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TUSCAN CITIES

BY

WILLIAM D. HOWELLS
AUTHOR OF "VENETIAN UFE," '* ITAUAN JOURNEYS," ETC.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
(£lie mtoemtK l^rtee, CamiinDoe

Copyright, 1884 and 1885,
Bt WILLIAM D. HOWELLS
All rights reserved.

PEEFACE.

The wish to see this book in the same size and
shape as Venetian Life and Italian Joumeys 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 inight 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
nnpictured text, than in the illustrated pages of the
former editions, that each of these studies offered to
the reader an historical view, however cursory, uf
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 wiU be spared his difficulty.

TUSCAN CITIES.

A FLORENTESTE MOSAIC.
L
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-wooUy 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,
cessive 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 moming 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
pages.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC,] 8
n.
It was quite three weeks before I began to keep
any record of impressions, and I cannot therefore fix
the date at which I pushed my search for them beyond
the limits of the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where
we were lodged. It is better to own up at once to
any sin which one is likely to be found out in, for
then one gains at least the credit of candor and 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 that is
by no means saying that there did not. There used,
under the early Medici and the late grand dukes, to
be chariot races in it, the goals of which are the two
obelisks by John of Bologna, set upon the backs of
bronze turtles, which the sympathetic observer will
fancy gasping under their weight at either end of the
irregular space ; and its wide floor is still unpaved, so
that it is a sop of mud in rainy weather, and a whirl
of dust in dry. At the end opposite the church is the
terminus of the steam tramway running to Prato, and
the small engine that drew the trains of two or three
horse-cars linked together was 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.

IIL
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 riiOEENTINE 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 space with the
air of peasants let loose amid the wonders of a city,
and smoking their long, straw-stemmed Italian cigars,
with their eyes all abroad. I do not think they kept
up so active a courtship with the nursemaids as the
soldiers in the London squares and parks, but 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 irumpet, 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 eome back in its revision. I should not
know how to give a just sense of the value of a man
who used to traverse the square with a wide wicker tray
on his head piled up with Chianti wine-flasks that looked
like a heap of great bubbles. I must trust him to the
reader's sympathy, together with the pensive donkeys
abounding there, who acquired no sort of spiritual
pride from the sense of splendid array, though their
fringed and tasselled harness blazed with burnished
brass. They appeared to be stationed in our piazza
while their peasant-owners went about the city on
their errands, and it may have been in an access of
homesickness too acute for repression that, with a 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. There
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 our subjection. After that we pretended once
that our 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 whicb

A FLORENTINE 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.

He was, like all of his calling with whom we had to
do in Florence, amiable and faithful, and he showed
that personal interest in us from the beginning which
is instant with most of them, and which found pretty
expression when I was sending home a child to the
hotel from a distance at nightfall. I was persistent
in getting the driver's number, and he divined the
cause of my anxiety.
" Oh, rest easy ! " he said, leaning down toward me
from his perch. " I, too, am a father ! "
Possibly a Boston hackman might have gone so far
as to teU 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 mu.st
come when it will not be shouldered aside by physical
and intellectual brutality. I hope it may come so
soon that the Italians will not have learned bad man
ners from the rest of us. As yet, they seem uncon
taminated, 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 not 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 stUl 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 pubhc
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
stander, 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 historj and art, that
made retum 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,
VL
It is trae 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 ©ther 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 northem heads,
this attribution of merit through mere belief to people
whose hves 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 me in 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,
VIII,
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 comes 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 vdbre 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 hurripd off
to the Ponte Vecchio. I 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 Aaterial, 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
facts, that is incomparably the best way of dealing
with the past. At home, in the closet, one may read
history, but one can realize it, as if it were something
personally experienced, only on the spot where 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 wUl 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 aU 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
aU? 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 tUted aU 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
d'un 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 Caffe Aurora, where the visitor
lunches at this day, and has an incomparable view of
Florence in the distance. When, in due time, the
proud citizens began to go out from their gates and
tumble their castles about the ears of the Germanic
counts and barons in the surrounding country, they
had my sympathy almost to the point of active co
operation ; though I doubt now if we did well to let
those hornets come into the town and build other
nests within the walls, where they continued nearly as
pestUent 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 mUes 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 G«ulph 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 finaUy 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 f uU 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 aU
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
the Medici for two hundred years, and then sleeping
under the Lorrainese for another century, to awake
in our own time the most polite, the most agreeable
of the Italians 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
inteUectual activity ; and that when the capital was
removed to Rome they accepted adversity almost with
iudifference, 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 he 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 ; one 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
mUliners, its dandies and tourists, and, ruggedly
massing up out of their midst, the mighty bulk of its
old Strozzi Palace, mediseval, 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 tbe 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 thc 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 paveraent 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. 23
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 Casciae 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 sweU 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 smaU 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 teU 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 aU 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 (droUy
parodied, by the way, in a structure of the same

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 25
street which is like a Strozzi Palace on tho 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 ci\-ic 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 famUies, 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 tUl
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 tho insult to his friend, probably
in terms that disabled the politeness of those who
laughed, for it is recorded that Oddo di Arrigo dei
Fifanti, " a proud and resolute man," became so 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 looldng out of the window, and possibly expect
ing the young man. She called to him, and when he
] lad alighted and come into the house she began to
mock him.
" Cheer up, young lover ! Your wedding-day is
ooming, and you wUl 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 1 " cried Monna Gualdrada. " As if
\ ou 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 MachiaveUi
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 tUl they were mar-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 29
ried. Then the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti,
and the Fifanti, and others who were outraged in their
cousinship or friendship by this treachery and insult
to Reparata, 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 aU 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 councU, and they agreed to kill
Buondelmonte 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 easUy
forgotten," they saUied 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 Lambertaocio Amidei, " and one of
the Gangolandi," ran up and cut his throat.

30 TUSCAN CITIES.
There arose a terrible tumult in the city, and ihe
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 ns, 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 th^ 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.
XIL
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 trath very different from the literary f actitiousness
which one is tempted to in foUowing 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 Lamberti, Monna Gualdrada,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 31
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
delmonti 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
SUk 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
famUy 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 faet, I do not believe it was
blue half a dozen days during the winter of 1882-^3.
The prevailing weather was gray, and down in the
passages about the bases of these mediaeval structures
ihe 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 caU 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, swoUen
by a vast number of English and American tourists,
wjbo 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, 33
> XHL
One of the furious Ghibelline 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 fiuttering 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
raan 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. 35
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 Borgognissanti so
smUing, 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 stem 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
Piazza 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 medisevalism 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 off 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 mo to No. 1 .
But No. 1 was a house so improbably genteel that I
had not tlie courage to ring ; and I asked thc grocer
alongside for a better direction. He did not know
how to give it, but he sent me 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 chureh. My
pull at the beU 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 com
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 manied. 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 continuaUy visited, the sacristan told me,
by all sorts of foreigners, English, French, Germans,
Spaniards, even Americans, but especiaUy 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 euch 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 visiting these scenes, one cannot but wonder at
the small compass in which the chief facts of Dante's

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 89
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 years
ago seems of yesterday, and one feels toward the Do
nati as if that troublesome family were one's own
contemporaries. The evU they brought on Dante was
not domestic only, but they and their party were the
cause of his exUe 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
raalicious, so tortuous, so perverse, as the series of
chances that ended in his banishment. Nothing could
apparently have been more remote from him, than that
quarrel of a Pistoja famUy, in which the children of
Messer Cancelliere'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 teU 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 ovra 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,
Dante is of the Bianchi party, which is that of the
liberals and patriots, and in this quality he goes to
Rome to 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
coraes bjick. 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
kUled him, seeing him already hurt to death. Dante
favors the latter version of his end, and sees him in
hell, tom 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 tumed against him

42 TUSCAN CITIES.
when Corso's lust of power threatened the liberties oi
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
witliout ascribing to Gemma more of his quaUty than
Piccarda's, one may readily perceive that the poet had
not married into a comfortable famUy,
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 natui-ally aboimds in them.
The Messer Capitani ai-e all dead, with their party,
and the hucksters aro no longer afraid,
XV,
For my part, I find it hard to be serious about the
tragedy of a people who eem, as one looks back at
them in their history, to .e 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 trivialty, 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 weU as to occurences. It looks very much,
at first glance, as if the Florentines had no peace from
the domination of the Romans to the domination of the
Medici. But in all that time they had been growing
in wealth, power, the arts and letters, and were con
stantly striving to realize in their state the ideal whioh
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 raler, and who had tried to make
himself their master by a series of cruel oppressions,
they stormed the Palazzo Vecchio, where he had taken

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 45
refuge, and demanded certain of his bloody minions ;
and when his soldiers thrust ono of these out among
them, they cut him into small pieces, and some toro
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
thc 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 wUl made itself known, the suffrage being
a thing as yet imperfectly understood and only sec-
ondarUy 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 Mth 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 kUled 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 recaUs
Lord Tolloller's appeal in Mr. Gilbert's opera of
" lolanthe : "— " Spurn not the nobly bom
With love affected,
Nor treat with virtuous scom
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 raled 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
govemment 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 faUed 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'
entiy foUowed, 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
unwiUingly, promoted the Tumult of the Ciompi and
the rule of the lowest classes, it is a long step to Ave-
rardo de' Medici, another popular leader in 1421 ; and
it is again another long step from him to Cosimo de'
Medici, who got himseK 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 unrivaUed 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 with a
growth of spindling grass and weeds, green the whole
year round. In front of me a vast, white old palace
springs seven stories into the sunshine, disreputably
shabby from basement to attic, but beautiful, with the
rags of a plebeian wash-day caught across it from 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 ; my
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 flrst houses ; and in the
narrow street opening Dut of this court stands the

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 49
little church which was then the famUy 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
L, 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
easUy 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 IH, 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
stiU 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
many-windowed walls of scorbutic brick and stucco.
These waUs 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 appeUation by whicli
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 , tranquUlity
and cahn 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 carnascialeschi),
of which he composed the first, and which were meant
to be sung in the masquerades of carnival, when the
youthful nobility, disguised to represent the Triumph
of Death, or a crew of demons, or some other caprice
of fancy, wandered through the city, filling it with
their riot. The reading of these songs will paint the
corruption of the 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 aU 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 prevaUed, 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 generosity
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 fnll 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," XVIIL
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 that among the principal famUies, 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 fiamed out in the conspiracy of the
Pazzi, adds the consecration of a desperate love of
liberty to the cathedral, hallowed by religion and
history, in which the tragedy was enacted. It was
always dramatizing itself there when I entered the
Duomo, whether in the hush and twilight of some
vacant hour, or in the flare of tapers and voices while
some high ceremonial filled the vast nave with its
glittering procession. But I think the ghosts pre
ferred the latter setting. To tell the truth, the Duo
mo at Florence is a temple to damp the spirit, dead
or aUve, by the immense impression of stony bareness,
or drab vacuity, which one receives from its interior,
unless it is fiUed 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,
und 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 aU the grandeur of the cathedral
outside, but you get enough, whUe 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 capabUities
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
faUed 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 wben 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 mediasval

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 tirae ? Malediction 1 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
oick. Two of us go for Giuliano to his house, and
being acquaintances of his, we laugh and joke farail
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 Bose
to invite us phantoms to a tum 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 littie 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 raixing 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 turabled 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 hira into the sacristy and barred the
doors, against which we shall beat ourselves in vain.
Fury ! Infaray ! 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 1 All is over 1 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
tirae 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 aU the world in that.
One should take the trouble also to keep constantly in
mind the smaUness 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 famUies 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 does not matter, since if you do
not come to the VUla Careggi when you go to look
for it, you corae to soraething else equally raeraorable,
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 hiU-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 gliraraer 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 clotho
themselves in skins.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 61
As to the interior of the vUla, everyone may go there
and observe its facts ; its vast, cold, dim saloons, its
floors of polished ceraent, 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 gloora, 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 BruneUeschi. 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 viUage, oUve 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 PoUtian, 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, flne or gross, and tumed 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 roora 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 Volterra, the theft of the public
dower of young girls, by which many were driven to
a wicked life, and the blood shed after the conspiracy
of the Pazzi. " He was greatly agitated, and 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 raust 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 hira 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 me the vividest event in Florentine history,
and VUlari has no need, for me at least, to suraraon
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
draraa, searching the depths of character on either
side, and on either side it was played with raatchless
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 tirae 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 chai-m 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 things — by the
menaces and mystery of Savonarola's prophesying,
and that I should have thought his crusade again.st
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 frora
the ideal. So far as we can understand, the popular
conception of Savonarola's doctrine was something as
gross as Army-of-Salvationisra, as wild and sensuous
as backwoods Wesleyisra, as fantastic, as spiritually
arrogant as primitive Quakerism, as bleak and grim as
militant Puritanisra. We must face these facts, and
the fact that Savonarola, though a Puritan, was no
Protestant at all, but the raost 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 1

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 65
• — Lorenzo knew the Florentines better than ho when
he turned his face away and died unshrivcn rather
than give them back their freedom. Then why, now
that they have both been dust for four hundred years,
— and in all things the change is such that if not a
new heaven there is a new earth since their day, — why
do we cling tenderly, devoutly, to the strange, frenzied
apostle of the Impossible, and turn, abhorring from
that gay, accomplished, charming, wise, and erudite
statesman who knew what men were so much better?
There is nothing of Savonarola now but the memory
of his purpose, nothing of Lorenzo but the 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-
nifico's t)Tanny, that the one wiUed 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 in 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 rauseum 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
nuraber of woraen, as beautiful as he could paint them,
in the frescos with which he has illurainated the long
line of cells. In one place he has left his own por
trait in a saintly company, looking on at an Annunci
ation : a very handsome youth, with an air expressive
of an artistic rather than a spiritual interest in the fact
represented, which indeed has the effect merely of a
polite interview. One looks at the frescos glimmering
through the dusk of the little rooms in hardly dis
cernible jjetail, with more or less care, according to

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 6T
one's real or attempted delight in them, and then
suddenly comes to the ceU 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 frora 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 !
StUl, 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 laraentable 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 aro
balked of their spectacle by that question between tho

68 TUSCAN CITIES,
Dominicans and the Franciscans about carrying the
host through the fiames ; 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
hira, 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
araong his friars beats in the skulls of his assaUants
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 off 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
hira to the question again, to the narrow cell high up
in the tower of the Old Palace, where, with the roofs
and towels of the cruel city he had so loved far below
him, and the purple hiUs misty against the snow-clad
raountains all round the horizon, he recovers sorae
thing of his peace of raind, and keeps his serenity of
Boul ; 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 hira between tho two monks who are
to suffer with hira ; and once more I stand among thc
pitiless multitude in the piazza. They make him taste
the agony of death twice in the death of his raonks ;
then he subraits his neck to the halter and the hang
man thrusts hira 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
rairacle 1 " The hangraan thinks to please the crowd
by playing the buffoon with the quivering forra ; a yell
of abhorrence breaks from thera, and he raakes haste
to descend and kindle the fire that it may reach Sa
vonarola while he is still alive. A wind rises and
blows the fiame away. The crowd shrinks back terri
fied : " A miracle 1 a miracle 1 " But the wind falls
again, and the bodies slowly burn, dropping a rain of
blood into the hissing erabers. The heat raoving the
right hand of Savonarola, he seeras 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 torabs below, and raade my feet
so very cold, were raore eloquent of immortality in
that place.
XXL
Onb 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 ^'ia Guicciardini and the Piazza
Pitti, with old canvases, and carvings, and bronzes in
their windows ; and though a little past the tirae 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 rauch 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 fiung 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 raaternal 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 astronoraer there, and a por
trait of the astronomer is painted on the stucco ; there
is a fruiterer underneath, and there are a great many
chUdren playing about, and their mothers screaming

72 , TUSCAN CITIES,
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 wUl 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 flnd 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
corapany 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 Vallorabrosa, lustrous
along the horizon ; but the reader ought to understand.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 78
XXIL
I WAS instnicted by the friend in whose tutelage I
was pursuing with so much passion my search for his
torical looalities that I had better not give rayself quite
away to either the associations or the landscapes at
Porta San Giorgio, but wait tUl 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, alraost as far as it
could reach. We went out of the faraous Porta
Romana, by which so much history enters and issues
that if the customs officers there were not the most
circuraspect of men, they could never get round
among the peasants' carts to tax their wine and oil
without trampUng 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 adomed 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 soU
that looks so red and poor, and seems to ffll the air.
In no other space, it seeras to me, do the great events
stand so dense as in that city and the circuit of its
hUls ; 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 incoramoded by it ;
and that moming, 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 hiUs 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 frora time to time,
and while he was trying to catch a faded phrase, and
going back and correcting hiraself, and saying, " No
— yes — no ! That's it — no ! Hold on — I have it ! "
as people do in repeating poetry, my embattled fancy
was fiying about over all the historic scene, sallying,
repulsing, defeating, succumbing; joining in the fa
mous camisada 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 baU
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 aU 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 tourLst 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 witlun, the church is what all the
guide-books know, but what I own 1 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 modem ItaHans 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 sweUed 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 tirae the seige was
over, and after a resistance of fifteen raonths 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 stUl
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 Alessandro, They brought him
back, of course, in prompt and explicit violation of
their sacred word ; and it seemed to me that I could
not wait for his cousin Lorenzino to kill him, — such is
the ferocity of the mUdest tourist in the presence of
occasions sufficiently reraote. But surely if ever a
raan merited raurder it was that brutal despot, whose
tyrannies and excesses had something almost delir
iously insolent in them, and who, crime for crime,
seeras 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 buUding, and now some branch of the munici
pal govemment has its meetings and offices there ; but
what the stranger coraraonly 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 efflcacy 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 fiuttering through the
dim, mellow atmosphere, the whole set dense and
close in an opulent yet delicate fancifulness 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 imraeasurable 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 seeralier 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. Tho revival of learning had
brought them the consolation of rauch classical ex
araple, 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 caUs 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 forraerly 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
modem 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 Unger 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 raounts 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 torraenting
and destroying raen 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 raost 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 raur
dered in exile, and so many beheaded without trial and
without cause, and only for empty suspicion, aud 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 raany 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 FK>rentine
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 accoraplished 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 woraan of
base condition, from Castelvecchi in the Romagna,
who Uved 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
inbom cruelty and ferocity, caused his mother to be
kUled 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, thc
most dramatic moraent occurs. He stops the bold
ruffian whora he has got to do him the pleasure of a
certain unspecified homicide, in requital of the good
tura 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
hira, 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 rauch 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 coraforted by the justice done on an execrable
wretch, the raurderer of his own raother, 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 fflled 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 his way to see a lady, by
the emissaries of the Medici, would have satisfied
public decorum by going through the form of a trial,
and would then have accepted some official employment
and raade a good end. Yet the seven Medicean dukes
who followed Alessandro were so variously bad for the
most part that it seems irapious to regard them as part
of the design of Providence. How, then, did they
corae to be ? Is it possible that soraetiraes evil prevails
by its superior force in the universe ? We raust 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 peacefulness of
their modem 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 aUow that it was more impossible.
People are not put in the world merely to love their
countiy ; they must have peace. True freedom is
only a means to peace ; and if such freedom as they
have wUl 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 magnaniraous few ;
the affair of raost 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 CITIES.
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
improveraent on the oppression of one. With this
thought kept before you vividly, and with those facts
blinked, you may go, for exaraple, 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 low!"
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 anatoraically sleeping for the spectator's perfect
loss of hiraself 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 tho
father of Alessandro, whora we have seen slain, and
of Catherine de' Medici. Some people raay 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 exaraple, is a temple whose rigors I should not like
to encounter again in January, especially if the day
be fine without. Then the sun strearas in with a de
ceitful warrath through the raeUow 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
aU an iUusion. By the tirae you have gone the
round of the strutting and raincing allegories, and the
porapous 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 thera 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 frora us, raorally, 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 frora them, if all the avaUable 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 ray 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 conteraporary. It is well, if possible, to
have sorae one with you to look at the book, and see
what the works are and the authors. But nothing of
it is coraparable 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
temperaraent coraes 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 raore raeagerly
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 dressed. 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, seeraed 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 civUization, and I know no more than that
it is said (as it has been said ever since the first
northem 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 his long fur-lined overcoat
loosely about him as he walked, had a gratifying
effect of being an ancestral portrait of himself ; and
with all persons and classes content to come short of
recent fashion, fur is the most popular wear for win
ter. Each has it in such raeasure as he may ; and one
day in the Piazza della Signoria, when there was for
some reason an asserablage 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 amiabUity, 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 rae 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 rauch 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
Cosirao's equestrian statue ; the lottery is drawn on
the platforra in front of the palace ; second-rate shops
of aU sorts face it frora two sides, and the restaurants
and caf^s 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 syraraetrical 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 raartyred
before it ; the wild passions of the huraan 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 sorae sort, century after century, the pur
pose of popular sovereignty — ^the rule of all by the
raost — struggled to fulfill itself, purblindly, bloodUy,
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 raan he was frora 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 chiefiy 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
CeUini, and got hira to raake 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 proraoted 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 inforraed 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 adom it with that terrible face of his on
many busts and statues. Its ferocity, as Benvenuto
CeUini has frankly recorded it, and as it betrays itself

92 TUSCAN CITIES.
in all the effigies, is soraething 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 Cosirao's favorite, and,
like a Medici, he had killed his brother ; but he was a
boy, and when his father carae to Pisa to find him,
where he had taken refuge with his mother, he threw
hiraself at Cosirao'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, sorae that she starved
herself ; in a week she died, and was carried with her
two children to Florence, where it was presently raade
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 Cosirao with preraature 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 hira of
speech and motion, but left him able to think and to
reraeraber !

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 yonth, 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 taUest 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 NoveUa, from whence the Pa
lazzo Mandragone is actuaUy 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 wiU 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,

94 TUSCAN CITIES.
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 thera trying to palm off a supjiosititious
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 Poggio a Caiano to the famous tart which
Bianca, remembering the skill of her flrst married
days, has raade 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 adrairable convenience at that time in Italy,
set with a stone that tumed 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 hira — 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 aU must deprecate. She knew she was to be
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 corae
to him at his villa, she took leave of her chUd as for
the last time, and Pietro met her in the dark of their
thamber and plunged his dagger into her breast.
The affair of IsabeUa Orsini was managed with much

96 TUSCAN CITIES.
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 Lucrezia, 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 as 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 raust try to excuse myself
for telling the thousandth tirae. At least I did not
invent them. They ai'e 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 havo
been under the first and second grand dukes. Cosimo
is believed to have kiUed 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 intfinded for Ferdi
nand, or of poison given them by hira. 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 reaUze 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 corae to be
studied with the sarae scientific rainuteness which is
brought to the solution of conteraporary 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 seem to die out in process of
G

98 TUSCAN CITIES.
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 IL, Tuscany, with the rest of Italy,
was wasted by the wafs 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 IIL, 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 rauch
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. Gerraany, France, England, and
Holland had already provided him with a successor,

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 99
by the treaty of London, in 1718; and when Oian
Gastone died, in 1737, Francis H. 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, crirainal, and
ecclesiastical law, which then astonished all Europe,
and which tardy civUization 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 IIL, was driven out by
the forces of the RepubUc in 1796, after which Tus
cany rapidly undefwent 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
Austrians. Ten years later he again retired, and in
1860 Tuscany united herself by popular vote to the
kingdom of Italy, of which Florence became the capi-

100 TUSCAN CITIES.
tal, and so remained till the French evacuated Rome
in 1871.
The time from the restoration of Ferdinand III. tiU
the first expulsion of Leopold II. must always be at
tractive to the student of Italian civUization 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 nationahty; 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 " forraed 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, siraplifying the civil
and raitigating the criminal ; and the voluraes are ten
that contain his wise statutes, edicts, and decrees. In
his tirae, 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 abolition of the cruel punishments, became
tare, and for three months at one period the prisons

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 101
of Tuscany reraained 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 f eUow-beings, and to raake them men rather than
princes. An iUustrious 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 aU his soldiers ; he has destroyed the
fortifications of PLsa, 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 caUed, in Tuscany, the palaces of the grand
duke. I visited them, and found throughout cleanli
ness, order, and deUcate 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 raight 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
lege, — abUity, 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 mUUon of sub
jects during the course of the day 1 ' "
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 Signor 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 tho glass, I am
willing to allow that kindly despot of a Leopold all the
glory that any history may claim for hira. 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 aU 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 Uke under
neath its superficial effect of gentleness and placidity,
the stranger, who reflects how little any one really
knows of his native civUization, wUl 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 raight say a great deal, — a great deal that would
be raore and less than trae. A brilliant and accom
plished -writer, a stranger naturalized by many years'
sojoum, 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 civU 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 German 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 ;
aU the dead walls invited me to " voto for Peruzzi" in
the approaching election for deputy, and at the last
election a Ginori had 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 difflcult to know
the troth ; but happUy the trath in this case is not im
portant. One of the few acquaintances I made with Italians
outside of the EngUsh-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 leam from him that
many other Florentine tradesmen gave their leisure tc-
the same Uterature ; in fact, I inferred that, generall]'
speaking, there was not much interest in any sort oi
Uterature among the Florentines ; and I only mention
him in the hope of throwing sorae light upon the prob
lem with which we are playing. He took me one
night to the Literary Club, of which he was a mera
^ler, and of which the Marchese Ricci is president ; and
I could not see that any presentation could have
avaUed me more than his with that nobleman or the
other nobleman who was secretary. The president

106 TUSCAN CITIES.
shook ray hand in a friendly despair, perfectly evident,
of getting upon any comraon 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 entertainraents, which were sometimes concerts,
sometimes lectures and recitations, and soraetiraes
conversation merely, for which I found the empty
chairs, on my entrance, arranged in groups of threes
and fives about the floor, with an arr perhaps of too
great social premeditation. Presently there was play
ing on the piano, and at the end the president shook
hands with the perforraer. If there was anything of
the snobbishness that poisons such intercourse for our
race, I could not see it. May be snobbishness, like
gentleraanliness, is not appreciable from one race to
another.
XXX.
My acquaintance, whom I should grieve to make in
Mny sort a victim by my personalities, did me tho
pleasure to take me over the little ancestral farra
which he holds just beyond one of the gates ; and thus
I got at one of the horaely 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 offlces with its
mellow expanse of brown tiles. A door opening flush
npon 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 tho library,
overflowing with books representing all the rich past
of Italian literature in poetry, history, and philosophy,
— the collections of mj' host's father and grandfather.
On the table he opened a bottle of the wine made on
his farra ; and then he took rae 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
cn the hUlside which bounded the little farm ; but I
Could see from this point how it was otherwise almost
*vholly devoted to market-gardening. The grass keeps
^een aU winter long at Florence, not growing, but
iiever withering ; and there were 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 miU-wheel, for pumping water into these trenches.
The farm implements and heavier household utensils
were kept in order here ; and araong 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 sorae
olives stUl lingered among the wiUow-like leaves, and
rewarded my curious palate with the insipidity of the
olive which has not been salted. Then we retumed

108 TUSCAN CITIES.
to the house, and explored the cow-stables, where the
well-kept Italian kine between their stone walls were
much warmer than most Italian Christians in Florence.
In a large room next the stable and behind the kitchen
the farm-people were assembled, men, women, and
children, in their Sunday best, who all stood up when
we came in, — all but two very old men, who sat in the
chiraney 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.
XXXL
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 tUted 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 murraurs of sympathy for the
child to overraaster 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 reUgious 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 Araerican, 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 horae of human nature, — simple,
unabashed even in the presence of its Maker, who is
probably not so rauch asharaed 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 mueh 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
sorae 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 monuraents, serious Gothic
or strutting rococo, — aU 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 raany of the forraer.
These enclose nearly always a grass-groVn space,
where daisies and dandelions began to abound with
the earliest consent of spring. Most public places and
edifices in Italy have been so rauch 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 raind as soraething not
less Florentine in character than the Ponte Vecchio
or the Palazzo Publico. I reraember 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
Qaring 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 pestUences, 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 anaesthesis of a freezing
horror. Those masked and trailing sable flgures,
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
Uy draped bier in their raidst, 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,
XXXIL
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 devU 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 veglione or ball on the
last night of the carnival ; but finally there were two
of thera : 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 charapagne; the floor covered with
maskers, gibbering in falsetto, 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 shctps where they sold costumes were
very gay ; but the thing is dying out, as at least one
Italian, in whose veins the new wine of Progress had
wrought, rejoiced to tell me. I do not know whether
I rejoiced so rauch 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 thera, till the Italians turn from it in
disgust. Then it raust be reraerabered 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 chUdish. I fancy that is the way
my friend felt about it. XXXIIL
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
StentereUo 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 pigtaU 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. Th^ 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 UmbreUa-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 hira.
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 cora
fortable place. It was raore 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 reraeraber " Stenterello White Slave in America"
and " Stenterello as Haralet " among the attractions
offered. In fact, he runs through an indefinite num
ber of draraas, 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 d'arte, where ho is at his best.
At what I may call the non-Stenterello theatres in
Florence, they were apt to give versions of the more
heart-breaking, vow-broken, French melodramas,
though occasionally there was a piece of Italian 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 short 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
exemplarUy spent his time in perfecting, instead of
playing cards and mora. I followed hira 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
raouth, pounding a drum attachment with one hand
and scraping a violin attachment with the other. I do
not think the instrument will ever corae 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 raore a little vocal and acrobatic en
tertainment, where again I found myself in the midst
of ray brothers in arras. Civilians paid three cents to
corae in, but we military only two ; and we had the best
seats and sraoked 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 whieh 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 warraed for them, and the chill was taken off the
air by a sheet iron stove, so that, upon the whole,
these saurians had the most corafortable quarters in
the whole shivering city. Although they had up a

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 110
sign, " Animali 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.
ATe had the luck to be in Florence on the 25th of
March, when one of the few surviving ecclesiastical
shows peculiar to the eity takes place. On that day
a great multitude, chiefly of peasants from the sur
rounding country, asserable 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 hira ; I could not
learn just how or why, from the very scoffing and
ironical Uttle 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 wUl be soraething 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 raother
with a sick child passes under the dove in its flight,
\he chUd 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 flzzing 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 raood of most of the Florentines
looking on, whatever the peasants thought, " ' Now,
Nina,' says the priest to the dove, ' we're almost ready,
and look out how you come back, as well as go out.
That's a dear ! It's for the good of all, and don't
play mc a trick — you understand ? Ready ! Are you
ready? Well, then, — Gloria in excelsis Deo, — go, go,
dear, and look out for your feathers 1 Shhhhh I 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
raass, 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
XXXVL
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 thc 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 thera. 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 siraple 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 foUowed 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 raU 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 groora severally if they would
help each other through life and be kind and faithful ;
then in a long, raechanical formula, which I could not
hear, he dismissed thera. They signed a register, and
the affair was all over for us, and just begun for thera,
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,
XXXVIL
In 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 horae. I found myself in rauch 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 ray respectability was consoled when I
found rayself shoulder to shoulder with an abbate in
it. The thing that chiefly struck rae in the court
itself was the abundance of forra 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 exarained the wit-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 123
nesses, and were very keen and quick with thera, but
not severe ; and what I adraired in all was the good
manner, — self -respect ful, unabashed ; nobody seeraed
browbeaten or afraid. One of the witnesses wits one
whom people near me called a gobbino (hunchbackling),
and whose deformity was so grotesque that I ara afraid
a crowd of our people would have laughed at hira,
but no one smiled there, lie bore himself with dig
nity, answering to the beautiful Florentine narae of
Vanuccio Vanucci ; the judges first addressed him as
voi (you), but slipped insensibly into the raore 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
xxxvm.
I BELIEVE there are not many crimes of violence in
Florence ; the people are not brutal, except to the
dumb brotes, and there is probably more cutting and
stabbing in Boston ; as for shooting, it is alraost 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 erabrace
the Christian doctrine ('¦'¦ Non sono Cristiani!'"), are
very harshly treated by the Florentines, I was told ;
though I ara 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, sraooth paveraents 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 inraates, 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 wom 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 aU cut of one size and
pattern 1
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 whieh 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 cora
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 theh' tuition, and the rest comes from private
Bources. 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
raatheraatics, 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 raost
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 Uttle 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 rae 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 raanufacturing, but they believed that
she inight still excel in the mechanical arts which are
nearest allied to the fine arts, if an intelligent interest
in thera eould 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 corae. 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 work of private be
neficence, and no one receives pay for service 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 rae 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 Superiori
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 rae. Then, " AMiat is your business?" he
asked. " Cleaning out eave-troughs." Sorae 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 pupUs
are given premiums for excellence, and are encouragdd
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 Araer
ica, whither he supreraely 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 beiug at Naples. On the day of
my visit, the older girls had just retumed frora the
funeral of one of their professors, — a priest in the
neighboring parish of S. Spirito. It was at noon, and,
m the natural reaction, they were chatting gaily ; and
I

130 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 mc np
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
iwenty, are five hundred in number, and are nearly all
from the middle class, though sorae 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. 131
which the state, which educates them for nothing,
pays scantily enough, — two hundred and fifty dollars
a year at most. They were all neatly dressed, and
well-mannered, of course, from the oldest to the
voungest; 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 horae
at one o'clock, while the others remained frora nine
tUl 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
ahout them. The girls were nearly all of the dark
type, though there was here and there one of those
opaque Southem blondes one finds in Italy. Fair or
dark, however, they all had looks of bright inteUi
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 extrerae cases ; but on the
other hand they had plenty of light and sunny air,
and all the brick floors and whitewashed walls were
exquisitely clean. I should not have been much tho

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 ray 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 rooras, 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
disraaying. 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 raust 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
Koming to teach the future mothers their catechism,
XL.
Few of ray readers, I hope, have faUed 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 terapted to form a
border to this capo d opera, bizarre and irregular, such
as I have sometimes seen composed of the bits of
fietra viva left over from a larger work. They are
mere fragments of color, scraps and shreds of Flor
ence, which I find stUl gleaming more or less dimly
in my note-books, and I have no notion of making any
ordered arrangement of them.
Bat 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, frora the
old cloistered court of that church, of Brunelleschi's
dorae 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 these
is my pleasure in the rich vulgarity and affluent bad

134 TUSCAN CITIES.
taste of thc 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 remeraber, 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 — tUl one
on hoUdays," 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 frora disdaining the memory of ray 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 triuraph, very brave in the sunset light.
The tramways make all the long distances in the
Florentine outskirts and suburbs, and the cars never
corae 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 wo were all fidgeting about, doing our Fra
Angelico or our Savonarola, sat motionless in a patch
of sunshine and tranquilly gossipped 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 eame so near

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 135
the hour of closing one day that he could show us al
most nothing. I could see that it wrung his heart
that we should have paid our francs to come in then,
when the Dante in the peaceful Giotto fresco was only
a pensive blur to the eye, and the hideous realizations
of the great Pest in wax were raere indistinguishable
nightmares. We tried to console him by assuring him
of our delight in Della Robbia's singing boys in an
other roora, and of the compensation we had in get
ting away from the Twelve (Useless) Labors of
Hercules by Rossi, and two or thrqe particularly un
pleasant muscular Abstractions of Michael Angelo.
It was in fact too dark to see rauch of the museura,
and we had to corae again for that ; but no hour
::ould 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 iirst Podesta of Florence had made
the Bargello his home, till the last Medici had made
it his prison.
Of statues and of pictures I have spoken very little,
because it seems to rae that others have spoken more
than enough. Yet I have hinted that I did ray 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 atterapt to
impart to others, I will rather beg the reader when

136 TUSCAN CITIES,
he goes to Florence, to go for my sake, as weU as his
own, to the Academy and look at the Spring of Botti
ceUi 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 thera. 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 rae 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 stUl easUy
first of all men, as they are in most other things when
they wiU, 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 frora his
seat, so that now he has hiraself strapped to the box,
and four grooms sit with folded arms on the seats
behind him, ready to jump down and fiy at the horses'
heads. As the strange figure, drawn at a slow trot,
passes along, with stiffly waxed moustache and im-

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC, 137
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 flerce, 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 naraes, and that
he should iUustrate 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 tbe 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.
Joumalism 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 comer had to fold up his cheap paper and put
it away before he could respond. They are of a vary
ing quaUty. The " Nazione," which is serious and
political, is as solidly, if not so heavily, written as an
English journal ; the " FanfuUa 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 raore political, but abounding mostly in jokes
at the expense of the seventh commandment, which
the Latins find so droU. There are in all thirty peri
odicals, monthly, weekly, and daily, published in Flor
ence, which you are continuaUy 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 MUan 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 Gubematis, whom the con
genial intellectual atmosphere of Florence has attracted
from Naples and Piedmont, I should not, if I were a
Florentine, yield the palra 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 faraous river that runs through
her heart. You are always coraing 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. 139
ily raving of summer drouth over its dam, and stietch-
ing a bar of silver from shore to shore. Tho 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 hiUs, set it foaming ; it rises momently,
and nothing but the presenee 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. Thc nightingales sang frora
the poplar tops in the dull rich warrath ; the carriages
blossomed with lovely hats and parasols ; handsome
cavaliers and slirn-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 sumraer, 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 rauch too big
for its lake, its wandering alleys and raoss-grown seats
abounding in talking age and whispering lovers. It
has a tangled vastness in which an American raight
almost lose his self -consciousness ; and the view of
Florence from one of its heights is incoraparably 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 frora 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-daUy 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 pitUess, but because of
the present, safe, free, kindly, fuU of possibiUties 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 Flore;nce had come
to an end.

PANFORTE DI SIENA.
L
A MONTH out of our winter at Florence we gave te
Siena, whither we went early in February. At that
time there were no raore signs of spring in the land
scape than there were in December, except for here and
there an ahnond-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 raUroad 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 m 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
rait of which the old Ghibelline city still sits capital,
proud of her past, beautiful and noble even among
Italian towns, and wearing in her raural 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 frora 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 rae 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 cliraate is soft, temperate and whole
some. The summer sojoum 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 stem, 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 forraed 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 whieh horizons raagnificent 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
their' husbands ; they are extremely refined in manner,
and renowned for their grace and beauty. The
comeliness of their figures, the regularity of their linea
ments, as well as their vivid coloring, which reveals
in them an enviable freshness of fibre and good blood
purified by the mountain air, justly 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 145
character is equal to its hospitality ; and this does not
spring from roughness of manners and customs, but is
a noble pride, magnaniraous, 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 caUcd the French of
Italy, are ardent spirits, enthusiastic, resolute, ener
getic, courageous, and prorapt beyond any other people
to brandish their arms in defence of their country.
They have a mai'tial nature, a fervid fancy, a lively
imagination ; they are bom 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 exceUence 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 aU gymnastic exercises, , . , Dante called the
Sienese 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 gi-eat curse of his tirae."
But for that flnal touch about Dante, I might have
thought I was reading a description of the Araericans,
and more especially the Bostonians, so exactly did my
author's eulogy of the Sienese embody the facts of
our own character. But that touch disillusioned me :
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 incoraparable loveliness, to experience that pro
verbial hospitality and that frank and loyal friendship,
to raingle 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 Roraulus,
stopped where Siena now stands and built hiraself a
castle. Whether the city got her name frora Senio or
not, it is certain that she adopted the faraily arras ;
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
Roraans, frora the wolf-bearing seal of her chief mag
istrate ; and a noble Roman faraily sent one of its sons
as early as 303 to perish at Siena for the conversion
of the city to Christianity. When the erapire feU,
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 Charleraagne, frora whose counts and
barons, enriched by his gifts of Sienese lands and eas-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 147
ties, the Sienese nobility trace their descent. These
foreign robbei's, whose nests the Florentines went out
of their gates to destroy, in their neighborhood, vol-
untarUy left their castles in the Sienese territory, and
came into the city, which they united with the bishops
in erabeUishing with beautiful palaces and ruling with
an iron hand, tiU the coraraons rose and made good
their claim to a share in their own governraent. Ira-
raunities and privUeges were granted by Caesar and
Peter, and at the close of the twelfth century a repub
Ucan govemment, with an elective magistracy, was
fuUy developed, and the democratized city entered
upon a career of great raaterial prosperity. " But in
the raidst of this potent activity of political and cora
raercial life, Siena more than any other Italian city
was afflicted with municipal rivalries and intestine
discords. To-day the nobles triuraphed and hurled
the coramons frora 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 era
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 hira ; 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 thc common ground of their coramon 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

PANFORTE 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 1860 felt that they had
sufficiently avenged themselves by their victory of
1269. This resulted in thc triumph of the Guelphs
in Siena, and finally in the substitution of the magis
tracy of tho 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
raous corruption that they " succeeded in destroying
very generous sentiraent, 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, Petracci, too, like Lorenzo, was called the
Magnificent, and he, too, passed his life in sensual
debauchery, in poUtical intrigues ending in bloody
Tevenges 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
\ike Pietro de' Medici and banished. One of his

150 TUSCAN CITIES.
pleasing famUy was that Achille Petrucci 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.
terraittent liberty within and varying fortunes of war
without, tUl 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 comraand of Don Hurtado de Mendozaj
who was not only, as ray " 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 Tormes," 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 proraises, the
exiles were few and feeble, and in 1554 the troops of
the Eraperor and of Duke Cosimo — ^him of the terrible
face and the blood-stained soul, raurderer of his son,
and father of a faraily of adultresses and assassins —
carae and laid siege to the dooraed city. The siege
lasted eighteen months, and until the Sienese were
wasted by faraine and pestilence, and the woraen

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 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 woraen and the or
phan children, hoping that the eneray would have pity
on these hapless creatures ; the Spaniards raassacred
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, w'hich 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 pestUential marshes breathing fever and
death. The inhabitants of the city were reduced frora
forty to six thousand ; seven hundred families pre
ferred exile to slavery.
Charles V. gave Siena as a fief to his son, Phillip
n,, who ceded it to Cosimo I., and he built there the
fort which the Spaniards had attempted. It reraained
under the good Lorrainese dukes tiU Napoleon raade
it capital of his department of the Ombrone, and it
retumed 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.

m.
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
iUustrated the Sienese narae, but of the two great
thinkers in religion and politics, who have given her
truer glory. The bold pontiff Alexander IIL, 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 comraerce, 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 raeraorial 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 163
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 raonumental Italian
whieh 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, Philosophets, 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 darap, and
looked out from the bow-shaped terrace bulging ov&l
the garden behind, and across the olive orchards^
But I forgot that I was not yet in Siena,
IV,
Before our arrival I had tirae 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 leamed 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 waUs; 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,
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 faraous region of Fontebranda, and
envelopes the birthplace of St. Catherine in an odor
of tan-bark. There is also a prosperous fabric of iron
fumiture, principally bedsteads, which is noted
throughout Italy ; this, with some cotton-factories and
carpet-looms on a smaU scale, and sorae 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
narae 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-
lative 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 sweetraeats, the primacy in Italy and beyond, and
forms one of the principal branches of our industry.

PANFORTE 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 ai'tistic confection : its brown
paste, gemmed with broken almonds, is covered in the
panfortes de luxe with a frosting of sugar, adomed
with broideries, with laces, with flowers, with leaves,
with elegant flgures in lively colors, and with artistic
designs, representing usuaUy some monument of the
city," V.
It was about dark when we reached Siena, looking
down over her waU upon the station in the valley ; but
there was stiU light enough to give us proof, in the
splendid quarrel of two raUway porters over our bag
gage, of that quickness to anger and readiness to for
give which demonstrates the exceUence 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 wUlingly 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 flrst 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 pre-

156 TUSCAN CITIES.
cipitous slopes she belts her girdling wall. The streets
within wander hither and thither at will ; in both they
are narrow and hemmed in with the gray fronts of
the stone houses ; without spreads a mighty vaUey,
— watered at Quebec by the confiuent 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
stUl the sarae grandeur and nobUity 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 picturesqueness
of the Cathedral Place at Quebec, and faithful to it in'
much scribbling hitherto, but nothing — not even the
love of pushing a parallel — shall make me pretend
that it is in any manner or degree comparable to the
old and deeply meraoried Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele
at Siena. This was anciently Piazza del Campo, but
now they call it Piazza Vittorio Eraraanuele, because,
since the Unification, they want some piazza of that
dear narae in every Italian city, as I have already
noted ; and I walked to it through the Via Cavour
whieh they raust 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 aU, that does not
say it : you raust 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 thc young moon, at half
its height, looked sparely over the battlements of the
Palazzo Communale, from whieh the tower sprang,
upon the fronts of the beautiful old palaces whose
semi-circle encloses the grand space before it, and
touched with its sUver the waters of the loveliest
fountain in the world whose statues and bas-reliefs
darkled above and ai-ound a silent pool. There were
shops in the basements of some of the palaces, and
there were lamps around the piazza, but there seeraed
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
Govemraent 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 seeraed half of them uninhabited. But there was
nothing dilapidated, nothing ruinous in the place ; it

158 TUSCAN CITIES.
had siraply a forsaken look, which the feeble stir of
buying and selling at the raarket-booths scarcely af
fected. The old Palace of the Comraonwealth stood
serene in the raorning 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 raysterious
facchino ; and a were-wolf. I only know that all these
were actually the agents of our doraiciliation, and that
without their intervention I do not see how we could
ever have been settled in Siena. The valet had corae
to show us the city, and no caricature of him could
give a sufficient impression of his forlorn and anxious
little face, his livid silk hat, his threadbare coat, his
meagre body, and his evanescent legs. He was a ter-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 159
ribly pathetic figure, and I count it no merit to havo
employed him at onee. The first day 1 gave him
three francs to keep away, and went myself in search
of a carriage to drive us about in search of rooms.
There were no carriages at the stand, but an old man
who kept a bookstore let the lady of the party have
his chair and his scaldino while I went to the stable
for one. There my purpose somehow became known,
and when the driver mounted the box, and I stepped
inside, the were-wolf mounted with him, and all that
moming he directed our moveraents 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 hira ; and heaven knows what dire
need of devouring strangers he raay 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 frora 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 ragged, stoveless, husk-raatressed,
mountain-bedsteaded, where we should have to fine/

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 2^ension, whose windows com
manded an enchanting panorama of the Sienese hills,
was provided with rather too much of the landscape
in-doors ; and at auother, 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 seo whether they were in or
not, before he ventured to show rae 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 resuraed 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 reproach in our eyes, and, without giving
us tirae to speak, promised us a perfect apartment for
the morrow, and vanished 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 tlie 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 raost S3rmpathetic
of all bricabrac dealers, who sent us to the apartment
of a French lady, — an apartment with a northern
exposure as sunless as fireless, from which we re
created 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 thc hotel at dusk I was stopped on
the stairs by a mysterious /flffcAmo 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 reaUy 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 raust have been alraost the fii'st 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 [giojello) 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 coi'ner, its carpet, its chest of drawers,
and its other splendors, the good Don A, holding hi.s
three-beaked classic lamp up for us to sec better, and
his niece behind him lo.st in a passion of sympathy,
which continually escaped in tender Ohs and Ahs, we
sighed again, " Yes, if we could only havo this, too ! "
Don A. nodded his head and compressed his lips.
" It would be a big thing ! " (" Sarebbe un' affaronel")
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 flnd described also in my notes as a
¦wry-necked larab, 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
Bzzo 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 hackling, 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 ?
VH,
No more, probably, than I had the virtue which I
affected about keeping my promises. But I have
never been sorry that I remained true to the word I
had given Don A., and I do not see what harm there
can be in saying that he was an ex-monk of the sup
pressed convent of Monte Olivetto, who was eking out
the smaU 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 rooras the blessed candle and
cracifix which hung on one side of the bed were bal
anced by the blazon of our host's arras in a frarae on
the other. Yet he was not above doing any sort of
horaely office for our comfort and convenience ; I saw
hira with his priest's gown off, in his shirt-sleeves and
knee-breeches, putting up a bedstead; soraetunes I
met him on the stairs with ajoad 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
coiirtesy, 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 apartraent,
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 horae 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 corafort 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 servo it; and to Angio-
lina, the housekeeper, who affected a sort of Yankee
old-maid's grumpiness, but was as sweet of soul as
Maddalena herself. More than once has that 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 frora 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, raoss-grown, balustraded with
marble, from which you descend by two curving
ffights 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 mUky 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 waU, 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 waU with ranks of
olive-trees. StUl, next the palace there were flowers,
or must have been in summer; and on another
raorning, another heavenly morning, a young lady,
doubtless of the ancient family to which the palace
belonged, came out upon the terrace from the first
fioor 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 hair was ashen blonde; she
was slimly cased in black silk, and as she slowly
. walked, she pulled forward the skirt a little with one
hand, while she drew together with the other a light
shawl, falling from the top of her head, round her
throat; her companion followed at a little distance;
on the terrace lingered a large white Persian cat, look
ing after them.
vm.
These gardens, or fields, of Siena occupy half the
space her walls enclose, and the olives everywhere
softly embower the borders of the shrivelled and
shrunken old city, which once raust have plumply
filled their circuit with life. But it is five hundred
years since the great pest reduced her hundred thous-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 167
and souls to fifteen thousand ; generation after gene
ration the plow has gone over the dead streets, and
the spade has been busy obliterating the decay, so
that now there is no sign of them where the arti
chokes stretch their sharp lines, aud the tops of the
ohves ron tangling in the wind. Except where the
streets carry the lines of buildings to thc 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 buUt 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. Sometiraes thc varied and ever-
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 sprang 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 raag
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 Coraraun-
,ile, 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 bewilderingly 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 CamoUia 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 wUl 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 SIENA. 169
people lured forth by his sarcastic glitter, though the
wind blew pitilessly. "Marzo matto!" (Crazy
March I) said the shopman, with a sympathetic smile
and impressive shrug, to whom I complained of it ;
and I had to confess that March was no better in
America. The peasants, who took the whole breadth
of Via Cavour with their carts laden with wine and
drawn by wide-homed dun oxen, had their faces tied
up against the blast, which must have been terrible
on their hUls ; 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-pUlows, 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 rauch 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-
amo 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 mediaeval charm
which belongs to Siena, and which perhaps you feel
most when you stand before the Toloraei 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 on

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
dora 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 mUitary band played there, and I was
told that the fine world of Siena resorted to the Lizza,
we hiu'ried thither to see it ; but we must have corae
too late. The band were blowing the drops of dis
tUled music out of their instruments and shutting
thera 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 thera, that I had raet 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
panforte and his son. A few young bucks, with fierce
trotting-ponies in two-seated sulkies, hamraered round
the drive; the crowd on foot was mostly a cloaked
and slouch-hatted crowd, which in Italy is always a
plebeian crowd. There were uo ladies, but many wo
raen of less degree, pretty enough, weU-dressed
enough, and radiantly smUing. 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 gayeties 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 Febraary ; a few days
later I find it recorded that in walking half-way round
the city outside the waU 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 aU through February, Uke 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 waU 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 rale, I suppose, can boast that these Uttle
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 d'un 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 Siena was always boiling with human pas
sions, and for four hundred years it vomited up and
ingulphed innuraerable governments and forms of
government, now aristocratic and now plebeian. From
those beautiful Gothic windows many a traitor has

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 173
dangled head downwards or feet downwards, as the
humor took the raob ; raany a temporizer or usurper
has hurtled from that high balcony ruining down to
the stones below.
Carlo FoUetti-Fassati, a Sienese citizen of our own
time, has made a luminous and interesting study of
the " Costumi Senese " of the Middle Ages, which no
reader of ItaUan should fail to get when he goes to
Siena, for the sake of the Ught which it throws upon
that tumultuous and straggling past of one of the brav
est and doughtiest little peoples that ever lived. In his
chapters on the " DaUy 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. He has read his De Tocqueville, and he
understands, as Mr. Matthew Arnold is beginning to
understand, that the secret of our political success is
in the ea,sy and natural fit of our political govemment,
the looseness of our social organization ; and he shows
with attractive clearness how, in the ItaUan republics,
there was no conception of the popular initiative, ex
cept in the matter of revolution, which was extra-con
stitutional. The govemment 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 storaachers ; 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 pubUc labors eleven reams of paper, twenty-
one quires of parchment, twelve pounds of red and
green sealing-wax, five hundred goose-quiUs, 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 put 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 expeUed 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 Ulumine 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
aUegories 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 modem 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 wUl not apprehend a great
deal of comment from me upon the frescos, inexpress
ibly quaint and rich, from which certain faces and
tertain looks remain with me yet. The pictures flg-

176 TUSCAN CITIES.
ure the great scenes of Sienese history and fable.
There are the battles in which the republic triumphed,
to the disadvantage chiefly of the Florentines ; there
are the victorious encounters of her son Pope 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 Sienese 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 Sodoraa ;
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 ha-ving concealed under his
cloak a model of it when he appears before the pon
tiff 1 For the rest, there is an impression of cavernous
gloom left frora many of the rooms of the palace
which characterizes the whole to my memory ; and as
I look back into it, beautiful, mystical, living eyes
glance out of it; noble presences, solemn attitudes,
forms of grandeur faintly appear ; and then all is again
a hovering twilight, out of which I am glad to emerge
into the laughing sunshine of the piazza.

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 177
X.
A MONUMENT of the old miignanimity of Siena is
that Capella di Piazza in front of the palace, at tho
foot of the tower, whieh 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 corae back to at every chance. The foun
tain was designed by Giacomo della Querela, who was
known thereafter as Giacomo della Fonte, and it was
called the Gay Fountain in memory of the festivities
with which the people celebrated the introduction of
good water into their city in 1419. Seven years the
artist wrought upon it, and three thousand florins of
gold the republic paid for the work, which after four
hundred years has been restored in all its first 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 olde.st,
— Fonte Branda of the twelfth century, and Fonte
Nuova of the fourteenth. Fonte Branda I wiJl 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
wches 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 extreraely 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 sorae of thera 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 chUd in this neighborhood, the good
Contrada 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-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 179
fore the odor of sanctity as well as of leather, and is
consecrated by the raeraory of one of the best and
bravest and raeekest woraan's lives ever lived. Her
house here is much visited by the curious and devout,
and across a chasmed and gardened space frora the
fountain rises high on the bluff tho high-shouldered
bulk of the church of San Domenico, in which Cath
erine was flrst rapt in her beatific visions of our Lord,
conversing with him, and giving him her heart for his
in mystical espousals. XI,
Few strangers in Siena fail to visit the house where
that great woman and saint, Caterina Benincasa, was
born in 1347. She was one of a family of thirteen
or fourteen chUdren, that blessed the union of Giaco
mo and Lapa, who were indeed weU-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 incUnation, but because (as I
leam from the life of her written by that holy raan,
G. B. Francesia), hearing on every side the praises of
her beauty and character, they hoped to raake a sjilen-
did raarriage for her. When she persisted in her
prayers and devotions, they scolded and beat her, as
good parents used to do, and raade her the household
dradge. 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 tirae 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. Dorainic, who were
then doing many good works in Siena. After that
our Lord began to appear to her in the Dorainican
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
and Florentines, and in the midst of it the terrible
pest appeared. Then the saint gave herself up to the
care of the sick, and performed miracles of cure, at
the same time suffering persecution from the suspi
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-

PANFORTE 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 ail of
them 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 raanner there was soon coraposed 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 reraained a long
hour sUent ; 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
aU the bishops of the state, with aU the secular and
reUgious orders, "That which was wonderful and
memorable on this occasion," says the Diario Senese,
" 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 seeras 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
thouglits and works of great material and universal
moraent ; 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 corae 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 raost 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.
Iler right thumb is in the church of the Dominicans
at Camporeggi ; one of her ribs is in the cathedi'al 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

PANFORTE 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 thero
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 grandezza) ; and the
good GigU does not know exactly what bone it is they
revere in the Chapel Royal at Madrid, But perhaps
this is enough, as it is, XIL
The arched and pUlared 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 doraestic 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 raarbles.
Frora the house we went to the church of St. Do
menico, hard by, and followed St. Catherine's history
there through the period of her first ecstasies, in
which she received the stigmata and gave her heart to
her heavenly Spouse in exchange for his own. I do
not know how it is with other Protestants, but for

184 TUSCAN CITIES,
rayself I will confess that in the place where so many
good souls for so many ages have stood in the devout
faith that the rairacles 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
rainds. " Here," says the printed tablet appended to
the wall of the chapel, " here she was invested with the
habit of St. Dorainic ; 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 chureh, 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
hira her robe, and he gave her an invisible garment
which forever after kept her from the cold. Here
onee 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 whieh Christ stood and walked. The
whole ehurch is full of raeraories 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 frora the wretch decapitated in tho 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 beUeved of what he was painting, — just
as it would be now to know how rauch 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 woraan of ex
traordinary political sagacity, and so great a power
among statesmen and princes that she alone could put
an end to the long exUe of the popes at Avignon, and
bring them back to Rome. She faUed 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
raous 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, bom 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 arabition of the
popes, their temporal power, and the scandalous
schism of the Roman Church."
In the Coraraunal 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. XIII.
A HUNDRED years after St. Catherine's death there
was born in the sarae " noble Ward of the Goose" one
of the raost faraous 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 character, and the wonder of his eloquence he
becarae the General of his Order in Italy, and then he
becarae 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 tlie 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
Uttle 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 subUmest 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 Rorae, 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,
>nd Niagara, and the cathedral at Siena. I am not
sure that one has 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 quaintness, the gro
tesqueness, the magnificence of the 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 coraing again and again can irapart. One
or two facts, however, raay be imagined, and the read
er may fancy the cfithedral 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 unapproaehed, 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 raen's hearts in those
days! What a love of beauty raust 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 thera 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 wUdest
excess; not only did neighbor abandon neighbor,

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 189
friend forsake friend, but the wife her husband, par
ents their children. In the general fear, 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 1 ' 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," TTiroughout 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 waUs. , , , The work on the
cathedral, which had gone forward for ten years, was
suspended, , , , and when resumed, it was upon a
scale adjusted to the diminished wealth of the city,
and the plan was restricted to the dimensions which
we now behold. , , , And if the fancy contemplates
the grandeur of the original 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 dispossed 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
consuraed 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
describing this wonderful cathedral of Siena in detail,
he says that " nothing in the world can raake a pret
tier show to those who prefer false beauties and
affected omaments to a noble and majestic simplicity.
The time will no doubt corae 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 191
am -willing to make a little interest with it by admit
ting that the Tuscan fashion of alternate courses of
black and white raarble in architecture robs the in'
terior of the cathedral of all repose, and that nowhere
else does the godless joke which nicknamed a New
York temple " the Church of the Holy Zebra" insist
upon itself so rauch. 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 piUars ; 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 detaU. Shall I attempt to describe it ? Not
I ! Get photographs, get prints, dear reader, or go
see for yourself ! Otherwise, trust me that if we had
a tithe of that lavish loveUness in one structure in
America, the richness of that one would impoverish
the effect of aU the other buUdings 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 ItaUans.
The day was abominably cold, of course, — it had
been snowing that raorning, — 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 raultiplicity of sacristans suffered us to omit
nothing, and one of thera 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 teraple 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 seera as if these relics frora 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 bome by the Sienese,
trusting for victory in the favor of God, upon the field
of Montaperto,"

PANFORTE DI SIENA, 193
I make haste to say that I was not a stranger dis
posed to perplex ray " 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 Montaperto with a joy whieh nothing matched
except the pleasure I had in viewing the fur-lined can
opy of the War Car, whieh is preserved in the Opera
del Duomo, and from which the custodian bestowed
upon my devotion certain sraall 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 raediaeval 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 rae
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 tums 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 moming 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
aUke 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 govemment. It gave me
some notion of the difficulties with which that govern
ment has to contend, and impressed me anew with its
adrairable 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

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 195
campanUe to make one almost forget the Tower of
Giotto. But before we came away one corner of the
edifice had caught the light, and hung richly bathed,
tenderly ethereaUzed 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 fuU of the moon, and dimly lighted
by an exquisite lantern of beaten iron, which hung
near a massive pillar at the foot of the staircase. The
piUar 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
earUest govemment, according to Alessandro Sozzini,
was popular, after the Swiss fashion. Now the pal
ace is the residence and property of the Grattanelli
famUy, who have restored and preserved it in the
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 arraor 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 are tableted in Siena beyond almost anything I
have seen. The villa outside the gate where the poet
Manzoni once visited his daughter records the fact 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 'svrote
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 remejn-
ber ohly 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 leaming it was not the

PANFORTE DI SIENA, 197
day when uninvited guests were received, I always
kept in mind, moreover, the Palazzo Toloraei for tho
sake of that dear and fair lady who besought the
traveler through purgatory —
"Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma,"—
and who was of the ancient name still surviving in
Siena, Some say that her husband carried her to die
of malaria in the marshes of the Maremma; some,
that he killed her with his dagger; others, that he
made his servants throw her from the window of his
castle; and none are certain whether or no he had
reason to murder her, — they used to think there could
be a reason for murdering wives in his day ; even the
good Gigli, of the Diario Senese, speaks of that " gi
usto motivo" Messer Nello may possibly have had.
What is certain is that Pia was the most beautiful
woman in Italy ; and what is still more certain is that
she was not a Toloraei at all, but only the widow of a
Toloraei. Perhaps it was prescience of this fact that
kept me frora visiting the Toloraei 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 Toloraei by raar
riage. There were several other ladies of Siena, in past
ages, who interested rae. Such an one was the exem
plary Onorata de' Principi Orsini, one of the four
hundred Sienese noblewomen who went out to meet
the Eraperor Frederick III. in 1341, when he carae to
Siena to espouse Leonora, Infanta of Portugal ; a col-

198 TUSCAN CITIES,
uran near Porta CamoUia 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 baU that
night, being asked who was the handsomest gentle
man present, she answered that she saw no one but
her husband there. Is the estiraable 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 erabraced 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 whieh 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
Eraperor 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 ;

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 199
and I commend them to the reader, whoso fancy can
not be so hard-worked as raine.
The great siege of Siena by the Florentines and
ImperiaUsts 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 immortaUze your name so long
as the book of Montluc shall live ; for in truth you are
worthy of iraraortal 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 corapanies : the first was
led by Lady Forteguerra, who was dressed in violet,
and aU those who foUowed her likewise, having her
accoutreraent in the fashion of a nymph, short and
showing the buskin ; the second by Lady Piecoloraini,
dressed in rose-colored satin, and her troops in the
sarae 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 sorae pretty
devices ; I would give a good deal if I could remera
ber them. These three squadrons were composed of
three thousand ladies, — gentlewomen or citizenesses.
Their arms were pickaxes, shovels, baskets, and fas
cines, and thus equipped, they mustered and set to
«vork 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. I would give
the best horse I have if I could have been there. And
since I ara 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 narae of her brother, and
stands sentinel in his plaee, without being known till
morning. She was brought home in triumph. That
afternoon Signor Cornelio showed her to me."
I ara 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 raoraent 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

PANFORTE 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 theu 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 acaderay finally becarae the raost
polite in Siena. Their theatre still enjoys a national
farae, none but the best corapanies being admitted to
its stage. We saw there the Rossi company of Turin,
¦ — the best players by aU odds, after the great Flor
entine Stenterello, whom I saw in Italy. Commenda
tore Rossi's is an exquisite comic talent, — the raost
deUcately 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 narae, is the first coraedian 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 {or knighthood. King Humbert seems soraehow
to bave got over this prodigious obstacle.
The theatre was always filled, and between the acts

202 TUSCAN CITIES,
there was mueh drama in the boxes, where the gentle
men went and came, raaking 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 lis some
thing of the people in the others. I wish, in faet,
that we might have known something of the count
hiraself, whom, as it is, Iknow only by the title boldly
lettered on his box-door. The acquaintance was slight,
but very agreeable. Before the evening was out 1 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 becarae 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 disraal at horae, 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 ehurch of San Cristofero, in
viting the poor girls of the parish to a competitive
examination for the wedding-portions to be suppUed to
the raost deserving from an aneient fund. They were

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 208
advised that they raust 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 girl who has 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 BeUini in this
coUection, which, with a smaU Veronese, distinguished
itself frora 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
cems the superior charm of the earlier frescos, espec
iaUy in the Public Palace. In the churches the best
frescos are at San Doraenico, where one sees the ex
quisite chapel of St. Catherine painted by Sodoma,
which I have already mentioned. After these one
raust reckon in interest the histories with which Pin
turicchio has covered thc 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.
rifie facts of Scripture and legend ; they were terrible
feUows 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 raost butcherly of their siraple-minded car
nages ; it is where the allegorists get hold of horror
that it becoraes 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 skuUs. 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 robi are of no mer
it. They are beautiful, however." I liked this church,
which was near our pension, because it seeraed 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
BtiU maintains fifty of the monks. We passed a com-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 205
pany of thera, 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 oue
knee before the door, disappeared into the convent.
The chapel is not very rauch to see, though there is a
most beautiful Della Robbia there, — a Madonna and
St. Thomas, — which I would give rauch 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
rauch du't, rose from the last altar before which he
had knelt with a rheumatic's groans, and turning to
the ladies with a maUcious 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 gaUeries, 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 smaUness
of the gardened court enclosed by the cloisters, or by
the tinkle of a faint old piano coming from some room
where one of the brothers was practising. The whole
place was very bare, and stared with fresh whitewash;
but from the pervading sraeU 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
raighty 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 raile 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 ofi
on us for it — flowed down through the uplands over
which we drove, with a small volurae that seemed
quite inadequate to slake the wide drought of the land
scape, in which, except for the cypresses about the
vUlas, 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-

PANFORTE DI SIENA. 207
bandry there was scarcely a sign. Yet the peasants
whom we raet were well dressed (to bc sure it was
Sunday), and there was that air of corafort about the
farmsteads whieh 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 Ufting 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-
tadinL 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 frora
a heap of flasks on his stand. Here again I was re
minded of Quebec, for the interior of this ehurch was,
in its bareness and poverty, quite like the poor Uttle
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 Roraana ;
but pleasure lies in any course you take, and perhaps
greater pleasure in any other than this. The beauty
of the scenery is wUder 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 CamoUia, iu 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 thrasting 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-baUs 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 wUl not raind this a
great deal, especially as I am able to offer hirn the
local etymology of the name Belcaro : bei 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 wUd, and sometimes almost savage, like
that all around Siena, but of more fertile aspect than
that to the southward. The reader raust always think
of the wUdness in Italy as different frora our priraeval
wUdness ; it is the wildness of decay, of relapse. At
one point a group of cypresses huddling about the
arraless statue of some poor god thrUled us with a
note, Uke 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 paviUon 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 waUs of masonry just above the
smooth level of the Uex-tops that hedged it loftily in.
There was not very much to see within it, except the
dining-hall, painted by Peruzzi with the Judgment of
Paris. After we had adraired 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 Te at Mantua.
Beside it is the chapel in which he has indifferently
0

210 TUSCAN CITIES.
turned his hand, with the same brilliant faciUty, to the
illustration of holy writ and legend. It was a curious
civilization. Both lodge and chapel were extraordi
narily bright and cheerful.
Frora these works of art we turned and clirabed 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
hiU seven miles away. A delicate rose-light began to
bathe it, in which the divine cathedral looked like
some perfect shape of cloudland ; whUe the clustering
towers, palaces and gates, and the war dering sweep
of the city wall seemed the details o?" a vision too
l6vely for waking eyes.

PITILESS PISA.

L
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 faet she looked
vounger, 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 mueh more in Pisa than one
who knew her merely in the region of her palaces and
churches and bridges would beUeve. 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. AU this made her perceptibly younger, even
with her memories ranning so far back of Roman
times, into twUights whither perhaps a less careful
modern historian than myself would not foUow thera.
But when I ara in a town that has real claims to an
tiquity, I Uke to aUow 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. He 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 fleld, 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, saUing 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 rayself 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 eould not be con
verted to Christianity by a less person than St. Peter,
Virho, on his way to Rome, was expressly wrecked on
the Pisan coasts for that purpose. Her faith, like her
origin, is as aneient 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. 213
life of her own. Early in the Middle Ages she had,
with the arrogance of long-established consequence,
supercUiously explained the Florentines, to an Eastern
potentate who had just heard of thera, 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 mUes 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 raore iraportant 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 onee the Lucchese took Pisa and sacked
it ; the Pisans were Ghibelline, 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
waUs 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, whora 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 ara 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 Rorae, 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 raaking 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 hira in his turn ;
nothing eould 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 smUes 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 raet
shortly afterward in Rome, and exchanged sorae 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 aU the Florentines in
Rorae were furious. Oddo di Arrigo Fifanti, whom
the diUgent reader of these pages -wiU 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 Uttle state in a flame. She was glad of a
thance 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 aU the
Florentine merchandise within their borders. Florence
still reraained 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 wUling to offer
any reasonable reparation ; and her consuls even sent
to pay secretly the price of the conflscated goods, if
only they could have them back, and so make an ap
pearance of honorable reconcUiation 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 raasters 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 generaUy
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
raonths, 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 faUen city.

PITxLESS PISA. 217
The Florentines had hoped to inherit tho 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 raake inter
est for himself with Charles VIII. 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. When
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 raen ; it is told of two sisters working upon
the fortifications, that when one was MUed 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 feU 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 thera terras 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 comraon reraembrance. 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 GalUeo, who
carae 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 CelUni, 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 coraes 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 raighty wills,
and it seems to me that a very pretty case might be
made out in behalf of the democracy whose level was
60 high that no one head could be seen above it. Per'

PITILESS PISA. 219
haps this is what we are coming to in our own civili
zation, and I ara 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.
I wish, if this is the ease, 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
prevaUed. As I said, Pisa herself was iu 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 deterraination to take notes of
her. " Is it possible ? " she expressed, with that raute,
melancholy air of hers. " You, who have lived in
Italy, and ought to know better? Yqu, who have
been here before ? Sit down with rae beside the
Amo ! " 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 weU 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 Centubt.*
" 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 remeraber no century, since the fif
teenth, when — I — died."
She would not say, when she feU under the power of
her eneray, 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 waUs. At one
point a long stretch of the waU seemed treUised for
yellow roses which covered acres of it with their gold
en raulfitude; 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 Uked in his garden, and he invited us to
drink of the water of his weU, 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 caUed 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 aU extremely pretty, and young, raany 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 incUned to think it was positive. At any rate,
there can be no donbt 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 Une of aqueduct stretched
across the smUing fields to the feet of the arid, purple
hUls, 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 huraan 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 gtass 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 hiUs, 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, tiU it brought us
to a flour-whitened mUl, near the city wall, slowly and
thoughtfully tuming 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. IIL
I try to give the reader a trae 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 prirae 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. 228
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 dreamUy 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 woolUy tufted with their
leaf-buds ; and I wUl 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 tarabourine
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. His natal roof is
overlooked by a lofty gallery leading into Prince Cor-
sini'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 remeraber in Pisa. It had faUen
frora no better state, and raust always have witnessed
to the poverty of the decayed Florentine family from
which GaUleo 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 smaU 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 rayrtles 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 raissionaries have unexpected diffi
culties to encounter in preaching to the Italians, who
we 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 havc, moreover,
their intellectual pride in the matter : they believe that
if Protestantism had been the wiser and better thing
we think it, the ItaUans would have found it out long
ago for themselves. As it is, such proselytes as we
raake 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 impleraent ware
house — alongside of a shop glaring with alabaster
statuary — where the polite attendant offered rae an
Araerican pump as the very best thing of its kind that
I could nse 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 coraparison, and I
raade 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 ray
roora, which opened by an inner door into the artist's
room, and was told that the artist had it. He had
corae 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 hiraself 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
naraes, their residences, their feelings, their opinions
of Pisa and of the Hotel Minerva.
" This," I said to ray 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 naraes from our
heraisphere, 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 expaiisiveness were the
French. I should rather have thought the Gerraans
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 raore
beautiful it is," he cries, " now when I see it on ray
bridal tour ! " and his wife writes fondly above this,
— one fancies her with her left arra thrown round
his neck while they bend over the book together, —
" Life is a joumey 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 corapany 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
conld get nothing but salad. There is nothing I hate
more, under such circumstances, than a giardinetto 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 pau- 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 dny 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 whUe
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 Duorao, 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 Carapo 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 Vergognosa
peeping through her fingers at the debauch of Noah
should not be capable of making ferocious fun of the
scenes which they seemed to depict seriously ? There
is, as we aU 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 thoy not sometiraes making a mock
of the devout clerics and laics who employed thera ?
It is bitter fun, I sdlow. 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
entraUs dangling out (my pen cannot be half so plain
as his brush), with their arms chopped off, and their
tongues tom out by fiends, with their woraen's breasts
eaten by snakes. I for one wiU not pretend to have
revered those works of art, or to have felt anything
but loathing in their presence. If I ara 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 evU dreams in contempt of them, — doing
what he could to make faith in them impossible by
realizing them in aU 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 fiowers and weeds, — the daisies that powdered
the sacred earth brought from the Holy Land in the

230 TUSCAN CITIES.
Pisan gaUeys 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 corafort.
I revisited the Baptistery for the sake of the famous
echo whieh 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 skUlf uUy to evoke
it was no longer there, but a mere tyro intent upon
his half franc, with no real feeUng for ululation as an
art. Guides and custodians of an unexampled rapac
ity swarmed in and aU 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 faU, 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 whora 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
raeant 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. 231
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
anotlier part of the city, whieh went much raore to
my heart. I do not pretend that I entered it ; but it
had a lovely fagade of Pisan gothic, raellowed through
all its marble by the suns of a thousand suraraers, 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 alraost quadrangular, and
reposing on a level which expands to the borders of
the hUls beyond Lucca, and drops softly with the Amo
towards the sea. The river divides the southward third
of the city from the rest, to which stately bridges bind
it again. The group of the Four Fabrics, to which we
have paid a devoir tempered by modem raisgivings,
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-
Jiot 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-erainent 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 easUy 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 faU 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 rauch like dishes set upon
the table : the Duorao a vast and beautiful pudding ;
the Baptistery a gigantic charlotte russe; the Campo
Santo an exquisite structure in sugar; the Leaning
Tower, a column of ice-cream which has been weak
ened at the base by too zealous an appUcation 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 Amo. 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 sesthetic matters, but the tirae was when polite
tourists took things raore easily. In the seventeenth
century, " Richard Lassels, Gent, who Traveled
through Italy five tiraes 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 buUt after La maniera Tedescha, a fashion of
BuUding much used in Italy four or five hundred
years ago, aud brought in by Germans or Tedeschi,
saith Vasari. Near to the Domo stands (if leaning
may be caUed standing) the bending Tower, so artifi
ciaUy made, that it seems to be faUing, and yet it stands
iirm  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 Carapo Santo that
it was " curiously painted," and there an end. Per
haps there was a reUef for the reader also ih this
method. Master Lassels vexed hiraself to spell his
Italian correctly no raore 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 rayself found full 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 ai 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 Knigbts 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 stiU 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
gaUeys. 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.
VIL
Issuing from the Church of the Cavaliers I found
myself iu the most famous spot in the whole city : the
wide dusty square where the Tower of Faraine once
stood, and where you may stUl see a palace with
iron baskets swung from the corners of the edifice, in
which it Ls 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 tUl 1655, and
that here it was that Ugolino and his children and
grandchUdren 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 wUl always have a fascination to
the scribbler who visits Pisa, irresistibly tempting him
to recaU 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 rauch 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 teraper; he had caused
one of his nephews to be poisoned, he stabbed another,
and when the young raan'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 Uneage,

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 evU 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 feU 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 np, and in this assault his bastard son
and one of his grandchUdren were kUled ; 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 foUowers 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 aU food, in a few days .they perished of hunger.
But first, the count imploring a confessor, they would
not aUow 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 narae 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, VIIL
The meraory of that curious literary conjunction
which once took place at Pisa, when Byron, SheUey,
and Leigh Hunt raet there to establish an English
review on Italian ground, iraparts 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 wUl point you out, if you wish,
the palace in which Byron lived on the Lung' Arno,
hut as I would not have gone to look at a palace with
Byron alive in it, I easily excused myself for not
hunting np this one of the residences with which he
left Italy swarming. The Shelleys lived first in a
vffia, four mUes off under the hUls, 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 SheUey 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. WUliams with whom he
was afterward drowned in Spezzia Bay. " Once,"
writes Mrs. SheUey, " I went down with hira to the
mouth of the Amo, 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 wUdness or strife
in the Amo, not so rauch 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 whieh 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 gaUeys she launched on
every sea then known. They are used now for
military stables; they are not unUke the ordinary
horse-car stables of our civUization ; 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 adraire in my own
land. There is no doubt but the toilet of a horse is
something that interests every human being.

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA

I.
With rather less than the ordinary stupidity of
tourists, wretched slaves of routine as they are, we
had imagined the possibility of going to Lucca 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, whieh is what can be said
of, alas, how few pleasures ! On the contrary it is
rapture to think of it stiU.
Already, at eight o'clock of the April raorning, the
sun had fiUed the city with a sickening heat, which
intimated pretty clearly what it might do for Pisa in
August; but when we had raounted 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 thte 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 hUls
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 iraplored, 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
vUlas he whirled us by ! What gray chateaux ! What
old wayside towers, hoary out of all remembrance !
What delightfully stupid-looking little stony pictur
esque villages, in every one of which ihat 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, tho 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 frora 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 smUing 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 Uttle space in which they used to
play bloodUy at national hostUites. 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.
IL
LucoA lies as flat as Pisa, but in shape it is as reg-
larly oblong as that is square, and instead of the brick
waU, 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 charra to the proraenade 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 draraatic rattling and bang
ing through her streets, at the door of the Universe,
or the Croce di Malta, — I do not really remeraber
which hotel it was. But I reraeraber very well the
whole domestic force of the inn seeraed to be concen
trated in the distracted servant who gave us our
rooms, and was landlord, porter, accountant, waiter,
and charaberraaid 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 nuraerous 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 Eugland
was beastly. But I own I should not like to have
said it to hira.
In their talk of the ducal past of Lucca these Eng
lish people struck again the note which ray 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 dorainions
than most of her sister coraraonwealths, 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 ray raind.
Yet I should be at a loss how to irapart 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 raler 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 fa,ble 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 Rorae. 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 raagistrates 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 onee 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 Parraa, 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 flerce, 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 hira, and made him
Lord of Lucca, Uguccione's fetters were still upon
him. He was of the ancient Ghibelline family of the
AntelmineUi, who had prospered to great wealth in
England, where they spent a long exUe 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 tum, 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 tirae is not quoted
¦ — to the Florentines, whom the Pisans drove out.
These held her in a servitude so cruel that the Luc
chese caUed 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 CITIES.
An ancient Lucchese family, the Guanigi, whose
Gothic palaces are stUl the most beautiful in the city,
now rose to power, and held it tiU 1430; and then
the city finally established the repubUcan governraent,
which in its deraocratic and oligarchic form continued
tiU 1799.
The noblest event of this long period was the mag
nanimous atterapt of the gonfaloniere, Francesco Bur-
laraacchi, who in 1546 drearaed of driving the Medici
frora power and re-establishing the republic through
out Tuscany. Burlamacchi was of an old patrician
faraily, but the love of freedom had been instilled in
hira 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 gonfaloniere'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 MUan 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 suras for the confirraation 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 fied 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 famUies, were the Burlamacchi,
from whom the hero came. He had counted some
what upon the spirit of the Reformation to help hira
in his design against the Medici, knowing it to be the
spirit of freedom, but there is no one evidence that he
was himself more a Protestant than Savonarola was.
Eight years after his death the constitution of 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, tUl 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 Uttle Republic towards
the midst of Tuscany," he says, " caUed 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 hira now that she is free, and more industri
ous to support this freedom, than if she were becorae
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, teUs 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
beeome 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, fiung 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 raore 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 smaUness 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." IIL
Of mediaeval 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, whUe keeping its own ; here are the pil
lars resting on the backs of Uons 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
latter in the beautiful old church of San Frediano, an
Irish saint who for some reason figured in Lucca ; he
was bishop there in the fifth century, and the 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 Podesti of Lucca, in pursuance
of the republic's high-languaged decree, recognizing
the fact that " araong the ornaments with which cities
embellish theinselves, the greatest expenditure should
always be devoted to those where the deities are wor
shipped, the magistracy adrainisters justice, and the
people convenes." The Palazzo Pretorio is now the
repository of a public archaeological collection, and the
raeraory of its original use has so utterly perished
that the combined intellects of the two policemen,
whom we appealed to for inforraation, could not as
sign to it any other function than that of lottery offlce,
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 arai
able, and she had three pretty daughters in the bon
bon departraent, 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 handsorae 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. Buriamacchi " ? The
hero thus canonized stood frowning down upon a grain
and seed raarket when we went to offer him our hom-

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
Uterary celebrities, who need tablets as greatly as any
Uterary 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 wiU readily identify her
from this ; or if he cannot, the greater shame to him ;
he might as weU 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 coraraonplace, 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 poUte leaming ; but she does not imbue her po
licemen and caffetieras with it, as Boston does. Yet I
would wilUngly be at this moment in a town where I
could step out and see a Roman amphitheatre, built
bodUy up into the modem city, and showing its
mighty ribs through the houses surrounding the raar
ket place, — a market-place quaint beyond any other,

254 TUSCAN CITIES.
with its tUe-roofed stands and booths. There is mach
more silk in Lucca than in Boston, if we have the
greater culture; and the oU of Lucca is sublime; and
 yes, I -wUl own it ! — Lucca has the finer city wall,
Tho 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, deUcious palace garden, fuU of
weather-beaten statues, old, bad, ridiculous, divinely
dear and beautiful !
I cannot say that I have been hardly used, when I
reraeraber that I have seen such gardens as those ; and
I hurably 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 clirabed to the top of one of
their towers, which I had wondered at ever since my
first sight of Lucca because of the Uttle grove it bore
upon its crest, I asked the custodian of the palace
what it was, and he said it was a Uttle garden, which
I suspected already. But I had a consuraing desire
to know what it looked Uke, 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 leveUed
them. They were for the convenience of private war
fare ; the custodian showed me a little charaber 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 stiU more the magnificent prospect of
the city and country from the towers ; the fertile plain
with the hUls 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 fflled 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 raay 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 raarquis
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 exceUent 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 FIESOLE.

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 fuU of yellow fiowering seed-turnips. The
peasants were spading their fields ; as we ran along, it
came noon, and they began to troop over thc white
roads to dinner, past villas frescoed with false balco
nies and casements, and corafortable brownish-gray
farmsteads. On our right the waves of distant purple
hiUs swept aU the way to Pistoja.
I made it part of my business there to look up a
young raarried 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 frora time to tirae I started with recognition of
different objects — as if I had been one of that pair ;
Bo young, so siraple-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 raind that ; they wan
dered about, faraished but blest, and by one of the
happy accidents that usuaUy befriended thera, they
found their way up to the Piazza del Duomo and saw
the Communal Palace so thoroughly, in all its gothic
fulness and mediasval richness of detail, that I seemed
never to have risen frora 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

PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 259
feuds introdueed the factions of the Bianchi and Neri
in Florence, and finally caused the exile of Dante ;
and we may inoffensively remember that Catiline raet
his defeat and death ou her hUls 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 woraen 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 hira out. After the heroic struggle
they re-established their own republic, which presently
fell a prey to the feud of two of her families, in whose
private warfare she suffered almost as much as from
her foreign enemies. Between them the Cancellieri
and the Panciatichi bumed 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 ¦<^e 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 Duorao ; and while the artist got out a
plate and began to etch in the rain, the author be
stirred himself to find the sacrista,n 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 detaU of art, especially the fourteenth-cen
tury monuraent 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 FUippo Vergiolesi, the leader of the Ghibellines in
Pistoja, and she died of hopeless love for Cino, when
the calamities of their country drove hira into exile
at the tirae of the siege. He remains the most
tangible if not the greatest name of Pistoja ; he was

PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE, 201
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 grararaarlan, attor
ney, Utterateur, 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 Della 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 Della Robbias com
monly wrought. The saint is seen visiting "The
Naked," " The PUgruns," " The Sick," " The Impris
oned," "The Dead," "The An Hungered," "The
Athirst ; " and between the tableaux are the figures of
" Faith," " Charity," " Hope," " Prudence," and "Jus
tice," There is also " An Annunciation," " A Visit
ation," " An Assumption ; " and in three circular re
liefs, adomed with fruits and fiowers after the Della
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 raercy. In these color is
used as it must be in that material, and in the broad,
unmlngled blues, reds, yellows, and greens, priraary,
sincere, you have satisfying actuality of effect. I
beUeve 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 deUghtful. Giovanni della Robbia and his broth
er, the raonk 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 suffered neglect by all the earUer
connoisseurs. It was skillfully restored in 1826 by a
Pistojese architect, who reraoved 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 raade for the Crystal Palace at Syd-
enhara. It is, by all odds, the chiefest thing in
Pistoja, where the reader, when he goes to look at it,
raay 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 np 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-vUla whioh 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
vUla was closed; simply that — closed. But I was

PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 263
not wholly a loser, for in celebration of my 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 tho
ancient church of Sant' Andrea, where I found myself
as Uttle expected, indeed, as elsewhere, but very pret
tily welcoraed by the daughter of the sacristan, whose
father was absent, and who raade me free of the
church. I thought that I wished to see the faraous
pulpit of Giovanna da Pisa, son of Niccolo, and the
Uttle maid had to light rae a candle to look at it with.
She was not of much help otherwise ; she did not at
aU 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, whUe I lec
tured her upon it as if I had been the sacristan and
she a siraple 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 unwUl
ing hand, she asked me to come again, when her fath
er was at home.

264 TUSCAN CITIES.
Would I could ! There is no sueh pulpit in Amer
ica, that I know of ; and even Pistoja, in the rain and
mud, nonchalant, unenterprising, is no bad place.
I had actuaUy business there besides that of a scrib
bling dilletante, and it took me, on behalf of a sculptor
who had sorae 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 offlce,
where the raaster raet rae 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 eyery variety of
dimension and all stages of finish. When I confess
ed ray ignorance, with a candor which I shaU 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, till a
sufflcient 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 FIESOLE, 265
II.
On my way home from Lucca, I stopped at Prato,
whither I had been tempted to go all winter by the
steam-traraway trains snuffling in and out of our Pi
azza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. I found it a
flat, dull, commonplace-looking town at flrst 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 Roraan
profile, in the railway carriage, assured rae between
the prayers he kept saying to himself, there was work
for all and all were at work.
Secular report was not so fiattering 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 raade 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

PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 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 fuUy 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 repubUc, with its factions and family
fends, like another. The greatest of its famUies were
the GuazzioUtri, of Guelph politics, who aspired to its
sovereignty, but were driven out and aU 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
Uttle gaUery, 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 sojoum in Italy. Let me now explain
that it was only dull and coramonplace in coraparison
with other towns I had been seeing. If we had Prato
Ln 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 supercUious 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 DeUa 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 stUl 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 rae. 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
raake 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.

PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 269
I dare say ho is removed by this tirae, for a man
with an incorae 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-
cars coupled together, and drawn by the pony-engine
I was famUiar with in our Piazza. This is a coramon
means of travel between all large Italian cities and
outlying sraaU 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
ap to the steam-tram, and I will never believe that
American horses are less capable of inteUectual devel
opment than the Italian, IH,
We postponed our visit to Fiesole, which we had
been meaning to make aU winter, until the last days of
our Florentine sojoum, and it was quite the middle of
April when we drove up to the Etruscan city.
" Go by the new road and come back by the old,"
said a friend who heard we were reaUy going at last.
" Then you wiU get the whole thing."
We did so ; but I ara not going to raake the
reader a partner of all our advantages ; I ara 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 vUla of the Medici. Wherever
they are they are charming. The villa of Boccaccio
is now the ViUa Palraieri ; I stUl see it fenced with
cypresses, and its broad terrace peopled with weather-

270 TUSCAN CITIES,
beaten statues, which a;t a distance I could not have
sworn were not the gay ladies and gentleraen who met
there and told their raerry 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 gentleraan who wrote a poera there, in which
he raaintained that at the tirae 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 conderaned 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 hiraseH 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 kiUed him and
Giuliano at the time of their ill-starred conspiracy.
You come suddenly upon it, deeply dropped araidst
its gardens, at a turn of the winding slopes which
make the ascent to Fiesole a constantly changing de
Ught and wonder.
Fiesole was farther than she seemed in the fine, high
air she breathes, and we had sorae long hours of sun
and breeze in the exquisite spring raorning 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 Umits, where the Pia Casa di Ri-

PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 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
neither promise, for it yielded to us without a strug
gle, and then was rather tame and comraonplace —
commonplace and tame, of course, comparatively. It
is not everywhere that you have an impressive Etrus
can wall ; a grass-grown Roraan 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 raodern aspect to
think of the Etniscan 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 Caffe 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 aU the waUs in Fiesole should not be dead by this
time — were stUl 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 rae rather stand aside with the Fiesolans,
and leave it to the reader !

THE END.

LSLO 98900