a
church where Savonarola had lived and aspired ; and
that even the dead, who had known him and heard
him, and who now sent up their chill through the
pavement from the tombs below, and made my feet
so very cold, were more eloquent of immortality in
that place.

XXI.

ONE morning, early in February, I walked out
through the picturesqueness of Oltrarno, and up the
long ascent of the street to Porta San Giorgio, for the
purpose of revering what is left of the fortifications
designed by Michael Angelo for the defence of the
city in the great siege of 1535. There are many

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 71

things to distract even the most resolute pilgrim on
the way to that gate, and I was but too willing to
loiter. There are bricabrac shops on the Ponte
Vecchio, and in the Via Guicciardini and the Piazza
Pitti, with old canvases, and carvings, and bronzes in
their windows ; and though a little past the time of
life when one piously looks up the scenes of fiction, I
had to make an excursion up the Via de' Bardi for
the sake of Romola, whose history begins in that
street. It is a book which you must read again in
Florence, 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 visit for its
own Gothic-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 mur-
mur 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 countenance in
the presence of a long line of Guicciardini palaces —
where Machiavelli lived ; a barber has his shop on the
ground floor now, and not far off, again, are the
houses of the Canigiani, the maternal ancestors of
Petrarch. And yet a little way, up a steep, winding
street, is the house of Galileo. It bears on its front
a tablet recording the fact that Ferdinand II. de'
Medici visited his valued astronomer there, and a por-
trait 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

72 TUSCAN CITIB8.

at them. The sky is blue without a speck overhead,
and I look down on the tops of the 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 in 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 de-
scent 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, bask-
ing in the warm dust, rustle away among them at my
approach, and up the path comes a gentleman in the
company of two small terrier dogs, whose little bells
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 glistened and
sparkled as far as the snows of Vallombrosa, lustrous
along the horizon ; but the reader ought to understand.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 78

XXII.

I WAS instructed by the friend in whose tutelage I
was pursuing with so much passion my search for his-
torical localities that I had better not give myself quite
away to either the associations 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 cer-
tainly the point from which to enjoy both. The day
of our visit was gray and overcast, but the air was
clear, and nothing was lost to the eye among the ob-
jects 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 officers there were not the most
circumspect of men, they could never get round
among the peasants' carts to tax their wine and oil
without trampling a multitude of august and pathetic
presences under foot. One shudders at the rate at
which one's cocchiere dashes through the Past throng-
ing 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 that city and the circuit of its
hills ; so that, for mere pleasure in its beauty, the

74 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 morning, when I drove up to San Miniato to
" realize" the siege of Florence, keeping a sharp eye
out for Montici, where Sciarra Colonna had his quar-
ters, 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 unpre-
meditating 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 trying 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 fa-
mous camiaada when the Florentines put their shirts
on over their armor and attacked the enemy's sleeping
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 Min-
iato, which was the outpost of the Florentines, and
walked tremulously round 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 75

so many conceits of a frivolous tourist springing from
the tragic history it recorded. The apse of the church
below this tower is of the most satisfying golden
brown in color, and within, the church is what all the
guide-books know, but what I own I have forgotten.
It is 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 Giusti, whose mon-
ument was there. After four hundred years of slavery,
his pen was one of the keenest and bravest of those
which resumed the old Italian fight for freedom, and
he might have had a more adequate monument I be-
lieve there is an insufficient statue, or perhaps it is only
a bust, or may be a tablet with his face in bas-relief;
but the modern Italians are not happy in their com-
memorations of the dead. The little Campo Santo at
San Miniato is a place to make one laugh and cry with
the hideous vulgarity of its realistic busts and its pho-
tographs 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 land-
scape. The city seemed to cover the whole plain be-
neath us with the swarm of its edifices, and the steely
stretch of the Arno 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

76 TUSCAN .CITIES.

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 every-
where, and whitened the plain to its remotest purple.
I spare the reader the successive events which my
unhappy acquaintance 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 Michelan-
gelo so delicious in the summer twilight ; the bronze
copy of the David in the center of the square looked
half frozen. The terrace is part of the system of em-
bellishment and improvement of Florence for her brief
supremacy as capital ; and it is fitly called after Mich-
elangelo because it covers the site of so much work
of his for her defense 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 seige 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 Roma-
na, which his treason opened, and because it was so
convenient, entered the city with a horde of other
Spanish and German bigots and mercenaries 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 77

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 AJessandro. 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
tyrannies and excesses had something almost delir-
iously insolent in them, and who, crime for crime,
seems to have preferred that which was most revolt-
ing. But I had to postpone this exemplary assassina-
tion till I could find the moment for visiting the Ric-
cardi 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 munici-
pal 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 per-
haps the most simply and satisfyingly lovely little
space that ever four walls enclosed. The sacred his-
tories cover every inch of it with form and color ; and
if it all remains in my memory a sensation of de-
light, rather than anything more definite, that is
perhaps a witness to the efficacy with which the
painter wrought. Serried ranks of seraphs, peacock-
plumed, and kneeling in prayer; garlands of roses

78 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 delicate fancif ulness of design,
— that is what I recall, with a conviction of the idle-
ness 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 Fam-
ine, no less than Peace, Plenty, and Hygienic Plumb-
ing,— if that was one of the antithetical personages.
Upon the whole, I think the seventeenth century was
more comfortable than the fifteenth, and that when
men had fairly got their passions and miseries imper-
sonalized 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 magnifi-
cence, 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 79

primitive fashion. The revival of learning had
brought them the consolation of much classical ex-
ample, 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 Roman 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 insufficient death, you
must wreak your frenzy upon a small passage opening
out of the present court. You enter this from the
modern liveliness of -the Via Cavour, — in every Italian
city since the unification there is a Via Cavour, a Via
Garibaldi, and a Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, — and you
ordinarily linger for a moment among the Etruscan
and Roman 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 tyrannicide, sharpens his im-
patience, while he turns aside into the street which no
longer exists, and mounts the phantom stairs to the
vanished 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

80 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 Per-
illus for his cruel invention for miserably tormenting
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 mon-
ster 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 abominable 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 mur-
dered 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 vio-
lences, not only in things profane but in sacred also,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 81

that it will be difficult to decide whether the tyrant
was more atrocious and impious, or the Florentine
people more patient and vile. . . . 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 killing 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 accomplished it otherwise, I should have done it.
. . . .That he was not of the house of Medici and my
kinsman is manifest, for he was born of a woman of
base condition, from Castelvecchi in the Romagna,
who lived in the house of the Duke Lorenzo [of Urbi-
no], and was employed 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 dwarf'
ish, 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
F

82 TUSCAN CITIES.

him, " It is the Duke ! " Scoronconcolo, who had
merely counted on an every-day murder, falters in dis-
may. 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 Lorenzino
bends over him with " Are you asleep, sir ? " and
drives his 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 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 murderer of his own mother, and the pol-
lution 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 83

republic again at once. Lorenzino, instead of being
assassinated in Venice, on bis 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 official employment
and made a good end. Yet the seven Mcdicean 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 prevails
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 Flor-
entines out to the flat and polished peacefulncss of
their modern effect. Of course, the commonwealth
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 in 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 affair of most men is mainly to be sheltered and
victualled and allowed to prosper and bring up their
families. 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 exper-

84 TUSCAN CITIEg.

ience this emotion, put out of his 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 other was
driven out of the city ; and that even within the tri-
umphant party every soul seemed corroded by envy
and distrust of every other. There is, to be sure, the
consoling reflection that the popular party was always
the most generous and liberal, 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
Michelangelo's, where his Night seems to have his
words of grief for the loss of liberty upon her lips : —

"'T is sweet to sleep, sweeter of stone to be,
And while endure this infamy and woe,

For me 't is happiness not to feel or see.
Do not awake me, therefore. Ah, speak lowl"

XXV.

THOSE words of Michelangelo'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 seldom condescended in sculpture. Even
the Day is too muscularly awakening and the Night
too anatomically sleeping for the spectator's perfect
loss of himself in the sculptor's thought ; but the fig-
ures are so famous that it is hard to reconcile one's

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 85

self to the fact that they do not celebrate the memory
of the greatest Medici. That Giuliano whom we see
in the chapel there is little known to history ; of that
Lorenzo, history chiefly remembers that he was the
father of Alessandro, whom we have seen slain, and
of Catherine 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 visiting any of
the in-door monuments of Florence. Santa Croce,
for example, is a temple whose rigors I should not like
to encounter again in January, especially if the day
be fine without. Then the sun streams in with a de-
ceitful warmth through the mellow blazon of the
windows, and the crone, with her scaldino 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 which art here, as everywhere,
renders death ridiculous, you have scarcely the cour-
age 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 them than if
they were so many boreal lights. 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 any-
thing at the poles ; so that the honest sufferer, who
feels himself taking cold in his bare head, would blush
for his absurdity in pretending to get any comfort or

86 TUSCAN CITIES.

joy from thorn, if all the available blood in his body
were not then concentrated in the tip of his nose.
For my part, I marvelled 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 in the open piazza
again, where the sun is so warm, — though not so
warm as it looks.

It suffices 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
temperament 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 meagerly
breakfasted and lunched than anything but destitution
with us, and protected 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 dressec1. I do not mean that the
average of fashion is so great as with us, but that the

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 87

average of raggedness is less. Venice, when I saw it
again, seemed in tatters, but, so far as I can remem-
ber, 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 Rome. 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 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 turn-
outs 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 gentleman, slim, tall, with an iron-gray mus-

88 TUSCAN CITIES.

tache, who, in folding Lis 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 win-
ter. 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-folks 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 impas-
sioned amiability, and their voices filled the place with
a leafy rustling which it must have known so often in
the old times, when the Florentines 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 peculiarly noble effect of
the piazza, as it rose before me from the gentle slope
of the Via Borgo dei Greci. I was coming back from
that visit 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 front, and at the big clumsy
Dante on his pedestal before it, when all my burden
suddenly lifted from me, as if nothing could resist

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 89

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 history of art is at his last extreme of insincerity,
weariness, and degradation, — the ridiculous and miser-
able 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 generous space of afternoon sky which the
piazza opened to the vision ; and my spirit rose as light
as the lion of the Republic, 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 nar-
row 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 an-
cient character. It is now the starting-point of a line
of omnibuses ; a rank of cabs surrounds 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 cafes of the neighborhood 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 Uffizzi, and, best of all, the great, bold,
irregular mass of the old palace itself, beautiful as
some rugged natural object is beautiful, and with the

90 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 vio-
lent crime and outbreak. And yet it is sacred, and
the scene is sacred, to all who hope for their kind ;
for there, in some sort, century after century, the pur-
pose of popular sovereignty — the rule of all by the
most — struggled to fulfill itself, purblindly, bloodily,
ruthlessly, but never ignobly, and inspired by an in-
stinct 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 demo-
cratic 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 afterward. 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 91

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 Uffizzi, thus
securing the eternal gratitude of the tourists who visit
these galleries, and have something to talk about at
the table d'hote. It was he who patronized Benvenuto
Cellini, and got him to make his Perseus in the Log-
gia de' Lanzi ; he built the fisherman's arcade in the
Mercato Vecchio, and the fine loggia of the Mercato
Nuovo ; he established the General Archives, and re-
formed the laws and the public employments ; he
created Leghorn, and throughout Tuscany, which his
arms had united under his rule, he promoted the ma-
terial welfare of his people, after the manner of tyrants
when they do not happen to be also fools.

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
neglect 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
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

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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, Garzia 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, hand-
some, 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 !

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 93

The son was that Francesco I. who is chiefly known
to fame as the lover and then the husband of Bianca
Cappello, — to so little may a sovereign prince come in
the crowded and busy mind of aftertime. 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 luxu-
rious 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 Sa-
vonarola's convent, in the tallest of the stupid, com-
monplace 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 Pa-
lazzo Mandragone is actually in sight; and the mar-
chioness 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 confusion, 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 neg-
lect ; and when Bianca' s husband, whom his honors
and good fortune have rendered intolerably insolent,

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is slain by one 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 distin-
guished 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 cele-
bration 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 the Cardinal Ferdinand, who was the true
heir to his brother, and would have none of his spu-
rious nephew ; and we see these three sitting down in
the villa at Pogrffio a Caiano to the famous tart which

OO

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 par-
take of. He politely refuses, being provided 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 begin," cries Francisco,
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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 95

grand duke died of the same malarial fever that carried
off his brothers Garzia and Giovanni, and Bianca per-
ished 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
remembers 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 Eleonora by her husband Pietro
de' Medici. The grand duke, who was then in the
midst of his intrigue with Bianca, was naturally jeal-
ous 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, how-
ever, there was something gross, Medicean, butcherly,
which all must deprecate. She knew she was to bo
killed, poor woman, as soon as her intrigue was dis-
covered to the grand duke; and one is not exactly
able to sympathize with either the curiosity or the
trepidation of that "celebrated Roman 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 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

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greater taste, with a sort of homicidal grace, a senti-
ment, if one may so speak, worthy a Roman 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 Rome for her
husband, and arrange her death with him. She, too,
like Eleonora, had her forebodings, when Paolo Orsini
asked her to their villa (it seems to have been the cus-
tom 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 iVcrezia, shall I go or shall I not go to
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 gentle-
man, knows how to be ns sweet as before, and without
once passing from caresses to violence, has that silken
cord about her neck —

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 97

Terrible stories, which I must try to excuse myself
for telling the thousandth time. At least I did not
invent them. They arc 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 by her
husband, both murders being done with the know-
ledge and approval of the reigning prince. Francesco
and Bianca his wife die of poison intended for Ferdi-
nand, or of poison given them by him. On these
facts throw the light of St. Bartholomew's day in
Paris, whither Catherine de' Medici, the cousin of
these homicides, had carried the methods and morals
of her family, and you begin to realize the Medici.

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 pro-
cess 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 prob-
lems. 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 seeiu to die out in process of
G

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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 ma-
terial, and, by his marriage with Catherine of Lor-
raine, bringing that good race to Florence, where it
afterward reigned so long in the affections of the peo-
ple. His son Cosimo II. was like him, but feebler, as
a copy always is, with a dominant desire to get the
sepulcher of our Lord away from the Turks to Flor-
ence, and long waging futile war to that end. In the
time of Ferdinand II., Tuscany, 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 harrass 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 wife who hated
him, and who 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 en-
joy 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,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 99

by the treaty of London, in 1718; and when Gian
Gastone died, in 1737, Francis II. of Lorraine became
Grand Duke of Tuscany.

XXVIII.

UNDER the later Medici the Florentines were draw-
ing 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 be-
came 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 aboli-
tion of the death penalty resulted not in more, but in
fewer crimes of violence ; yet the law continues to kill
murderers, even in Massachusetts.

He lived to see the outbreak of the French revolu-
tion, and his son, Ferdinand III., was driven out by
the forces of the Republic in 1796, after which Tus-
cany rapidly underwent the Napoleonic metamor-
phoses, and was republican under the Directory, regal
under Lodovico I., Bonaparte's king of Etruria, 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 Leopold II.
was driven out, to return the next year with the
Atistrians. 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 capi-

100 TUSCAN CITIES.

tal, and so remained till the French evacuated Rome
in 1871.

The time from the restoration of Ferdinand III. till
the first expulsion of Leopold II. must always be at-
tractive to the student of Italian civilization as the
period in which the milder Lorrainese traditions per-
mitted the germs of Italian literature to live in Flor-
ence, while everywhere else the native and foreign
despotisms sought diligently to destroy them, instinc-
tively knowing them to be the germs of Italian liberty
and nationality; but I 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 history, full of repose and
genial, beneficent growth. For twenty-five years, ap-
parently, 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," ac-
cording to Signor Bacciotti, by whose " Firenze
Illustrata" I would not thanklessly profit, " of restor-
ing Tuscany to her original happy state," — which, I
think, must have been prehistoric. " His first occu-
pation was to reform the laws, simplifying the civil
and mitigating the criminal ; and the volumes are ten
that contain 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 cor-
poral penalty but the loss of liberty. The amelioration
of the laws improved the public morals ; grave crimes,
after the . bolition of the cruel punishments, became
rare, and fOr three months at one period the prisons

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 101

of Tuscany remained empty. The hospitals that Leo-
pold founded, and the order and propriety in which
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 dis-
missed nearly all his soldiers ; he has destroyed the
fortifications of Pisa, whose maintenance was ex-
tremely 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, and opened superb
roads at his own cost, and founded hospitals. These
might be called, in Tuscany, the palaces of the grand
duke. I visited them, and found throughout cleanli-
ness, 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 com-
ing 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 dis-
tinction ; three days of the week are devoted to one

102 TUSCAN CITIES.

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, commerce and industry have be-
come the patrimony of the few : in Tuscany, all that
know how may do ; there is but one exclusive privi-
legC) — ability. Leopold has enriched the year with a
great number of work-days, which he took from idle-
ness 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 believes in God ; and what must be his satisfaction
when, before closing his eyes at night, before permit-
ting 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 lan-
guage of the illustrious stranger, whom I quote at
second hand, has not kept some terms which are
native to Signer Bacciotti rather than himself. But it
must be remembered that he was an eighteenth-cen-
tury Englishman, and perhaps expressed himself much
in this way. The picture he draws, if a little too
idyllic, too pastoral, too operatic, for our realization,
must still have been founded on fact, and I hope it is
at least as true as those which commemorate the
atrocities of the Medici. At any rate it is delightful,
and one may as probably derive the softness of the

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 103

modern Florentine morals and manners from the be-
nevolence 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 them-
selves the wink on seeing their faces in the glass, I am
willing to allow that kindly despot of a Leopold 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 child-
ren rather than his brothers still he wished them well
and did them all the good he knew how. After a
hundred years it must be admitted that we have made
a considerable advance beyond him — in theory.

XXIX.

WHAT society in Florence may now be like under-
neath its superficial 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 tiian true. A brilliant and accom-
plished 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 civil condition in meeting

104 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 re-
flection ; and I was not astonished to hear that the
sort of rich American girls who form the chase of
young Florentine noblemen show themselves indiffer-
ent 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, in their prey, and ask nothing but money.
This implies certain other facts, — certain compensa-
tions 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 gentlemen bore, with others, to the
excellent stuff of the peasants, whom he declared good
and honest, and full of simple, kindly force and up-
rightness. The citizen class, on the other hand, was
unenlightened and narrow-minded, and very selfish
towards those beneath it ; he believed that a peas-
ant, for example, who cast his lot in the city, would
encounter great Unfriendliness in it if he showed
the desire and the ability to rise above his original
station. Both from this observer, and from other for-
eigners 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 Gennan emperors remaining,
— the Ricasoli, Gherardeschi, and the Stufe; and a
title counts absolutely for nothing with the Italians.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 105

At the same time a Corsini was syndic of Florence ;
all the dead walls invited me to " vote for Peruzzi" in
the approaching election for deputy, and at the last
election a Ginori liad been chosen. It is very hard to
know about these things, and I am not saying my in-
formants were wrong; but it is right to oppose to
theirs the declaration of the intelligent and sympa-
thetic scholar with whom I took my walks about Flor-
ence, 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 im-
portant.

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 read-
ing Shakspeare in English, and — if I may say it —
" Venetian Life." I think some Americans had lent
him the latter classic. I did not learn 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 in any sort of
literature among the Florentines ; and I only mention
him in the hope of throwing some light upon the prob-
lem with which we are playing. He took me one
night to the Literary Club, of which he was a mem-
ber, and of which the Marchese Ricci is president ; and
I could not see that any presentation could have
availed me more than his with that nobleman or the
other nobleman who was secretary. The president

106 TUSCAN CITIES.

shook my hand in a friendly despair, perfectly evident,
of getting upon any common ground with me ; and the
secretary, after asking me if I knew Doctor Holmes,
had an amiable effect of being cast away upon the sea
of American literature. These gentlemen, as I under-
stood, came every week to the club, and assisted at
its entertainments, which were sometimes concerts,
sometimes 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 play-
ing on the piano, and at the end the president shook
hands with the performer. If there was anything of
the snobbishness that poisons such intercourse for our
race, I could not see it. May be snobbishness, like
gentlemanliness, 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
rieasure 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 sunshine, led up
from the street to the farm-house, where one wander-
ing roof covered house, stables, and offices with its
mellow expanse of brown tiles. A door opening flush
upon the lane admitted us to the picturesque interior^

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 107

which was divided into the quarters of the farmer and
his family, and the apartment which the owner oc-
cupied during the summer heat. This contained half
a dozen pleasant rooms, chief of which was the library,
overflowing with books representing 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 wore several sorts of vege-
tables in view, in the same sort of dreamy arrest. Be-
tween 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 wo returned

108 TUSCAN CITIES.

to the house, and explored the cow-stahles, where the
well-kept Italian kine between their stone walls were
much wanner 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 their 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 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.

XXXI.

ONE January afternoon I idled into the Baptistery,
to take my chance of seeing some little one made a
Christian, where so many babes, afterward memorable
for good and evil, had been baptised ; and, to be sure,
there was the conventional Italian infant of civil con-
dition 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 officiating 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,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 109

held a negligently tilted taper in the other. Then the
priest lifted the lid of the font in which many a re-
nowned 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 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 kneel-
ing devotees, balanced himself on the chapel-rail and
sat swinging his legs there, as if it had been a store-
box on a curb stone.

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

110 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 American, 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, unmo-
lested by the workmen, aud unawed either by the
function going on in a distant chapel or by the theat-
rical magnificence of the sculptures around them or
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 disheartened
almost out of existence in the streets is still fostered,
and an aged crone with a scaldino in her lap, a tat-

A FLORENTINE: MOSAIC. Ill

tered 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 in-
terests 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 remote altar, the tapers star-
ring the distant dusk ; the straggling tourists ; the sa-
cristan, eager, but not too persistent with his tale of
some special attraction, at one's elbow ; the worship-
pers, 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
deserted cloisters belonging to so many of the former.
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 photographed that
few have any surprise left in them ; one is sure that
one has seen them before ; but the cloisters are not
yet the prey of this sort of pre-acquaintance. Whether
the vaults and walls of the colonnades are beautifully

112 TUSCAN CITIES.

frescoed, like those of Sta. Maria Novella or Sta. An-
nunziata 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 effect in the cloister of Santa Annunziata,
when the belfry in the corner, 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 home-
ward to his hotel and its table d'hote ; and why we
cannot 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 corner of, say, Clarendon Street and Common-
wealth Avenue, where the new Brattle Street church
is, would be a great pleasure on one's way home in
the afternoon ; but still I should lack the final satisfac-
tion of dropping into the chapel of the 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 113

flaring torches through the streets of Florence, the
mediaeval tradition remains unbroken ; Italy is still
Italy. They knew better how to treat Death in the
Middle Ages than we do now, with our vain profana-
tion of flowers to his service, our loathsome dapper-
ness of " burial caskets," and dress-coat and white tie
for the dead. Those simple old Florentines, with
their street wars, their pestilences, their manifold de-
structive violences, felt instinctively that he, the inex-
orable, was not to be hidden or palliated, not to be
softened or prettified, or anywise 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 anresthesis 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 heav-
ily draped bier in their midst, supremely awe the
spectator, whose heart falters within him in the pres-
ence of that which alone is certain to be. I cannot
say they are so effective 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 be-
cause it was the festa of St. Sebastian.
H

114 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 any-
thing that has been promised to be done. The carni-
val came on scatteringly and reluctantly. A large sum
of money which had been raised for its celebration
was properly diverted to the relief of the sufferers 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-ar-
mor, 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
through the streets ; two or three carriages feebly at-
tempted 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 veylione 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 ro-
mances : the boxes filled with brilliantly dressed spec-
tators, drinking champagne; the floor covered with
maskers, gibbering in falseCto, dancing, capering, co-
quetting till daylight. This, more than any other
aspect of the carnival, seemed to give one the worth

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 115

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 tiling 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 regret 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 car-
nival was fostered by their tyrants to corrupt and
enervate them ; and I cannot wonder that their love of
Italy is wounded by it. They are trying to be men,
and the carnival is childish. I fancy that is the way
my friend felt about it.

XXXIII.

AFTER the churches, the Italians are most at home
in their theatres, and I went as often as I could to see
them there, preferably where they were giving the
Stenterello plays. Stenterello is the Florentine mask
or type who survives the older Italian comedy which
Goldoni destroyed ; and during carnival he appeared
in a great variety of characters at three different thea-
tres. He is always painted with wide purplish circles
round his eyes, with an effect of goggles, and a hare-
lip ; and his hair, caught into a queue behind, curls up
into a pigtail on his neck. With this face and this
wig he assumes any character the farce requires, and
becomes delicious in proportion to his grotesque unfit-

116 TUSCAN CITIES.

ness 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 mat-
tered 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 Umbrella-mender," or " Sten-
terello Quack Doctor" was one of the great and sim-
ple pleasures. He was an actor who united the
quaintness of Jefferson to the sweetness of Warren ;
in his wildest burlesque he was so true to nature in
every touch and accent, that I wanted to sit there and
spend my life in the innocent folly of enjoying him.
Apparently, 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 absurdity at
the Teatro Rossini, which was not otherwise a com-
fortable 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 remember " Stenterello White Slave in America"
and " Stenterello as Hamlet " among the attractions
offered. In fact, he runs through an indefinite num-
ber of dramas, as Brighella, Arlecchino, Pantalone,
Florindo, Rosaura, and the rest, appear and reappear
in the comedies of Goldoni while he is temporizing

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 117

with the old commedia (Tarte, where he is at his hest.
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 ori-
gin, generally Giacosa's. But it seemed to me that
there were now fewer Italian plays given than there
were twenty years ago ; and the opera season was al-
most as sliort and inclement as in Boston.

XXXIV.

I VISITED many places of amusements more popular
than the theatre, but I do not know that I can fitly
offer them all to the more polite and formal acquaint-
ance 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 gen-
tlemen shall I ask for example, to go with me to see a
dying Zouave in wax in a booth at the Mercato Vec-
chio, where there were other pathetic and monstrous
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 in perfecting, instead of
playing cards and mora. I followed him inside with
the crowd, chiefly soldiers, who were in such over-
whelming 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 platform before a most in-
tricate instrument, which combined in itself, as he

118 TUSCAN CITIES.

boasted, the qualities of all other kinds of instruments.
He shuffled off his shoes and played its pedals with
his bare feet, while he sounded its pipes with his
mouth, pounding a drum attachment with one hand
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. I enjoyed more a little vocal and acrobatic en-
tertainment, where again I found myself 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 performance. 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 together, screeching the
dialogue with which it was interspersed in the ear-
piercingest voices; it represented a lovers' quarrel,
and sounded very like some which I have heard on
the roof and the back 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 croco-
diles which I saw ,in a booth in our piazza classed
themselves with great moral shows, because of their
instructiveness. The water in which they lay soaking
was warmed for them, and the chill was taken off the
air by a sheet iron sto\e, so that, upon the whole,
these saurians had the n.ost comfortable quarters in
the whole shivering city. Although they had up a

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 119

sign, " Animal! pericolosi — non si toccano," nothing
was apparently farther from their thoughts than biting;
they lay blinking in supreme content, and allowed a
captain of horse to poke them with his finger through-
out 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 surviving ecclesiastical
shows peculiar to the city takes place. On that day
a great multitude, chiefly of peasants from the sur-
rounding country, assemble in front of the Duomo to
see the explosion of the Car of the Pazzi. This car
somehow celebrates the exploit of a crusading Pazzi,
who broke off a piece of the Holy Sepulchre and
brought it back to Florence with him ; I could not
learn just how or why, from tho very 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 harvest
for that year will be something remarkable. The car
is stationed midway between the Duomo and the Bap-
tistery, 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.

120 TUSCAN CITIES.

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
fiery dove came flying along the wire, showering sparks
on every side ; it rushed out to the car, and then fled
back to the altar, amidst a most satisfactory banging
of the fire-crackers. It was not a very awful spectacle,
and I suspect that my sarcastic phamphleteer's de-
scription was in the mood of most of the Florentines
looking on, whatever the peasants thought. " ' Now,
Nina,' says the priest to the dove, ' we're almost ready,
and lo'ok 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 ? Ready ! Are you
ready? Well, then, — Gloria in excelsis Deo, — go, go,
dear, and look out for your feathers ! Shhhhh ! pum,
pum ! Hurrah, little one ! Now for the return ! Here
you come ! Shhhhh ! 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 corner of the Pazzi palace, where the unexploded
remnants are fired in honor of the family."

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 121

XXXVI.

THE civil rite now constitutes the only legal mar-
riage in Italy, the blessing of the church going for
nothing without it before the law ; and I had a curios-
ity to see the ceremony which one may see any day
in the office of the syndic. The names of those in-
tending 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 peo-
ple, 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 old
gentleman, with a tricolor sash accenting his fat mid-
dle— 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, mechanical 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

122 TUSCAN CITIES.

we returned to the anteroom ; she borrowed her hus-
band's handkerchief, lightly blew her nose with it, and
tucked it back in his breast pocket

XXXVII.

IK pursuance of an intention of studying Florence
more seriously than anything here represents, I as-
sisted one morning at a session of the police court,
which I was willing to compare with the like tribunal
at home. I found myself in much the same sort of
crowd as frequents the police court here ; but upon
the whole the Florentine audience, though shabby,
was not so truculent-looking nor so dirty as the Bos-
ton one ; and my respectability was consoled when I
found myself shoulder to shoulder with an abbate in
it. The thing that chiefly struck me in the court
itself was the abundance 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 ceremoniously apparelled, in-
stead 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
exactly like those in the theatre. Like the ushers,
they wore black gowns 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 examined the wit-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 123

nesses, 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 of the witnesses was one
whom people near me called a yobbiiio (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. lie bore himself with dig-
nity, answering to the beautiful Florentine name of
Vanuccio Vanucci ; the judges first addressed him as
voi (you), but slipped insensibly into the more respect-
ful lei (lordship) before they were done with him. I
was too far off 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 probably more cutting and
stabbing in Boston ; as for shooting, it is almost un-
heard 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 sono 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 under-

124 TUSCAN CITIES.

fed and overworked, and doubtless they suffer from
the hard, smooth pavements of the city, which are so
delightful to drive on ; but as for the savage scourg-
ings, 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 Ricovero in Florence. This refuge
for pauperism was established by the first Napoleon,
and is formed of two old convents, which he sup-
pressed and joined together for the purpose. It has
now nearly eight hundred inmates, men, women, and
children ; and any one found begging in the streets is
sent there. The whole is under 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 volun-
tary, every week. The kitchen, with its shining cop-
pers, 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
abundance 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 gregariously
gossiping in the wards, or blinking vacantly in the

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 125

sunshine of the courts, was an enviable spectacle ;
and I should have liked to know what those old fel-
lows 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 nearly 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 large-
minded as her own. It is for the education of young
girls in book-keeping and those departments of com-
merce in which they can be useful to themselves and
others, and has a subsidy from the state of two-fifths
of its expenses ; the girls pay each ten francs a year
for their tuition, and the rest comes from private
sources. The person who had done- most to estab-

126 TUSCAN CITIES.

lish it was the lady in whose charge I found it,
and who was giving her time to it for nothing ; she
was the wife of a professor in the School of 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 devo-
tion to it consistent with all her domestic duties and
social pleasures : she had thoroughly philosophized it,
and enjoyed it practically as well as aesthetically. The
school occupies three rooms on the ground floor of an
old palace, whose rear windows look upon the Arno ;
and in these rooms are taught successively writing and
mathematics, the principals of book-keeping, and prac-
tical book-keeping, with English and French through-
out the three years' course. The teacher of penman-
ship was a professor in the Academy of Fine Arts, and
taught it in its principles ; in his 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 till 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 127

of discipline — I have forgotten what — were promptly
rebuked by Signora G , and her rebuke was re-
ceived 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 busi-
ness of the world ; and in giving me a letter to the
director of the Popular Schools in Florence, Signora

G told me something of what 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 indus-
trial 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 educated to the appreciation
of skill and beauty in these. To this end a number
of Florentine gentlemen united to establish the Popu-
lar Schools, where instruction is given free every
Sunday to any man or boy of any age who chooses to
wash his hands and face and come. Each of these
gentlemen pledges himself to teach personally in the
schools, or to pay for a teacher in his place ; there is
no aid from the state ; all is the wort of private be-
neficence, and no one receives pay for sen-ice in the
schools except the porter.

128 TUSCAN CITIES.

I found them in a vast old palace in the Via Pari-
one, 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 faculties
for the practice of the decorative arts, and any art in
which 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 to another, and witness the operation of the ad-
mirable 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, three 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 light. 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 efficient. There was a gymnasium, and the
pupils were taught the principles of hygiene ; there
was abundant scientific apparatus, and a free circulat-
ing library. There is no religious instruction, but in
one of the rooms a professor from the Studii Superior!
was lecturing on the Duties of a Citizen ; I heard him

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 129

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
asked. "Cleaning out eave-troughs." Some of the
rest tittered. " Why laugh ? " demanded the director
sternly. " It is an occupation, 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 re-
mained. Of these was a certain rosso (red-head),
whom the director called up. Afterwards he told me
that this rosso had a wild, romantic passion for Amer-
ica, whither he supremely desired to go, and that it
would be an inexpressible pleasure for him to have
seen me. I came away regretting that he could form
so little idea from my looks of what America was
really like.

In an old Medici palace, which was also once a con-
vent, at the Oltrarno end of the Trinita 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 in the
neighboring parish of S. Spirito. It was at noon, and,
in the natural reaction, they were chatting gaily ; and
I

180 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 up
stairs through their formidable ranks to the room of the
professor to whom I was accredited, and who 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 light, clean, airy rooms were empty of
students ; and he presently gave me in charge of the
directress, Signora Billi, who kindly led the way
through the whole establishment. Some Boston lady,
whom she had met in our educational 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 Amer-
ican school furniture, desks and seats. But there the
Americanism of the Normal School ended. The in-
struction 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 181

which the state, which educates them for nothing,
pays scantily enough, — two hundred ami fifty dollars
a year at most They were all neatly dressed, and
well-mannered, of course, from the oldest to the
youngest; the discipline is perfect, and the relation of
teachers and pupils, I understand, 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 intelli-
gence, 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. 1 should not have been much the

132 TUSCAN CITIES.

wiser for seeing them at their lessons, and I shall al-
ways be glad of that impression of hopeful, cheerful
young life which the 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 very well satisfied
with my century.

My content was in no wise impaired by the visit
which I made to the girls' public school in Via Monte-
bello. It corresponded, I suppose, to one of our
primary schools ; and here, as elsewhere, the teaching
was by dictation; the children had readers, but no
other text-books; these were in the hands of the
teachers alone. Again everything was very clean, very
orderly, very humane and kindly. The little ones
in the various rooms, called up at random, were won-
derfully proficient in reading, mathematics, grammar,
and geography ; one small person showed an intimacy
with 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
corning 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

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 133

the pictures in stone which glare at you from the win-
dows of the mosaicists on the Lungarno 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 ambitious
— a paper-weight; and now I am tempted to form a
border to this capocTopera, bizarre and irregular, such
as I have sometimes seen composed of the bits of
pietra viva left over from a larger work. They are
mere fragments of color, scraps and shreds of Flor-
ence, which I find still gleaming more or less dimly
in my note-books, and I have no notion of making any
ordered arrangement of them.

But I am sure that if I shall but speak of how the
sunshine lies in the Piazza of the Annunziata at noon-
day, falling on the feebly dribbling grotesques of the
fountain there, and on John of Bologna's equestrian
grand duke, and on that dear and ever lovely band of
babes by Luca della Robbia in the front of the Hos-
pital 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 eyes.

The beautiful pulpit of Donatello in San Lorenzo I
find associated in sensation with the effect, from the
old cloistered court of that church, of Brunelleschi's
dome and Giotto's tower showing in the pale evening
air above all the picturesque roofs between San Lo-
renzo and the cathedral ; and not remote from those
is my pleasure in the rich vulgarity and affluent bad

134 TUSCAN CITIES.

taste of the modern decoration of the Caffe del Parla-
mento, 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 remember, beloved brethren and sisters of
Florentine sojourn, the little windows beside the grand
portals of the palaces, the cantine, where you% could
buy a graceful wicker-covered flask of the prince's or
marquis's wine ? " Open from ten till four — till one
on holidays," they were lettered ; and in the Borgo
degli Albizzi I saw the Cantina Filicaja, though it had
no longer the old sigh for Italy upon its lips : —
" Deh, fossi tu men bella o almen piu 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 custodians, in the convent of San Marco,
who, while we were all fidgeting about, doing our Fra
Angel ico or our Savonarola, sat motionless in a patch
of sunshine and tranquilly gossippcd together in se-
nile falsetto. On the other hand, I never saw truer
grief, or more of it, in a custodian than the polite soul
displayed in the Bargello on whom we came so near

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 135

the hour of closing one day that he could show us al-
most nothing. I could sec 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 only
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 an-
other room, and of the compensation we had in get-
ting away from the Twelve (Useless) Labors of
Hercules by Rossi, and two or three particularly un-
pleasant muscular Abstractions of Michael Angelo.
It was in fact too dark to sec 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 Podesta of Florence had made
the Bargello his home, till the hist Medici had made
it his prison.

Of statues and of pictures I have spoken very little,
because it seems to me that others have spoken more
than enough. Yet 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 consciousness 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 conso-
lation forever, but which I will not vainly attempt to
impart to others. I will rather beg the reader when

186 TUSCAN CITIES.

he goes to Florence, to go for my sake, as well as his
own, to the Academy and look at the Spring of Botti-
celli as long and often as he can keep away from the
tender and dignified and exquisitely refined Mino da
Fiesole sculptures in the Badia, or wherever else he
may find them. These works he may enjoy without
technique, and simply upon condition of his being a
tolerably genuine human creature. 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 deli-
cious, 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 gentle-
man 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 Floren-
tine 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 stiffly waxed moustache and im-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 187

passive face, it looks rather like a mechanical contri-
vance in the human form ; and you are yielding to
this fancy, when, approaching a corner, it breaks into
a long cry, astonishingly harsh and fierce, to warn
people in the next street of its approach. It is a cu-
rious sight, and seems to belong to the time when rich
and privileged people used their pleasure to be eccen-
tric, and the " madness " of Englishmen especially was
the amazement and delight of the Continent. It is in
character with this that the poor old gentleman 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 impatience 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 Vecchio, I can imagine noth-
ing worse.

Journalism is very active in Florence, and newspa-
pers 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 corner had to fold up his cheap paper and put
it away before he could respond. They are of a vary-
ing quality. The " Nazione," which is serious and
political, is as solidly, if not so heavily, written as an
English journal ; the " Fanfulla della Domenica,"
which is literary, contains careful and brilliant reviews
of new books. The cheap papers are apt to be in-

138 TUSCAN CITIES.

flammatory in politics; if humorous, they are local
and somewhat unintelligible. 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 peri-
odicals, monthly, weekly, and daily, published in Flor-
ence, which you are continually assured is no longer
the literary center of Italy. It is true none of the
leaders of the new realistic movement in fiction are
Florentines by birth or residence ; the chief Italian
poet, Carducci, lives in Bologna, the famous traveler
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 in-
tellectual body of the Studii Superiori, or University
of Florence ; and thinking of such an able and delight-
ful historian as Villari, and such a thorough and inde-
fatigable man of letters as Gubernatis, whom the con-
genial intellectual atmosphere of Florence 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 famous 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 dream-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 189

ily raving of summer drouth over its dam, and stretch-
ing 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 tor-
rents from the hills, set it foaming; it rises momently,
and nothing 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 November 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 dashed by on blooded
horses (I will say blooded for the effect), and a fat

140 TUSCAN CITIES.

flower-girl urged her wares upon every one she could
overtake. It was enough to suggest what the Cascine
would be to Florence in the summer, and enough to
make one regret the winter, when one could 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 the range of it only
on Sundays, when the people throng it. But, unless
one is very greedy, it is none the less a pleasure for
that, with its charming, silly grottoes, its masses of
ivy-covered wall, its curtains of laurel-hedge, its black
spires of cypress and domes of pine, its weather-beat-
en marbles, its sad, unkempt lawns, its grotesque, over-
grown 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 en-
chanting, — 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 mediaeval towers, monumentally

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 141

abounding among the modern roofs that swelled above
their broken pride. The Florence that I saw was in-
deed 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
prosperity and fraternity, like that of Boston or Den-
ver.

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.

A MONTH out of our winter at Florence we gave tc
Siena, whither we went early in February. At that
time there were no more signs of spring in the land-
scape than there were in December, except for here and
there an almond-tree, which in the pale pink of its
thronging blossoms showed delicately as a lady's com-
plexion in the unfriendly air. The fields were in their
green arrest, but the trees were bare, and the yellow
river that wandered 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, some-
times 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 Judean back-
grounds. 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 dis-
tance there were villages cropping out of the hill-tops
and straggling a little way down the slopes. At times
we whirled by the ruins of a castle, and nearer Siena
we caught sight of two or three walled towns which
had come down from the Middle Ages apparently

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 143

with every turret in repair. Our course was south-
westward, but we were continually mounting into the
cold, thin air of the volcanic hill-country, at the sum-
mit of which the old Ghibelline 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 Venice.

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 monotony 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 title-page 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 center of
Tuscany. . . .Its climate is soft, temperate and whole-
some. The summer sojourn is very grateful there on
account of the elevated position and the sea breezes
that, with an agreeable constancy, prevail in that sea-
son. . . . The panorama 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 charac-
teristic 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

144 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 plains are everywhere
clothed with rich olive groves, festive orchards, luxuri-
ant vineyards, and delightful bosks of oak, of chest-
nut, and of walnut, which form the umbrageous
breathing-places of the enchanting landscape, and ren-
der the air pure and oxygenated." The native inhab-
itants 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 quickness 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
tfieir 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 awakens the ad-
miration 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 re-
ception of strangers are the hereditary, the proverbial
virtues of the Sienese. . . . The pride of the Sienese

PANFORTB DI 8IFNA. 145

character is equal to its hospitality ; and this does not
spring from roughness of manners and customs, but is
a noble pride, magnanimous, worthy of an enlightened
people with a self-derived dignity, and intensely at-
tached to its own liberty and independence. The Si-
enese, whom one historian has called the French of
Italy, arc ardent spirits, enthusiastic, resolute, ener-
getic, 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
imagination ; they are born artists ; laborious, affable,
affectionate, expansive; they are frank and loyal
friends, but impressionable, impetuous, fiery to exalta-
tion. 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 nature is their love of song, of the dance,
and of all gymnastic exercises. . . . Dante called the
Sienesc gente vana (a vain people). But we must re-
flect that the altissimo poeta was a Florentine, and
though a sublime genius, he was not able to emanci-
pate 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 Sicnese embody the facts of
our own character. But that touch disillusioned me :
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

146 TUSCAN CITIES.

that wondrous air, to bask in that light, to behold
that incomparable loveliness, to experience that pro-
verbial hospitality and that frank and loyal friendship,
to mingle in the song and dance and the gymnastic
exercises ; and nothing but the sober-minded delibera-
tion of the omnibus-train which was four hours in
going to Siena, prevented me from throwing myself
into the welcoming embrace of the cordial city at
once.

II.

I HAD not only time to reflect that perhaps Siena
distinguished between strangers arriving at her gates,
and did not bestow an indiscriminate hospitality, but
to wander back with the " New Guide" quite to
the dawn of her history, when Senio, the son of Re-
mus, flying from the wrath of his uncle Romulus,
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
much 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 mag-
istrate ; 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 suffered 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 Charier* agne, from whose counts and
barons, enriched by his gl*ts of Sienese lands and cas-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 147

ties, the Sienesc nobility trace tbeir descent These
foreign robbers, whose nests the Florentines went out
of their gates to destroy, in their neighborhood, vol-
untarily left their castles in the Sienesc territory, and
came into the city, which they united with the bishops
in embellishing 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 Im-
munities and privileges were granted by Caesar and
Peter, and at the close of the twelfth century a repub-
lican 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 com-
mercial life, Siena more than any other Italian city
was afflicted with municipal rivalries and intestine
discords. To-day the nobles triumphed and hurled
the commons from power ; to-morrow the people took
a bloody revenge and banished every patrician from
the city. Every change of administration was accom-
panied 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 em-
perors, and it is odd that one of her proudest victories
should have been won against Henry the son of Bar-
barossa. 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

148 TUSCAN CITIES.

and San Marco, and fell upon his Germans 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 politics favored, and the
Sienese were for theirs, which they believed the impe-
rial 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
Florence had her cruel revenge when her tyrant Cosi-
mo I. entered Siena at the head of the imperial forces
fifteen years later. The Florentines 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 1' Arbia colorata in rosso ; "
and in 1269 the Sienese were routed by their own
Guelph exiles and the Florentines at Colle di Val
d'Elsa.

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 Monta-
perto, you know," — as if it were of the year before,
and must still, after six hundred years, have been

PANPOKTE DI SIENA. 149

rankling in the Florentine mind. But perhaps in that
time it had become confused there with other injuries,
or perhaps the Florentines of 1800 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 magis-
tracy 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 infa-
mous corruption that they "succeeded in destroying
very generous sentiment, in sapping the noble pride
of character in the Sienese population, and if not in
extinguishing, at least in cooling, their ardent 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 astute-
ness 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

150 TUSCAN CITIES.

pleasing family was that Achille Petnicci who, in the
massacre of St. Bartholomew at Paris, cut the throat
of the great Protestant admiral, Coligny.

After them, the Sienese enjoyed a stormy and in-
termittent liberty 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, pro-
found dissimulator," but also the author of the " His-
tory of the war of Granada," and of one of the most
delightful books in the world, namely, " The Life of
Lazarillo de Tonnes," Spanish rogue and beggar, for
whose sake I freely forgive him on my part all his
sins against the Sienese ; especially as they presently
drove him and his Spaniards out of the city and de-
molished 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 plot-
ting 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 adultresses and assassins —
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

PANFORTB DI SIBVA. 151

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 or-
phan 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 pestilential marshes breathing fever and
death. The inhabitants of the city were reduced from
forty to six thousand ; seven hundred families pre-
ferred exile to slavery.

Charles V. gave Siena as a fief to his son, Phillip
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 Napoleon 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 Vic-
tor Emmanuel, — the only honest king known to his-
tory, says my " New Guide."

152 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 Emperor at Venice,
was a Sienese ; the meek, courageous St. Catherine,
daughter of a dyer, and the envoy of popes and
princes, was a Sienese ; 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 glo-
rious apostle," he cries bitterly, " who has been called
the father of modern rationalism, is cherished in Eng-
land, 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.
Rightly do the strangers who visit our city marvel at
neglect which denies him even a commemorative tab-
let in the house where he was born, — the Casa Soz-
zini, now Palazzo Malavolta, 21 Via Ricasoli." The
justness of this censure is not impugned by the fact
that the tablet has since been placed there ; perhaps it

PANFOBTE DI SIENA. 153

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 lan-
guages : —

" In the first Half of the 16th Century

Were born in this House

Lelio and Fausto Sozzini,

Scholars. Philosophers, Philanthropists.

Strenuous Champions of the Liberty 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 industrially and com-
mercially 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 within the walls; the
houses fell down, the streets vanished, and the plow

154 TUSCAN CITIES.

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,

O O "

two hundred years after the time of the great pest,
she counted only forty thousand souls within her
gates, and her silk and woolen 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 region of Fontebranda, and
envelopes the birthplace of St. Catherine in an 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 all that the " New Guide"
can boast, till he comes to speak of the ancient march-
pane 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 deco-
rative 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 specialty, wholly Sienese, enjoys, in the article
of sweetmeats, the primacy in Italy and beyond, and
forms one of the principal branches of our industry.

PANFORTB DI SIENA. 155

The panforte of Siena fears no competition or com-
parison, cither 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 de luxe with a frosting of sugar, adorned
with broideries, with laces, with 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 bag-
gage, of that quickness to anger and readiness to for-
give 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 grat-
itude for the impassioned spectacle they had afforded
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 like-
ness 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 prc-

156 TUSCAN CITIES.

cipitous slopes she belts her girdling wall. The streets
within wandor hither and thither at will ; in both they
are narrow and hemmed in with the gray fronts of
the stone houses ; without spreads a mighty valley,
— watered at Quebec by the confluent St. Lawrence
and St. Charles, and walled at the horizon with prime-
vally 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 differ-
ence of the North and South, the difference of the Old
World and the New.

I have always been a friend of the picturesqucness
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 Siena. This was anciently Piazza del Campo, but
now they call it Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, 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 that I failed
to traverse a Via Garibaldi I do not understand. It was
in the clearness that follows the twilight when, after
the sudden 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 157

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 height, looked sparely over the battlements of the
Palazzo Communale, from which the tower sprang,
upon the fronts of the beautiful old palaces whose
semi-circle encloses the grand space before it, and
touched with its silver the waters of the loveliest
fountain in the world whose statues and bas-reliefs
darkled above and around a silent pool. There were
shops in the basements of some of the palaces, and
there were lamps around the piazza, but there seemed
no one in it but ourselves, and no figure broke the
gentle slope in which the ground shelves from three
sides toward 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 peasant 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 dis-
use, and that the noble Gothic and Renaissance pal-
aces seemed half of them uninhabited. But there was
nothing dilapidated, nothing ruinous in the place ; it

158 TUSCAN CITIES.

had simply a forsaken look, which the feeble stir of
buying and selling at the market-booths scarcely af-
fected. 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 vol-
canic fires which are said once to have burned there.
These, indeed, still smoulder 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 forevermore.

VI.

WE waited at the hotel forty-eight hours for the
proverbially cordial 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 in-
volved the complicity of a valet de place ; a short, fat,
amiable man of no definite occupation ; a barber ; a
dealer in bricabrac ; a hunchbackling ; a mysterious
facchino ; and a were-wolf. I only know that all these
were actually the agents of our domiciliation, 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 the city, and no caricature of him could
givebifOfficient impression of his forlorn and anxious
little face, his livid silk hat, his tlireadbare coat, his
meagre body, and his evanescent legs. He was a ter-

PANFOBTE DI SIENA. 159

ribly pathetic 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 sealdino 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 per-
sistence and ferocity, but with a wolfishly characteris-
tic lack of intelligence. He had an awful face, poor
fellow, but I 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 unfur-
nished lodgings in spite of our repeated groans and
cries for furnished ones. From time 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 be-
side 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 out-
look. He hopefully laid hold of me, and walked me
off to one impossible apartment after another, — brick-
floored, scantily rugged, stoveless, husk-rnatressed,
mountain-be dsteaded, where we should have to find

160 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 com-
manded an enchanting panorama of the Sienese hills,
was provided with rather too much of the landscape
in-doors; and at another, which was cleanly and at-
tractive, two obdurate young Englishmen were occupy-
ing 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 shel-
ter. 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 reproac}- in our eyes, and, without giving
us time to speak, promised us a perfect apartment for
the morrow, and vanis/:cd round the first corner 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 161

he ran across the way to get the keys from a shoe-
maker. The shoemaker was at dinner, and his shop
was shut; and the barber having, with however great
regret, to go back to the customer left steeping in his
lather, we fell into the hands of the most sympathetic
of all bricabrac dealers, who sent us to the apartment
of a French lady, — an apartment with a northern
exposure as sunless as tireless, from which we re-
treated with the vague praises and promises of peo-
ple 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 fncchino 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 apartment 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
occupying an apartment on the same floor had cer-
tain others ; and with these and one more room which
we got in the pension below, we really sheltered our-
selves at last. It was not quite a realization of the
hereditary Sienese hospitality, but we paid almost
nothing for very comfortable quarters ; and I do not
see how a party of five could be better housed and fed
for twenty-five francs a day in the world.

We must have been almost the first lodgers whom
our good ecclesiastic and his niece had ever had, their
enterprise being so new ; the rooms were pretty and
fresh, and there was a comfortable stove in our little
parlor — a francklinetto which, three days out of four,
L

162 TUSCAN CITIES.

did not smoke — and a large 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 us a jewel (yiojello) 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 and his dog. As we stood looking at it, with
its stove in the comer, its carpet, its chest of drawers,
and its other splendors, the good Don A. holding his
three-beaked classic lamp up for us to sec better, and
his niece behind him lost in a passion of sympathy,
which continually escaped in tender Ohs and Ahs, we
sighed again, " Yes, if we could only have this, too !"
Don A. nodded his head and compressed his lips.
" It would be a big thing ! " (" Sarcbfo uii1 o/a rone /")
And then we all cast our eyes to heaven, 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 breathlessly together for a moment, and
then fled precipitately into our own rooms. We
parted for that night with many whispered vows of
esteem, and we returned in the morning to take pos-
session. It was in character with the whole affair
that on the way we should be met by the hunch-back-
ling, (whom I find described also in my notes as a
wry-necked lamb, probably from some forcible con-
trast which he presented to the were-wolf) with a
perfectly superb apartment, full of sun, in the Piazza
Vittorio Emmanuele, looking squarely upon the Pal-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 163

azzo Communale and the Tower of the Mangia. I
was forced to confess that I had engaged my rooms.

" A pity for you ! " cried the hunch backling, pas-
sionately.

" I have promised," I falter. " One must keep
one's promises, no ? "

" Oh, you are right, you are right," said the hunch-
backling, and vanished, and I never saw him more.
Had he really the apartment to which he pretended ?

vn.

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 sup-
pressed 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 bal-
anced 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

164 TUSCAN CITIES.

and happy at having filled all their rooms for a month,
that one could not help sharing 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 envel-
oped us in the manners of this good priest and his
niece. They did together the work of the apartment,
serving us without shame and without reluctance, yet
keeping a soft dignity withal that was very 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 rec-
ognition of the grace with which they adorned their
gentle poverty. They never intruded, but they were
always there, saluting our outgoing and incoming, and
watchful of our slightest wish. Often before we could
get our key into the outer door Maddalena had run to
open it, holding her lucerna above her head to light
us, and hailing us with a " Buona sera Loro! " (Good-
evening to them — our lordships, 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 presided
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 impenetrable an-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 165

tiquity and rushed in to help serve it; and to Angio-
lina, the housekeeper, who affected a sort of Yankee
old-maid's grurnpiness, but was as sweet of soul as
Maddalcna herself. More than once has that sympa-
thetic 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 descend 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 the old gardener
stirred, noiselessly turning up the earth. In the ut-
most 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 out-
side 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

166 TUSCAN CITIES.

of a garden. While I once stood at the open window
looking, brimful of content, tingling with it, a bugler
came up the road without the wall, and gayly, bravely
sounded a gallant fanfare, purely, as it seemed, for
love of it and pleasure in it.

I call our garden a garden, but it was mostly a suc-
cession of fields, planted with vegetables for the mar-
ket, 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 family to which the palace
belonged, came out upon the terrace from the first
floor with an elderly companion, and, loitering list-
lessly there a moment, descended the steps into the
garden to a stone basin where some serving-women
were washing. Her hah- 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, look-
ing after them.

vni.

-'-IESE gardens, or fields, of Siena occupy half the
space ^er walls enclose, and the olives everywhere
softly eii-hower the borders of the shrivelled and
shrunken ort city, which once must have plumply
filled their cii»uit with life. But it is five hundred
years since the g.-eat pest reduced her hundred thous-

TANFORTE DI SIENA. 167

and souls to fifteen thousand ; generation after gene-
ration the plow lias gone over the dead streets, and
the sjMule has l>een busy obliterating the decay, so
that now there is no sign of them where the arti-
ehokcs 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 Span-
iards failed, a gaunt ravine — deep, lonely, shadowy
— pushes itself up into the heart of the town. Once,
and once only, so old is the decay of Siena, I saw the
crumbling foundations of a house on a garden slope ;
but again and again the houses break away, and the
street which you have been following ceases in acre-
ages of vegetation. Sometimes the varied and cver-
picturesquely irregular ground has the effect of having
fallen away from the palaces; the rear of a line of
these, at one point, rested on massive arches, with
buttresses sprung fifty or seventy-five feet from the
lower level ; and on the lofty shoulders of the palaces,
here and there, was caught a bit of garden, and lifted
with its overhanging hedge high into the sun. There
are abundant evidences of that lost beauty and mag-
nificence of Siena — she has kept enough of both —
not only in the great thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
tury structures in the Via Cavour, the Via del Capi-

168 TUSCAN CITIES.

tano, and the neighborhood of the Palazzo Commun-
ale, 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 por-
tals and windows of noble palaces. These gave their
pathos to walks which were bcwildcringly abundant in
picturesqueness ; walks that took us down sharp de-
clivities dropping under successive arches between the
house-walls, and flashing out upon sunny prospects of
gardens; up steep thoroughfares climbing and crook-
ing 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 the city from
Porta Camollia to Porta Romana. Sharp turns every-
where bring your nose up against some incomparable
piece of architecture, or your eye upon some view
astonishingly vast, and smiling or austere, but always
enchanting.

The first night we found the Via Cavour full of
people, walking and talking together; and there was
always the effect of out-door liveliness in the ancient
town, which is partly to be accounted for by the pun-
gent strength of the good air. This stirs and sustains
one like the Swiss air, and when not in too rapid mo-
tion it is delicious. In March 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 next morning the sun
blazed out with that ironical smile which we know
here as well as in Italy, and Via Cavour was full of

PANFORTE DI 8IENA. 169

people lured forth by his sarcastic glitter, though the
wind blew pitilessly. " Marzo mattof" (Crazy
March !) said the shopman, with a sympathetic smile
and impressive shrug, to whom I complained of it;
and 1 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 impos-
sible to keep warm ; with his back planted well into
the fire-place blazing with the little logs of the coun-
try, 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 Lung-
arno at Florence — or the Pincio at Rome — or Piazza
Bra at Verona. Any of these places would do, and
yet they would all lack the strictly medieval charm
which belongs to Siena, and which perhaps you feel
most when you stand before the Tolomei Palace, with
its gray Gothic front, on the richly sculptured porch
of the Casino dei Nobili. At more than one point
the gaunt Roman wolf suckles her adoptive twins oq

170 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 free-
dom 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 prin-
cipal street ; it is only not so narrow 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 artificial level. It is planted
with pleasant little bosks and trim hedges, beyond
which lurk certain caffe and beer-houses, and it has
walks and a drive. On a Sunday afternoon of Feb-
ruary, 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 dis-
tilled music out of their instruments and shutting
them up, and on the drive there was but one equi-
page worthy of the name. Within this carriage sat a
little refined-looking boy, — delicate, pale, the expres-
sion of an effete aristocracy ; and beside him sat a very
stout, gray-moustached, 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 DI SIENA. 171

panforto and his son. A few young bucks, with fierce
trotting ponies in two-seated sulkies, hammered round
the tlrive; 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 wo-
men of less degree, pretty enough, well-dressed
enough, and radiantly smiling. In the center 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 gayetics of Siena, and
we wandered off to climb the bastions of the old Med-
icean fort — very bold with its shield and palle 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 cour-
age 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 dande-
lions in it, the landscape generally had a pathetic look
of winter weariness, when we drove out into the coun-
try beyond the wall.

It is this wall with the color of its red brick which
everywhere warms up the cold gray tone of Siena. It
is like no other city wall that I know, except that of
Pisa, and is not supported with glacis on the inside,
but rises sheer from the earth there as on the outside.

172 TUSCAN CITIES.

With its towers and noble gates it is beautiful always ;
and near the 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 Republic, the Palazzo
Communale, 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 governo (Tun solo,
which supplanted them, except in the one fact only
that they did not give continuous civil peace. The
crater of the extinct volcano before the Palazzo Com-
munale in Sieaa was always boiling with human pas-
sions, and for Tour hundred years it vomited up and
ingulphed innumerable governments and forms of
government, now aristocratic and now plebeian. From
those beautiful Gothic windows many a traitor has

PANFOETE DI SIENA. 173

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 Sicncsc citizen of our own
time, has made a luminous and interesting study of
the " Costumi Scncse " 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 brav-
est 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 difference be-
tween the American democracy and the mediaeval de-
mocracies, lie has read his I)e Tocqueville, and he
understands, as Mr. Matthew Arnold is beginning to
understand, that the secret of our political success is
in the easy and natural fit of our political 'government,
the looseness of our social organization ; and he shows
with attractive clearness how, in the Italian republics,
there was no conception of the popular initiative, ex-
cept in the matter of revolution, which was extra-con-
stitutional. The government once established, no
matter how democratic, how plebeian its origin, it
began at once to interfere with the personal affairs 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

174 TUSCAN CITIES.

of letter-paper ; costumed the different classes ; estab-
lished 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 gov-
ernment 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.

Besides this confinement at hard labor, they were
obliged to suffer from the shrieks of the culprits, who
were mutilated or puf. to death in the rear of the pal-
ace ; for in those days prison expenses were saved by
burning a witch or heretic, tearing out the tongue of

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 175

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 meanwhile 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 remoter quarter.

It is well enough for the tourist to give a thought
to these facts and conditions of the times that pro-
duced the beautiful architecture of the Palazzo Com-
munale 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 disturb the signory
at their meals, and thanked Heaven that I was of the
nineteenth century. The place is now flanked by an
immense modern prison, whose ample casements were
crowded with captives pressing to them for the sun ;
and in the distance there is a beautiful view of an in-
sane 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, inexpress-
ibly quaint and rich, from which certain faces and
certain looks remain with me yet. The pictures fig-

176 TUSCAN CITIES.

urc the great scenes of Sicnese 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 Alexan-
der III. with Barbarossa; there are allegories in which
her chief citizens appear. In one of these — I think
it is that representing " Good and Bad Government,"
painted by Lorenzetti in 1337 — there is a procession
of Sienesc figures and faces of the most curious real-
istic 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 halls, 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 rep-
resented 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 pon-
tiff ! 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 sunshiue of the piazza.

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 177

X.

A MONUMENT 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 public approval.
This and the beautiful Fonte Gaja — as beautiful in
its way as the tower — make the piazza a place to lin-
ger in and come back to at every chance. The foun-
tain was designed by Giacomo dclla Qucrcia, who was
known thereafter as Giacomo dclla 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 loveli-
ness by Tito Sarocchi, an admirable Sienese sculptor
of our day.

There are six fountains in all, in different quarters
of the city ; and of these, the finest are the two oldest,
— Fonte Branda of the twelfth century, and Fonte
Nuova of the fourteenth. Fonte Branda I will allow
to be the more famous, but never so beautiful as Fonte
Nuova. They are both as practicable now as when
they were built, and Fonte Nuova has a small house
atop of its arches, where people seem to live. The
arches are Gothic, and the delicate carved brick-work
of Siena decorates their sharp spring. Below, in the
M

178 TUSCAN CITIES.

bottom of the four-sided structure, is the clear pool
from whose affluent pipes the neighborhood comes to
draw its water (in buckets hammered from solid cop-
per into antique form), and in which women seem to
be always rinsing linen, or beating it with wooden
paddles in the Latin fashion.

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 balco-
nies and house-tops, but, from a multitude of galleries
and casements, sides 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
born and lived a child in this neighborhood, the good
Cont \da dell' 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 there-

PANPORTE DI 8IENA. 179

fore 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 Cath-
erine was first rapt in her beatific visions of our Lord,
conversing with him, and giving him her heart for his
in mystical espousals.

XL

FEW strangers in Siena fail to visit the house where
that great woman and saint, Catcrina Benincasa, was
born in 1347. She was one of a family of thirteen
or fourteen children, that blessed the union of Giaco-
mo and Lapa, who were indeed wcll-in-the-house as
their name is, being interpreted ; for with the father's
industry as a dyer, and the mother's thrift, they lived
not merely in decent poverty, but in sufficient ease ;
and it was not from a need of her work nor from any
want of piety in themselves that her parents at first
opposed her religious inclination, but because (as I
learn from the life of her written by tliat holy man,
G. B. Francesia), hearing on every side the praises of
her beauty and character, they hoped to make a splen-
did marriage 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,

180 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 she began her pen-
ances, 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 a
sisterhood, under the rule of St. Dominic, who were
then doing many good works in Siena. After that
our Lord began 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 miti-
gate their furies, and then trying to make peace be-
tween the Ghibellines of that city and the Guelphs of
Florence. She pacified many family feuds; multi-
tudes 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
pnd 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 stispi
cions of the Sienese, among whom question of her pa-
triotism 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 re-

PANFOETE DI SIENA. 181

move 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
tin-in and the Pope; in difficult 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 on her
face, she revived." She died in Rome in 1380; but
even after her death she continued to work miracles ;
and her head was brought amidst great public rejoic-
ing to her native city. A procession went out to re-
ceive 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 Scnese,
" was that Madonna Lapa, mother of our Seraphic
Compatriot, — who had many years before restored
her to life, and liberated her from the pains of hell,
— was led to the solemn encounter."

182 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 Roman 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 stupifying, 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 advan-
tage, 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 is 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

PANFOBTB DI SIENA. 183

her right foot is in the church of San Giovanni e Pa-
olo 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 (osso di giusta yrandezza); 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.

XII.

THE arched and pillared front of St. Catherine's
house 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 declivity that
no carriage could descend. It has been converted, up
stairs and down, into a number of chapels, and I sup-
pose that the ornate front dates from the ecclesiastic
rather than the domestic occupation. Of a human
home there are indeed few signs, or none, in the
house ; even the shop in which the old dyer, her fa-
ther, worked at his trade has been turned into a chapel
and enriched, like the rest, with gold and silver, gems
and precious marbles.

From the house we went to the church of St. Do-
mcnico, hard by, and followed St. Catherine's history
tlit-rc 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, but for

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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 lived, and 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
who up to that time had worn it. Here she remained
withdrawn from the world, listening to the divine ser-
vices of the church, and here continually 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 invisible garment
which forever after kept her from the cold. Here
once he gave her the Host himself, and her confessor,
missing it, was in great terror till she told him. Here
the Lord took his own heart from his breast and put
it into hers.

You may also see in this chapel, framed and covered
with a grating 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 185

her deeds and miracles, which in its kind is almost in-
comparably rich and beautiful. It is the painter's
most admirable and admired work, in which his ge-
nius 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 con-
science 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 ex-
traordinary political sagacity, and so great a power
among statesmen 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
confesses, " the germs of evil were planted so deeply
that it was beyond human power to uproot them."
But, nevertheless, " she rendered herself forever fa-
mous by her civic virtues," her active beneficence, her
perpetual striving for the good of others, all and
singly; and even so furious a free-thinker as the
author of my " New Guide to Siena" thinks that, set-
ting aside the marvels of legend, she has a right to
the reverence of posterity, the veneration of her fel-
low-citizens. " St. Catherine, an honor to humanity,

186 TUSCAN CITIES.

is also a literary 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 virgin 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, born of the people, meek child
of Giacomo the dyer, lifted herself to the summit of
religious and political grandeur. . . . With an over-
flowing eloquence and generous indignation she stig-
matised 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 pleas-
ure of seeing many of St. Catherine's letters in the
MS. in which they were dictated : she was not a schol-
ar 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 born 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 Francis-
can, and through the austerity of his life, the beauty
of his cha/acter, 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 187

Siena, no space was large enough for his audience ex-
cept 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
Beneficio di Cristo," was very famous in its time and
potent for reform 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 to have
been invented in the city which gave one of the love-
liest and sublimest saints to the Church. Let us not
forget, either, that brave archbishop 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 Galileo 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
Goose ; " 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 advan-
tage, as St. Mark's, for instance, and Notre Dame, and
Giotto's Tower, and the curve of the Arno at Pisa,
and Niagara, and the cathedral at Siena. I am not
sure that one lias not here more authority for holding

188 TUSCAN CITIES.

his peace than before any of the others. Let the
architecture go, then : the inexhaustible treasure of the
sculptured marbles, the ecstasy of Gothic invention,
the splendor of the mosaics, the quaintncss, the gro-
tesqueness, the magnificence of tlie design and the
detail. The photographs do well enough in sugges-
tion for such as have not seen the church, but these
will never have the full sense of it which only long
looking and coming again and again can impart. One
or two facts, however, may be imagined, and the read-
er 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 only partially realizes the vast design of its
founders, impresses one with 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 ! What a love of beauty must have exalted the
whole community !

The Sienese were at the height of their work on the
great cathedral when the great pestilence smote them,
and broke them forever, leaving them a feeble phan-
tom of their past glory and prosperity. " The infec-
tion," says Buonsignore, " spread not only from the
sick, but from everything they touched, and the terror
was such that selfish frenzy mounted to the wildest
excess; not only did neighbor abandon neighbor,

PANFORTB DI 8IENA. 189

friend forsake friend, but the wife her husband, par-
ents their children. In the general ft-ar, all noble and
endearing feelings were hushed. . . . Such was the
helplessness into which the inhabitants 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 the duty : their appeal was, ' Help to
carry this body to the grave, that when we die others
may bear us thither ! ' The proportion of the dead to
the sick was frightful ; out of every five seized by the
plague, scarcely one survived. Angelo di Tura tells
us that at Siena, in the months of May, June, July,
and August of the year 1348, the pest carried off
eighty thousand persons. ... A hundred noble fam-
ilies 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 pro-
motes grandeur. In Siena the region of Fonte Branda
was largely saved from the infection by the odor of
its tanneries. Other quarters, 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 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 pla.n was restricted to the dimensions which
we now behold. . . . And if the fancy contemplates
the grandeur of the original project, divining it from

190 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 perpet-
ual wars with its neighbors, and in the midst of in-
cessant 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 barbarous
buildings, one cannot but fancy to himself what mira-
cles 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
consumed on these Gothic cathedrals as would have
finished a greater variety of noble buildings than have
been raised either before or since that time." And
detiribing this wonderful cathedral of Siena in detail,
he says that " nothing in the world can make a pret-
tier 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. Addi-
son 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

PANFORTK DI SIENA. 101

am willing to make a little interest with it by admit-
ting that the Tuscan fashion of alternate courses of
black and white marble in architecture robs the in-
terior of the cathedral of all repose, and that nowhere
else docs 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 icono-
clasm, I should much rather smash the rococo apos-
tolic statues which Mr. Addison doubtless admired,
perching on their brackets at the base of the varie-
gated 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 de-
lightful detail. Shall I attempt to describe it ? Not
I ! Get photographs, get prints, dear reader, or go
see for yourself 1 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 imparting an idea of
the beauty, which words cannot, but to give some
notion of the wealth poured out upon this mere frag-
ment of what was meant to be the cathedral of Siena,
and to help the reader conceive 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

192 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 en-
graved pavement, and showed us the wonderful pulpit
and the rich chapels, and finally the library all frescoed
by Pinturicchio with scenes from the lives of the two
Sienese Piccolomini 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 Monta-
perto in 1260. "How," says my "New Guide,"
" how on earth, the stranger will ask, do we find here
in the house of God, who shed his blood for all man-
kind, here in the temple consecrated to Mary, mother
of every sweet affection, these two records of a terrible
carnage between brothers, sons of the same country ?
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 not
how to answer this 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."

PANPOBTE DI SIENA. 193

I make haste to say that I was not a stranger dis-
posed to perplex my "New Guide" with any such
question, and that nothing I saw in the cathedral gave
me so much satisfaction as these flag-poles. Ghibel-
line and Sienese as I had become as soon as I turned
my back on Guelphic Florence, I exulted in these tro-
phies of Montapcrto with a joy which nothing matched
except the pleasure I had in viewing the fur-lined can-
opy 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 cu-
rious museum of antique and mediaeval art called the
Opera del Duomo, especially the original sculptures
of the Fonte Gaia ; but the place is chiefly interesting
as the outline, the colossal sketch in sculptured mar-
ble, of the cathedral as it was projected. The present
structure rises amid the halting fragments of the me-
diaeval edifices, which it has included in itself, with-
out exceeding their extent ; and from the roof there is
an ineffable prospect of the city and the country,
from which 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, famed for his
eloquence, preach in the cathedral. An oblong can-
N

194 TUSCAN CITIES.

opy of coarse gray canvas had been stretched over-
head 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 be-
tween them was 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-altars,
where squads of worshippers were kneeling, indifferent
alike to one another and to the sermon of the monk.
Some of his listeners, however, wore a look of intense
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 govern-
ment has to contend, and impressed me anew with its
admirable patience and forbearance. Italy is unified,
but many interests, prejudices, and ambitions are
still at war within her unity.

XV.

ONE night we of the Pension T. made a sentimen-
tal 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 campanile, — a

PANFOETB DI SIENA. 195

campanile to make one almost forget the Tower of
Giotto. But before wo came away one corner of the
edifice had caught the light, and hung richly bathed,
tenderly ethercalized in it. What was gold, what was
marble before, seemed transmuted to the luminous
substance of the moonlight itself, and rested there like
some 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 dirnly 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 architec-
tural presence that I should have been surprised to
find that we had not stumbled upon an historic edi-
fice. 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 Popo-
lo for the head 'of such a democracy as Siena, whose
earliest government, according to Alessandro Sozzini,
was popular, after the Swiss fashion. Now the pal-
ace is the residence and property of the Grattanelli
family, who have restored and preserved it in tho
mediaeval 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 cer-
tainly a gentleman of enlightened taste, and of a due

196 TUSCAN CITIES.

sense of his Siena — keeps an apartment of the pal-
ace 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 prince's own
design ; and not fail of two or three ceilings frescoed
in dark colors, in dense, close designs and small pan-
els, after what seems a fashion peculiar to Siena.

Now that 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 provoca-
tion to penetrate interiors that I failed to do so.
They arc 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 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 remem-
ber only having got so far as the vestibule and stair-
case — lovely and grand they were, too — of one of
those noble Gothic palaces in Via Cavour; I was de-
terred from going farther by learning it was not the

PANFOBTB DI SIENA. 197

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
traveler through purgatory —

"Ricorditi dl me. cheson la Pia:
Siena ml fe, diafecemi 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
castk-; 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 " gi-
usto raotivo" 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 dedicated a mistaken sigh
to the poor lady who was only a Tolomei by mar-
riage.

There were several other ladies of Siena, in past
ages, who interested me. Such an one was the exem-
plary 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 espouse Leonora, Infanta of Portugal ; a col-

198 TUSCAN CITIES.

umn near Porta Camellia still commemorates the ex-
act 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 simply dressed ; but she
defended herself against their censure, affirming 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 gentle-
man 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 him turn
then to the Lady Battista Berti, wife of Achille Pe-
trucci, 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 Em-
peror to found a free public library, besought him to
have her exempted from the existing law which pro-
hibited the wearing of jewels and brocade dresses in
Siena. The careful Gigli would have us think that
by this reply Lady Battista lost all the credit which
her Latinity had won her ; but it appears to me that
both of these ladies knew very well what they were
about, and each in her own way perceived that the
Emperor 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 inquire into all the imaginable facts of these cases ;

PANFORTB DI SIENA. 199

and I commend them to the reader, whose fancy can-
not be so hard-worked as mine.

The great siege of Siena by the Florentines and
Imperialists in 1554-55 called forth high civic vir-
tues 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 women were so.
As soon as the people took the noble resolution of de-
fending their liberty, the ladies of the city of Siena
divided themselves into three companies : the first was
led by Lady Forteguerra, who was dressed in violet,
and all those who followed her likewise, having her
accoutrement in the fashion of a nymph, short and
showing 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 remem-
ber them. These three squadrons were Composed of
three thousand ladies, — gentlewomen or citizenesses.
Their arras were pickaxes, shovels, baskets, and fas-
cines, and thus equipped, they mustered and set to
work on the fortifications. Monsieur de Termes, who

200 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 afterward.
They had made a song in honor of France, and they
sang it in going to the fortifications. 1 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 is-
sued 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-gor-
get; 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 Cornelio 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 them-
selves so very much higher than the Borghesi of
Rome. She stopped fanning herself a moment while
some one spoke of them. " Oh, yes ; I have heard
that a branch of our family went to Rome. But I
know nothing about them."

What glimpse we caught of Sienese society was at

PANFORTB DI SIENA. 201

the theatre, — the lovely little theatre of the Accade-
mia 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 confessed their unpolished origin in their title ;
afterwards the Academies of the Wrapped-up, the
Twisted, and the Insipid (such was the fantastic hu-
mor 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 companies being admitted to
its stage. We saw there the Rossi company of Turin,
— the best players by all odds, after the great Flor-
entine Stenterello, whom I saw in Italy. Commenda-
tore 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 satisfaction 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 obstacle.

The theatre was always tilled, and between the acts

202 TUSCAN CITIES.

there was much drama in the boxes, where the gentle-
men 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 some-
thing of the people in the others. I 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 agreeable. Before the evening was out I had
imagined him in a dozen figures and characters ; and I
still feel that I came very near knowing a Sienese
count. Some English people, who became English
friends, in our pension, had letters which took them
into society, and they reported it very charming. In-
deed, I heard at Florence, from others who knew it
well, that it was pleasantly characterized by the num-
ber of cultivated people connected with the ancient
university of Sienna. Again, I heard that here, and
elsewhere in Italy, husbands neglect their wives, and
leave them dismal at home, while they go out to spend
their evenings at the clubs and caffes. Who knows ?
I will not even pretend to do so, though the tempta-
tion is great.

A curious phase of the social life in another direc-
tion appeared in the notice which I found posted one
day on the door of the church of San Cristoforo, in-
viting the poor girls of the parish to a competitive
examination for the wedding-portions to be supplied to
the most deserving from an ancient fund. They were

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 203

advised that they must appear on some Sunday during
Lent before the parish priest, with a petition certify-
ing to these facts : —

"I. Poverty.

"II. Good morals.

"III. Regular attendance at church.

" IV. Residence of six months In the parish.

" V. Age between 18 and 30 years.

" N. B. A Rirl who lias won a dower in this or any other parish
cannot compete."

XVI.

THE churches are very rich in paintings of the Sien-
ese school, and the gallery 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 period 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 con-
cerns the superior charm of the earlier frescos, espec-
ially in the Public Palace. In the churches the best
frescos are at San Domenico, where one sees the ex-
quisite chapel of St. Catherine painted by Sodoma,
which I have already mentioned. After these one
must reckon in interest the histories with which Pin-
turicchio 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 hor-

204 TUSCAN CITIES.

rific 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 san-
guinary of these slaughters is in the Church of the
Servi. 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 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 mer-
it. They are beautiful, however." I liked this church,
which was near our pension, because it seemed such a
purely little neighborhood affair ; 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 Osservanza, which was suppressed with the other
convents, but in which the piety of charitable people
still maintains fifty of the monks. We passed a com-

PANFORTE DI 8IBNA. 205

pany of them, young and old, on our way, bareheaded
and barefooted, as their use is, and looking very fit in
the landscape ; they saluted us politely, and overtak-
ing us in the porch of the church, rang up the sacris-
tan 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 Robbia there, — a Madonna and
St. Thomas, — which I would give much to see now.
When we had gone the round of the different 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 gen-
tlemen could come. We followed him through the
long, dreary galleries, yawning with hundreds of
empty cells, and a sense of the obsoleteness of the
whole affair 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 t ink Ir 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 pervading smell I feared that this vener-
able relic of the past was not well drained, — though I
do not know that in the religious ages they valued
plumbing greatly, anywhere.

206 TUSCAN CITIES.

XVII.

IN this and other drives about Siena the peculiar
character of the volcanic landscape made itself contin-
ually felt. There is a desolation in the treeless hills,
and a wildness and strangness in their forms, which I
can perhaps best suggest by repeating that they have
been constantly reproduced by the Tuscan painters in
their backgrounds, and that most Judean landscapes
in their pictures are faithful studies 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, how-
ever reluctantly, I should say that it must be poor.
Some of the hills look mere heaps of clay, such as
mighty geysers might have cast up until at last they
hid themselves under the accumulation ; and this
seems 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 had
no real interest in it, now, either as Florentines or Si-
enese, and contented ourselves with a look at the Ar-
bia, which the battle " colored red," but which has
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 land-
scape, in which, except for the cypresses about the
villas, no tree lifted its head. There were not even
olives ; even the vineyards had vanished. The fields
were green with well -started wheat, but of other hus-

PANFORTK DI 8IENA. 207

bandry 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 sun-
flowers. 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 por-
tioned his Italian lands, marking to this day a clear
distinction of race between the citizens and the con-
t.-nlini. 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. lie re again I was re-
minded 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 south-
ward, and back to the city through the Porta Romana ;
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 Flor-
ence. 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

208 TUSCAN CITIES.

it seems to have been as greatly beloved and as much
frequented, and there are villas and palaces every-
where, with signs of that personal eccentricity in the
architecture and inscriptions for which the 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 dec-
oration of the brick front, where heads of Turks and
Saracens are everywhere thrusting out of the frieze
and cornice. At Poggio Pini an inscription on the
porter's lodge declares : " Count Casti de' Vecchi, jeal-
ous conservator of the ornaments of the above-situated
villa Poggio Pini, his glory, his care, placed me guar-
dian 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 wasted 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, chestnuts, — 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 can-
non-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 Si-
enese, or by the Sienese after he took it, I cannot now

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 209

remember. I hope the reader will not mind this a
great deal, especially as I am able to offer him the
local etymology of the name Belcaro : bel because 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
wildncss ; 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 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 mediaeval castle, walled and fossed about, and
lifting its mighty walls 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
• lining-hall, painted by Peruzzi with the Judgment of
Paris. After we had admired 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 To at Mantua.
Beside it is the chapel in which he has indifferently
0

210 TUSCAN CITIES.

turned his hand, with the same brilliant facility, to the
illustration of holy writ and legend. It was a curious
civilization. Both lodge and chapel were extraordi-
narily 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 wan-
ing 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.

PITILESS PISA.

I.

As Pisa made no comment on the little changes she
may have observed in me since we had last met, nine-
teen 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 region of her palaces and
churches and bridges would believe. She has not, in-
deed, quite that breadth of orchards and gardens
within her walls 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 pave-
ment. All this made her perceptibly younger, even
with her memories running so far back of Roman
times, into twilights whither perhaps a less careful
modern historian than myself would not follow them.
But when I am in a town that has real claims to an-
tiquity, I like to allow them to the uttermost; and
with me it is not merely a duty, it is a pleasure, to

212 TUSCAN CITIES.

remind the reader that Pisa was founded by Pelops,
the grandson of Jove, and the son of Tantalus, king
of Phrygia. lie was the same who was slain by his
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, very tired
and hungry, and popped down and 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 Arno,
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 de-
claring 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 eas-
ily^ perceives that a sense of her antiquity might affect
an Ohio man, even after a residence in Boston. A
city founded by Pelops or Nestor could not be con-
verted to Christianity by a less person than St. Peter,
who, on hisv, way to Rome, was expressly wrecked on
the Pisan coasts for that purpose. Her faith, like her
origin, is as ancient 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

PITILESS PISA. 218

life of her own. Early in the Middle Ages she had,
with the arrogance of long-established consequence,
superciliously 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 com-
merce with the East, but wars; and in 1005 she fa-
mously beat back the Saracens from their conquests
in the northern Mediterranean, and, after a struggle of
eighteen 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 preoccupa-
tion 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 in-
dependence of the empire. It is supposed 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 afterward in the
intervals of their more important wars with the Geno-
ese by sea and the Florentines by land. There must
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 tedious, in which they
ravaged each other's territory, and I dare say I have
missed some. Once the Pisans captured Lucca and
sacked it, and once the Lucchese took Pisa and sacked
it ; the Pisans were Ghibellinc, and the Lucchese were

214 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 spir-
ited 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 Sara-
cens, and to beat the Greeks in sea-fights under the
walls of Constantinople. 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 Flor-
entines, whom she had despised so long.

Almost from the beginning of their rivalry, some
three or four hundred years before, the triumph of
Florence was a foregone conclusion. The serious his-
torians 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 chron-
iclers, cannot offer it less respect. The fact is, that
one day, at the time of the coronation of the Emperor
Frederick II. in Rome, the Florentine ambassador,
who was dining with a certain cardinal, either politely
or sincerely admired the cardinal's lapdog so much
that the cardinal could not help making him a present
of the dog, out of hand. The Florentine thought this
extremely 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 lapdog, the car-

PITILESS PISA. 215

dinal promptly bestowed it upon him in his turn ;
nothing could equal the openhandedness of that cardi-
nal in the matter of lapdogs. He seems to have for-
gotten his gift to the Pisan as readily as he had
forgotten his present to the Florentine ; or possibly he
thought that neither of them would have the ill man-
ners to take him in earnest; very likely it was the
custom to say to a guest who admired your dog, " He
is yours," and 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 afterward in Rome, and exchanged some nat-
ural jeers and taunts concerning the good cardinal's
gift, and came to blows about it. The Pisans were the
first to begin this quarrel, and all the Florentines in
Rome were furious. Oddo di Arrigo Fifanti, whom
the diligent reader of these pages will remember as
one of the Florentine gentlemen who helped cut the
throat of Buondelmonte on his wedding 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 suffer 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

216 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 re-
spectability 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 ap-
pearance of honorable reconciliation before their peo-
ple. 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, supported by
the Lucchese, defeated the Pisans with great slaughter,
and conquered a peace that left them masters of the
future. After 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 siege of eight
months, she was reduced by the Florentines. Her
women had fought together with her men in her de-
fence ; the people were starving, and the victors wept
at the misery they saw within the fallen city.

PITILESS PISA. 217

The Florentines had hoped to inherit the maritime
greatness of Pisa, but this perished with her ; there-
after 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 inter-
est for himself with Charles VIIL of France (who
seems to have invaded Italy rather for the verification
of one of Savonarola's prophesies than for any other
specific purpose), handed over Pisa with the other
Florentine fortresses to the French troops. AVhen
their commandant evacuated the place, he restored it
not to the Florentines but to the Pisans. The Flor-
entines 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 Pisan women fought side by side
with the men ; it is told of two sisters working upon
the fortifications, that when one was killed by a can-
non-shot the other threw her body into a gabion, cov-
ered it with earth, and went on with her work above
it. Before Pisa fell people had begun to drop dead
of famine in her streets, and the Florentines, afraid
that they would destroy the city in their despair, of-
fered them terms far beyond their hopes, after a war
of fifteen years.

II.

WHAT is odd in the history of Pisa is that it has
given but one name to common remembrance. Her

218 TUSCAN CITIES.

prosperity was early and great, and her people em-
ployed it in the cultivation of all the arts ; yet Andrea
and Nicolo Pisano are almost the only artists whose
fame is associated with that of their native city. She
was perpetually at war by sea and by land, yet her
admirals and generals are unknown to the world. Her
university is one of the oldest and most learned in
Italy, yet she produced no eminent scholars or poets,
and one hardly realizes that the great Galileo, who
came a century after the fall of his country, was not a
Florentine but a Pisan by birth ; he was actually of a
Florentine family settled in Pisa. When one thinks
of Florence, one thinks of Dante, of Giotto, of Cima-
bue, of Brunelleschi, of Michelangelo, of Savonarola,
and of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X., of Boccaccio
and Pulci and Politian, of Machiavelli, of Giovanni
delle Bande Nere and Gino Capponi, of Guido Caval-
canti, of Amerigo Vespucci, of Benvenuto Cellini, and
Masaccio and Botticelli, and all the rest. When one
thinks of Siena, one thinks of St. Catherine, and
Ochino, and Socinus, and the Piccolomini, and Ban-
dini, and Sodoma ; but when one thinks of Pisa, Ugo-
lino is the sole name that comes into one's mind. I
\ am not at all sure, however, that one ought to despise
Pisa for her lack of celebrities , I am rather of a con-
trary opinion. It is certain that such a force and
splendor as she was for five hundred years could have
been created only by a consensus of mighty wills,
and it seera.s to me that a very pretty case might be
made out in beiialf of the democracy whose level was
so high that no one head could be seen above it. Per-

PITILESS PI8A. 219

haps this is what we are coming to in our own civili-
zation, and I am disposed to take heart from the hero-
less history of Pisa when I look round over the vast
plain of our equality, where every one is as great as
every other.

1 wish, if this is the case, we might come finally to
anything as clean and restful and lovely as I found
Pisa on the day of my arrival; but of course that
would be much more difficult for a continent than for
a city, and probably our last state will not be so pleas-
ant. On 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 hi 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 Arno, in the midst of
the gardens that compassed her about within her walls.
I do not know what Pisa had to say to the other tour-
ists 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
Arno ! " and she indicated two or three empty bridges,

220 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 art-
ist 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 un-
der 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 inexpressible pathos and
bitterness, " I remember no century, since the fif-
teenth, 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 throats.

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 Arno,
whose mighty curve is followed on either side by lines
of magnificent palaces, and got our driver to carry us
out to the streets that dwindled into lanes beside the
gardens fenced in by the red brick city walls. At one
point a long stretch of the wall seemed trellised for
yellow roses which covered acres of it with their gold-
en multitude; but when we got down and walked
nearer, with the permission of the peasant whose field
we passed through, we found that they were lemons.
He said they grew" very well in that shelter and ex-

* The Magazine in which these sketches were first printed.

PITILESS PISA. 221

posure, and his kind old weather-beaten, friendly face
was almost the color of one. He bade us go any-
where we liked in his garden, and he invited us to
drink of the water of his well, which he 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 in-
to our carriage. We generalized from his behavior
a manly independence of character in the Pisan peo-
ple, 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 loveliness of the Pi-
sans. It may have been comparative, only, though I
am inclined to think it was positive. 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 coun-
try, 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 pic-
ture, which was of as few tones as a landscape of
Titian or Raphael, 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

222 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 summer fields, and this quivered be-
fore us like the confluent phantoms of multitudes,
indistinguishably vast, who had fallen there in imme-
morial 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 resist entering and speaking to the miller,
where, leaning upon a sack 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 TRT 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;

PITILESS PISA. 223

and if I had been less modern, less recent, less raw, I
should have been by just so much indifferent to the
antique charms 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 etching, — 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 impression
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 sycamore with their sewing ; and in a narrow
street running out of this was the house where Galileo
was born. 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. Ilis natal roof is
overlooked by a lofty gallery leading into Prince Cor-
si n i's garden ; and I wish I could have got inside of
that garden ; it must have been pleasanter than the
street in which Galileo was born, and which more

224 TUSCAN CITIES.

nearly approaches squalor in its condition than any
other street that I remember in Pisa. It had fallen
from no better state, and must always have witnessed
to the poverty of the decayed Florentine family from
which Galileo sprang.

I left the artist there — beginning an etching as
usual — and wandered back to our hotel ; for it was
then in the drowsy heart of the late afternoon, and I
believed that Pisa had done all that she could for me
in one day. But she had reserved a little surprise,
quaint and unimaginable enough, in a small chapel of
the Chiesa Evangelica Metodista Italiana, which she
suddenly showed me in a retired street I wandered
through. This Italian Evangelical Methodist 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 afterward that the Methodists of Pisa were in
that state of arrest which the whole Protestant move-
ment in Italy has fallen into, after its first vigorous
impulse. It has not lost ground, but it has not gained,
which is also a kind of loss. Apparently the Protes-
tant 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 unaccompanied by our one gravy.
It is said that our missionaries have unexpected diffi-
culties to encounter in preaching to the Italians, who
are not amused, as we should be, by a foreigner's blun-

PITILESS PISA. 225

ders in our language, but annoyed and revolted by in-
correct Italian from the pulpit. They have, moreover,
their intellectual pride in the matter: they believe that
if Protestantism 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 aston-
ishing to come upon an agricultural implement ware-
house — alongside of a shop glaring with alabaster
statuary — where the polite attendant offered me an
American pump as the very best thing of its kind that
I could use on my podere. When I explained that I
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 carried 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
P

226 TUSCAN CITIES.

that for one door one key was enough, and they would
not hear to the superiority of the American hotel sys-
tem of several keys, which I, flown with pride by the
lately acknowledged pre-eminence of American pumps,
boasted for their mortification. I leave the sympa-
thetic reader of forty-six 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 inevitable vigils. In the reading-
room there were plenty of old newspapers that one
could sleep over ; but there was not a lounge, not an
arm-chair. I pulled up one of the pitiless, straight-
backed 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 reg-
ister in which the different guests had inscribed their
names, their residences, their feelings, their opinions
of Pisa and of the Hotel Minerva.

" This," I said to my bitter heart, " will help a man
to sleep, standing upright."

But to my surprise I presently found myself inter-
ested in these predecessors of mine. They were, in
most unexpected number, South American, and there
were far more Spanish than English names from our
hemisphere, though I do not know why the South
Americans should not travel as well as we of the
Northern continent. There were, of course, Euro-
peans of all races and languages, conspicuous among
whom for their effusion and expausiveness were the
French. I should rather have thought the Germans
would be foremost in this sort, but these French brid-

PITILESS PISA. 227

al 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,
— ooe fancies her with her left arm thrown round
his neck while they bend over the book together, —
" Life .is a journey 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 satisfied with each other's company than
with the hotels they stop at ?

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 al-
most 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 yiardinetto for
desert, and a gardenette was all we had ; a little gar-
den that grew us only two* wizened pears, some dried
prunes, and two slices of Gruyere cheese, fitter for a
Parisian bridal pair than for us. If my memory
serves me right we had to go out to a caffe for our
after-dinner coffee.

228 TUSCAN CITIES.

At any rate we went out, and walked up to look at
the Arno 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 caffe —
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 im-
pression 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 per-
fect sincerity in which the early masters wrought, —
that no one could have painted those horrors of death
and torments of hell who had not thoroughly believed
in them. But this time I had my doubts, and I ques-
tioned if the painters of the Campo Santo might not

PITILESS PISA. 229

have worked with almost as little faith and reverence
as so many American humorists. Why should we
suppose that the men who painted the Vcrgognosa
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 employed them ?
It is bitter fun, I allow. The Death and the Hell of
Orgagna are atrocious — nothing less. A hideous
fancy, if not a grotesque, 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 portray-
ing 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 wild-
ing flowers and weeds, — the daisies that powdered
the sacred earth brought from the Holy Land in the

230 TUSCAN CITIES.

Pisan galleys of old, for the sweeter repose of those
laid away here to await 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 skillfully to evoke
it was no longer there, but a mere tyro intent upon
his half franc, with no real feeling for ululation as an
art. Guides and custodians of an unexampled rapac-
ity swarmed in and all about the Four Fabrics, 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 sol-
do. She had not the public spirit to refuse it; with-
out giving me time to correct the error, her hand closed
upon it like the 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 ma-
lign light upon the cathedral, which I found, after
that of Siena, not at all estimable. 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

PITILESS PISA. 281

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 pretend that I entered it ; but it
had a lovely facade 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 suppos-
ing Pisa shut within walls almost quadrangular, and
reposing on a level which expands to the borders of
the hills beyond Lucca, and drops softly with the Arno
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, to which we
have paid a devoir tempered by modern misgivings,
rises in aristocratic seclusion in the northwestern cor-
ner of the quadrangle, 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 reproduc-
tion in small alabaster copies, costs them something
of the sympathy of the sensitive spectator. He can-
not withhold his admiration of that grandeur, but his
soul turns to the Duomo in the busy heart of Florence,

232 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 region 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 re-
ligious 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 architec-
ture,— the perfect 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 avast 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 weak-
ened at the base by too zealous an application of hot
water to the outside of the mould. But I do not in-
sist upon this comparison ; I only say that I like the
ancient church of St. Paul by the Arno. Some ques-
tion 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 suf-
fered shortly after its completion.

One must nowadays seem to have some preference

PITILESS PISA. 233

in all aesthetic matters, but the time was when polite
tourists took things more easily. In the seventeenth
century, " Richard Lassels, Gent, who Traveled
through Italy five times as Tutor to several of the
English Nobility and Gentry," says of the Pisan Duo-
mo 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 Tedescha, 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 artifi-
cially 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 succinct-
ness, 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 seven-
teenth century could say of the Pisan Duomo that it
was " a neat structure," and of the Campo Santo that
it was " curiously painted," and there an end. Per-
haps 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

234 TUSCAN CITIES.

I myself found fall of unique attraction. Of these
knights he says : " They wear a Red 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 with-
out 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 exhortation to their Successors, to do,
and die bravely. In fine, these Knights may marry if
they will, and live in their own particular 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
anything 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 Genoa's, and then Venice's, and then the

PITILESS PISA. 235

Hanseatic Cities', and then Holland's, and then Eng-
land'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 im-
pression of the decay of Pisa.

VII.

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 corners of the edifice, in
which it is said the wicked Archbishop Ruggieri used
to put the heads of traitors. It may not be his pal-
ace, 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 recall it to his reader. I for my part shall not do
less than remind him that Ugolino was Captain of the
People and Podesta 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

236 TUSCAN CITIES.

arose, " If you want to see Pisa, go to Genoa." In
those days they had a short and easy way of account-
ing for disaster, which has been much practised since
down even to the date of our own civil war ; they attri-
buted 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 negotiotions 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 pur-
pose 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 be-
ing ancestrally Ghibelline ; for his name is one of the
three still surviving in Tuscany 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 bloodshed between them. " And what hap-
pened to Count Ugolino a little after," says the Flor-
entine 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 felicity, he
made himself a splendid birthday feast, where he had
his children and grandchildren and all his lineage,

PITILESS PISA. 237

kinsmen and kinswomen, with great pomp of apparel,
and ornament, 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, ' Because you
lack nothing but the wrath of God.' And surely the
wrath of God quickly fell upon him, as it pleased God,
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 en-
trammel Ugolino, and weaken the Guelphs, the Arch-
bishop 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 cas-
tles 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 Ugolino
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 degli Anziani,
caused the door of the tower to be locked and the keys
to be thrown into the Arno, and forbidding these cap-

238 TUSCAN CITIES.

tives all food, in a few days they perished of hanger.
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 un-
punished, as may be seen in after time."

A monograph on Ugolino by an English writer
states that the victims 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 Fran-
cesco. The grave was opened in the fourteenth cen-
tury, 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 Vannu-
chi. Of the prison where they suffered, no more
remains now than of the municipal eagles which the
Republic put to moult there, and from which 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

PITILESS PISA. 239

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' Arno,
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 residences with which he
left Italy swarming. The Shelleys lived first in a
villa, four miles off under 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 Arno in a boat he had contrived of
pitched canvas and lath. His companion in this peril-
ous navigation was that Mr. Williams with whom he
was afterward 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 Arno, 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 wreath-
ing 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

240 TUSCAN CITIES.

done with its river. But what quick and sensitive
allies of Nature the Italians have always shown them-
selves ! No suggestion of hers has been thrown away
on them ; they have made the most of her lavish kind-
ness, 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 begins, near a
spick-and span new iron bridge, is the mediaeval tower
of the galley prison, which we found exquisitely pic-
turesque 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.

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA.

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 over-
land ; that is, of driving fifteen miles across the coun-
try 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 im-
prudent, 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 by-standers, 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 Fab-
rics, and I advise the reader to get that view of them
if he can. To the backward glance of the journeyer
toward Lucca, they have the unity, the ensemble, the
want of which weakens their effect to proximity. Be-

Q

242 TUSCAN CITIES.

side us swept the great level to the blue-misted hills
on our right ; before us it stretched indefinitely. From
the grass, the larks were quivering up to the perfect
heaven, and the sympathy of Man with the tender and
lovely mood of Nature, was expressed in the presence
of 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 author 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
bargained 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 mis-
understood; 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 i]s by ! What gray chateaux ! What
old wayside towe .*s, hoary out of all remembrance !
What delightfull) stupid-looking little stony pictur-
esque 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 con-
stant features of the landscape from us so quickly ;
these we had time to peruse and imprint forever on

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 243

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 con-
tinuously from field to field. Everywhere the peas-
ants 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 I cannot think it put
on expressly for us.

Pisa seemed hardly 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 hostilites. The plain narrow-
ed 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 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.

LUCOA lies as flat as Pisa, but in shape it is as reg-
larly 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

244 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 bang-
ing 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 concen-
trated 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 cer-
tainly one of the less discovered of the Tuscan cities.
At the dinner table 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 off everything English but their speech. I
wondered a good deal who they could be ; they spoke
conservatively — the foreigners are always conserva-
tive 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 them-
selves 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 apologetic ; he says
that America is best, and he pretends that he is going

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 245

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 Eng-
lish 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 in-
terruption 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 or
Siena ; as long, in fact, as Venice, which she resem-
bled in an arbitrary change effected from a democratic
to an aristocratic constitution at the moment when the
change was necessary to her existence as an independ-
ent state. The duchy of Lucca created by the Congress
of Vienna, 1817, and assigned to the Bourbons of Par-
ma, 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 Napo-
leon's Austrian widow had meantime enjoyed a life
interest. In this brief period, however, the old re-
publican 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

246 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 persist-
ent 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 con-
ception of a beefsteak.

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
Roman antiquity which is hardly less formidable.
Here in A. u. 515 there was fixed a colony of two
thousand citizens; here in 698 the great Caesar met
with Pompey and Crassus, and settled who should rule
in Rome. After the Romans, she knew the Goths,
the Lombards, and the Franks ; then she had her own
tyrants, and in the twelfth century she began to have
her own consuls, the magistrates 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 Faggi-
uola, in 1314 ; and more than once she was sold. She
was sold for thirty-five thousand florins to two ambi-

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 247

tious and enterprising gentlemen, the Rossi brothers,
of Parma, who, 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 twen-
ty-two thousand florins, from whom his German gar-
rison 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 Luc-
chese suffered 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 servitude so cruel that the Luc-
chese 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 German a hundred thousand florins
for their liberty, which had been sold so many times
for far less money.

248 TUSCAN CITIBS.

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 government,
which in its democratic and oligarchic form continued
till 1799.

The noblest event of this long period was the mag-
nanimous attempt of the gonfaloniere, Francesco Bur-
lamacchi, who in 1546 dreamed of driving the Medici
from power and re-establishing the republic through-
out Tuscany. Burlamacchi was of an old patrician
family, but the love of freedom had been instilled in
him by his uncle, Filippo Burlamacchi, that Fra Pac-
ifico who wrote the first life of Savonarola and was
one of his most fervent disciples. The gonfalon iere's
plot was discovered ; and he was arrested by the timid
Lucchese Senate, which hastened to assure the fero-
cious Cosimo I. that they were guiltless of complicity.
The imperial commissioner came from Milan to pre-
side 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 an-
cient communal palace, appeals to all who love free-
dom 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 at-
tempt to save him ; but doubtless she would have tried
if she had dared. She was under the special protec-
tion of the emperors, having paid Maximilian and then

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 249

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 per-
secute the Protestants with the same cowardice that
she had shown in abandoning Burlamacchi.

It cost, indeed, no great effort to suppress the Prot-
estant congregation at Lucca. Peter Martyr, its
founder, had fled before, and was now a professor at
Strasburg, whence he wrote a letter of severe upbraid-
ing to the timorous flock who suffered themselves to
be frightened 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 some-
what upon the spirit of the Reformation to help him
in bis 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 Luc-
ca 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 succeeded
one another. She had always been called Lucca the
Industrious ; in her safe subordination, she now worked
and throve for two hundred and fifty years, till the
French republicans came and toppled 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 traveler
of that day.

250 TUSCAN CITIES.

" There is a notable active little Republic towards
the midst of Tuscany," he says, " called Lucca, which,
in regard 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 State why
he meddles not with her, because she is more benefi-
cial unto him now that she is free, and more industri-
ous 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 com-
odities 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 Mus-
kets in its arsenal, eight thousand Pikes, two thousand
Brest Pieces of Musket proof, and store of great Ar-
tillery. The whole State, for a need can arm eighteen
thousand 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 re-
public. An ignominious peace, timid, selfish, pru-
dent, was her condition from the time the aristocratic
change took place. For two centuries she was pre-
paring for that Bourbon despotism which characterized
her even physically to my fancy. " An absolute gov-
ernment," says my Lucchese guide-book, " but of

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 251

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 ac-
tivity 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
traversed in every direction by carriage roads; abun-
dance of the best water for use and beauty brought to
the city by a monumental work of art ; an ample high-
way across the Apennines, to communicate with
Modena and Lombardy ; bridges, ornamental and con-
venient, of stone and iron.''

III.

OF mediieval Lucca I have kept freshest the sense
of her Gothic church architecture, with its delicate
difference from that of Pisa, which it resembles and
excels. It is touched with the Lombardic and Byzan-
tine character, while keeping its own ; here are the pil-
lars resting on the backs of lions and leopards ; 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
hitter 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 founda-
tion of his 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, in the very heart of the town, opposite the

252 TUSCAN CITIES.

Palazzo Pretorio. This structure was dedicated to
the occupation of the Podesta of Lucca, in pursuance
of the republic's high-languaged decree, recognizing
the fact that " among the ornaments with which cities
embellish themselves, the greatest expenditure should
always be devoted to those where the deities are wor-
shipped, the magistracy 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 combined intellects of the two policemen,
whom we appealed to for information, could not as-
sign to it any other function than that of lottery office,
appointed by the late grand duke. The popular
intellect at Lucca is not very vivid, so far as we tested
it, and though willing, it is not quick. The caffetiera
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 ami-
able, and she had three pretty daughters in the bon-
bon department, 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 Luc-
chese 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 offer him our horn-

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 253

age, 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 tab-
leted to the memory of her celebrities, 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 learning 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.

" All there are barrators, except Bontura ;
No into yea for money there is changed,"

says Dante of this Lucca in which I find 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 po-
licemen 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 a Roman amphitheatre, built
bodily up into the modern city, and showing its
mighty ribs through the houses surrounding the mar-
ket place, — a market-place quaint beyond any other,

254 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 privilege 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 suspected 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 out-
done by any old lady of eighty, and I went up. The
trees were really rooted in little beds of earth up there,

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 255

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 Guanigi levelled
them. They were for the convenience of private war-
fare ; the custodian showed me a little chamber near
the top, where he pretended the garrison used to stay.
I enjoyed his statement as much as if it were a fact,
and I enjoyed still more the magnificent prospect of
the city and country from the towers ; the fertile plain
with the hills all round, and distant mountains snow-
crowned except to the south where the valley widened
toward Florence; the multitudinous roofs and bell-
towers of the city, which filled 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 pre-
tended, lives in another palace, and lets this in apart-
ments; you may have the finest for seventy -five
dollars a year, with privilege of sky-garden. I did
not think it dear, and I said so, though I did not visit
any of the interiors and do not know what state the
finest of them may be in.

We did, however, see one Lucchese palace through-
out ; the Palazzo Mansi, in which there is an admirable
gallery of Dutch pictures inherited by the late marquis
through a Dutch marriage made by one of his ances-
tors. The portrait of this lady, a gay, exuberant,
eighteenth-century blonde, ornaments the wall of one
of the gilded and tapestried rooms which form two

256 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 im-
pression of the pride and state in which life was lived
in the old days in Lucca. 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 aristoc-
racy, after it has ceased to be feudal and barbaric, and
become elegant and municipal. What laced coats and
bag-wigs, what hoops and feathers had not alighted
from gilt coaches and sedan-chairs in that silent
and empty court! I am glad to be plebeian and
American, 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 Ring in Lucca, a marquis,
and a Mansi?

PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FTESOLE.

IT was on the last day of March, after our return
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 prev-
alent tone, amid the tints of the peach and pear
blossoms. Dandelions thickly strewed the railroad-
sides ; the grass was powdered 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 began to troop over the white
roads to dinner, past villas frescoed with false balco-
nies and casements, and comfortable brownish-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
remembered how strange and beautiful they thought
it, and from time to time I started with recognition of
different objects — as if I had been one of that pair ;
so young, so simple-heartedly, greedily glad of all that
R

258 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 under the lowering sky, with a locked-up
cathedral, a bare baptistery, and a mediaeval 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 hungry, and they
could get no breakfast in the drowsy town, not even a
cup of coffee, but they did not mind that ; they wan-
dered about, famished but blest, and by one of the
happy accidents that usually befriended them, they
found their way up to the Piazza del Duomo and saw
the Communal Palace so thoroughly, in all its gothic
fulness and mediaeval richness of detail, that I seemed
never to have risen from the stone benching around
the interior of the court on which they sat to study
the escutcheons carven and painted on the walls. I
could swear that the bear on the arms of Pistoja was
the same that they saw and noted with the amuse-
ment which a bear in a checkered tabard must inspire
in ignorant minds ; though I 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.

We need not otherwise go deeply into the history
of Pistoja. We know already how one of her family

PI8TOJA, PRATO, AND FIE8OLE. 259

feuds introduced the factions of the Bianchi and Neri
in Florence, and finally caused the exile of Dante ;
and we may inoffensively remember that Catiline met
his defeat and death on her hills A. u. 691. She was
ruled more or less tumultuously, by princes, popes,
and people till the time of her great siege by the
Lucchese and Florentines and her own Guelph exiles
in 1305. Famine began to madden the besieged, 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 ex-
posing them to the sight of those they had gone out
to save from starvation. After the city fell the Flor-
entine and Lucchese leaders commanded such of the
wounded Pistojese as they found on the field to be
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 govern-
or, and men, women, children, priests, and monks
joined in driving him out After the heroic struggle
they re-estaUislifd their own republic, which presently
fell a prey to the feud of two of her families, in whose
private warfare she suffered almost as mm* h as from
her foreign enemies. Between them the Cancellieri
and the Panciatichi burned a thousand houses within

260 TUSCAN CITIES.

her walls, not counting those without, and the latter
had plotted to deliver over their country to the
Visconti of Milan, when the Florentines intervened
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 began to etch in the rain, the author be-
stirred himself to find the sacristan and get into the
cathedral. It was easy enough to find the sacristan,
but when he had been made to put his head out of the
fifth-story window he answered, with a want of enter-
prise and hospitality which I had never before met in
Italy, that the cathedral was always open at three
o'clock, and he would not come down to open it
sooner. At that time I revenged 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^en-
tury monument to the great lawyer and lover, Cino da
Pistoja, who is represented lecturing to Petrarch
among eight other of his pupils. The lady in the
group is the Selvaggia whom he immortalized in his
subtle and metaphysical verses; she was the daughter
of Filippo Vergiolesi, the leader of the Ghibellines in
Pistoja, and she died of hopeless love for Cino, when
the calamities of their country drove him into exile
at the time of the siege. He remains the most
tangible if not the greatest name of Pistoja ; he was

PI8TOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE, 261

the first of those who polished the Tuscan speech ; he
was a wonder of jurisprudence in his time, restoring
the Roman law and commenting nine books of the
Code; and the wayfarer, whether grammarian, attor-
ney, litterateur, or young lady may well look on his
monument with sympathy.

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 com-
monly wrought. The saint is seen visiting "The
Naked," " The Pilgrims," " The Sick," " The Impris-
oned," "The Dead," "The An Hungered," "The
Athirst ; " and between the tableaux are the figures of
"Faith," "Charity," "Uope," "Prudence," and "Jus-
tice." There is also " An Annunciation," " A Visit-
ation," " An Assumption ; " and in three circular re-
liefs, 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,
uniningled blues, reds, yellows, and greens, primary,
sincere, you have satisfying actuality of effect. I
believe the critics are not decided that these are the

262 TUSCAN CITIES.

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 at first, and then for every succeeding moment
it is delightful. Giovanni della Robbia and his broth-
er, 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 mentioned by Vasari,
and seems to have suifered neglect by all the earlier
connoisseurs. It was skillfully restored in 1826 by a
Pistojese architect, 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 Syd-
enham. 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 legend of the dry tree-
stump (ceppo) breaking into bud and leaf, to indicate
to the two good Pistojese of six hundred years ago
where to found the hospital this lovely frieze adorns.
Apparently, however, Pistoja does not 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 cathedral, and I have now to report an
equal indifference on the part of the owner of a beau-
tiful show-villa which a cab-man persuaded me to
drive some miles out of the town through the rain to
see. When we reached its gate, we were told that the
villa was closed; simply that — closed. But I was

PI8TOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 263

not wholly a loser, for in celebration of ray supposed
disappointment my driver dramatized a grief which
was as fine a theatrical spectacle as I have seen.

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 pret-
tily welcomed by the daughter of the sacristan, 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 Niccolo, 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 ex-
plained), nor the Slaughter of the Innocents, nor the
Crucifixion, nor the Judgment. These facts were as
strange to her as the marvelous 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 lec-
tured 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 pretense of astonishment
(which, being interpreted, is something like "The
idea ! ") ; and when I forced the coin into her unwill-
ing hand, she asked me to come again, when her fath-
er was at home.

264 TUSCAN CITIES.

Would I could ! There is no such pulpit in Amer-
ica, that I know of ; and even Pistoja, in the rain and
mud, nonchalant, unenterprising, is no bad place.

I had actually business there besides that of a scrib-
bling dilletante, and it took me, on behalf of a sculptor
who had some medallions casting, to the oldest of the
bronze founderies in Pistoja. An irregular group of
low roofs was enclosed in a hedge of myrtle, and I de-
scended through flowery garden-paths to the office,
where the master met me with the air of a host, in-
stead of that terrifying no-admittance-except-on-bus-
iness address, which I have encountered in my rare
visits to foundries in my own country. Nothing could
be more fascinating than the interior where the bronze
figures, groups, reliefs, stood about in every variety of
dimension and all stages of finish. When I confess-
ed my ignorance, with a candor which I shall not ex-
pect from the reader, of how the sculpturesque forms
to their last fragile and delicate detail were repro-
duced in metal, he explained that an exact copy was
first made in wax, which was painted with successive
coats of liquid mud, one dried upon another, tijl a
sufficient 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 days when our founderies 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 foundery in Pisa to
attain its idyllic setting. Patience !

PISTOJA, PRATO AND FIE8OLB. 265

II.

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 Pi-
azza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. I found it a
flat, dull, commonplace-looking town at first blush,
with one wild, huge, gaunt piazza, planted with strag-
gling sycamores, and banged all round by copper-
smiths, whose shops seemed to alternate with the sta-
bles occupying its arcades. Multitudinous hanks of
new-dyed yarn blew in the wind under 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 Roman
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 Prato. I
was told that business was but dull there since the
death of the English gentlemen, 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 old, sleek, fat monk, round-
est of the round dozen of brothers remaining 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 ad-
mired them without stint, and had a particular delight

266 TUSCAN CITIES..

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 : " Sempre scappa, ma e sempre la ! "
(Always running, but always there !) 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 sup-
press 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 con-
vert 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 Ra-
venna 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 II. invented, and they were march-
ing 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 began to burn and to kill,
to rob and to ravish.

" Five thousand persons," says a careful and tem-
perate history, " without resisting, without defending
themselves, without provocation, were inhumanly
slaughtered in cold blood ; neither age nor sex was

PI8TOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLB. 267

spared, nor sanctity respected ; every house, every
church, every convent was pillaged, devastated, and
brutally defiled. Only the cathedral, thanks to the
safeguard posted there by the Cardinal Legate Gio-
vanni de Medici, was spared, and this was filled with
women, gathered there to weep, to pray, to prepare
for death. For days the 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 population reached the number it
had attained before the siege."

At that time Prato had long been subject to Flor-
ence, but in its day Prato had also been a free and
independent republic, with its factions and family
feuds, like another. The greatest of its families were
the Guazziolitri, of Guelph politics, who aspired to its
sovereignty, but were driven out and all their property
confiscated. They had built for their palace and fort-
ress the beautiful old pile which now serves the town
for municipal uses, and where there is an interesting
little gallery, though one ought rather to visit it for
its own sake, and the stately image it keeps, in singu-
lar perfection, of a grandeur 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 be-
comes by a sojourn in Italy. Let me now explain
that it was only dull and commonplace in comparison
with other towns I had been seeing. If we had Prato
in America we might well visit it for inspiration from

268 TUSCAN CITIES.

its wealth of picturesqueness, of 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 inte-
rior even of these edifices such frescos as those of Lip-
po Lippi and Ghirlandajo in the cathedral at Prato ;
and as for the Delia Robbia over the door and the
pulpit of Donatello on the corner without, where they
show the Virgin's girdle on her holiday, what shall
one say ? We have not even a girdle of the Virgin !
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 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 dis-
tributions of the mail. His salary was fifty francs a
month, and he had a family.

PI8TOJA, PRATO, AN1> FIE80LB. 269

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

The steam-tramway consisted of two or three horse-
care coupled together, and drawn by the pony-engine
I was familiar with in our Piazza. This is a common
means of travel between all large 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
American horses are less capable of intellectual devel-
opment than the Italian.

III.

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 wore 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 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 Medici. Wherever
they are they are charming. The villa of Boccaccio
is now the Villa Palmieri; I still see it fenced with
cypresses, and its broad terrace peopled with weather-

270 TUSCAN CITIES.

beaten statutes, which at a distance I could not have
sworn were not the gay ladies and gentlemen 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, but 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 in-
habiting our bodies. For this uncomfortable doctrine
his poem, though never printed, was condemned by
the Inquisition — and justly. The Villa Medici, once
Villa Mozzi, and now called Villa Spence, after the
English gentleman who inhabits it, was the favorite
seat of Lorenzo before he placed himself at Villa Car-
reggi ; hither he resorted with his wits, his philoso-
phers, his concubines, buffoons, and scholars ; and
here it was that 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 de-
light 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 exquisite spring morning before the
first Etruscan emissaries met us with the straw fans
and parasols whose fabrication still employs their re-
mote antiquity. They were pretty children and young
girls, and they were preferable to the mediaeval beg-
gars who had swarmed upon us at the first town out-
side the Florentine limits, where the Pia Casa di Ri-

PI8TOJA, PRATO, AND FIE80LE. 271

covero could not reach them. From every point the
world-old town, fast seated on its rock, looked like a
fortress, inexpugnable and picturesque ; but it kept
m-itluT promise, for it yielded to us without a strug-
gle, and then was rather tame and commonplace —
commonplace and tame, of course, comparatively. It
is not everywhere that you have an impressive Etrus-
can wall ; a grass-grown Roman amphitheatre, lovely,
silent ; a museum stocked with classic relics and a cus-
todian with a private store of them for sale, not to
speak of a cathedral begun by the Florentines just af-
ter they destroyed Fiesole in 1000. Fiesole certainly
does not, however, invite one by its modern 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 Gaffe Aurora afforded
us, and the Fiesolans seemed a plain and simple folk ;
perhaps in one of them who was tipsy an image of
their classic corruptions survived.

The only excitement of the place we seemed to have
brought with us ; there had, indeed, been an election
some time before, and the dead walls — it seems odd
that all the walls in Fiesole should not be dead by this
time — were still placarded with appeals to the en-
lightened voters to cast their ballots for Peruzzi, can-
didate 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 beautiful monument of

272 TUSCAN CITIES.

Bishop Salutali by Mino 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 before !

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

But let me rather stand aside with the Fiesolans,
and leave it to the reader !

THE END.

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