UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES TUSCAN CITIES. TUSCAN CITIES BY WILLIAM D. HOW ELLS SHitfj ElIuBttatfoitB FROM DRAWINGS AND ETCHINGS BY JOSEPH PENNELL AND OTHERS BOSTON TICKNOR AND COMPAN Y 211 JTrrmont 5trrrt Copyright, 1884 and 1885, By W. D. Howells. All rights reserved. iHmbcrsttg Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. u* - LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. P1GI Escutcheons in the Cloister of Santa Makia Novella 3 The Virginia Cigar G An Orange-vender 10 School-boy 10 A Chestnut-vender 11 JV Nl In the Sun 12 A Laborer 12 Florence, on the Arno. Ponte Veccuio 15 A Florentine Flower-girl 22 At Doney's 23 Across the Ponte Vecchio 30 A Street in Florence 33 San Martino. Exterior 35 Door of Dante's House 3G Church where Dante was married. San Martino 37 John ok Bologna's Devil 11 Initial Letter 42 In the Old Market 47 In the Barge llo f>2 A Street in Oltrarno fH hr LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE TllE PORTA KOMANA 66 Ponte Santa Trinita C8 Tailpiece ? 5 Initial Lettek 76 Loggia dei Lanzi 81 The Brothers of the Misericordia 99 Stenterello 102 The Clown 104 On the Arno. Rear of Via de' Bardi 110 Florentine Housetops 116 Fountain in the Boboli Garden 121 Initial Letter 125 A Mountain Town 127 A City Gate 137 Piazza Commuxale and Tower of the Mangia 140 A Street in Siena 148 A High Breeze 149 Under the Arches in Siena 152 Fountain' outside of the Wall at Siena ]57 Washing-day. Siena 159 Initial Letter 101 The Return from the Fountain 1(54 Sienese Gardens 168 Up and Down in Siena 169 Fields within the Walls 171 A Medieval Sienese 174 One of the Listeners . 175 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. V PAGE An Archway in Siena 17o: ^r IN TIIK OLD MARKET. A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 49 worst classes seem to be everywhere, I do not know why, and the air was full of the clatter of their feet and tongues, intolerably reverberated from the high many-windowed walls of scorbutic brick and stucco. These walls were, of course, garlanded with garments hung to dry from their casements. It is perpetually washing-day in Italy, and the observer, seeing so much linen washed and so little clean, is everywhere invited to the solution of one of the strangest problems of the Latin civilization. The ancient home of the Medici has none of the feudal dignity, the baronial pride, of the quarter of the Lamberti and the Buon- delmonti ; and, disliking them as I did, I was glad to see it in the possession of that squalor, so different from the cheerful and indus- trious thrift of Piazza Donati and the neighborhood of Dante's house. No touch of sympathetic poetry relieves the history of that race of demagogues and tyrants, who, in their rise, had no thought but to aggrandize themselves, and whose only greatness was an apotheosis of egotism. It is hard to understand through what law of develop- ment, from lower to higher, the Providence which rules the affairs of men permitted them supremacy ; and it is easy to understand how the better men whom they supplanted and dominated should abhor them. They were especially a bitter dose to the proud-stomached aristocracy of citizens which had succeeded the extinct Ghibelline nobility in Florence ; but, indeed, the three pills which they adopted from the arms of their guild of physicians, together with the only appellation by which history knows their lineage, were agreeable to none who wished their country well. From the first Medici to the last, they were nearly all hypocrites or ruffians, bigots or imbeciles ; and Lorenzo, who was a scholar and a poet, and the friend of scholars and poets, had the genius and science of tyranny in supreme degree, though he wore no princely title and assumed to be only the chosen head of the commonwealth. " Under his rule," says Villari, in his " Life of Savonarola," that almost incomparable biography, " all wore a prosperous and contented aspect; the parties that had so long disquieted the city were at peuce ; imprisoned, or banished, or dead, those who would not sub- 4 50 TUSCAN CITIES. mit to the Medicean domination ; tranquillity and calm were every- where. Feasting, dancing, public shows, and games amused the Florentine people, who, once so jealous of their rights, seemed to have forgotten even the name of liberty. Lorenzo, who took part in all these pleasures, invented new ones every day. But among all his inven- tions, the most famous was that of the carnival songs (canti carna- scialeschi), of which he composed the first, and which were meant to be sung in the masquerades of carnival, when the youthful nobility, disguised to represent the Triumph of Death, or a crew of demons, or some other caprice of fancy, wandered through the city, filling it with their riot. The reading of these songs will paint the corruption of the town far better than any other description. To-day, not only the youthful nobility, but the basest of the populace, would hold them in loathing, and to go singing them through the city would be an offence to public decency which could not fail to be punished. These things were the favorite recreation of a prince lauded by all the world and held up as a model to every sovereign, a prodigy of wisdom, a political and literary genius. And such as they called him then, many would judge him still," says our author, who ex- plicitly warns his readers against Eoscoe's " Life of Lorenzo de' Medici," as the least trustworthy of all in its characterization. " They would forgive him the blood spilt to maintain a dominion unjustly acquired by him and his ; the disorder wrought in the common- wealth ; the theft of the public treasure to supply his profligate waste ; the shameless vices to which in spite of his feeble .health he abandoned himself ; and even that rapid and infernal corruption of the people, which he perpetually studied with all the force and capacity of his soul. And all because he was the protector of letters and the fine arts ! " In the social condition of Florence at that time there was indeed a strange contrast. Culture was universally diffused; everybody knew Latin and Greek, everybody admired the classics ; many ladies were noted for the elegance of their Greek and Latin verses. The arts, which had languished since the time of Giotto, revived, and on all sides rose exquisite palaces and churches. But artists, scholars, A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 51 politicians, nobles, and plebeians were rotten at heart, lacking in every public and private virtue, every moral sentiment. Eeligion was the tool of the government or vile hypocrisy ; they had neither civil, nor religious, nor moral, nor philosophic faith ; even doubt feebly asserted itself in their souls. A cold indifference to every principle prevailed, and those visages full of guile and subtlety wore a smile of chilly superiority and compassion at any sign of enthusiasm 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 be- came the resort of the most illustrious wits of his time, . . . and whether in the meetings under his own roof, or in those of the famous Platonic Academy, his own genius shone brilliantly in that elect circle. ... A strange life indeed was Lorenzo's. After giving his whole mind and soul to the destruction, by some new law, of some last remnant of liberty, after pronouncing some fresh sentence of ruin or death, he entered the Platonic Academy, and ardently dis- cussed virtue and the immortality of the soul ; then sallying forth to mingle with the dissolute youth of the city, he sang his carnival songs, and abandoned himself to debauchery ; returning home with Pulci and 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 that variety of life they cannot cite a solitary act of real gen- erosity toward his people, his friends, or his kinsmen ; for surely if there had been such an act, his indefatigable flatterers would not have forgotten it. . . . He had inherited from Cosimo all that subtlety by which, without being a great statesman, he was prompt in cunning subterfuges, full of prudence and acuteness, skilful in dealing with ambassadors, most skilful in extinguishing his enemies, bold and cruel when he believed the occasion permitted. . . . His face revealed his character; there was something sinister and hateful in it; the complexion was greenish, the mouth very large, the nose flat, and the vdice nasal ; but his eye was quick and keen, his forehead was 52 TUSCAN CITIES. high, and his manner had all of gentleness that can be imagined of an age so refined and elegant as that; his conversation was full of vivacity, of wit and learning; those who were admitted to his familiarity were always fascinated by him. He seconded his age in all its tendencies ; corrupt as it was, he left it cor- rupter still in every way ; he gave himself up to pleasure, and he taught his people to give themselves up to it, to its intoxication and its delirium." XVIII. This is the sort of being whom human nature in self-defence ought always to recognize as a devil, and whom no glamour of cir- cumstance or quality should be suffered to disguise. It is success like his which, as Victor Hugo says of Louis Napoleon's similar suc- cess, " confounds the human conscience," and kindles the lurid light in which assassination seems a holy duty. Lorenzo's tyranny in Florence was not only the extinction of public liberty, but the con- trol of private life in all its relations. He made this marriage and he forbade that among the principal families, as it suited his pleas- ure ; he decided employments and careers ; he regulated the most intimate affairs of households in the interest of his power, with a final impunity which is inconceivable of that proud and fiery Florence. The smoldering resentment of his tyranny, which flamed out in the conspiracy of the Pazzi, adds the consecration of a desperate love of liberty to the cathedral, hallowed by religion and history, in which the tragedy was enacted. It was always dramatizing itself there when I entered the Duomo, whether in the hush and twilight of some vacant hour, or in the flare of tapers and voices while some high ceremonial filled the vast nave with its glittering procession. But I think the ghosts preferred the latter setting. To tell the truth, the Duomo at Florence is a temple to damp the spirit, dead or alive, by the immense impression of stony bareness, of drab vacuity, which one receives from its interior, unless it is filled with people. Outside it is magnificently imposing, in spite of the insufficiency and irregu- A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 53 larity 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 being almost crowded upon by the surrounding shops and cafes, it is noble, and more and more astonishing ; and there is the baptistery, with its heavenly gates, and the tower of Giotto, with its immortal beauty, as novel for each new-comer as if freshly set out there overnight for his advantage. Nor do I object at all to the cab- stands there, and the little shops all round, and the people thronging through the piazza, in and out of the half-score of crooked streets opening upon it. You do not get all the grandeur of the cathedral outside, but you get enough, while you come away from the interior in a sort of destitution. One needs some such function as I saw there one evening at dusk in order to realize all the spectacular capabilities of the place. This function consisted mainly of a visible array of the Church's forces "against blasphemy," as the printed notices informed me ; but with the high altar blazing, a constellation of candles in the distant gloom, and the long train of priests, chor- isters, acolytes, and white-cowled penitents, each with his taper, and the archbishop, bearing the pyx, at their head, under a silken canopy, it formed a setting of incomparable vividness for the scene on the last Sunday before Ascension, 1478. There is, to my thinking, no such mirror of the spirit of that time as the story of this conspiracy. A pope was at the head of it, and an archbishop was there in Florence to share actively in it. Having failed to find Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici together at Lorenzo's villa, the conspirators transfer the scene to the cathedral ; the mo- ment chosen for striking the blow is that supremely sacred moment when the very body of Christ is elevated for the adoration of the kneeling worshippers. What a contempt they all have for the place and the 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 bottom of the heart of one conspirator lingers a mediasval 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 54 TUSCAN CITIES. simple soldier ; give it to this priest ; he knows what a church is, and how little sacred ! The cathedral is packed with people, and Lorenzo is there, but Giuliano is not come yet. Are we to be fooled a second time ? Malediction ! Send some one to fetch that Medicean beast, who is so slow coming to the slaughter ! I am of the conspiracy, for I hate the Medici; but these muttered blasphemies, hissed and ground through the teeth, this frenzy for murder, it is getting to be little better than that, make me sick. Two of us go for Giuliano to his house, and being acquaintances of his, we laugh and joke familiarly with him ; we put our arms caressingly about him, and feel if he has a shirt of mail on, as we walk him between us through the crowd at the corner of the cafe there, invisibly, past all the cabmen ranked near the cathedral and the baptistery, not one of whom shall snatch his horse's oat-bag from his nose to invite us phantoms to a turn in the city. We have our friend safe in the cathedral at last, hap- less, kindly youth, whom we have nothing against except that he is of that cursed race of the Medici, and now at last the priest ele- vates the host and it is time to strike ; the little bell tinkles, the multitude holds its breath and falls upon its knees ; Lorenzo and Giuliano kneel with the rest. A moment, and Bernardo Bandini plunges his short dagger through the boy, who drops dead upon his face, and Francesco Pazzi flings himself upon the body, and blindly striking to make sure of his death, gives himself a wound in the leg that disables him for the rest of the work. And now we see the folly of intrusting Lorenzo to the unpractised hand of a priest, who would have been neat enough, no doubt, at mixing a dose of poison. The bungler has only cut his man a little in the neck ! Lorenzo's sword is out and making desperate play for his life ; his friends close about him, and while the sacred vessels are tumbled from the altar and trampled under foot in the mellay, and the cathedral rings with yells and shrieks and curses and the clash of weapons, they have hurried him into the sacristy and barred the doors, against which we shall beat ourselves in vain. Fury ! Infamy ! Malediction ! Pick yourself up, Francesco Pazzi, and get home as you may ! There is A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 55 no mounting to horse and crying liberty through the streets for you ! All is over ! The wretched populace, the servile signory, side with the Medici ; in a few hours the Archbishop of Pisa is swinging by the neck from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio ; and while he is yet alive you are dragged, bleeding and naked, from your bed through the streets and hung beside him, so close that in his dying agony he sets his teeth in your breast with a convulsive frenzy that leaves you fast in the death-clutch of his jaws till they cut the ropes and you ruin hideously down to the pavement below. XIX. One must face these grisly details from time to time if he would feel what Florence was. All the world was like Florence at that time in its bloody cruelty ; the wonder is that Florence, being what she otherwise was, should be like all the world in that. One should take the trouble also to keep constantly in mind the smallness of the theatre in which these scenes were enacted. Compared with modern cities, Florence was but a large town, and these Pazzi were neighbors and kinsmen of the Medici, and they and their fathers had seen the time when the Medici were no more in the state than other families which had perhaps scorned to rise by their arts. It would be insuf- ferable to any of us if some acquaintance whom we knew so well, root and branch, should come to reign over us; but this is what happened through the Medici in Florence. I walked out one pleasant Sunday afternoon to the Villa 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 Villa Careggi when you go to look for it, you come to something else equally memorable, by ways as beautiful and through landscapes as picturesque. I remember that there was hanging from a crevice of one of the stone walls which we sauntered between, one of those great purple anemones of Florence, tilting and swaying in the> sunny air of February, and that there was a tender presentiment 56 TUSCAN CITIES. of spring in the atmosphere, and people were out languidly enjoying the warmth about their doors, as if the winter had been some malady of theirs, and they were now slowly convalescent. The mountains were white with snow beyond Fiesole, but that was perhaps to set off to better advantage the nearer hill-sides, studded with villas gleam- ing white through black plumes of cypress, and blurred with long gray stretches of olive orchard ; it is impossible to escape some such crazy impression of intention in the spectacular prospect of Italy, though that is probably less the fault of the prospect than of the people who have painted and printed so much about it. There were vineyards, of course, as well as olive orchards on all those broken and irregular slopes, over which wandered a tangle of the high walls which everywhere shut you out from intimate approach to the fields about Florence ; you may look up at them, afar off, or you may look down at them, but you cannot look into them on the same level. We entered the Villa Careggi, when we got to it, through a high, grated gateway, and then we found ourselves in a delicious garden, the exquisite thrill of whose loveliness lingers yet in my utterly satisfied senses. I remember it as chiefly a plantation of rare trees, with an enchanting glimmer of the inexhaustibly various landscape through every break in their foliage ; but near the house was a for- mal parterre for flowers, silent, serene, aristocratic, touched not with decay, but a sort of pensive regret. On a terrace yet nearer were some putti, some frolic boys cut in marble, with a growth of brown moss on their soft backs, and looking as if, in their lapse from the civilization for which they were designed, they had begun to clothe themselves in skins. As to the interior of the villa, every one may go there and observe its facts; its vast, cold, dim saloons, its floors of polished cement, like ice to the foot, and its walls covered with painted histories and anecdotes and portraits of the Medici. The outside warmth had not got into the house, and I shivered in the sepulchral gloom, and could get no sense of the gay, voluptuous, living past there, not even in the prettily painted loggia where Lorenzo used to sit with his friends overlooking Val d'Arno, and glimpsing the tower of Giotto and the A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 57 dome of Brunelleschi. But there is one room, next to the last of the long suite fronting on the lovely garden, where the event which makes the place memorable has an incomparable actuality. It is the room where Lorenzo died, and his dying eyes could look from its windows out over the lovely garden, and across the vast stretches of villa and village, olive and cypress, to the tops of Florence swimming against the horizon. He was a long time dying, of the gout of his ancestors and his own debauchery, and he drew near his end cheer- fully enough, and very much as he had always lived, now reasoning high of philosophy and poetry with Pico della Mirandola and Politian, and now laughing at the pranks of the jesters and buffoons whom they brought in to amuse him, till the very last, when he sickened of all those delights, fine or gross, and turned his thoughts to the mercy despised so long. But, as he kept saying, none had ever dared give him a resolute No, save one ; and dreading in his final hours the mockery of flattering priests, he sent for this one fearless soul ; and Savonarola, who had never yielded to 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 pic- ture of Perugino's on the wall at the left beside it. Piero, Lorenzo's son, from whom he has just parted, must be in the next room yet, and the gentle Pico della Mirandola, whom Lorenzo was so glad to see that he smiled and jested with him in the old way, has closed the door on the preacher and the sinner. Lorenzo confesses that he has 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 Savonarola to quiet him kept repeat- ing ' God is good ; God is merciful. But,' he added, when Lorenzo had ceased to speak, ' there is need of three things.' ' And what are they, father ? ' ' First, you must have a great and living faith in the mercy of God.' 'This I have the greatest.' 'Second, you must restore that which you have wrongfully taken, or require your chil- dren to restore it for you.' Lorenzo looked surprised and troubled ; but he forced himself to compliance, and nodded his head in sign of 58 TUSCAN CITIES. assent. Then Savonarola rose to his feet, and stood over the dying prince. ' Last, you must give back their liberty to the people of Florence.' Lorenzo, summoning all his remaining strength, disdain- fully turned his back; and, without uttering a word, Savonarola departed without giving him absolution." It was as if I saw and heard it all, as I stood there in the room where the scene had been enacted ; it still remains to me the vividest event in Florentine history, and Villari has no need, for me at least, to summon all the witnesses he calls to establish the verity of the story. There are some disputed things that establish themselves in our credence through the nature of the men and the times of which they are told, and this is one of them. Lorenzo and Savonarola were equally matched in courage, and the Italian soul of the one was as subtle for good as the Italian soul of the other was subtle for evil. In that encounter, the preacher knew that it was not the sack of a city or the blood of conspirators for which the sinner really desired absolution, however artfully and naturally they were advanced in his appeal ; and Lorenzo knew when he sent for him that the monk would touch the sore spot in his guilty heart unerringly. It was a profound drama, searching the depths of character on either side, and on either side it was played with matchless magnanimity. XX. After I had been at Careggi, I had to go again and look at San Marco, at the cell to which Savonarola returned from that death-bed, sorrowing. Yet, at this distance of time and place, one must needs wonder a little why one is so pitiless to Lorenzo, so devoted to Savonarola. I have a suspicion, which I own with shame and reluc- tance, that I should have liked Lorenzo's company much better, and that I, too, should have felt to its last sweetness the charm of his manner. I confess that I think I should have been bored it is well to be honest with one's self in all things by the menaces and mystery of Savonarola's prophesying, and that I should have thought his crusade against the pomps and vanities of Florence a vulgar and A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 59 ridiculous business. He and his monks would have been terribly- dull companions for one of my make within their convent; and when they came out and danced in a ring with his male and female devotees in the square before the church, I should have liked them no better than so many soldiers of the Army of Salvation. That is not my idea of the way in which the souls of men are to be purified and elevated, oi* their thoughts turned to God. Puerility and vul- garity of a sort to set one's teeth on edge marked the excesses which Savonarola permitted in his followers ; and if he could have realized his puritanic republic, it would have been one of the heaviest yokes about the neck of poor human nature that have ever burdened it. For the reality would have been totally different from the ideal. So far as we can understand, the popular conception of Savonarola's doctrine was something as gross as Army-of-Salvationism, as wild and sensuous as backwoods Wesleyism, as fantastic, as spiritually arrogant as primitive Quakerism, as bleak and grim as militant Puritanism. We must face these facts, and the fact that Savonarola, though a Puritan, was no Protestant at all, but the most devout of Catholics, even while he defied the Pope. He was a sublime and eloquent preacher, a genius inspired to ecstasy with the beauty of holiness ; but perhaps perhaps ! Lorenzo knew the Florentines better than he when he turned his face away and died unshriven rather than give them back their freedom. Then why, now that they have both been dust for four hundred years, and in all things the change is such that if not a new heaven there is a new earth since their day, why do we cling tenderly, devoutly, to the strange, frenzied apostle of the Impossible, and turn, abhorring, from that gay, accomplished, charming, wise, and erudite statesman who knew what men were so much better? There is nothing of Savonarola now but the memory of his purpose, nothing of Lorenzo but the memory of his ; and now we see, far more clearly than if the /rate had founded his free state upon the ruins of the magnificd's tyranny, that the one willed only good to others, and the other willed it only to himself. All history, like each little individual experience, en- fcft'ces nothing but this lesson of altruism ; and it is because the 60 TUSCAN CITIES. memory which consecrates the church of San Marco teaches it in supreme degree that one stands before it with a swelling heart. In itself the church is nowise interesting or imposing, with that ugly and senseless classicism of its facade, which associates itself with Spain rather than Italy, and the stretch of its plain, low con- vent walls. It looks South American, it looks Mexican, with its plaza-like piazza ; and the alien effect is heightened by the stiff tropical plants set round the recent military statue in the centre. But when you are within the convent gate, all is Italian, all is Florentine again ; for there is nothing more Florentine in Florence than those old convent courts 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 lias a climate of its own. Of course, the Dominican friars are long gone from San Marco ; the place is a museum now, admirably kept up by the Government. I paid a franc to go in, and found the old cloister so little convent- ual that there was a pretty girl copying a fresco in one of the lunettes, who presently left her scaldino on her scaffolding, and got down to start the blood in her feet by a swift little promenade under the arches where the monks used to walk, and over the dead whose gravestones pave the way. You cannot help those things ; and she was really very pretty, much prettier than a monk. In one of the cells upstairs there was another young lady ; she was copying a Fra Angelico, who might have been less shocked at her presence than some would think. He put a great number of women, as beautiful as he could paint them, in the frescos with which he has illuminated the long line of cells. In one place he has left his own portrait in a saintly company, looking on at an Annunciation : a very handsome youth, with an air expressive of an artistic rather than a spiritual interest in the fact represented, which indeed has the effect merely of a polite interview. One looks at the frescos glimmering through the dusk of the little rooms in hardly discernible detail, with more or less care, according to one's real ' or attempted delight in them, A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 61 and then suddenly comes to the cell of Savonarola ; and all the life goes out of those remote histories and allegories, and pulses in an agony of baffled good in this martyrdom. Here is the desk at which he read and wrote ; here are laid some leaves of his manuscript, as if they had just trembled from those wasted hands of his ; here is the hair shirt he wore, to mortify and torment that suffering flesh the more; here is a bit of charred wood gathered from the fire in which he expiated his love for the Florentines by a hideous death at their hands. It rends the heart to look at them ! Still, after four hundred years, the event is as fresh as yesterday, as fresh as Calvary ; and never can the race which still gropes blindly here con- ceive of its divine source better than in the sacrifice of some poor fellow-creature who perishes by those to whom he meant nothing but good. As one stands in the presence of these pathetic witnesses, the whole lamentable tragedy rehearses itself again, with a power that makes one an actor in it. Here, I am of that Florence which has sprung erect after shaking the foot of the tyrant from its neck, too fiercely free to endure the yoke of the reformer ; and I perceive the waning strength of Savonarola's friends, the growing number of his foes. I stand with the rest before the Palazzo Vecchio waiting for the result of that ordeal by fire to which they have challenged his monks in test of his claims, and I hear with foreboding the murmurs of the crowd when they are balked of their spectacle by that question between the Dominicans and the Franciscans about carrying the host through the flames ; I return with him heavy and sorrowful to his convent, prescient of broken power over the souls which his voice has swayed so long; I am there in San Marco when he rises to preach, and the gathering storm of insult and outrage bursts upon him, witli hisses and yells, till the battle begins between his Piagnoni and the Arrabbiati, and rages through the consecrated edifice, and that fiery Peter among his friars beats in the skulls of his assailants with the bronze crucifix caught up from the altar ; I am in the piazza before the church when the mob attacks the convent, and the monks, shaking off his meek control, reply with musket-shots from their 62 TUSCAN CITIES. 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 woman's ; IN THE BARGELLO. I hear his confused and uncertain replies under the torture when they ask him whether he claims now to have - i ->^ j v 7 ;, prophesied from God; I climb with him, for that month's respite they allow him before they put him to the question again, to the narrow cell high up in the tower of the Old Palace, where, with the roofs and towers of the cruel city he had so loved far below him, and the purple hills misty against the snow-clad mountains all round the horizon, he recovers something of his peace of mind, and keeps his serenity of soul; I follow him down to the chapel beautiful with Ghirlandajo's frescos, where he spends his last hours, before they lead him between the two monks who are to suffer with him ; and once more T stand among the pitiless multitude in the piazza. They make him taste the agony of death twice in the death of his monks ; then he submits his neck to the halter and the hangman thrusts him from the A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 63 scaffold, where the others hang dangling in their chains above the pyre that is to consume their bodies. " Prophet ! " cries an echo of the mocking voice on Calvary, " now is the time for a miracle ! " The hangman thinks to please the crowd by playing the buffoon with the quivering form ; a yell of abhorrence breaks from them, and he makes haste to descend and kindle the fire that it may reach Savona- rola while he is still alive. A wind rises and blows the flame away. The crowd shrinks back terrified : " A miracle ! a miracle ! " But the wind falls again, and the bodies slowly burn, dropping a rain of blood into the hissing embers. The heat moving the right hand of Savonarola, he seems to lift it and bless the multitude. The Pia- gnoni fall sobbing and groaning to their knees ; the Arrabbiati set on a crew of ribald boys, who, dancing and yelling round the fire, pelt the dead martyrs with a shower of stones. Once more I was in San Marco, but it was now in the nineteenth century, on a Sunday of January, 1883. There, in the place of Savon- arola, who, though surely no Protestant, was one of the precursors of the Reformation, stood a Northern priest, chief perhaps of those who would lead us back to Eome, appealing to us in the harsh sibi- lants of our English, where the Dominican had rolled the organ harmonies of his impassioned Italian upon his hearers' souls. I have certainly nothing to say against Monsignor Capel, and I have never seen a more picturesque figure than his as he stood in his episcopal purple against the curtain of pale green behind him, his square priest's cap on his fine head, and the embroidered sleeves of some ecclesiastical under-vestment showing at every tasteful gesture. His face was strong, and beautiful with its deep-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 exquisite in diction and accent, and his matter was very good. He was warning us against Agnosticism and the limitations of merely scientific wisdom ; but I thought that there was little need to persuade us of God in a church where Savonarola 64 TUSCAN CITIES. 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 pave- ment from the tombs below, and made my feet so very cold, were more eloquent of immortality in that place. XXI. One morning, early in February, I walked out through the pictur- esqueness of Oltrarno, and up the long ascent of the street to Porta San Giorgio, for the purpose of revering what is left of the for- tifications designed by Michael Angelo for the defence of the city in the great siege of 1535. There are many things to distract even the most resolute pilgrim on the way to that gate, and I was but too will- ing to loiter. There are bricabrac shops on the Ponte Vecchio, and in the Via Guicciar- dini and the Piazza Pitti, with old canvases, and carvings, and bronzes in their win- dows ; and though a little past the time of life when one piously looks up the scenes of fiction, I had to make an excursion up the Via de' Bardi for the sake of Eomola, whose history begins in that street. It is a book which you must read again in Flor- A STREET IN OLTRARNO. A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 65 ence, for it gives a true and powerful impression of Savonarola's time, even if the author does burden her drama and dialogue with too much history. The Via de' Bardi, moreover, is worthy a visit for its own Gothic-palaced, mediaeval sake, and for the sake of that long stretch of the Boboli garden wall backing upon it with ivy flung over its shoulder, and a murmur of bees in some sort of invisible blossoms beyond. In that neighborhood I had to stop a moment before the house simple, but keeping its counte- nance in the presence of a long line of Guicciardini palaces where Machiavelli lived ; a barber has his shop on the ground floor now, and not far off, again, are the houses of the Canigiani, the maternal ancestors of Petrarch. And yet a little way, up a steep, winding street, is the house of Galileo. It bears on its front a tablet record- ing the great fact that Ferdinand II. de' Medici visited his valued astronomer there, and a portrait of the astronomer is painted on the stucco; there is a fruiterer underneath, and there are a great many children playing about, and their mothers screaming at them. The vast sky is blue without a speck overhead, and I look down on the tops of garden trees, and the brown-tiled roofs of houses sinking in ever richer and softer picturesqueness from level to level below. But to get the prospect in all its wonderful beauty, one must push on up the street a little farther, and pass out between two indolent sentries lounging under the Giottesquely frescoed arch of Porta San Giorgio, into the open road. By this time I fancy the landscape will have got the better of history in the interest of any amateur, and he will give but a casual glance at Michael Angelo's bastions or towers, and will abandon himself altogether to the rapture of that scene. For my part, I cannot tell whether I am more blest in the varieties of effect which every step of the descent outside the wall reveals in the city and its river and valley, or in the near olive orchards, gray in the sun, and the cypresses, intensely black against the sky. The road next the wall is bordered by a tangle of blackberry vines, which the amiable Florentine winter has not had the harshness to rob of their leaves ; they hang green from the canes, on which one might almost hope to find some berries. The lizards, basking in the warm 5 66 TUSCAN CITIES. dust, rustle away among them at my approach, and up the path comes a gentleman in the company of two small terrier dogs, whose little bells finely tinkle as they advance. It would be hard to say just how these gave the final touch to my satisfaction with a prospect in which everything glistened and sparkled as far as the snows of Vallombrosa, lustrous along the horizon ; but the reader ought to understand. XXII. I was instructed by the friend in whose tutelage I was pursuing with so much passion my search for historical localities that I had better not give myself quite away to either the asso- ciations or the landscapes at Porta San Giorgio, but wait till I visited San Miniato. Afterward I was "lad that I did so, for that is certainly the point from THE PORTA ROMAXA. which best to enjoy both. The day of our visit was gray and overcast, but the air was clear, and nothing was lost to the eye A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 67 among the objects distinct in line and color, almost as far as it could reach. We went out of the famous Porta Eomana, by which so much history enters and issues that if the customs officers there were not the most circumspect of men, they never could get round among the peasants' carts to tax their wine and oil without trampling a multi- tude of august and pathetic presences under foot. One shudders at the rate at which one's cocchiere dashes through the Past thronging the lofty archway, and scatters its phantoms right and left with loud explosions of his whip. Outside it is somewhat better, among the curves and slopes of the beautiful suburban avenues, with which Florence was adorned to be the capital of Italy twenty years ago. But here, too, history thickens upon you, even if you know it but a little ; it springs from the soil that looks so red and poor, and seems to fill the air. In no other space, it seems to me, do the great events stand so dense as in that city and the circuit of its hills ; so that, for mere pleasure in its beauty, the sense of its surpassing loveliness, perhaps one had better not know the history of Florence at all. As little as I knew it, I was terribly incommoded by it ; and that morn- ing, when I drove up to San Miniato to " realize " the siege of Flor- ence, keeping a sharp eye out for Montici, where Sciarra Colonna had his quarters, and the range of hills whence the imperial forces joined in the chorus of his cannon battering the tower of the church, I would far rather have been an unpremeditating listener to the poem of Browning which the friend in the carriage with me was repeating. The din of the guns drowned his voice from time to time, and while he was trying to catch a faded phrase, and going back and correcting himself, and saying, " No yes no ! That 's it no ! Hold on I have it ! " as people do in repeating poetry, my embattled fancy was flying about over all the historic scene, sallying, repulsing, defeating, succumbing ; joining in the famous camisada when the Florentines put their shirts on over their armor and attacked the enemy's sleep- ing camp by night, and at the same time playing ball down in the piazza of Santa Croce with the Florentine youth in sheer contempt of the besiegers. It was prodigiously fatiguing, and I fetched a long stgh of exhaustion as I dismounted at the steps of San Miniato, which 68 TUSCAN CITIES. was the outpost of the Florentines, and walked tremulously round it for a better view of the tower in whose top they had planted their great gun. It was all battered there by the enemy's shot aimed to dislodge the piece, and hi the crumbling brickwork nodded tufts of grass and dry weeds in the wind, like so many conceits of a frivolous tourist springing from the tragic history it recorded. The apse of the church below this tower is of the most satisfying golden brown in color, and within, the church is what all the guide-books know, but what I own I have forgotten. It is a very famous temple, and every PONTE SANTA TRINITA. 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 monument was there. After four hundred years of slavery, his pen was one of the keenest and bravest A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 69 of those which resumed the old Italian fight for freedom, and he might have had a more adequate monument. I believe there is an insufficient statue, or perhaps it is only a bust, or may be a tablet with his face in bas-relief ; but the modern Italians are not happy in their commemorations of the dead. The little Campo Santo at San Miniato is a place to make one laugh and cry with the hideous vul- garity of its realistic busts and its photographs set in the tombstones ; and yet it is one of the least offensive in Italy. When I could escape from the fascination of its ugliness, I went and leaned with my friend on the parapet that encloses the Piazza Michelangelo, and took my fill of delight in the landscape. The city seemed to cover the whole plain beneath us with the swarm of its edifices, and the steely stretch of the Arno thrust through its whole length and spanned by its half-dozen bridges. The Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio swelled up from the mass with a vastness which the distance seemed only to accent and reveal. To the northward showed the snowy tops of the Apennines, while on the nearer slopes of the soft brown hills Hanking the wonderful valley the towns and villas hung densely drifted everywhere, and whitened the plain to its remotest purple. I spare the reader the successive events which my unhappy ac- quaintance with the past obliged me to wait and see sweep over this mighty theatre. The winter was still in the wind that whistled round our lofty perch, and that must make the Piazza Michelangelo so delicious in the summer twilight ; the bronze copy of the David in the centre of the square looked half frozen. The terrace is part of the system of embellishment and improvement of Florence for her brief supremacy as capital ; and it is fitly called after Michael Angelo because it covers the site of so much work of his for her defence in the great siege. We looked about till we could endure the cold no longer, and then returned to our carriage. By this time the siege was over, and after a resistance of fifteen months we were betrayed by our leader Malatesta Baglioni, who could not resist the Pope's bribe. With the disgraceful facility of pleasure-seeking foreigners we instantly changed sides, and returned through the Porta Bomana, Which his treason opened, and, because it was so convenient, entered 70 TUSCAN CITIES. the city with a horde of other Spanish and German bigots and mer- cenaries that the empire had hurled against the stronghold of Italian liberty. XXIII. Yet, once within the beloved walls, I must still call them walls, though they are now razed to the ground and laid out in fine avenues, with a perpetual succession of horse-cars tinkling down their midst, I was all Florentine again, and furious against the Medici, whom after a whole generation the holy league of the Emperor and the Pope had brought back in the person of the bastard Alessandro. They brought him back, of course, in prompt and explicit violation of their sacred word ; and it seemed to me that I could not wait for his cousin Lorenzino to kill him, such is the ferocity of the mildest tourist in the presence of occasions sufficiently remote. But surely if ever a man merited murder it was that brutal despot, whose tyran- nies and excesses had something almost deliriously insolent in them, and who, crime for crime, seems to have preferred that which was most revolting. But I had to postpone this exemplary assassination till I could find the moment for visiting the Biccardi Palace, in the name of which the fact of the elder Medicean residence is clouded. It has long been a public building, and now some branch of the municipal government has its meetings and offices there ; but what the stranger commonly goes to see is the chapel or oratory frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli, which is perhaps the most simply and satisfy- ingly lovely little space that ever four walls enclosed. The sacred histories cover every inch of it with form and color ; and if it all remains in my memory a sensation of delight, rather than anything more definite, that is perhaps a witness to the efficacy with which the painter wrought. Serried ranks of seraphs, peacock-plumed, and kneeling in prayer ; garlands of roses everywhere ; contemporary Florentines on horseback, riding in the train of the Three Magi Kings under the low boughs of trees ; and birds fluttering through the dim, mellow atmosphere, the whole set dense and close in an opulent yet delicate fancifulness of design, that is what I recall, A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 71 with a conviction of the idleness and absurdity of recalling anything. It was like going out of doors to leave the dusky splendor of this chapel, which was intended at first to be seen only by the light of silver lamps, and come into the great hall frescoed by Luca Giordano, where his classicistic fables swim overhead in immeasurable light. They still have the air, those boldly foreshortened and dramatically postured figures, of being newly dashed on, the work of yesterday begun the day before; and they fill one with an ineffable gayety: War, Pestilence, and Famine, no less than Peace, Plenty, and Hygi- enic Plumbing, if that was one of the antithetical personages. Upon the whole, I think the seventeenth century was more comfort- able than the fifteenth, and that when men had fairly got their passions and miseries impersonalized into allegory, they were in a state to enjoy themselves much better than before. One can very well imagine the old Cosimo who built this palace having himself carried through its desolate magnificence, and crying that, now his son was dead, it was too big for his family ; but grief must have been a much politer and seemlier thing in Florence when Luca Giordano painted the ceiling of the great hall. In the Duke Alessandro's time they had only got half-way, and their hearts ached and burned in primitive fashion. The revival of learning had brought them the consolation of much classic example, both virtuous and vicious, but they had not yet fully philosophized slavery into elegant passivity. Even a reprobate like Lorenzino de' Medici "the morrow of a debauch," as De Musset calls him had his head full of the high Roman fashion of finishing tyrants, and behaved as much like a Greek as he could. The Palazzo Eiccardi now includes in its mass the site of the house in which Lorenzino lived, as well as the narrow street which formerly ran between his house and the palace of the Medici; so that if you have ever so great a desire to visit the very spot where Alessandro died that only too insufficient death, you must wreak your frenzy upon a small passage opening out of the present court. You enter this from the modern liveliness of the Via Cavour, in every Italian city since the unification there is a Via Cavour, a Via 72 TUSCAN CITIES. Garibaldi, and a Corso Vittorio Emmanuel e, and you ordinarily linger for a moment among the Etruscan and Koman marbles before paying your half franc and going upstairs. There is a little confusion in this, but I think upon the whole it heightens the effect ; and the question whether the custodian can change a piece of twenty francs, debating itself all the time in the mind of the amateur of tyranni- cide, sharpens his impatience, while he turns aside into the street which no longer exists, and mounts the phantom stairs to the van- ished chamber of the demolished house, where the Duke is waiting for the Lady Ginori, as he believes, but really for his death. No one, I think, claims that he was a demon less infernal than Lorenzino makes him out in that strange Apology of his, in which he justifies himself to posterity by appeals to antiquity. " Alessandro," he says, " went far beyond Phalaris in cruelty, because, whereas Phalaris justly punished Perillus for his cruel invention for miserably tor- menting and destroying men in his brazen Bull, Alessandro would have rewarded him if he had lived in his time, for he was himself always thinking out new sorts of tortures and deaths, like building men up alive in places so narrow that they could not turn or move, but might be said to be built in as a part of the wall of brick and stone, and in that state feeding them and prolonging their misery as much as possible, the monster not satisfying himself with the mere death of his people ; so that the seven years of his reign, for de- bauchery, for avarice and cruelty, may be compared with seven others of Nero, of Caligula, or of Phalaris, choosing the most abomi- nable of their whole lives, in proportion, of course, of the city to the empire ; for in that time so many citizens will be found to have been driven from their country, and persecuted, and murdered in exile, and so many beheaded without trial and without cause, and only for empty suspicion, and for words of no importance, and others poisoned or slain by his own hand, or his satellites, merely that they might not put him to shame before certain persons, for the condition in which he was born and reared ; and so many extortions and robberies will be found to have been committed, so many adulteries, so many violences, not only in things profane but in sacred also, that it will A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 73 be difficult to decide whether the tyrant was more atrocious and impious, or the Florentine people more patient and 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 kill- ing one who trusted me (which I do not allow I have done), I say that if I had done it in this case, and if I could not have accom- plished it otherwise, I should have done it. . . . That he was not of the house of Medici and my kinsman is manifest, for he was born of a woman of base condition, from Castelvecchi in the Eomagna, who lived in the house of the Duke Lorenzo [of Urbino], and was em- ployed in the most menial services, and married to a coachman. . . . He [Alessandro] left her to work in the fields, so that those citizens of ours who had fled from the tyrant's avarice and cruelty in the city determined to conduct her to the Emperor at Naples, to show his Majesty whence came the man he thought fit to rule Florence. Then Alessandro, forgetting his duty in his shame, and the love for his mother, which indeed he never had, and through an inborn cruelty and ferocity, caused his mother to be killed before she came to the Emperor's presence." On the way up to the chamber to which the dwarfish, sickly little tyrannicide has lured his prey, the most dramatic moment occurs. He stops the bold ruffian whom he has got to do him the pleasure of a certain unspecified homicide, in requital of the good turn by which he once saved his life, and whispers to him, " It is the Duke ! " Scoronconcolo, who had merely counted on an every-day murder, falters in dismay. But he recovers himself : " Here we are ; go ahead, if it were the devil himself ! " And after that he has no more compunction in the affair than if it were the butchery of a simple citizen. The Duke is lying there on the bed in the dark, and Loren- zino bends over him with " Are you asleep, sir ? " and drives his sword, shortened to half length, through him , but the Duke springs up, and crying out, " I did not expect this of thee ! " makes a fight for his life that tasks the full strength of the assassins, and covers fche chamber with blood. When the work is done, Lorenzino draws 74 TUSCAN CITIES. the curtains round the bed again, and pins a Latin verse to them explaining that he did it for love of country and the thirst for glory. XXIV. Is it perhaps all a good deal too mucli like a stage-play ? Or is it that stage-plays are too much like facts of this sort ? If it were at the theatre, one could go away, deploring the bloodshed, of course, but comforted by the justice done on an execrable wretch, the mur- derer of his own mother, and the pollution of every life that he touched. But if it is history we have been reading, we must turn the next page and see the city filled with troops by the Medici and their friends, and another of the race established in power before the people know that the Duke is dead. Clearly, poetical justice is not the justice of God. If it were, the Florentines would have had the republic again at once. Lorenzino, instead of being assassinated in Venice, on his way to see a lady, by the emissaries of the Medici, would have satisfied public decorum by going through the form of a trial, and would then have accepted some official employment and made a good end. Yet the seven Medicean dukes who followed Alessandro were so variously bad for the most part that it seems impious to regard them as part of the design of Providence. How, then, did they come to be ? Is it possible that sometimes evil pre- vails by its superior force in the universe ? We must suppose that it took seven Medicean despots and as many more of the house of Lorraine and Austria to iron the Florentines out to the flat and polished peacefulness of their modern effect. Of course, the com- monwealth could not go on in the old way ; but was it worse at its worst than the tyranny that destroyed it ? I am afraid we must allow that it w T as more impossible. People are not put into the world merely to love their country ; they must have peace. True freedom is only a means to peace ; and if such freedom as they have will not give them peace, then they must accept it from slavery. It is always to be remembered that the great body of men are not affected by oppressions that involve the happiness of the magnanimous few ; the A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 75 affair of most men is 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 experience 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 triumphant party every soul seemed cor- roded by envy and distrust of every other. There is, to be sure, the consoling reflection that the popular party was always the most generous and liberal, and that the oppression of all parties under the despotism was not exactly an improvement on the oppression of one. With this thought kept before you vividly, and with those facts blinked, you may go, for example, into the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo and make pretty sure of your pang in the presence of those solemn figures of Michael Angelo'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 the infamy and woe, For me 't is happiness not to feel or see. Do not awake me therefore. Ah, speak low ! " 76 TUSCAN CITIES. XXV. 'HOSE words of Michael Angelo's answer to Strozzi's civil verses on his Day and Night are nobly simple, and of a colloquial and natural pitch to which their author sel- dom condescended in sculpture. Even the Day is too muscularly awaking and the Night too anatomi- cally sleeping for the spectator's perfect loss of himself in the sculptor's thought ; but the figures are so famous that it is hard to reconcile one's self to the fact that they do not celebrate the memory of the greatest Medici. That Giuliano whom we see in the chapel there is little known to history ; of that Lorenzo, history chiefly remembers that he was the father of Alessandro, whom we have seen slain, and of Catharine de' Medici. Some people may think this enough ; but we ought to read the lives of the other Medici before deciding. Another thing to guard against in that chapel is the cold ; and, in fact, one ought to go well wrapped up in visiting any of the in-door monuments of Florence. Santa Croce, for example, is a tem- ple whose rigors I should not like to encounter again in January, especially if the day be fine without. Then the sun streams in with a deceitful warmth through the mellow blazon of the windows, and the crone, with her scaldino at the door, has the air almost of sitting by a register. But it is all an illusion. By the time you have gone the round of the strutting and mincing allegories, and the pompous effigies with which art here, as everywhere, renders death ridiculous, you have scarcely the courage to penetrate to those remote chapels where the Giotto frescos are. Or if you do, you shiver round among them with no more pleasure in them than if they were so many boreal lights. Vague they are, indeed, and spectral enough, those faded histories of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, and St. Francis of Assisi, and as far from us, morally, as anything at the pole ; so that the honest sufferer, who feels himself taking cold in his bare head, would blush for his absurdity in pretending to get any A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 77 comfort or joy from them, if all the available blood in his body were not then concentrated in the tip of his nose. For my part, I mar- velled at myself for being led, even temporarily, into temptation of that sort ; and it soon came to my putting my book under my arm and my hands in my pockets, and, with a priest's silken skull-cap on my head, sauntering among those works of art with no more sense of obligation to them than if I were their contemporary. It is well, if possible, to have some one with you to look at the book, and see what the works are and the authors. But nothing of it is comparable to getting out into the open piazza again, where the sun is so warm, though not so warm as it looks. It 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 temperance comes back with perpetual surprise to the gluttonous Northern nature. Their shyness of your fire, their gentle deprecation of your out-of-hours hospitality, amuse as freshly as at first ; and the reader who has not known the fact must imagine the well-dressed throng in the Florentine street more meagrely break- fasted and lunched than anything but destitution with us, and pro- tected against the cold in-doors by nothing but the clothes which are much more efficient without. XXVI. What strikes one first in the Florentine crowd is that it is so well dressed. I do not mean that the average of fashion is so great as with us, but that the average of raggedness is less. Venice, when I saw it again, seemed in tatters, but, so far as I can remember, Florence was not even patched ; and this, in spite of the talk one constantly hears of the poverty which has befallen the city since the removal of the capital to Eome. All classes are said to feel this adversity more or less, but none of them show it on the street; beggary itself is silenced to the invisible speech which one sees moving the lips of the old women who steal an open palm towards you at the church doors. Florence is not only better dressed on the average than 78 TUSCAN CITIES. Boston, but, with little over half the population, there are, I should think, nearly twice as many private carriages in the former city. I am not going beyond the most non-committal si dice in any study of the Florentine civilization, and I know no more than that it is said (as it has been said ever since the first northern tourist discovered them) that they will starve themselves at home to make a show abroad. But if they do not invite the observer to share their domes- tic self-denial, and it is said that they do not, even when he has long ceased to be a passing stranger, I do not see why he should complain. For my part their abstemiousness cost me no sacrifice, and I found a great deal of pleasure in looking at the turnouts in the Cascine, and at the fur-lined coats in the streets and piazzas. They are always great wearers of fur in the south, but I think it is less fashionable than it used to be in Italy. The younger swells did not wear it in Florence, but now and then I met an elderly gentle- man, slim, tall, with an iron -gray mustache, who, in folding his long fur-lined overcoat loosely about him as he walked, had a gratifying effect of being an ancestral portrait of himself ; and with all persons and classes content to come short of recent fashion, fur is the most popular wear for winter. Each has it in such measure as he may; and one day in the Piazza della Signoria, when there was for some reason an assemblage of market-folk there, every man had hanging operatically from his shoulder an overcoat with cheap fur collar and cuffs. They were all babbling and gesticulating with an impassioned amiability, and their voices filled the place with a leafy rustling which it must have known so often in the old times, when the Floren- tines came together there to govern Florence. One ought not, I suppose, to imagine them always too grimly bent on public business in those times. They must have got a great deal of fun out of it, in the long run, as well as trouble, and must have enjoyed sharpening their wits upon one another vastly. The presence now of all those busy-tongued people bargaining or gossiping, whichever they were gave its own touch to the pecu- liarly noble effect of the piazza, as it rose before me from the gentle slope of the Via Borgo dei Greci. I was coming back from that visit A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 79 to Santa Croce, of which I have tried to give the sentiment, and I was resentfully tingling still with the cold, and the displeasure of a backward glance at the brand-new ugliness of the facade, and of the big clumsy Dante on his pedestal before it, when all my burden suddenly lifted from me, as if nothing could resist the spring of that buoyant air. It was too much for even the dull, vague rage I felt at having voluntarily gone through that dreary old farce of old-master doing again, in which the man only averagely instructed in the his- tory of art is at his last extreme of insincerity, weariness, and degra- dation,- the ridiculous and miserable slave of the guide-book asterisks marking this or that thing as worth seeing. All seemed to rise and float away with the thin clouds, chasing one another across the gen- erous space of afternoon sky which the piazza opened to the vision ; and my spirit rose as light as the lion of the Eepublic, which capers so nimbly up the staff on top of the palace tower. There is something fine in the old piazza being still true to the popular and even plebeian use. In narrow and crowded Florence, one might have supposed that fashion would have tried to possess itself of the place, after the public palace became the residence of the Medici ; but it seems not to have changed its ancient character. It is now the starting-point of a line of omnibuses ; a rank of cabs sur- rounds the base of Cosimo's equestrian statue ; the lottery is drawn on the platform in front of the palace ; second-rate shops of all sorts face it from two sides, and the restaurants and cafes of the neighbor- hood are inferior. But this unambitious environment leaves the observer all the freer to his impressions of the local art, the groups of the Loggia dei Lanzi, the symmetrical stretch of the Portico degli 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 kindliness of nature in it. Plenty of men have been hung from its windows, plenty dashed from its turrets, slain at its base, torn in pieces, cruelly martyred before it ; the wild passions of the human heart have beaten against it like billows ; it has faced every violent crime and outbreak. And yet it is sacred, and the scene is sacred, to all who hope for their kind; for there, in some 80 TUSCAN CITIES. sort, century after century, the purpose of popular sovereignty the rule of all by the most struggled to fulfil itself, purblindly, bloodily, ruthlessly, but never ignobly, and inspired by an instinct only less strong than the love of life. There is nothing superfine, nothing of the salon about the place, nothing of the beauty of Piazza San Marco at Venice, which expresses the elegance of an oligarchy and suggests the dapper perfection of an aristocracy in decay ; it is loud with wheels and hoofs, and busy with commerce, and it has a certain ineffaceable rudeness and unfinish like the structure of a democratic state. XXVII. When Cosimo I., who succeeded Alessandro, moved his residence from the family seat of the Medici to the Palazzo Vecchio, it was as if he were planting his foot on the very neck of Florentine liberty. He ground his iron heel in deeply ; the prostrate city hardly stirred afterwards. One sees what a potent and valiant man he was from the terrible face of the bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini, now in the Bargello Museum; but the world, going about its business these many generations, remembers him chiefly by a horrid crime, the murder of his son in the presence of the boy's mother. Yet he was not only a great warrior and wild beast; he befriended letters, endowed universities, founded academies, encouraged printing ; he adorned his capital with statues and public edifices ; he enlarged and enriched the Palazzo Vecchio ; he bought Luca Pitti's palace, and built the Uffizzi, thus securing the eternal gratitude of the tourists who visit these galleries, and have something to talk about at the table d'hote. It was he who patronized Benvenuto Cellini, and got him to make his Perseus in the Loggia de' Lanzi ; he built the fishermen's arcade in the Mercato Vecchio, and the fine loggia of the Mercato Nuovo; he established the General Archives, and reformed the laws and the public employments ; he created Leghorn, and throughout Tuscany, which his arms had united under his rule, he promoted the material welfare of his people, after the manner of tyrants when they do not happen to be also fools. v4< 7 ^f>: A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 83 His care of them in other respects may be judged from the fact that he established two official spies in each of the fifty wards of the city, whose business it was to keep him informed of the smallest events, and all that went on in the houses and streets, together with their conjectures and suspicions. He did not 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 do it, and then take the credit of them, but he seems to have loved to adorn it with that terrible face of his on many busts and statues. Its ferocity, as Benvenuto Cellini has frankly recorded it, and as it betrays itself in all the effigies, is something to appall us still ; and whether the story is true or not, you see in it a man capable of striking his son dead in his mother's arms. To be sure, Garzia was not Cosimo's favorite, and, like a Medici, he had killed his brother ; but he was a boy, and when his father came to Pisa to find him, where he had taken refuge with his mother, he threw himself at Cosimo's feet and implored forgiveness. " I want no Cains in my family ! " said the father, and struck him with the dagger which he had kept hidden in his breast. " Mother ! Mother ! " gasped the boy, and fell dead in the arms of the hapless woman, who had urged him to trust in his father's mercy. She threw herself on the bed where they laid her dead son, and never looked on the light again. Some say she died of grief, some that she starved herself ; in a week she died, and was carried with her two children to Florence, where it was presently made known that all three had fallen victims to the bad air of the Maremma. She was the daughter of a Spanish king, and eight years after her death her husband married the vulgar and ignoble woman who had long been his mistress. This woman was young, handsome, full of life, and she queened it absolutely over the last days of the bloody tyrant. His excesses had broken Cosimo with premature decrepitude ; he was helpless in the hands of this creature, from whom his son tried to separate him in vain ; and hi; was two years in dying, after the palsy had deprived him of speech and motion, but left him able to think and to remember ! ' The son was that Francesco I. who is chiefly known to fame as 84 TUSCAN CITIES. the lover and then the husband of Bianca Cappello, to so little may a sovereign prince come in the crowded and busy mind of after- time. This grand duke had his courts and his camps, his tribunals and audiences, his shows of authority and government ; but what we see of him at this distance is the luxurious and lawless youth, sated with every indulgence, riding listlessly by under the window of the Venetian girl who eloped with the Florentine banker's clerk from her father's palace in the lagoons, and is now the household drudge of her husband's family in Florence. She is looking out of the window that looks on Savonarola's convent, in the tallest of the stupid, commonplace houses that confront it across the square ; and we see the prince and her as their eyes meet, and the work is done in the gunpowdery way of . southern passion. We see her again at the house of those Spaniards in the Via de' Banchi, which leads out of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella, from whence the Palazzo Man- dragone is actually in sight ; and the marchioness is showing Bianca her jewels and Wait a moment! There is something else the marchioness wishes to show her ; she will go get it ; and when the door reopens Francesco enters, protesting his love, to Bianca' s con- fusion, and no doubt to her surprise ; for how could she suppose he would be there ? We see her then at the head of the grand-ducal court, the poor, plain Austrian wife thrust aside to die in neglect ; and then when Bianca's husband, whom his honors and good fortune have rendered intolerably insolent, is slain by some of the duke's gentlemen, in the narrow street at Santo Spirito, hard by the handsome house in Via Maggio which the duke has given her, we see them married, and receiving in state the congratulations of Bianca's father and brother, who have come on a special embassy from Venice to proclaim the distinguished lady Daughter of the Kepublic, and, of course, to withdraw the price hitherto set upon her head. We see them then in the sort of life which must always follow from such love, the grand duke had spent three hundred thousand ducats in the celebration of his nuptials, overeating, overdrinking, and seeking their gross pleasures amid the ruin of the State. We see them trying to palm off a supposititious child upon A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 85 the Cardinal Ferdinand, who was the true heir to his brother, and would have none of his spurious nephew ; and we see these three sitting down in the villa at Poggio a Caiano to the famous tart which Bianca, remembering the skill of her first married days, has made with her own hands, and which she courteously presses the Cardinal to be the first to partake of. He politely refuses, being pro- vided with a ring of admirable convenience at that time in Italy, set with a stone that turned pale in the presence of poison. " Some one has to begin," cries Francesco, impatiently ; and in spite of his wife's signs she was probably treading on his foot under the table, and frowning at him he ate of the mortal viand ; and then in despair Bianca ate too, and they both died. Is this tart perhaps too much for the reader's digestion? There is another story, then, to the effect that the grand duke died of the same malarial fever that carried off his brothers Garzia and Giovanni, and Bianca perished of terror and apprehension ; and there is still another story that the Cardinal poisoned them both. Let the reader take his choice of them ; in any case, it is an end of Francesco, whom, as I said, the world remem- bers so little else of. It almost forgets that he was privy to the murder of his sister Isabella by her husband Paolo Orsini, and of his sister-in-law Eleo- nora by her husband Pietro de' Medici. The grand duke, who was then in the midst of his intrigue with Bianca, was naturally jealous of the purity of his family ; and as it has never been denied that both of those unhappy ladies had wronged their husbands, I suppose he can be justified by the moralists who contend that what is a venial lapse in a man is worthy death, or something like it, in a woman. About the taking-off of Eleonora, however, there was something gross, Medicean, butcherly, which all must deprecate, She knew she was to be killed, poor woman, as soon as her intrigue was discovered to the grand duke ; and one is not exactly able to sympathize with either the curiosity or the trepidation of that "celebrated Koman singer " who first tampered with the letter from her lover, intrusted to him, and then, terrified at its nature, gave it to Francesco. When her husband sent for her to come to him at his villa, she took leave 86 TUSCAN CITIES. of her child as for the last time, and Pietro met her in the dark of their chamber and plunged his dagger into her breast. The affair of Isabella Orsini was managed with much greater taste, with a sort of homicidal grace, a sentiment, if one may so speak, worthy a 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 Eome for her husband, and arrange her death with him. She, too, like Eleonora, had her fore- bodings, when Paolo Orsini asked her to their villa (it seems to have been the custom to devote the peaceful seclusion of the country to these domestic rites) ; but he did what he could to allay her fears by his affectionate gayety at supper, and his gift of either of those stag- hounds which he had brought in for her to choose from against the hunt planned for the morrow, as well as by the tender politeness with which he invited her to follow him to their room. At the door we may still see her pause, after so many years, and turn wistfully to her lady in waiting : " Madonna Lucrezia, shall I go or shall I not go to my husband ? What do you say ? " And Madonna Lucrezia Frescobaldi answers, with the irresponsible shrug which we can imagine : " Do what you like. Still, he is your husband ! " She enters, and Paolo Orsini, a prince and a gentleman, knows how to be as sweet as before, and without once passing from caresses to violence, has that silken cord about her neck Terrible stories, which I must try to excuse myself for telling the thousandth time. At least, I did not invent them. They are all part of the intimate life of the same family, and the reader must group them in his mind to get an idea of what Florence must have been under the first and second grand dukes. Cosimo is believed to have killed his son Garzia, who had stabbed his brother Giovanni. His son Pietro kills his wife, and his daughter Isabella is strangled A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 87 by her husband, both murders being done with the knowledge and approval of the reigning prince. Francesco and Bianca his wife die of poison intended for Ferdinand, or of poison given them by him. On these facts throw the light of St. Bartholomew's day in Paris, whither Catharine de' Medici, the cousin of these homicides, had carried the methods and morals of her family, and you begin to realize the Medici. By what series of influences and accidents did any race accumulate the enormous sum of evil which is but partly represented in these crimes ? By what process was that evil worked out of the blood ? Had it wreaked its terrible force in violence, and did it then no longer exist, like some explosive which has been fired ? These would be interesting questions for the casuist ; and doubtless such questions will yet come to be -studied with the same scientific minuteness which is brought to the solution of contemporary social problems. The Medici, a family of princes and criminals, may come to be studied like the Jukes, a family of paupers and criminals. What we know at present is, that the evil in them did seem to die out in process of time ; though, to be sure, the Medici died with it. That Ferdinand who succeeded Francesco, whichever poisoned the other, did prove a wise and beneficent ruler, filling Tuscany with good works, moral and material, and, by his marriage with Catharine of Lorraine, bringing that good race to Florence, where it afterwards reigned so long in the affections of the people. His son Cosimo II. was like him, but feebler, as a copy always is, with a dominant desire to get the sepulchre of our Lord away from the Turks to Florence, and long waging futile war to that end. In the time of Ferdinand II., Tus- cany, with the rest of Italy, was wasted by the wars of the French, Spaniards, and Germans, who found it convenient to fight them out there, and by famine and pestilence. But the grand duke was a well- meaning man enough ; he protected the arts and sciences as he got the opportunity, and he did his best to protect Galileo against the Pope and the inquisitors. Cosimo III., who followed him, was obliged to harass his subjects with taxes to repair the ruin of the wars in his father's reign ; he was much given to works of piety, and he had a 88 TUSCAN CITIES. wife who hated him, and finally forsook him and went back to France, her own country. He reigned fifty years, and after him came his son Gian Gastone, the last of his line. He was a person, by all accounts, who wished men well enough, but, knowing himself destined to leave no heir to the throne, was disposed rather to enjoy what was left of his life than trouble himself about the affairs of state. Germany, France, England, and Holland had already provided him with a successor, by the treaty of London, in 1718 ; and when Gian Gastone died, in 1737, Francis II. of Lorraine became Grand Duke of Tuscany. XXVIII. Undek the later Medici the Florentines were drawing towards the long quiet which they enjoyed under their Lorrainese dukes, the first of whom, as is well known, left being their duke to go and be husband of Maria Theresa and emperor consort. Their son, Pietro Leopoldo, succeeded him in Tuscany, and became the author of reforms in the civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical law, which then astonished all Europe, and which tardy civilization still lags behind in some things. For example, Leopold found that the abolition of the death penalty resulted not in more, but in fewer crimes of vio- lence ; yet the law continues to kill murderers, even in Massachu- setts. He lived to see the outbreak of the French revolution, and his son, Ferdinand I IT., was driven out by the forces of the Eepublic in 1796, after which Tuscany rapidly underwent the Napoleonic meta- morphoses, and was republican under the Directory, regal under Lodovico I., Bonaparte's king of 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 Leo- pold II. was driven out, to return the next year with the Austrians. Ten years later he again retired, and in 1860 Tuscany united herself by popular vote to the kingdom of Italy, of which Florence became the capital, and so remained till the French evacuated Eome in 1871. A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 89 The time from the restoration of Ferdinand III. till the first expulsion of Leopold II. must always be attractive to the student of Italian civilization as the period in which the milder Lorrainese traditions permitted the germs of Italian literature to live in Flor- ence, while everywhere else the native and foreign despotisms sought diligently to destroy them, instinctively knowing them to be the germs of Italian liberty and nationality ; but 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, apparently, the good prince got up at six o'clock in the morning, and dried the tears of his people. To be more specific, he " formed the generous project," according to Signor Bacciotti, by whose " Firenze Illustrata " I would not thanklessly profit, " of re- storing Tuscany to her original happy state," which, I think, must have been prehistoric. " His first occupation was to reform the laws, simplifying the civil and mitigating the criminal ; and the volumes are ten that contain his wise statutes, edicts, and decrees. In his time, ten years passed in which no drop of blood was shed on the scaffold. Prisoners suffered no corporeal 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 rare, and for three months at one period the prisons of Tuscany remained empty. The hospitals that Leopold founded, and the order and propriety in which he kept them, justly entitled him to the name of Father of the Poor. The education he gave his children aimed to render them compassionate and beneficent to their fellow- beings, and to make them men rather than princes. An illustrious Englishman, then living in Florence, and consequently an eye-witness, wrote of him : ' Leopold loves his people. He has abolished all the imposts which were not necessary ; he has dismissed nearly all his soldiers ; he has destroyed the fortifications of Pisa, whose main- tenance was extremely expensive, overthrowing the stones that de- voured men. He observed that his court concealed him from his people ; he no longer has a court. He has established manufactures, 90 TUSCAN CITIES. and opened superb roads at his own cost, and founded hospitals. These might be called, in Tuscany, the palaces of the grand duke. I visited them, and found throughout cleanliness, order, and delicate and attentive treatment ; I saw sick old men, who were cared for as if by their own sons ; helpless children watched over with a mother's care ; and that luxury of pity and humanity brought happy tears to my eyes. The prince often repairs to these abodes of sorrow and pain, and never quits them without leaving joy behind him, and coming away loaded with blessings : you might fancy you heard the expression of a happy people's gratitude, but that hymn rises from a hospital. The palace of Leopold, like the churches, is open to all without distinction ; three days of the week are devoted to one class of persons ; it is not that of the great, the rich, the artists, the foreigners ; it is that of the unfortunate ! In many countries, com- merce and industry have become the patrimony of the few : in Tuscany, all that know how may do ; there is but one exclusive privilege, ability. Leopold has enriched the year with a great number of work-days, which he took from idleness and gave back to agriculture, to the arts, to good morals. . . . The grand duke always rises before the sun, and when that beneficent star rejoices nature with its rays, the good prince has already dried many tears. . . . Leopold is happy, because his people are happy ; he be- lieves in God ; and what must be his satisfaction when, before closing his eyes at night, before permitting himself to sleep, he renders an account to the Supreme Being of the happiness of a million of sub- jects during the course of the day ! ' " English which has once been Italian acquires an emotionality which it does not perhaps wholly lose in returning to itself ; and I am not sure that the language of the illustrious stranger, whom I quote at second hand, has not kept some terms which are native to Signor Bacciotti rather than himself. But it must be remembered that he was an eighteenth-century Englishman, and perhaps expressed him- self much in this 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 A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 91 commemorate the atrocities of the Medici. At any rate it is de- lightful, and one may as probably derive the softness of the modern Florentine morals and manners from the benevolence of Leopold as from the ferocity of Cosimo. Considering what princes mostly were in the days when they could take themselves seriously, and still are now when I should think they would give themselves the wink on seeing their faces in the glass, I am willing to allow that kindly despot of a Leopold all the glory that any history may claim for him. He had the genius of humanity, and that is about the only kind of genius which is entitled to reverence in this world. If he perhaps conceived of men as his children rather than his brothers still he wished them well and did them all the good he knew how. After a hundred years it must be allowed that we have made a considerable advance beyond him in theory. XXIX. What society in Florence may now be like underneath its super- ficial effect of gentleness and placidity, the stranger, who reflects how little any one really knows of his native civilization, will carefully guard himself from saying upon his own authority. From the report of others, of people who had lived long in Florence and were qualified in that degree to speak, one might say a great deal, a great deal that would be more and less than true. A brilliant and accomplished writer, a stranger naturalized by many years' sojourn, and of an imaginable intimacy with his subject, sometimes spoke to me of a decay of manners which he had noticed in his time : the peasants no longer saluted persons of civil condition in meeting them; the young nobles, if asked to a ball, ascertained that there was going to be supper before accepting. I could not find these instances very shocking, upon reflection ; and I was not astonished to hear that the sort of rich American girls who form the chase of young Florentine noblemen show themselves indifferent to untitled persons. There was something more of instruction in the fact that these fortune- hunters care absolutely nothing for youth or beauty, wit or character.. 92 TUSCAN CITIES. in their prey, and ask nothing but money. This implies certain other facts, certain compensations and consolations, which the American girl with her heart set upon an historical name would be the last to consider. What interested me more was the witness which this gentleman bore, with others, to the excellent stuff of the peasants, whom he declared good and honest, and full of simple, kindly force and uprightness. The citizen class, on the other hand, was unen- lightened and narrow-minded, and very selfish towards those beneath them ; he believed that a peasant, for example, who cast his lot in the city, would encounter great unfriendliness in them if he showed the desire and the ability to rise above his original station. Both from this observer, and from other foreigners resident in Florence, I heard that the Italian nobility are quite apart from the national life ; they have no political influence, and are scarcely a social power ; there are, indeed, but three of the old noble families founded by the German emperors remaining, the Eicasoli, the Gherardeschi, and the Stufe ; and a title counts absolutely for nothing with the Italians. At the same time a Corsini was syndic of Florence ; all the dead walls invited me to " vote for Peruzzi " in the approaching election for dep- uty, 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 informants were wrong : but it is right to oppose to theirs the declaration of the intelligent and sympathetic scholar with whom I took my walks about Florence, and who said that there was great good-will between the people and the historical families, who were in thorough accord with the national aspirations and endeavors. Again, I say, it is difficult to know the truth ; but happily the truth in this case is not important. One of the few acquaintances I made with Italians outside of the English-speaking circles was that of a tradesman who, in the intervals of business, was reading Shakspeare in English, and if I may say it "Venetian Life." I think some Americans had lent him the latter classic. I did not learn from him that many other Florentine tradesmen gave their leisure to the same literature; in fact, I inferred that, generally speaking, there was not much interest A FLORENTINE MOSAIC. 93 in any sort of literature among the Florentines ; and I only mention him in the hope of throwing some light upon the problem with which we are playing. He took me one night to the Literary Club, of which he was a member, and of which the Marchese Eicci is presi- dent ; and I could not see that any presentation could have availed me more than his with that nobleman or the other nobleman who was secretary. The president shook my hand in a friendly despair, perfectly evident, of getting upon any common ground with me ; and the secretary, after asking me if I knew Doctor Holmes, had an ami- able effect of being cast away upon the sea of American literature. These gentlemen, as I understood, came every week to the club, and assisted at its entertainments, which were sometimes concerts, some- times lectures and recitations, and sometimes conversation merely, for which I found the empty chairs, on my entrance, arranged in groups of threes and fives about the floor, with an air perhaps of too great social premeditation. Presently there was playing on the piano, and at the end the president shook hands with the performer. If there was anything of the snobbishness which poisons such inter- course for our race, I could not see it. May be snobbishness, like gentlemanliness, is not appreciable from one race to another. XXX. My acquaintance, whom I should grieve to make in any sort a victim by my personalities, did me the pleasure to take me over the little ancestral farm which he holds just beyond one of the gates ; and thus I got at one of the homely aspects of life which the stranger is commonly kept aloof from. A narrow lane, in which some boys were pitching stones for quoits in the soft Sunday afternoon sun- shine, led up from the street to the farm-house, where one wandering roof covered house, stables, and offices with its mellow expanse of brown tiles. A door opening flush upon the lane admitted us to the picturesque interior, which was divided into the quarters of the farmer and his family, and the apartment which the owner occupied 'during the summer heats. This contained half a dozen pleasant 94 TUSCAN CITIES. rooms, chief of which was the library, overflowing with books repre- senting all the rich past of Italian literature in poetry, history, and philosophy, the collections of my host's father and grandfather. On the table he opened a bottle of the wine made on his farm ; and then he took me up to the terrace at the house-top for the beautiful view of the city, and the mountains beyond it, streaked with snow. The floor of the terrace, which, like all the floors of the house, was of brick, was heaped with olives from the orchard on the hillside which bounded the little farm ; but I could see from this point how it was otherwise almost wholly devoted to market-gardening. The grass keeps green all winter long at Florence, not growing, but never withering ; and there were several sorts of vegetables in view, in the same sort of dreamy arrest. Between the rows of cabbages I noticed the trenches for irrigation ; and I lost my heart to the wide, deep well under the shed-roof below, with a wheel, picturesque as a mill-wheel, for pumping water into these trenches. The farm implements and heavier household utensils were kept in order here ; and among the latter was a large wash-tub of fine earthenware, which had been in use there for a hundred and fifty years. My friend led the way up the slopes of his olive-orchard, where some olives still lingered amon!") 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 breath- lessly 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 possession. It was in character with the whole affair that on the way we should be met by the hunchbackling (whom I find described also in my notes as a wry-necked lamb, probably from some forcible contrast which he presented to the were-wolf) with a perfectly superb apart- ment, full of sun, in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, looking squarely upon the Palazzo Communale and the Tower of the Mangia. I was forced to confess that I had engaged my rooms. "A pity for you !" cried the hunchbackling, passionately. " I have promised," I faltered. " One must keep one's prom- ises, no ? " PANFORTE DI SIENA. 145 " Oh, you are right, you are right," said the hunchbackliug, and vanished, and I never saw him more. Had he really the apartment to which he pretended ? VII. No more, probably, than I had the virtue which I affected about keeping my promises. But I have never been sorry that I remained true to the word I had given Don A., and I do not see what harm there can be in saying that he was an ex-monk of the suppressed convent of Monte Olivetto, who was eking out the small stipend he received for his priestly offices in the next parish church by letting these lodgings. All the monks of Monte Olivetto had to be of noble family, and in one of our rooms the blessed candle and crucifix which hung on one side of the bed were balanced by the blazon of our host's arms in a frame on the other. Yet he was not above doing any sort of homely office for our comfort and convenience; I saw him with his priest's gown off, in his shirt-sleeves and knee- breeches, putting up a bedstead ; sometimes I met him on the stairs with a load of fire-wood in his arms, which I suspect he must have been sawing in the cellar. He bowed to me over it with unabashed courtesy, and he and Maddalena were so simply proud and happy at having filled all their rooms for a month, that one could not help 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 enveloped us in the manners of this good priest and his niece. They did together all the work of the apartment, serving us without shame and without reluctance, yet keeping a soft dignity withal that was extremely pretty. May no word of mine offend them, for every word of theirs was meant to make us feel at home with them ; and I believe that they will not mind this public recog- nition of the grace with which they adorned their gentle poverty. They never intruded, but they were always there, saluting our out- going and incoming, and watchful of our slightest wish. Often 10 146 TUSCAN CITIES. before we could get our key into the outer door Maddalena had run to open it, holding her lucerna above her head to light us, and hailing us with a " Buona sera Low!" (Good-evening to them our lord- ships, namely) to which only music could do justice. But the landlord of the pension below, where we took our meals, was no less zealous for the comfort of his guests, and at that table of his, good at any price, and wonderful for the little they gave, he pre- sided with a hospitality which pressed them to eat of this and that, and kept the unstinted wine a-flowing, and communicated itself to Luigi, who, having cooked the dinner, hurled on a dress-coat of im- penetrable antiquity and rushed in to help serve it; and to Angiolina, the housekeeper, who affected a sort of Yankee old-maid's grumpiness, but was as sweet of soul as Maddalena herself. More than once has that sympathetic spirit, in passing me a dish, advised me with a fine movement of her clasping thumb which morsel to choose. We took our rooms in the belief that we were on the sunny side of the house ; and so we were ; the sun obliquely bathed that whole front of the edifice, and I never can understand why it should not have got in-doors. It did not ; but it was delightful in the garden which stretched from the rear of our palace across to the city wall. Just under our windows but far under, for we were in the fourth story was a wide stone terrace, old, moss-grown, balustraded with marble, from which you descended by two curving flights of marble steps into the garden. There, in the early March weather, which succeeded a wind-storm of three days, the sun fell like a shining silence, amidst which the bent figure of an old gardener stirred, noiselessly turning up the earth. In the utmost distance the snow- covered Apennines glistened against a milky white sky growing pale blue above ; the nearer hills were purplish ; nearer yet were green fields, gray olive orchards, red plowed land, and black cypress-clumps about the villas with which the whole prospect was thickly sown. Then the city houses outside the wall began, and then came the beautiful red brick city wall, wandering wide over the levels and heights and hollows, and within it that sunny silence of a garden. While I once stood at the open window looking, brimful of content, PANFORTE DI SIENA. 147 tingling with it, a bugler came up the road without the wall, and gayly, bravely sounded a gallant fanfare, purely, as it seemed, for love of it and pleasure in it. I call our garden a garden, but it was mostly a succession of fields, planted with vegetables for the market, and closed round next the city wall with ranks of olive-trees. Still, next the palace there were flowers, or must have been in summer ; and on another morning, another heavenly morning, a young lady, doubtless of the ancient family to which the palace belonged, came out upon the terrace from the first floor with an elderly companion, and, loitering listlessly there a moment, descended the steps into the garden to a stone basin where some serving-women were washing. Her hair was ashen blonde ; she was slimly cased in black silk, and as she slowly walked, she pulled forward the skirt a little with one hand, while she drew together with the other a light shawl, falling from the top of her head, round her throat ; her companion followed at a little distance ; on the terrace lingered a large white Persian cat, looking after them. VIII These gardens, or fields, of Siena occupy half the space her walls enclose, and the olives everywhere softly embower the borders of the shrivelled and shrunken old city, which once must have plumply filled their circuit with life. But it is five hundred years since the great pest reduced her hundred thousand souls to fifteen thousand ; generation after generation the plow has gone over the dead streets, and the spade has been busy obliterating the decay, so that now there is no sign of them where the artichokes stretch their sharp lines, and the tops of the olives run tangling in the wind. Except where the streets carry the lines of buildings to the ten gates, the city is completely surrounded by these gardens within its walls; they drop on all sides from the lofty ledge of rocks to which the edifices cling, with the cathedral pre-eminent, and cover the slopes with their herbage and foliage ; at one point near the Lizza, flanking 'the fort which Cosimo built where the Spaniards failed, a gaunt 148 TUSCAN CITIES. A STREET IN SIENA. ravine deep, lonely, shadowy pushes it- self 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 follow- ing ceases in acreages of vegetation. Some- times the varied and ever-picturesquely ir- regular ground has the effect of having fallen away from the pal- aces ; the rear of a line of these, at one point, rested on mas- sive arches, with but- tresses sprung fifty or seventy-five feet from the lower level; and on the lofty shoulders of the palaces, here and there, was caught a bit of garden, and lifted with its over- hanging hedge high into the sun. There are abundant evi- PANFORTE DI SIENA. 149 dences of that lost beauty and magnificence of Siena she has kept enough of both not only in the great thirteenth and four- teenth century structures in the Via Cavour, the Via del Capitano, and the neighborhood of the Palazzo Communale, but in many little wandering, darkling streets, where you come upon exquisite Gothic arches walled up in the fronts of now ordinary houses, which before some time of great calamity must have been the portals and windows of noble palaces. These gave their pathos to walks which were bewilderingly opulent in picturesqueness ; walks that took us down sharp declivities dropping under successive arches between the house- walls, and flashing out upon sunny prospects of gardens ; up steep thoroughfares climbing and crooking from the gates below, and stopping as if for rest in successive piazzas, till they reach the great avenue which stretches along the high spine of the city from Porta Camollia to Porta Eomana. Sharp turns everywhere bring your nose 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 Lound 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 pungent strength of the good air. This stirs and sustains one like the Swiss air, and when not in too rapid motion it is delicious. In March I will own that its motion was often too rapid. It swept cold from the Apennines, and one night it sifted the gray depths of the streets full of snow. The next morning the sun A HIGH BREEZE. 150 TUSCAN CITIES. blazed out with that ironical smile which we know here as well as in Italy, and Via Cavour was full of people lured forth by his sarcastic glitter, though the wind blew pitilessly. " Marzo matio ! " (Crazy March !) said the shopman, with a sympathetic smile and impressive shrug, to whom I complained of it ; and I had to confess that March was no better in America. The peasants, who took the whole breadth of Via Cavour with their carts laden with wine and drawn by wide- horned dun oxen, had their faces tied up against the blast, which must have been terrible on their hills ; and it roared and blustered against our lofty eyry in Palazzo Bandini-Piccolomini with a force that penetrated it with icy cold. It was quite impossible to keep warm; with his back planted well into the fire-place blazing with the little logs of the country, and fenced about on the windward side with mattresses and sofa-pillows, a suffering novelist was able to complete his then current fiction only at the risk of freezing. But before this, and after it, we had weather in which the streets were as much a pleasure to us as to the Sienese; and in fact I do not know where I would rather be at this moment than in Via Cavour, unless it were on the Grand Canal at Venice or the Lungarno at Florence or the Pincio at Eome or Piazza 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 Tolomei Palace, with its gray Gothic facade, on the richly sculptured porch of the Casino dei Nobili. At more than one point the gaunt Roman wolf suckles her adoptive twins on the top of a pillar ; and the olden charm of prehistoric fable mingles with the interest of the city's proper life, when her people fought each other for their freedom in her streets, and never trusted one another except in some fiery foray against the enemy beyond her gates. Let the reader not figure to himself any broad, straight level when I speak of Via Cavour as the principal street ; it is only not so nar- row and steep and curving as the rest, and a little more light gets into it ; but there is one level, and one alone, in all Siena, and that is the Lizza, the public promenade, which looks very much like an PANFORTE DI SIENA. 151 artificial level. It is planted with pleasant little bosks and trim hedges, beyond which lurk certain cafes and beer-houses, and it has walks and a drive. On a Sunday afternoon of February, when the military band played there, and I was told that the fine world of Siena resorted to the Lizza, we hurried thither to see it; but we must have come too late. The band were blowing the drops of distilled music out of their instruments and shutting them up, and on the drive there was but one equipage worthy of the name. Within this carriage sat a little refined-looking boy, delicate, pale, the expression of an effete aristocracy; and beside him sat a very stout, gray-mustached, side-whiskered, eagle-nosed, elderly gentleman, who took snuff out of a gold box, and looked like Old Descent in person. I felt, at sight of them, that I had met the Sienese nobility, whom otherwise I did not see; and yet I do not say that they may not have been a prosperous fabricant of panforte and his son. A few young bucks, with fierce trotting-ponies in two-seated sulkies, hammered round the drive ; the crowd on foot was mostly a cloaked and slouch-hatted crowd, which in Italy is always a plebeian crowd. There were no ladies, but many women of less degree, pretty enough, well-dressed enough, and radiantly smiling. In the centre of the place shone a resplendent group of officers, who kept quite to themselves. We could not feel that we had mingled greatly in the social gayeties of Siena, and we wandered off to climb the bastions of the old Medicean fort very bold with its shield and pallc over the gateway and listened to the bees humming in the oleander hedge beneath. This was toward the end of February ; a few days later I find it recorded that in walking half-way round the city outside the wall I felt the sun very hot, and heard the birds singing over the fields, where the peasants were breaking the clods with their hoes. The almond-trees kept blossoming with delicate courage all through February, like girls who brave the lingering cold with their spring finery ; and though the grass was green, with here and there daring dandelions in it, the landscape generally had a pathetic look of win- ter weariness, when we drove out into the country beyond the wall. 152 TUSCAN CITIES. It is this wall with the color of its red brick which everywhere warms up the cold gray tone of Siena. It is like no other city wall that I know, except that of Pisa, and is not supported with glacis on UNDER THE ARCHES IN SIENA. the inside, but rises sheer from the earth there as on the outside. With its towers and noble gates it is beautiful always ; and near the PANFORTE DI SIENA. 153 railway station it obligingly abounds in repaired spots which look as if they had been holes knocked in it at the great siege. I hope they were. It is anywhere a study for a painter, preferably a water-colorist, I should say, and I do not see how an architect could better use his eyes in Italy than in perusing the excellent brick-work of certain of the smaller houses, as well as certain palaces and churches, both in the city and the suburbs of Siena. Some of the carved brick there is delightful, and the material is treated with peculiar character and feeling. IX. The ancient palace of the Eepubiic, the Palazzo Communale, is of brick, which allegorizes well enough the multitude of plebeian wills and forces that went to the constitution of the democratic state. No friend of popular rule, I suppose, can boast that these little mediaeval commonwealths of Italy were the homes of individual liberty. They were popular tyrannies ; but tyrannies as they were, they were always better than the single-handed despotisms, the governo 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 vol- cano before the Palazzo Communale in Siena was always boiling with human passions, and for four hundred years it vomited up and ingulfed innumerable governments and forms of government, now aristocratic and now plebeian. Prom those beautiful Gothic windows many a traitor has dangled head downwards or feet downwards, as the humor took the mob ; many a temporizer or usurper has hurtled from that high balcony ruining down to the stones below. Carlo Folletti-Possati, a Sienese citizen of our own time, has made a luminous and interesting study of the "Costumi Senese" of the Middle Ages, which no reader of Italian should fail to get when he goes to Siena, for the sake of the light which it throws upon that tumultuous and struggling past of one of the bravest and doughtiest little peoples that ever lived. In his chapters on the "Daily Life" of the Sienese of those times, he speaks first of the world-wide differ- 154 TUSCAN CITIES. ence between the American democracy and the mediaeval democra- cies. He has read his De Tocqueville, and he understands, as Mr. Matthew Arnold is beginning to understand, that the secret of our political success is in the easy and natural fit of our political govern- ment, the looseness of our social organization; and he shows with attractive clearness how, in the Italian republics, there was no con- ception of the popular initiative, except in the matter of revolution, which was extra-constitutional. The government once established, no matter how democratic, how plebeian its origin, it began at once to interfere with the personal affairs of the people. It regulated their household expenses; said what dishes and how many they might have at dinner ; clipped women's gowns, and forbade the braid and laces on their sleeves and stomachers ; prescribed the fashion of men's hats and cloaks ; determined the length of coats, the size of bricks, and the dimensions of letter-paper ; costumed the different classes ; established the hours of pleasure and business ; limited the number of those who should be of this or that trade or profession ; botjiered in every way. In Siena, at a characteristic period, the signory were chosen every two months, and no man might decline the honor and burden of office except under heavy fine. The government must have been as great a bore to its officers as to its subjects, for, once elected, the signory were obliged to remain night and day in the public palace. They could not leave it except for some grave reason of state, or sickness, or marriage, or the death of near kindred, and then they could only go out two at a time, with a third for a spy upon them. Once a week they could converse with the citizens, but solely on public business. Then, on Thursdays, the signory the Nine, or the Twelve, or the Priors, whichever they chanced to be descended from their magnificent confinement in the apartments of state to the great hall of the ground floor, and heard the petitions of all comers. Otherwise, their official life was no joke : in the months of March and April, 1364, they consumed in their public labors eleven reams of paper, twenty-one quires of parchment, twelve pounds of red and green sealing-wax, five hundred goose-quills, and twenty bottles of ink. PAN FORTE DI SIENA. 155 Besides this confinement at hard labor, they were obliged to suffer from the shrieks of the culprits, who were mutilated or put to death in the rear of the palace ; for in those days prison expenses were saved by burning a witch or heretic, tearing out the tongue of a blasphemer, striking off the right hand of a perjurer or bigamist, and the right foot of a highwayman. The Sienese in course of time became so refined that they expelled the mutilated wretches from the city, that they might not offend the eye, after the infliction of their penalties ; but in the mean while the signory could not bear the noise of their agony, especially while they sat at dinner ; and the execution-grounds were finally changed to a remote quarter. It is well enough for the tourist to give a thought to these facts and conditions of the times that produced the beautiful architecture of the Palazzo Communale and the wonderful frescos which illumine its dim-vaulted halls and chambers. The masters who wrought either might have mixed the mortar for their bricks, and the colors for their saints and angels, and allegories and warriors, with human blood, it flowed so freely and abundantly in Siena. Poor, splendid, stupid, glorious past ! I stood at the windows of the people's palace and looked out on the space in the rear where those culprits used to dis- turb the signory at their meals, and thanked Heaven that I was of the nineteenth century. The place is flanked now by an immense modern prison, whose ample casements were crowded with captives pressing to them for the sun ; and in the distance there is a beautiful view of an insane asylum, the largest and most populous in Italy. I suppose the reader will not apprehend a great deal of comment from me upon the frescos, inexpressibly quaint and rich, from which certain faces and certain looks remain with me yet. The pictures figure the great scenes of Sienese history and fable. There are the battles in which the republic triumphed, to the disadvantage chiefly of the Florentines ; there are the victorious encounters of her son Pope Alexander III. with Barbarossa ; there are allegories in which her chief citizens appear. In one of these I think it is that repre- senting "Good and Bad Government," painted by Lorenzetti in 1337 * there is a procession of Sienese figures and faces of the most curi- 156 TUSCAN CITIES. ous realistic interest, and above their heads some divine and august ideal shapes, a Wisdom, from whose strange eyes all mystery looks, and a Peace and a Fortitude which, for an unearthly dignity and beauty, I cannot remember the like of. There is also, somewhere in those dusky halls, a most noble St. Victor by Sodoma ; and I would not have my readers miss that sly rogue of a saint ("We are famous for our saints in Siena," said the sardonic custodian, with a shrug) who is represented in a time of interdict stealing a blessing from the Pope for his city by having concealed under his cloak a model of it when he appears before the pontiff! For the rest, there is an impression of cavernous gloom left from many of the rooms of the palace which characterizes the whole to my memory ; and as I look back into it, beautiful, mystical, living eyes glance out of it; noble presences, solemn attitudes, forms of grandeur faintly appear ; and then all is again a hovering twilight, out of which I am glad to emerge into the laughing sunshine of the piazza. X. A monument of the old magnanimity of Siena is that Capella di Piazza in front of the palace, at the foot of the tower, which the tourist goes to see for the sake of Sodoma' s fresco in it, but which deserves to be also revered as the memorial of the great pest of 1348 ; it was built in 1352, and thrice demolished and thrice rebuilt before it met with public approval. This and the beautiful Fonte Gaja as beautiful in its way as the tower make the piazza a place to linger in and come back to at every chance. The fountain was designed by Giacomo della Quercia, who was known thereafter as Giacomo della Fonte, and it was called the Gay Fountain in memory of the festivities with which the people celebrated the introduction of good water into their city in 1419. Seven years the artist wrought upon it, and three thousand florins of gold the republic paid for the work, which after four hundred years has been restored in all its first loveliness by Tito Sarocchi, an admirable Sienese sculptor of our day. FOUNTAIN OUTSIDE OF THE WALL AT SIENA. PANFORTE DI SIENA. 159 There are six fountains in all, in different quarters of the city ; and of these, the finest are the two oldest, Fonte Branda of the twelfth century, and Fonte Nuova of the fourteenth. Fonte Branda I will allow to be the more famous, but never so beautiful as Fonte Nuova. They are both as practicable now as when they were built, and Fonte WASHING-DAY. SIENA. Nuova has a small house atop of its arches, where people seem to live. The arches are Gothic, and the delicate carved brick-work of Siena decorates their sharp spring. Below, in the bottom of the four- sided structure, is the clear pool from whose affluent pipes the neigh- borhood comes to draw its water (in buckets hammered from solid copper into antique form), and in which women seem to be always rinsing linen, or beating it with wooden paddles in the Latin fashion. 160 TUSCAN CITIES. Fonte Bran da derives a world-wide celebrity from being mentioned by Dante and then having its honors disputed by a small stream of its name elsewhere. It, too, is a lovely Gothic shape, and whenever I saw it wash-day was in possession of it. The large pool which the laundresses had whitened with their suds is used as a swimming- vat in summer ; and the old fountain may therefore be considered in very active use still, so many years after Dante dedicated the new fountain to disputed immortality with a single word. It was one of those extremely well-ventilated days of March when I last visited Fonte Branda ; and not only was the linen of all Siena blowing about from balconies and house-tops, but, from a multitude of galleries and casements, hides of leather were lustily flapping and giving out the pungent aroma of the tan. It is a region of tanneries, and some of them are of almost as august a presence as the Fonte Branda itself. We had not come to see either, but to pay our second visit to the little house of St. Catherine of Siena, who was born and lived a child 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 therefore the odor of sanctity as well as of leather, and is consecrated by the memory of one of the best and bravest and meekest woman's lives ever lived. Her house here is much visited by the curious and devout, and across a chasmed and gardened space from the fountain rises high on the bluff the high- shouldered bulk of the church of San Domenico, in which Catherine was first rapt in her beatific visions of our Lord, conversing with him, and giving him her heart for his in mystical espousals. PANFORTE DI SIENA. 161 XL EW strangers in Siena fail to visit the house where that great woman and saint, Cate- rina Benincasa, was born in 1347. She was one of a family of thirteen or four- teen children, that blessed the union of Giacomo and Lapa, who were indeed well- in-the-house as their name is, being inter- preted; for with the father's industry as a dyer, and the mother's thrift, they lived not merely in decent poverty, but in suffi- cient ease ; and it was not from a need of her work nor from any want of piety in themselves that her parents at first opposed her religious inclina- tion, but because (as I learn from the life of her written by that holy man, G. B. Francesia), hearing on every side the praises of her beauty and character, they hoped to make a splendid mar- riage for her. When she persisted in her prayers and devotions, they scolded and beat her, as good parents used to do, and made her the household drudge. But one day while the child was at prayer the father saw a white dove hovering over her head, and though she said she knew nothing of it, he was struck with awe and ceased to persecute her. She was now fourteen, and at this time she began her penances, sleeping little on the hard floor where she lay, scourging herself continually, wearing a hair shirt, and lacerating her flesh with chains. She fell sick, and was restored to health only by being allowed to join a sisterhood, under the rule of St. Dominic, who were then doing many good works in Siena. After that our Lord began to appear to her in the Dominican church ; she was likewise tempted of the devil ; but Christ ended by making her his spouse. "While her ecstasies continued she not only visited the sick and poor, but she already took an interest in public affairs, appealing first to the rival factions in Siena to mitigate their furies, and then trying to make peace between the Ghibellines of 11 162 TUSCAN CITIES. that city and the Guelphs of Florence. She pacified many family feuds; multitudes thronged to see her and hear her; and the Pope authorized her to preach throughout the territory of Siena. While she was thus dedicated to the salvation of souls, war broke out afresh between the Sienese and Florentines, and in the midst of it the terrible pest appeared. Then the saint gave herself up to the care of the sick, and performed miracles of cure, at the same time suffering persecution from the suspicions of the Sienese, among whom question of her patriotism arose. She now began also to preach a new crusade against the Saracens, and for this purpose appeared in Pisa. She went later to Avignon to beseech the Pope to remove an interdict laid upon the Florentines, and then she prevailed with him to remove his court to the ancient seat of St. Peter. The rest of her days were spent in special miracles ; in rescuing cities from the plague; in making peace between the different Italian states and between all of them and the Pope; in difficult journeys; in preaching and writing. "And two years before she died," says her biographer, " the truth manifested itself so clearly in her, that she prayed certain scriveners to put in writing what she should say during her ecstasies. In this manner there was soon composed the treatise on Obedience and Prayer, and on Divine Providence, which contains a dialogue between a Soul and God. She dictated as rapidly as if reading, in a clear voice, with her eyes closed and her arms crossed on her breast and her hands opened her limbs became so rigid that, having ceased to speak, she remained a long hour silent ; then, holy water being sprinkled in 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- ings to her native city. A procession went out to receive it, led by the Senate, the Bishop of Siena, and all the bishops of the state, with all the secular and religious orders. "That which was wonderful and memorable on this occasion," says the Diario Senese, "was that Madonna Lapa, mother of our Seraphic Com- patriot, who had many years before restored her to life, and PANFORTE DI SIENA. 163 liberated her from the pains of hell, was led to the solemn encounter." It seems by all accounts to have been one of the best and strongest heads that ever rested on a woman's shoulders or a man's, for the matter of that ; apt not only for private beneficence, but for high humane thoughts and works of great material and universal moment; and I was willing to see the silken purse, or sack, in which it was brought from Ronie, and which is now to be viewed in the little chamber where she used to pillow the poor head so hard. I do not know that I wished to come any nearer the saint's mortal part, but our Roman Catholic brethren have another taste in such matters, and the body of St. Catherine has been pretty well dispersed about the world to supply them with objects of veneration. One of her fingers, as I learn from the Diario Senese of Girolamo Gigli (the most confusing, not to say stupefying, form of history I ever read, being the collection under the three hundred and sixty-five several days of the year of all the events happening on each in Siena since the time of Remus's son), is in the Certosa at Pontignano, where it has been seen by many, to their great advantage, with the wedding-ring of Jesus Christ upon it. Her right thumb is in the church of the Dominicans at Camporeggi ; one of her ribs is in the cathedral at Siena; another in the church of the Company of St. Catherine, from which a morsel has been sent to the same society in the city of Lima, in Peru ; her cervical vertebra and one of her slippers are treasured by the Nuns of Paradise ; in the monastery of Sts. Dominic and Sixtus at Rome is her right hand; her shoulder is in the convent of St. Catherine at Magnanopoli ; and her right foot is in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. In St. Catherine at Naples are a shoulder-bone and a finger ; in other churches there are a piece of an arm and a rib ; in San Bartolomeo at Salerno there is a finger; the Predicatori at Colonia have a rib ; the Canons of Eau-Court in Artois have a good-sized bone (osso di giusta grandczza) ; and the good Gigli does not know exactly what bone it is they revere in the Chapel Royal at Madrid. But perhaps this is enough, as it is. 164 TUSCAN CITIES. XII. The arched and pillared front of St. Catherine's house is turned toward a street on the level of Fonte Branda, but we reached it from the level above, whence we clambered down to it by a de- clivity that no carriage could descend. It has been converted, up stairs and down, into a num- ber of chapels, and I suppose that the ornate facade dates from the ecclesiastic rather than the domestic occupation. Of a human home there are in- deed few signs, or none, in the house ; even the shop in which the old dyer, her father, worked at his trade has been turned into a chapel and enriched, like the rest, with gold and silver, gems and precious marbles. From the house we went to the church of San Domenico, 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 myself I will confess that in the place where so many good souls for so many ages have stood in the devout faith that the miracles recorded really happened there, I could not feel otherwise than reverent. Illusion, hallucination as it all was, it was the error of one of the purest souls that ever lived, and of one of the noblest minds. " Here," says the printed tablet appended to the wall of the chapel, "here she was invested with the habit of St. Dominic ; and she was the first woman who up to that time had worn it. Here she remained withdrawn from the world, listening to the divine services of the church, and here continually THE RETURN FROM THE FOUNTAIN. PAN FORTE DI SIENA. 16-5 in divine colloquy she conversed familiarly with Jesus Christ, her Spouse. Here, leaning against this pilaster, she was rapt in frequent ecstasies ; wherefore this pilaster has ever since been potent against the infernal furies, delivering many possessed of devils." Here Jesus Christ appeared before her in the figure of a beggar, and she gave him alms, and he promised to own her before all the world at the Judgment Day. She gave him her robe, and he gave her an invisi- ble garment which forever after kept her from the cold. Here once he gave her the Host himself, and 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 grat- ing in the floor, a piece of the original pavement on which Christ stood and walked. The whole church is full of memories of her; and there is another chapel in it, painted in fresco by Sodoma with her deeds and miracles, which in its kind is almost incomparably rich and beautiful. It is the painter's most admirable and admired work, in which his genius ranges from the wretch decapitated in the bottom of the picture to the soul borne instantly aloft by two angels in response to St. Catherine's prayers. They had as much nerve as faith in those days, and the painter has studied the horror with the same conscience as the glory. It would be interesting to know how much he believed of what he was painting, just as it would be now to know how much I believe of what I am writing : probably neither of us could say. What impresses St. Catherine so vividly upon the fancy that has once begun to concern itself with her is the double character of her greatness. She was not merely an ecstatic nun : she was a woman of extraordinary political sagacity, and so great a power among states- men and princes that she alone could put an end to the long exile of the popes at Avignon, and bring them back to Rome. She failed to pacify her country because, as the Sienese historian Buonsignore con- fesses, "the germs of the evil were planted so deeply that it was t beyond human power to uproot them." But, nevertheless, " she rendered herself forever famous by her civic virtues," her active 166 TUSCAN CITIES. 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, setting aside the marvels of legend, she has a right to the reverence of posterity, the veneration of her fellow-citizens. " St. Catherine, an honor to humanity, is also a lite- rary celebrity : the golden purity of her diction, the sympathetic and affectionate simplicity of expression in her letters, still arouse the admiration of the most illustrious writers. With the potency of her prodigious genius, the virgin stainlessness of her life, and her great heart warm with love of country and magnanimous desires, inspired by a sublime ideal even in her mysticism, she, born of the people, meek child of Giacomo the dyer, lifted herself to the summit of religious and political grandeur. . . . With an overflowing eloquence and generous indignation she stigmatized the crimes, the vices, the ambition of the popes, their temporal power, and the scandalous schism of the Eoman Church." In the Communal Library at Siena I had the pleasure of seeing many of St. Catherine's letters in the MS. in which they were dic- tated : she was not a scholar like the great Socinus, whose letters I also saw, and she could not even write. XIII. A hundred years after St. Catherine's death there was born in the same " noble Ward of the Goose " one of the most famous and eloquent of Italian reformers, the Bernardino Ochino, whose name commemorates that of his native Contrada dell' Oca. He became a Franciscan, and through the austerity of his life, the beauty of his character, and the wonder of his eloquence he became the General of his Order in Italy, and then he became a Protestant. " His words could move stones to tears," said Charles V. ; and when he preached in Siena, no space was large enough for his audience except the great piazza before the Public Palace, which was thronged even to the house-tops. Ochino escaped by flight the death that overtook his sometime fellow-denizen of Siena, Aonio Paleario, whose book, "II PAN FORTE Dl SIENA. 167 Beneficio di Cristo," was very famous in its time and potent for re- form throughout Italy. In that doughty little Siena, in fact, there has been almost as much hard thinking as hard fighting, and what with Ochino and Paleario, with Socinus and Bandini, the Beforma- tion, Rationalism, and Free Trade may be said almost to have been invented in the city which gave one of the loveliest and sublimest saints to the Church. Let us not forget, either, that brave arch- bishop of Siena, Ascanio Piccolomini, one of the ancient family which gave two popes to Borne, 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 advantage, as St. Mark's, for in- stance, and Notre Dame, and Giotto's Tower, and the curve of the Arno at Pisa, and Niagara, and the cathedral at Siena. I am not sure that one has not here more authority for holding his peace than before any of the others. Let the architecture go, then : the inex- haustible treasure of the sculptured marbles, the ecstasy of Gothic invention, the splendor of the mosaics, the quaintness, the grotesque- ness, the magnificence of the design and the detail. The photographs do well enough in suggestion for such as have not seen the church, but these will never have the full sense of it which only long look- ing and coming again and again can impart. One or two facts, how- ever, may be imagined, and the reader may fancy the cathedral set on the crest of the noble height to which Siena clings, and from which the streets and houses drop all round from the narrow level expressed in the magnificent stretch of that straight line with which the cathedral-roof delights the eye from every distance. It has a pre- eminence which seems to me unapproached, and this structure, which 108 TUSCAN CITIES. only partially realizes the vast design of its founders, impresses one with the courage even more than the piety of the little republic, now so utterly extinct. What a force was in men's hearts in those days ! "What a love of beauty must have exalted the whole community ! The Sienese were at the height of their work on the great cathedral when the great pestilence smote them, and broke them forever, leav- ing them a feeble phantom of their past glory and prosperity. " The infection," says Buonsignore, " spread not only from the sick, but from everything they touched, and the terror was such that selfish frenzy mounted to the wildest excess ; not only did neighbor abandon neighbor, friend forsake friend, but the wife her husband, parents SIENESE GARDENS. their children. In the general fear, all noble and endearing feel- ings 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 UP AND DOWN IN SIENA. PANFORTE DI SIENA. 171 the duty : their appeal was, ' Help to carry this body to the grave, that when we die others may bear us thither ! ' The proportion of the dead to the sick was frightful ; out of every five seized by the plague, scarcely one survived. Angelo di Tura tells us that at Siena, in the months of May, June, July, and August of the year 1348, the pest carried off eighty thousand persons. ... A hundred noble familes were extinguished." Throughout Italy, " three fourths of the population perished. The cities, lately flourishing, busy, industrious, full of life, had become squalid, deserted, bereft of the activity which promotes grandeur. In Siena the region of Fonte Branda was largely saved 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 FIELDS WITHIN THE WALLS. see within the walls. . . . The work on the cathedral, which had gone forward for ten years, was suspended, . . . and when resumed, it was upon a scale adjusted to the diminished wealth of the city, and the plan was restricted to the dimensions which we now behold. . . . And if the fancy contemplates the grandeur of the original 172 TUSCAN CITIES. project, divining it from the vestiges of the walls and the columns remaining imperfect, but still preserved in good condition, it must be owned that the republic disposed of resources of which we can form no conception ; and we must rest astounded that a little state, embroiled in perpetual wars with its neighbors, and in the midst of incessant party strife, should undertake the completion of a work worthy of the greatest and most powerful nations." " When a man," says Mr. Addison, writing from Siena in the spirit of the genteel age which he was an ornament of, " sees the prodigious pains and expense that our forefathers have been at in these bar- barous buildings, one cannot but fancy to himself what miracles of architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money con- sumed 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 make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity." The time will no doubt come again when we shall prefer " noble and majestic simplicity," as Mr. Addison did; and I for one shall not make myself the mock of it by confessing how much better I now like "false beauties and affected ornaments." In fact, I am willing to make a little interest with it by admitting that the Tuscan fashion of alternate courses of black and white marble in architecture robs the interior of the cathedral of all repose, and that nowhere else does the godless joke which nicknamed a New York temple "the Church of the Holy Zebra " insist upon itself so much. But if my business were iconoclasm, I should much rather smash the rococo apostolic statues which Mr. Addison doubtless admired, perching on their brackets at the base of the variegated pillars ; and I suspect they are greatly to blame for the distraction which the visitor feels before he loses himself in the inexhaustibly beautiful and delightful detail. PAN FORTE DI SIENA. 173 Shall I attempt to describe this ? Not I ! Get photographs, get prints, dear reader, or go see for yourself ! Otherwise, trust me that if we had a tithe of that lavish loveliness in one structure in America, the richness of that one would impoverish the effect of all the other buildings on the continent. I say this, not with the hope of impart- ing an idea of the beauty, which words cannot, but to give some notion of the wealth poured out upon this mere fragment of what was meant to be the cathedral of Siena, and to help the reader con- ceive not only of the piety of the age, but of the love of art then universally spread among the Italians. The day was abominably cold, of course, it had been snowing that morning, when we first visited the church, and I was lurking about with my skull-cap on, my teeth chattering, and my hands benumbing in my pockets, when the little valet cle place who had helped us not find a lodging espied us and leaped joyously upon us, and ran us hither and thither so proudly and loudly that one of the priests had to come and snub him back to quiet and decorum. I do not know whether this was really in the interest of decency, or of the succession of sacristans who, when the valet had been retired to the front door, took possession of us, and lifted the planking which preserves the famous engraved pavement, and showed us the wonder- ful pulpit and the rich chapels, and finally the library all frescoed by Pinturicchio with scenes from the lives of the two Sienese Picco- lomini who were Popes Pius II. and III. This multiplicity of sacristans suffered us to omit nothing, and one of them hastened to point out the two Hag-poles fastened to the two pillars nearest the high altar, which are said to be those of the great War Car of the Florentines, captured by the Sienese at Montaperto in 1260. "How," says my " New Guide," "how on earth, the stranger will ask, do we find here in the house of God, who shed his blood for all mankind, here in the temple consecrated to Mary, mother of every sweet affection, these two records of a terrible car- nage between brothers, sons of the same country ? Does it not seem as if these relics from the field of battle stand here to render Divinity accomplice of the rage and hate and vengeance of men ? We know 174 TUSCAN CITIES. not how to answer this question ; we must even add that the crucifix not far from the poles, in the chapel on the left of the transept, was borne by the Sienese, trusting for victory in the favor of God, upon the field of Montaperto." I make haste to say that I was not a stranger disposed to perplex my "New Guide" with any such question, and that nothing I saw in the cathedral gave me so much satisfaction as these flag-poles. Ghibelline and Sienese as I had become as soon as I turned my back on Guelphic Florence, I exulted in these trophies of Montaperto with a joy which nothing matched except the pleasure I had in view- ing the fur-lined canopy of the War Car, which is preserved in the Opera del Duomo, and from which the custodian bestowed upon my devotion certain small tufts of the fur. I have no question but this canopy and the flag-poles are equally genuine, and I counsel the reader by all means to see them. There are many other objects to be seen in the curious museum of antique and mediaeval art called the Opera del Duomo, especially the original sculptures of the Fonte Gaia ; but the place is chiefly interesting as the outline, the colossal sketch in sculptured marble, of the cathedral as it was projected. The present structure rises amid the halting fragments of the mediaeval edifice, which it has included in itself, without exceeding their extent ; and from the roof there is an ineffable prospect of the city and the country, from which one turns again in still greater wonder to the church itself. I had an even deeper sense of its vastness, the least marvellous of its facts, and a renewed sense of the domestication of the Italian churches, when I went one morning to hear a Florentine monk, A MEDIAEVAL SIENESE. PANFORTE DI SIENA. 175 famed for his eloquence, preach in the cathedral. An oblong canopy of coarse gray canvas had been stretched overhead in part of the great nave, to keep his voice from losing itself in the space around and above. The monk, from a pulpit built against one of the pillars, faced a dais, across the nave, where the archbishop sat in his chair to listen, and the planked floor between them 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 wor- shippers were kneeling, indifferent alike to one another and to the sermon of the monk. Some of his listeners, however, wore a look of in- tense interest, and I myself was not without concern in his discourse, for I perceived that it was all in honor and compassion of the captive of the Vatican, and fall of innuendo for the national government. It gave me some notion of the difficulties with which that government has to con- tend, and impressed me anew with its admirable patience and forbearance. 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 sentimental pilgrimage to the cathedral, to see it by moonlight. The moon was not so prompt as we, and at first we only had it on the baptistery and the campa- nile, a campanile to make one almost forget the Tower of Giotto. But before we came away one corner of the facade had caught the light, and hung richly bathed, tenderly etherealized in it. What was gold, what was marble before, seemed transmuted to the lumi- nous substance of the moonlight itself, and rested there like some ONE OP THE LISTENERS. 176 TUSCAN CITIES. translucent cloud that " stooped from heaven and took the shape " of clustered arch and finial. On the way home we passed the open portal of a palace, and made ourselves the guests of its noble court, now poured full of the moon, and dimly lighted by an exquisite lantern of beaten iron, which hung near a massive pillar at the foot of the staircase. The pillar divided the staircase, and lost its branchy top in the vault overhead ; and there was something so consciously noble and dignified in the whole architectural presence that I should have been surprised to find that we had not stumbled upon an historic edifice. It proved to be the ancient palace of the Captain of the People, and I will thank the reader to imagine me a finer name than Capitano del Popolo for the head of such a democracy as Siena, whose earliest government, according to Alessandro Sozzini, was popular, after the Swiss fashion. Now the palace is the residence and property of the Grattanelli fam- ily, who have restored it and preserved it in the medieval spirit, so that I suppose it is, upon the whole, the best realization of a phase of the past which one can see. The present Count Grattanelli who may be rather a marquis or a prince, but who is certainly a gentle- man of enlightened taste, and of a due sense of his Siena keeps an apartment of the palace open to the public, with certain of the rooms in the original state, and store of armor and weapons in which the consequence of the old Captains of the People fitly masquerades. One must notice the beautiful doors of inlaid wood in this apartment, which are of the count's or marquis's or prince's own design; and not fail of two or three ceilings frescoed in dark colors, in dense, close designs and small panels, after what seems a fashion peculiar to Siena. Now 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 provocation to penetrate interiors that I failed to do so. They are tableted in Siena beyond almost anything I have seen. The villa outside the gate where the poet Manzoni once visited his daughter records the fact PANFORTE DI SIENA. 177 for the passing stranger ; on the way to the station a house boasts that within it the dramatist Pietro Cossa, being there " the guest of his adored mother," wrote his Cecilia and the second act of his Sylla ; in a palace near that of Socinus you are notified that Alfieri wrote several of his tragedies ; and another proclaims that he frequented it " holding dear the friendship " of the lady of the house ! In spite of all this, I can remember only having got so far as the vestibule and staircase lovely and grand they were, too of one of those noble Gothic palaces in Via Cavour ; I was deterred from going farther by learning it was not the day when uninvited guests were received. I always kept in mind, moreover, the Palazzo Tolomei for the sake of that dear and fair lady who besought the traveller through pur- gatory " 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 " giusto motivo " Messer Nello may possibly have had. What is certain is that Pia was the most beautiful woman in Italy ; and what is still more certain is that she was not a Tolomei at all, but only the widow of a Tolomei. Perhaps it was prescience of this fact that kept me from visiting the Tolomei palace for her sake. At any rate, I did not visit it, though I often stopped in the street before it, and dedi- cated a mistaken sigh to the poor lady who was only a Tolomei by marriage. There were several other ladies of Siena, in past ages, who inter- ested me. Such an one was the exemplary Onorata de' Principi Orsini, one of the four hundred Sienese noblewomen who went out to meet the Emperor Frederick III. in 1341, when he came to Siena to 12 178 TUSCAN CITIES. espouse Leonora, Infanta of Portugal ; a column near Porta Camollia still commemorates the exact spot where the Infanta stood to receive him. On this occasion the fair Onorata was, to the thinking of some of the other ladies, too simply dressed ; but she defended herself against their censure, affirming that the " Sienese gentlewomen should make a pomp of nothing but their modesty, since in other displays and feminine adornments the matrons of other and richer cities could easily surpass them." And at a ball that night, being asked who was the handsomest gentleman present, she answered that she saw no one but her husband there. Is the estimable Onorata a trifle too sage for the reader's sympathy ? Let him turn then to the Lady Battista Berti, wife of Achille Petrucci, who, at another ball in honor of the Emperor, spoke Latin with him so elegantly and with such spirit that he embraced her, and created her countess, and begged her to ask some grace of him ; upon which this learned creature, instead of requesting the Emperor to found a free public library, besought him to have her exempted from the existing law which prohibited 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 way perceived that the Emperor could appreciate a delicate stroke of humor as well as another. If there were time, and not so many questions of our own day pressing, I should like to in- quire into all the imaginable facts of these cases ; and I commend them to the reader, whose fancy cannot be so hard-worked as mine. The great siege of Siena by the Florentines and Imperialists in 1554-55 called forth high civic virtues in the Sienese women, who not only shared all the hardships and privations of the men, but often their labors, their dangers, and their battles. " Never, Sienese ladies," gallantly exclaimed the brave Blaise de Montluc, Marshal of France, who commanded the forces of the Most Christian Kins? in defence of the city, and who treats of the siege in his Commentaries, " never shall I fail to immortalize your name so long as the book of Montluc shall live ; for in truth you are worthy of immortal praise, if ever AN ARCHWAY IN SIENA. PAN FORTE DI SIENA. 181 women were so. As soon as the people took the noble resolution of defending their liberty, the ladies of the city of Siena divided them- selves into three companies: the first was led by Lady Forteguerra, who was dressed in violet, and all those who followed her likewise, having her accoutrement in the fashion of a nymph, short, and show- ing the buskin ; the second by Lady Piccolomini, dressed in rose- colored satin, and her troops in the same livery ; the third by Lady Livia Fausta, dressed in white, as was also all her following, and bearing a white ensign. On their flags they had some pretty devices ; I would give a good deal if I could remember them. These three squadrons were composed of three thousand ladies, gentlewomen or citizenesses. Their arms were pickaxes, shovels, baskets, and fas- cines ; and thus equipped, they mustered and set to work on the fortifications. Monsieur de Termes, who has frequently told me about it (for I had not then arrived), has assured me that he never saw in his life anything so pretty as that. I saw the flags afterwards. They had made a song in honor of France, and they sang it in going to the fortifications. I would give the best horse I have if I could have been there. And since I am upon the honor of these ladies, I wish those who come after us to admire the courage of a young Sienese girl, who, although she was of poor condition, still deserves to be placed in the first rank. I had issued an order when I was chosen Dictator that nobody, on pain of being punished, should fail to go on guard in his turn. This girl, seeing her brother, whose turn it was, unable to go, takes his morion, which she puts on her head, his shoes, his buffalo-gorget ; and with his halberd on her shoulders, goes off with the corps de garde in this guise, passing, when the roll is called, under the name of her brother, and stands sentinel in his place, without being known till morning. She was brought home in triumph. That afternoon Signor Cornelio showed her to me." I am sorry that concerning the present ladies of Siena I know nothing except by the scantiest hearsay. My chief knowledge of them, indeed, centres in the story of one of the Borghesi there, who hold themselves so very much higher than the Borghesi of Rome. She stopped fanning herself a moment while some one spoke of them. 182 TUSCAN CITIES. " Oh, yes ; I have heard that a branch of our family went to Eome. But I know nothing about them." What glimpse we caught of Sienese society was at the theatre, the lovely little theatre of the Accademia dei Eozzi. This is one of the famous literary academies of Italy ; it was founded in the time of Leo X., and was then composed entirely of workingmen, who con- fessed their unpolished origin in their title ; afterwards the Academies of the Wrapped-up, the Twisted, and the Insipid (such was the fan- tastic humor of the prevailing nomenclature) united with these Eude Men, and their academy finally became the most polite in Siena. Their theatre still enjoys a national fame, none but the best com- panies being admitted to its stage. We saw there the Eossi company of Turin, the best players by all odds, after the great Florentine Stenterello, whom I saw in Italy. Commendatore Eossi's is an exquisite comic talent, the most delicately amusing, the most subtly refined. In a comedy of Goldoni's ("A Curious Accident") which he gave, he was able to set the house in an uproar by simply letting a series of feelings pass over his face, in expression of the conceited, wilful old comedy-father's progress from facetious satis- faction in the elopement of his neighbor's daughter to a realization of the fact that it was his own daughter who had run away. Eossi, who must not be confounded with the tragedian of his name, is the first comedian who has ever been knighted in Italy, the theory being that since a comic actor might receive a blow which the exigency of the play forbade him to resent, he was unfit for knighthood. King Humbert seems somehow to have got over this prodigious obstacle. The theatre was always filled, and between the acts there was much drama in the boxes, where the gentlemen went and came, making their compliments to the ladies, in the old Italian fashion. It looked very easy and pleasant ; and I wish Count Nerli, whose box we had hired one evening when he sent the key to the ticket- office to be let, had been there to tell us sometliing of the people in the others. I wish, in fact, that we might have known something of the count himself, whom, as it is, I know only by the title boldly lettered on his box-door. The acquaintance was slight, but very PANFORTE DI SIENA. 183 agreeable. Before the evening was out I had imagined him in a dozen figures and characters ; and I still feel that I came very near knowing a Sienese count. Some English people, who became English friends, in our pension, had letters which took them into society, and they reported it very charming. Indeed, I heard at Florence, from others who knew it well, that it was pleas- antly characterized by the number of culti- vated people connected with the ancient uni- versity of Siena. Again, I heard that here, and elsewhere in Italy, husbands neglect their wives, and leave them dismal at home, while they go out to spend their evenings at the clubs and cafes. Who knows ? I will not even pretend to do so, though the temptation is great. A curious phase of the social life in another direction appeared in the notice which I found posted one day on the door of the church of San Cristoforo, inviting the poor girls of the parish to a competi- tive examination for the wedding-portions to be supplied to the most deserving from an ancient fund. They were advised that they must appear on some Sunday during Lent before the parish priest, with a petition certifying to these facts : HURRYING HOME. "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 " 184 TUSCAN CITIES. XVI. The churches are very rich in paintings of the Sienese 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 moment when Sodoma came in Siena. Oddly enough, there was a very lovely little Bellini in this collection, which, with a small Veronese, distinguished itself from the Tuscan canvases, by the mellow beauty of the Venetian coloring, at once. It is worse than useless to be specific about pictures, and if I have kept any general impression of the Sienese work, it concerns the superior charm of the earlier frescos, especially in the Public Palace. In the churches the best frescos are at San Domenico, where one sees the exquisite chapel of St. Catherine painted by Sodoma, which I have already mentioned. After these one must reckon in interest the histories with which Pinturicchio has covered the whole library of the cathe- dral, and which are surpassingly delightful in their quaint realism. For the rest, I have a vivid memory of a tendency in the Sienese painters to the more horrific facts of Scripture and legend ; they were terrible fellows for the Massacre of the Innocents, and treated it with a bloodier carefulness of detail than I remember to have noticed in any other school ; the most sanguinary of these slaughters is in the Church of the Servi. But there is something wholesome and human even in the most butcherly of their simple-minded car- nages ; it is where the allegorists get hold of horror that it becomes loathsome, as in that choir of a church, which I have forgotten the name of, where the stalls are decorated with winged death's heads, the pinions shown dropping with rottenness and decay around the skulls. Yet this too had its effectiveness : it said what some people of that time were thinking ; and I suppose that the bust of a lady in a fashionable ruff, with a book in her hand, simpering at the bust of her husband in an opposite niche in San Vigilio, was once not so amusing as it now looks. I am rather proud of discovering her, for I found her after I had been distinctly discouraged from exploring PAN FORTE DI SIENA. 185 the church by the old woman in charge. She was civil, but went back eagerly to her gossip with another crone there, after saying : " The pictures in the roof are of no merit. They are beautiful, how- ever." I liked this church, which was near our pension, because it seemed such a purely little neighborhood 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 Osser- vanza, which was suppressed with the other convents, but in which the piety of charitable people still maintains fifty of the monks. We passed a company of them, young and old, on our way, bareheaded and barefooted, as their use is, and looking very fit in the landscape ; they saluted us politely, and overtaking us in the porch of the church, rang up the sacristan for us, and then, dropping for a moment on one knee before the door, disappeared into the convent. The chapel is not very much to see, though there is a most beautiful Delia Eobbia there, a Madonna and St. Thomas, which I would give much to see now. When we had gone the round of the different objects, our sacristan, who was very old and infirm, and visibly foul in the brown robes which are charitable to so much dirt, rose from the last altar before which he had knelt with a rheumatic's groans, and turning to the ladies with a malicious grin, told them that they could not be admitted to the cloisters, though the gentlemen could come. We followed him through the long, dreary galleries, yawning with hun- dreds of empty cells, and a sense of the obsoleteness of the whole affair oppressed me. 1 do not know why this feeling should have been heightened by the smallness of the gardened court enclosed by the cloisters, or by the tinkle of a faint old piano coming from some room where one of the brothers was practising. The whole place was very bare, and stared with fresh whitewash ; but from the per- vading smell 1 feared that this venerable relic of the past was not well drained, though T do not know that in the religious ages they valued plumbing greatly, anywhere. 186 TUSCAN CITIES. XVII. In this and other drives about Siena the peculiar character of the volcanic landscape made itself continually felt. There is a desolation in the treeless hills, and a wildness and strangeness in their forms, which I can perhaps Lest 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, however re- luctantly, I should say that it must be poor. Some of the hills look SIENESE FARM-HOUSE, mere heaps of clay, such as mighty geysers might have cast up until at last they hid themselves under the accumulation ; and this seems to be the nature of the group amidst which the battle of Montaperto was fought. I speak from a very remote inspection, for though we started to drive there, we considered, after a mile or two, that we had no real interest in it now, either as Florentines or Sienese, and OUTSIDE A SIENESE GATK. PANFORTE DI SIENA. 189 contented ourselves with a look at the Arbia, which the battle " col- ored red," but which had long since got back its natural complexion. This stream or some other which the driver passed off on us for it flowed down through the uplands over which we drove, with a small volume that seemed quite inadequate to slake the wide drought of the landscape, in which, except for the cypresses about the villas, no tree lifted its head. There were not even olives ; even the vineyards had vanished. The fields were green with well-started wheat, but of other husbandry there was scarcely a sign. Yet the peasants whom we met were well dressed (to be sure it was Sunday), and there was that air of comfort about the farmsteads which is seldom absent in Tuscany. All along the road were people going to vespers ; and these people were often girls, young and pretty, who, with their arms about one another's waists, walked three and four abreast, the wide brims of their straw hats lifting round their faces like the disks of sunflowers. A great many of them were blonde ; at least one in ten had blue eyes and red hair, and they must have been the far-descended children of those seigneurs and soldiers among whom Charlemagne portioned his Italian lands, marking to this day a clear distinction of race between the citizens and the contadini. By and by we came to a little country church, before which in the grassy piazza two men had a humble show of figs and cakes for sale in their wagon-beds, and another was selling wine by the glass from a heap of flasks on his stand. Here again I was reminded of Quebec, for the interior of this church was, in its bareness and poverty, quite like the poor little Huron village church at the Falls of Lorette. Our drive was out from the Porta Pispini southward, and back to the city through the Porta Romana ; but pleasure lies in any course you take, and perhaps greater pleasure in any other than this. The beauty of the scenery is wilder and ruggeder than at Florence. In the country round Siena all is free and open, with none of those high garden walls that baffle approach in the Florentine neighborhood. But it seems to have been as greatly loved and as much frequented, 4 and there are villas and palaces everywhere, with signs of that per- sonal eccentricity in the architecture and inscriptions for which the 190 TUSCAN CITIES. Italians ought to be as famous as the English. Out of the Porta Camollia, in the Palazzo del Diavolo, which was the scene of stirring facts during the great siege, when the Sienese once beat Duke Cosimo's Florentines out of it, the caprice of the owner has run riot in the decoration of the brick front, where heads of Turks and Saracens are everywhere thrusting out of the frieze and cornice. At Poggio Pini an inscription on the porter's lodge declares : " Count Casti de' Vecchi, jealous conservator of the ornaments of the above-situated villa Poggio Pini, his glory, his care, placed me guardian of this approach." The pines thus tenderly and proudly watched would not strike the American as worthy so much anxiety ; but perhaps they are so in a country which has 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, chest- nuts, that is the whole story of the forest growth. Its brevity impressed us particularly in our long drive to Belcaro, which I visited for its interest as the quarters of the Marquis of Marignano, the Imperialist general during the siege. Two cannon-balls imbedded in its walls recall the fight, with an appropriate inscription ; but whether they were fired by Marignano while it was occupied by the Sienese, or by the Sienese after he took it, I cannot now remember. I hope the reader will not mind this a great deal, especially as I am able to offer him the local etymology of the name of Belcaro : be! be- cause it is so beautiful, and euro because it cost so much. It is now owned by two brothers, rich merchants of Siena, one of whom lives in it, and it is approached through a landscape wild, and sometimes almost savage, like that all around Siena, but of more fertile aspect than that to the southward. The reader must always think of the wildness in Italy as different from our primeval wildness ; it is the wildness of decay, of relapse. At one point a group of cypresses huddling about the armless statue of some poor god thrilled us with a note, like the sigh of a satyr's reed, from the antique world ; at another, a certain wood-grown turn of the road, there was a brick stairway, which had once led to some pavilion of the hoop and PANFORTE DI SIENA. 191 bag-wig age, and now, grown with thick moss and long grasses, had a desolation more exquisite than I can express. Belcaro itself, however, when we came to it, was in perfectly good repair, and afforded a satisfying image of a mediaeval castle, walled and fossed about, and lifting its mighty curtains of masonry just above the smooth level of the ilex-tops that hedged it loftily in. There was not very much to see within it, except the dining-hall, painted by Peruzzi with the Judgment of Paris. After we had ad- mired this we were shown across the garden to the little lodge which the same painter has deliciously frescoed with indecenter fables than any outside of the Palazzo del Te at Mantua. Beside it is the chapel in which he has indifferently turned his hand, with the same brilliant facility, to the illustration of holy writ and legend. It was a curi- ous civilization. Both lodge and chapel were extraordinarily bright and cheerful. Prom these works of art we turned and climbed to the superb promenade which crowns the wide wall of the castle. In the garden below, a chilly bed of anemones blew in the March wind, and the top where we stood was swept by a frosty blast, while the waning sunshine cast a sad splendor over the city on her hill seven miles away. A delicate rose-light began to bathe it, in which the divine cathedral looked like some perfect shape of cloudland ; while the clustering towers, palaces and gates, and the wandering sweep of the city wall seemed the details of a vision too lovely for waking eyes. GOING TO MARKET. PITILESS PISA. PITILESS PISA. AS Pisa made no comment on the little changes she may have observed in me since we had last met, nineteen years before, I feel bound in politeness to say that I found her in April, 1883, looking not a day older than she did in December, 1864. In fact she looked younger, if anything, though it may have been the season that made this difference in her. She was in her spring attire, freshly, almost at the moment, put on ; and that counts for much more in Pisa than one who knew her merely in the region of her palaces and churches and bridges would believe. She has not, indeed, 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 pavement. All this made her perceptibly younger, even with her memories running so far back of Roman times, into twilights whither perhaps a less careful modern historian than myself would not follow them. But when I am in a town that has real claims to antiquity, I like to allow them to the uttermost ; and with me it is not merely a duty, it is a pleasure, to remind the reader that Pisa was founded by Pelops, the grandson of Jove, and the son of Tantalus, king of Phrygia. He was the same who was slain by his father, and served in a banquet to the gods, to try if they knew everything, or could be tricked into eating of the hideous repast ; and it was after this curious experience Ceres , came in from the field, very tired and hungry, and popped down and 190 TUSCAN CITIES. tasted a bit of his shoulder before they eould 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 Sohnus, and that generally adopted by the Pisan chroniclers ; but the sceptical Strabo would have us think that Pisa was not founded till much later, when Nestor, sailing homeward after the fall of Troy, was cast away on the Etruscan shore at this point. There are some historians who reconcile the accounts by declaring that Nestor merely joined the Phrygians at Pisa, and could never have pretended to found the city. I myself incline to this notion ; but even if Pisa was not built till after the fall of Troy, the reader easily perceives that a sense of her antiquity might affect an Ohio man, even after a residence in Boston. A city founded by Pelops or Nestor could not be converted to Christianity by a less person than St. Peter, who, on his way to Eome, was expressly wrecked on the Pisan coasts for that purpose. Her faith, like her origin, is as an- cient as possible, and Pisa was one of the first Italian communities to emerge from the ruin of the Eoman Empire into a vigorous and splendid life of her own. Early in the Middle Ages she had, with the arrogance of long-established consequence, superciliously explained the Florentines, to an Eastern potentate who had just heard of them, as something like the desert Arabs, a lawless, marauding, barbar- ous race, the annoyance of all respectable and settled communities. In those days Pisa had not only commerce with the East, but wars ; and in 1005 she famously beat back the Saracens from their con- quests in the northern Mediterranean, and, after a struggle of eigh- teen years, ended by carrying the war into Africa and capturing Carthage with the Emir of the Saracens in it. In the beginning of this war her neighbor Lucca, fifteen miles away, profited by her pre- occupation to attack her, and this is said to have been one of the first quarrels, if not the first, in which the Italian cities asserted their separate nationality and their independence of the empire. It is sup- posed on that account to have been rather a useful event, though it is scarcely to be praised otherwise. Of course the Pisans took it out of the Lucchese afterwards in the intervals of their more important PITILESS PISA. 197 wars with the Genoese 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 tedi- ous, in which they ravaged each other's territory, and I dare say I have missed some. Once the Pisans captured Lucca and sacked it, and once the Lucchese took Pisa and sacked it ; the Pisans were Ghibelline, and the Lucchese were Guelph, and these things had to be. In the mean time, Pisa was waging, with varying fortune, seven wars with Genoa, seven other with Florence, three with Venice, and one with Milan, and was in a spirited state of continual party strife within herself ; though she found leisure to take part in several of the crusades, to break the naval supremacy of the Saracens, and to beat the Greeks in sea-fights under the walls of 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 Florentines, whom she had despised so long. Almost from the beginning of their rivalry, some three or four hundred years before, the triumph of Florence was a foregone conclu- sion. The serious historians are rather ashamed of the incident that kindled the first hostilities between the two cities but the chroniclers, who are still more serious, treat it with perfect gravity ; and I, who am always with the chroniclers, cannot offer it less respect. The fact is, that one day, at the time of the coronation of the Emperor Frederick II. in Rome, the Florentine ambassador, who was dining with a certain cardinal, either politely or sincerely admired the cardi- nal's lapdog so much that the cardinal could not help making him a present of the dog, out of hand. The Florentine thought this ex- tremely handsome of the cardinal, and the cardinal forgot all about it ; so that when the Pisan ambassador came to dine with him the next day, and professed also to be charmed with this engaging lap- dog, the cardinal promptly bestowed it upon him in his turn ; noth- ing could equal the openhandedness of that cardinal in the matter of lapdogs. He seems to have forgotten his gift to the Pisan as readily 198 TUSCAN CITIES. as he had forgotten his present to the Florentine ; or possibly he thought that neither of them would have the ill manners to take him in earnest ; very likely it was the custom to say to a guest who ad- mired your dog, " He is yours," and then think no more about it. However, the Florentine sent for the dog and got it, and then the Pisan sent, and got the poor cardinal's best excuses ; one imagines the desolated smiles and deprecating shrugs with which he must have made them. The affair might have ended there, if it had not happened that a party of Florentines and a party of Pisans met shortly afterwards in Koine, and exchanging some natural jeers and taunts concerning the good cardinal's gift, came to blows about it. The Pisans were the first to begin this quarrel, and all the Floren- tines in Rome were furious. Oddo di Arrigo Fifanti, whom the dili- gent reader of these pages will remember as one of the Florentine gentlemen who helped cut the throat of Buondelmonte on his wed- ding day, chanced to be in Eome, and put himself at the head of the Florentines. He was not the kind of man to let any sort of quarrel suffer in his hands, and he led the Florentines on to attack the Pisan legation in the street. "When the news of this outrage came to Pisa, it set the hot little state in a flame. She was glad of a chance to break with Florence, for the Pisans had long been jealous of the growing power of the upstart city, and they hastened to make reprisal by seizing all the Florentine merchandise within their borders. Florence still remained in such awe of the old-established respectability of Pisa, and of her supremacy by land and sea, lately illustrated in her victorious wars with the Genoese and Saracens, that she was willing to offer any reasonable reparation ; and her consuls even sent to pay secretly the price of the confiscated goods, if only they could have them back, and so make an appearance of honorable reconciliation before their people. The Pisan authorities refused these humble overtures, and the Florentines desperately prepared for war. The campaign ended in a single battle at Castel del Bosco, where the Florentines, sup- ported by the Lucchese, defeated the Pisans with great slaughter, and conquered a peace that left them masters of the future. After PITILESS PISA. 199 that Pisa was in league with Florence, as she had been in league with her before that, against the encroachments of the emperors npon the liberties of the Tuscan cities, and she was often at war with her, siding with the Sienese in one of their famous defeats at the hands of the Florentines, and generally doing what she could to disable and destroy her rival. She seems to have grown more and more incapable of governing herself ; she gave herself to this master and that; and at last, in 1406, after a siege of eight months, she was reduced by the Florentines. Her women had fought together with her men in her defence ; the people were starving, and the victors wept at the misery they saw within the fallen city. The Florentines had hoped to inherit the maritime greatness of Pisa, but this perished with her ; thereafter the ships that left her famous arsenal were small and few. The Florentines treated their captive as well as a mediaeval people knew how, and addressed themselves to the restoration of her prosperity ; but she languished in their hold for nearly a hundred years, when Pietro de' Medici, hoping to make interest for himself with Charles VIII. of France (who seems to have invaded Italy rather for the verification of one of Savonarola's prophecies than for any other specific purpose), handed over Pisa with the other Florentine fortresses to the French troops. When their commandant evacuated the place, he restored it not to the Florentines but to the Pisans. The Florentines set instantly and actively about the reconquest, and after a siege and a blockade that lasted for years, they accomplished it. In this siege, as in the other great defence, the Pisan women fought side by side with the men ; it is told of two sisters working upon the fortifica- tions, that when one was killed by a cannon-shot the other threw her body into a gabion, covered it with earth, and went on with her work above it. Before Pisa fell people had begun to drop dead of famine in her streets, and the Florentines, afraid that they would destroy the city in their despair, offered them terms far beyond their h opes, after a war of fifteen years. 200 TUSCAN CITIES. II. What is odd in the history of Pisa is that it has given but one name to common remembrance. Her prosperity was early and great, and her people employed it in the cultivation of all the arts; yet Andrea and Nicolo Pisano are almost the only artists whose fame is associated with that of their native city. She was perpetually at war by sea and by land, yet her admirals and generals are unknown to the world. Her university is one of the oldest and most learned in Italy, yet she produced no eminent scholars or poets, and one hardly realizes that the great Galileo, who came a century after the fall of his country, was not a Florentine but a Pisan by birth ; he was actually of a Florentine family settled in Pisa. When one thinks of Florence, one thinks of Dante, of Giotto, of Cimabue, 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 Cavalcanti, of Amerigo Ves- pucci, of Benvenuto Cellini, and Masaccio and Botticelli, and all the rest. When one thinks of Siena, one thinks of St. Catharine, and Ochino, and Socinus, and the Piccolomini, and Bandini, and Sodoma ; but when one thinks of Pisa, Ugolino is the sole- name that comes into one's mind. I am not at all sure, however, that one ought to despise Pisa for her lack of celebrities ; I am rather of a contrary opinion. It is certain that such a force and splendor as she was for five hundred years could have been created only by a consensus of mighty wills, and it seems to me that a very pretty case might be made out in behalf of the democracy whose level was so high that no one head could be seen above it. Perhaps this is what we are coming to in our own civilization, and I am disposed to take heart from the heroless 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 case, we might come finally to anything as clean and restful and lovely as I found Pisa on the day of my arrival ; but of course that would be much more difficult for a continent than for a city, and probably our last state will not be so pleasant. On PITILESS PISA. 201 our way down from Florence, through much the same landscape as that through which we had started to Siena, the peach-trees were having their turn in the unhurried Italian spring's succession of blossoms, and the fields were lit with their pathetic pink, where earlier the paler bloom of the almond had prevailed. As I said, Pisa herself was in her spring dress, and it may be that the season had touched her with the langour which it makes the whole world feel, as she sat dreaming beside her Arno, in the midst of the gardens that compassed her about within her walls. I do not know what Pisa had to say to other tourists who arrived that day, but we were old friends, and she regarded me with a frank, sad wonder when she read in my eyes a determination to take notes of her. " Is it possible ? " she expressed, with that mute, melancholy air of hers. "You, who have lived in Italy, and ought to know better ? You, who have been here, before ? Sit down with me beside the Arno ! '* and she indicated two or three empty bridges, which I was welcome to, or if I preferred half a mile or so of that quay, which has the noblest sweep in the world, there it was, vacant for me. I shrugged my excuses, as well as I could, and indicated the artist at my side, who with his etching-plate under his arm, and his hat in his hand, was making his manners to Pisa, and I tried to explain that we were both there under contract to produce certain illustrated papers for The Century.* " What papers ? What Century ? " she murmured, and tears came into the eyes of the beautiful ghost ; and she added with an inex- pressible pathos and bitterness, " I remember no century, since the fifteenth, when I died." She would not say, when she fell under the power of her enemy, but we knew she was thinking of Florence ; and as she bowed her face in her hands, we turned away with our hearts in our throat. We thought it well not to go about viewing the monuments of her fallen grandeur at once, they arc 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 Magazine in which these sketches were first printed. 202 TUSCAN CITIES. the streets that dwindled into lanes beside the gardens fenced in oy the red brick city walls. At one point a long stretch of the wall seemed trellised for yellow roses which covered acres of it with their golden multitude ; but when we got down and walked nearer, with THE SWEEP OF THE ARNO AT PISA. the permission of the peasant whose field we passed through, we found they were lemons. He said they grew very well in that shel- ter and exposure, and his kind old weather-beaten, friendly face was almost the color of one. He bade us go anywhere we liked in his garden, and he invited us to drink of the water of his well, which he PITILESS PISA. 203 said never went dry in the hottest weather. Then he returned to his fat old wife, who had kept on weeding, and bent down beside her and did not follow us for drink-money, but returned a self-respectful adieu from a distance, when we called a good-by before getting into our carriage. "We generalized from his behavior a manly independence of character in the Pisan people, and I am sure we were not mistaken in the beauty of the Pisan women, who, as we met them in the street, were all extremely pretty, and young, many of them, even after five hundred years. One gets over expecting good looks in Tuscany ; and perhaps this was the reason why we prized the loveli- ness of the Pisans. It may have been comparative, only, though I am inclined to think it was positive. At any rate, there can be no doubt about the landscape outside the walls, which we drove into a little way out of one of the gates, to return by another. It was a plain country, and at this point a line of aqueduct stretched across the smiling fields to the feet of the arid, purple hills, that propped the blue horizon. There was something richly simple in the elements of the picture, which was of as few tones as a landscape of Titian or Raphael, and as strictly subordinated in its natural features to the human interest, which we did our best to represent. I dare say our best was but poor. Every acre of that plain had been the theatre of a great tragedy ; every rood of ground had borne its hero. Now, in the advancing spring, the grass and wheat were long enough to flow in the wind, and they flowed like the ripples of a wide green sea to the feet of those purple hills, away from our feet where we stood beside our carriage on its hither shore. The warmth of the season had liberated the fine haze that dances above the sum- mer fields, and this quivered before us like the confluent phantoms of multitudes, indistinguishably vast, who had fallen there in im- memorial strife. But we could not stand musing long upon this fact; we had taken that carriage by the hour. Yet we could not help loitering along by the clear stream that followed the road, till it brought us to a flour-whitened mill, near the city wall, slowly and .thoughtfully turning its huge undershot wheel; and I could not re- sist entering and speaking to the miller, where, leaning upon a sack 204 TUSCAN CITIES. of wheat, he dimly loomed through the powdered air, in the exact attitude of a miller I used to know in a mill on the Little Miami, in Ohio, when I was a boy. III. I TRY to give the reader a true impression of the sweet confusion of travel in those old lands. In the phrases that come out of the point of the pen, rather than out of the head or the heart, we talk about losing ourselves in the associations of the past ; but we never do it. A prime condition of our sympathy with it, is that we always and every instant and vividly find our dreary, tiresome, unstoried, unstoriable selves in it ; and if I had been less modern, less recent, less raw, I should have been by just so much indifferent to the an- tique charm of the place. In the midst of my reverie of the Pisan past, I dreamily asked the miller about the milling business in the Pisan present. I forget what he said. The artist outside had begun an 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 im- pression of a quiet that was only equalled by its cleanliness, of a cleanliness that was only surpassed by its quiet. I think of certain dim arcaded streets ; of certain genial, lonely, irregular squares, more or less planted with pollarded sycamores, just then woolily tufted with their leaf-buds ; and I will ask the reader to think of such white light over all as comes in our own first real spring days ; for in some atmospheric qualities and effects the spring is nowhere so much alike as in America and Italy. In one of these squares the boys were playing ball, striking it with a small tambourine instead of a bat ; in another, some young girls sat under a syca- more with their sewing ; and in a narrow street running out of this was the house where Galileo was 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 Corsini's gar- den ; and I wish I could have got inside of that garden ; it must PITILESS PISA. 205 have been pleasanter than the street in which Galileo was born, and which more nearly approached squalor in its condition than any other street that I remember in Pisa. It had fallen from no better state, and must always have witnessed to the poverty of the decayed Florentine fam- ily from which Galileo sprang. I left the ar- tist there be- ginning an etch- ing as usual and wandered back to our ho- tel; for it was then in the drowsy heart of the late after- noon, and I be- lieved that Pisa had done all that she could for me in one day. But she had reserved a little surprise, quaint and un- imaginable enough, in a small chapel of the Chiesa Evan- gel ica Metodista Italiana, which she suddenly showed me in a re- tired street I wandered through. This Italian Evangelical Method- ist Church was but a tiny structure, and it stood back from the street in a yard, with some hollies and myrtles before it, simple and plain, like a little Methodist church at home. It had not a frequented .look, and I was told afterwards that the Methodists of Pisa were in that state of arrest which the whole Protestant movement in Italy AN ARCADED STREET 206 TUSCAN CITIES. 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 Protestant church which prospers best in Italy is the ancient Italian church of the Waldenses. This presents the Italians a Protestantism of their own invention, while perhaps the hundred religions which we offer them are too distracting, if unaccompanied by our one gravy. It is said that our missionaries have unexpected difficulties to en- counter in preaching to the Italians, who are not amused, as we should be, by a foreigner's blunder, in our language, but annoyed and revolted by incorrect Italian from the pulpit. They have, moreover, their intellectual pride in the matter : they believe that if Protestant- ism had been the wiser and better thing we think it, the Italians would have found it out long ago for themselves. As it is, such proselytes as we make are among the poor and ignorant; though that is the way all religions begin. After the Methodist church it was not at all astonishing to come upon an agricultural implement warehouse alongside of a shop glaring with alabaster statuary where the polite attendant offered me an American pump as the very best thing of its kind that I could use on my vodcre. "When I explained that I and his pump were fellow-countrymen, I could see that we both rose in his respect. A French pump, he said, was not worth anything in comparison, and I made my own inferences as to the relative inferiority of a French man. IV. When I got to the hotel I asked for the key to my room, which opened by an inner door into the artist's room, and was told that the artist had it. He had come out by that door, it appeared, and car- ried off the key in his pocket, " Very well," I said, " then let us get in with the porter's key." They answered that the porter had no key, and they confessed that there was no other key than that which my friend had in his pocket. They maintained that for one door one key was enough, and they would not hear to the superiority of the American hotel system PITILESS PISA. 207 of several keys, which I, flown with pride by the lately acknowledged pre-eminence of American pumps, boasted for their mortification. I leave the sympathetic reader of forty-six to conceive the feelings of a man whose whole being had set nap-wards in a lethal tide, and who now found himself arrested and as it were dammed up in in- evitable vigils. In the reading-room there were plenty of old news- papers that one could sleep over ; but there was not a lounge, not an arm-chair. I pulled up one of the pitiless, straightbacked seats to the table, and meditated upon the lost condition of an artist who, without even meaning it, could be so wicked ; and then I opened the hotel register in which the different guests had inscribed their names, their residences, their feelings, their opinions of Pisa and of the Hotel Minerva. " This," I said to my bitter heart, " will help a man to sleep, stand- ing upright." But to my surprise I presently found myself interested in these predecessors of mine. They were, in most unexpected number, South Americans, and there were far more Spanish than English names from our hemisphere, though I do not know why the South Ameri- cans should not travel as well as we of the Northern continent. There were, of course, Europeans of all races and languages, con- spicuous among whom for their effusion and expansiveness were the French. I should rather have thought the Germans would be foremost in this sort, but these French bridal couples they all seemed to be on their wedding journeys let their joy bubble frankly out in the public record. One Baron declared that he saw Pisa for the second time, and " How much more beautiful it is," he cries, " now when I see it on my bridal tour!" and his wife writes fondly above this, one fancies her with her left arm thrown round his neck while they bend over the book together, " Life is a jour- ney which we should always make in pairs." On another page, " Cecie and Louis , on their wedding journey, are very content with this hotel, and still more witli being together." Who could they have been, I wonder ; and are they still better sat- isfied with each other's company than with the hotels they stop at ? 208 TUSCAN CITIES. The Minerva was a good hotel ; not perhaps all that these Gallic doves boasted it, but very fair indeed, and the landlord took off a charge for two pigeons when we represented that he had only given us one for dinner. The artist came in, after a while, with the appetite of a good conscience, and that dinner almost starved us. We tried to eke out the pigeon with vegetables, but the cook's fire had gone down, and we could get nothing but salad. There is nothing I hate more, under such circumstances, than a giarclinetto for dessert, and a garden- ette was all we had ; a little garden that grew us only two wizened pears, some dried prunes, and two slices of Gruyere cheese, fitter for a Parisian bridal pair than for us. If my memory serves me right we had to go out to a cafe for our after-dinner coffee. At any rate we went out, and walked up to look at the Arno under the pale moon. We found the river roughed by the chill wind that flared the line of lamps defining the curve of the quay before the shadowy palaces, and swept through the quiet streets, and while we lounged upon the parapet, a poor mountebank of those that tumble for centesimi before the cafes came by, shivering and shrinking in his shabby tights. His spangled breech-cloth emitted some forlorn gleams ; he was smoking a cigarette, and trying to keep on by a succession of shrugs the jacket that hung from one of his shoulders. I give him to the reader for whatever he can do with him in an impression of Pisa. One of our first cares in Pisa was of course to visit the Four Fabrics, as the Italians call, par excellence, the Duomo, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo. I say cares, for to me it was not a great pleasure. I perceive, by reference to my note- book, that I found that group far less impressive than at first, and that the Campo Santo especially appeared conscious and finicking. I had seen those Orgagna frescos before, and I had said to myself twenty years ago, in obedience to whatever art-critic I had in my pocket, that here was the highest evidence of the perfect sincerity in which the early masters wrought, that no one could have painted PITILESS PISA. 209 those horrors of death and torments of hell who had not thoroughly believed in them. But this time I had my doubts, and I questioned if the painters of the Campo Santo might not have worked with almost as little faith and reverence as so many American humorists. Why should we suppose that the men who painted the Vergognosa peeping through her fingers at the debauch of Noah should not be capable of making ferocious fun of the scenes which they seemed to depict seriously ? There is, as we all know, a modern quality in the great minds, the quickest wits, of all ages, and I do not feel sure these old painters are always to be taken at their word. Were they not sometimes making a mock of the devout clerics and laics who em- ployed them ? It is bitter fun, I allow. The Death and the Hell of Orgagna are atrocious nothing less. A hideous fancy, if not a gro- tesque, insolent humor, riots through those scenes, where the damned are shown with their entrails dangling out (my pen cannot be half so plain as his brush), with their arms chopped off, and their tongues torn out by fiends, with their women's breasts eaten by snakes. I for one will not pretend to have revered those works of art, or to have felt anything but loathing in their presence. If I am told that I ought at least to respect the faith with which the painter wrought, I say that faith was not respectable; and I can honor him more if I believe he was portraying those evil dreams in contempt of them, doing what he could to make faith in them impossible by realizing them in all the details of their filthy cruelty. It was misery to look upon them, and it was bliss to turn my back and give my gaze to the innocent wilding flowers and weeds, the daisies that powdered the sacred earth brought from the Holy Land in the Pisan galleys of old, for the sweeter repose of those laid away here to wait the judgment day. How long they had been sleeping already ! But they do not dream ; that was one comfort. I revisited the Baptistery for the sake of the famous echo which I had heard before, and which had sweetly lingered in my sense all these twenty years. But I was now a little disappointed in it, perhaps because the custodian who had howled so skilfully to evoke it was no longer there, but a mere tyro intent upon his half franc, 14 210 TUSCAN CITIES. with no real feeling for ululation as an art. Guides and custodians of an unexampled rapacity swarmed in and all about the Four Fab- rics, and beggars, whom we had almost forgotten in Florence, were there in such number that if the Leaning Tower were to fall, as it still looks capable of doing at any moment, it would half depopulate Pisa. I grieve to say that I encouraged mendicancy in the person of an old woman whom I gave a franc by mistake for a soldo. She had not the public spirit to refuse it; without giving me time to correct the error, her hand closed upon it like a talon of a vulture, and I had to get what consolation I could out of pretending to have meant to give her a franc, and to take lightly the blessings under which I really staggered. It may have been this misadventure that cast a malign light upon the cathedral, which I found, after that of Siena, not at all 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 and fro before my eyes. This cathedral, however, is only the new Duomo of Pisa, being less than eight hundred years of age, and there is an old Duomo, in another part of the city, which went much more to my heart. I do not pre- tend that I entered it ; but it had a lovely facade of Pisan gothic, mellowed through all its marble by the suns of a thousand summers, and weed-grown in every neglected niche and nook where dust and seeds could be lodged ; so that I now wonder I did not sit down before it and spend the rest of my life there. VI. The reader, who has been requested to imagine the irregular form and the perpetually varying heights and depths of Siena, is now set the easier task of supposing Pisa shut within walls almost quadran- gular, and reposing on a level which expands to the borders of the hills beyond Lucca, and drops softly with the Arno towards the sea. The river divides the southward third of the city from the rest, to which stately bridges bind it again. The group of the Four Fabrics, PITILESS PISA. 211 to which we have paid a devoir tempered by modern misgiving, rises in aristocratic seclusion in the northwestern corner of the quad- rangle, and the outer wall of the Campo Santo is the wall of the city. Nothing statelier than the position of these edifices could be conceived ; and yet their isolation, so favorable to their reproduction in small alabaster copies, costs them something of the sympathy of the sensitive spectator. He cannot withhold his admiration of that grandeur, but his soul turns to the Duomo in the busy heart of Florence, or to the cathedral, pre-eminent but not solitary in the crest of Siena. The Pisans have put their famous group apart from their streets and shops, and have consecrated to it a 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 religious edifices that I know in Italy. Here, as in some other things not so easily definable, the people so mute in all the arts but architecture of which they were the origin and school in Italy seem to have expressed themselves mistakenly. The Four Fabrics are where they are to be seen, to be visited, to be wondered at ; but they are remote from human society, and they fail of the last and finest effect of architecture, the per- fect adaptation of houses to the use of men. Perhaps also one feels a want of unity in the group ; perhaps they are too much like dishes set upon the table : the Duomo a vast and beautiful pudding ; the Baptistery a gigantic charlotte russe; the Campo Santo an exquisite structure in sugar ; the Leaning Tower, a column of ice-cream which has been weakened at the base by too zealous an application of hot water to the outside of the mould. But I do not insist upon this comparison ; I only say that I like the ancient church of St. Paul by the Arno. Some question whether it was really the first cathedral of Pisa, maintaining that it was merely used as such while the Duomo was in repair after the fire from which it suffered shortly after its completion. One must nowadays seem to have some preference in all {esthetic matters, but the time was when polite tourists took things more easily. In the seventeenth century, " Eichard Lassels, Gent, who 212 TUSCAN CITIES. Travelled through Italy five times as Tutor to several of the English Nobility and Gentry," says of the Pisan Duomo that it " is a neat Church for structure, and for its three Brazen Doors historied with a fine Basso rilievo. It 's built after La maniera Tedescha, a fashion of Building much used in Italy four or five hundred years ago, and brought in by Germans or Tedeschi, saith Vasari. Near to the Domo stands (if leaning may be called standing) the bending Tower, so arti- ficially made, that it seems to be falling, and yet it stands firm. . . . On the other side of the Domo, is the Campo Santo, a great square cloistered about with a low cloister curiously painted." Here is no trouble of mind about the old masters, either architects or painters, but a beautiful succinctness, a tranquil brevity, which no concern for the motives, or meanings, or aspirations of either pene- trates. We have taken upon ourselves in these days a heavy burden of inquiry as to what the mediaeval masters thought and felt ; but the tourist of the seventeenth century could say of the Pisan Duomo that it was "a neat church for structure," and of the Campo Santo that it was " curiously painted," and there an end. Perhaps there was a relief for the reader also in this method. Master Lassels vexed himself to spell his Italian correctly no more than he did his English. He visited, apparently with more interest, the Church of the Knights of St. Stephen, which indeed I myself found full of unique attraction. Of these knights he says : " They wear a Bed Cross of Satin upon their Cloaks, and profess to fight against the Turks. Eor this purpose they have here a good House and Maintainance. Their Church is beautified without with a handsome Faciata of White Marble, and within with Turkish Ensigns and divers Lanterns of Capitanesse Gallies. In this House the Knights live in common, and they are well maintained. In their Treasury they shew a great Buckler of Diamonds, won in a Battle against the Turks. . . . They have their Cancellaria, a Catalogue of those Knights who have done notable service against the Turks, which serves for a powerful exhor- tation to their Successors, to do, and die bravely. In fine, these Knights may marry if they will, and live in their own particular PITILESS PISA. 213 houses, but many of them choose celibate, as more convenient for brave Soldiers ; Wives and Children being the true impedimenta exercitus." The knights were long gone from their House and Maintenance in 1883, and I suspect it is years since any of them even professed to fight the Turks. But their church is still there, with their trophies, which I went and admired ; and I do not know that there is any- thing in Pisa which gives you a more vivid notion of her glory in the past than those flags taken from the infidels and those carvings that once enriched her galleys. These and the ship-yards by the Arno, from which her galleys were launched, do really recall the majesty and dominion of the sea which once was hers and then Genoa's, and then Venice's, and then the Hanseatic Cities', and then Holland's, and then England's ; and shall be ours when the Moral Force of the American Navy is appreciated. At present Pisa and the United States are equally formidable as maritime powers, unless indeed this conveys too strong an impression of the decay of Pisa. VII. Issuing from the Church of the Cavaliers I found myself in the most famous spot in the whole city: the wide dusty square where the Tower of Famine once stood, and where you may still see a palace with iron baskets swung from the corners of the facade, in which it is said the wicked Archbishop Euggieri used to put the heads of traitors. It may not be his palace, and the baskets may not have been used for this purpose ; but there is no doubt that this was the site of the tower, which was not demolished till 1655, and that here it was that Ugolino and his children and grandchildren cruelly perished. The writer of an excellent little local guide to Pisa, which I bought on my first visit, says that Dante has told the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, and that "after Dante, God alone can repeat it." Yet I fancy the tragedy will always have a fascination to the scribbler who visits Pisa, irresistibly tempting him to recall 214 TUSCAN CITIES. it to his reader. I for my part shall not do less than remind him that Ugolino was Captain of the People and 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 arose, " If you want to see Pisa, go to Genoa." In those days they had a short and easy way of accounting for disaster, which has been much prac- tised since down even to the date of our own civil war ; they attrib- uted it to treason, and in this case they were pretty clear that Count Ugolino was the traitor. He sailed away with his squadron before his critics thought the day lost ; and after the battle, in his negotiations with Florence and Genoa they declared that he behaved as only a man would who wished to ruin his country in order to rule her. He had already betrayed his purpose of founding an hereditary lordship in Pisa, as the Visconti had done in Milan and the Scaligeri in Verona, and to this end had turned Guelph from being ancestrally Ghibelline ; for his name is one of the three still surviving in Tus- cany of the old German nobility founded there by the emperors. He was a man of furious and ruthless temper ; he had caused one of his nephews to be poisoned, he stabbed another, and when the young man's friend, a nephew of the Archbishop, would have defended him, Ugolino killed him with his own hand. The Archbishop, as a Ghi- belline, was already no friend of Ugolino's, and here now was blood- shed between them. " And what happened to Count Ugolino a little after;' says the Florentine chronicler, Villani, "was prophesied by a wise and worthy man of the court, Marco Lombardo ; for when the count was chosen by all to be Lord of Pisa, and when he was in his highest estate and felicity, he made himself a splendid birthday feast, where he had his children and grandchildren and all his line- age, kinsmen and kinswomen, with great pomp of apparel, and orna- ment, and preparation for a rich banquet. The count took this Marco, and went about showing him his possessions and splendor, and the preparation for the feast, and that done, he said, ' What do you think of it, Marco ? ' The sage answered at once, and said, ' You are fitter for evil chance than any baron of Italy.' And the count, afraid of Marco's meaning, asked, 'Why?' And Marco answered, PITILESS PISA. 215 ' Because you lack nothing but the wrath of God.' And surely the wrath of God quickly fell upon him, as it pleased God, for his sins and treasons ; for as it had been intended by the Archbishop of Pisa and his party to drive out of Pisa Nino and his followers, and betray and entrammel Ugolino, and weaken the Guelphs, the Archbishop ordered Count Ugolino to be undone, and immediately set the people on in their fury to attack and take his palace, giving the people to understand that he had betrayed Pisa, and surrendered their castles to the Florentines and Lucchese ; and finding the people upon him, without hope of escape, Ugolino gave himself up, and in this assault his bastard son and one of his grandchildren were killed ; and Ugo- lino being taken, and two of his sons and two of his son's sons, they threw them in prison, and drove his family and his followers out of Pisa. . . . The Pisans, who had thrown in prison Ugolino and his two sons, and two sons of his son Count Guelfo, as we have before mentioned, in a tower on the Piazza degli Anziani, caused the door of the tower to be locked and the keys to be thrown into the Arno, and forbidding these captives all food, in a few days they perished of hunger. But first, the count imploring a confessor, they would not allow him a friar or priest that he might confess. And all five being taken out of the tower together, they were vilely buried ; and from that time the prison was called the Tower of Famine, and will be so always. For this cruelty the Pisans were strongly blamed by the whole world, wherever it was known, not so much for the count, who for his crimes and treasons was perhaps worthy of such a death, but for his sons and grandsons, who were young, boys, and innocent ; and this sin, committed by the Pisans, did not remain unpunished, as may be seen in after time." A monograph on Ugolino by an English writer states that the vic- tims were rolled in the matting of their prison floor and interred, with the irons still on their limbs, in the cloister of the church of San Francesco. The grave was opened in the fourteenth century, and the irons taken out ; again, in 1822, the remains were found and carelessly thrown together in a spot marked by a stone bearing the name of Vannuchi. Of the prison where they suffered, no more 216 TUSCAN CITIES. remains now than of the municipal eagles which the Eepublic put to moult there, and from which it was called the Moulting Tower before it was called the Tower of Famine. VIII. The memory of that curious literary conjunction which once took place at Pisa, when Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt met there to establish an English review on Italian ground, imparts to the old city an odor, faint now and very vague, of the time when Komance was new enough to seem immortal ; but I could do little with this association, as an element of my impression. They will point you out, if you wish, the palace in which Byron lived on the Lung' Arno, but as I would not have gone to look at a palace with Byron alive in it, I easily excused myself for not hunting up this one of the resi- dences with which he left Italy swarming. The Shelleys lived first in a villa, four miles off under the hills, but were washed out of it in one of the sudden inundations of the country, and spent the rest of their sojourn in the city, where Shelley alarmed his Italian friends by launching on the Arno in a boat he had contrived of pitched can- vas and lath. His companion in this perilous navigation was that Mr. Williams with whom he was afterwards drowned in Spezzia Bay. " Once," writes Mrs. Shelley, " I went down with him to the mouth of the Arno, where the stream, then high and swift, met the tideless sea and disturbed its sluggish waters. It was a waste and dreary scene ; the desert sand stretched into a point surrounded by waves that broke idly but perpetually around." At Pisa there is nothing of this wildness or strife in the Arno, not so much as at Florence, where it rushes and brawls down its channel and over its dams and ripples. Its waters are turbid, almost black, but smooth, and they slip oilily away with many a wreathing eddy, round the curve of the magnificent quay, to which my mind recurs still as the noblest thing in Pisa ; as the noblest thing, indeed, that any city has done with its river. But what quick and sensitive allies of Nature the Italians have always shown themselves ! No PITILESS PISA. 217 suggestion of hers has been thrown away on them ; they have made the most of her lavish kindness, and transmuted it into the glory and the charm of art. Our last moments of sight-seeing in Pisa were spent in strolling beside the river, in hanging on the parapet and delighting in the lines of that curve. At one end of the city, before this begins, near a spick-and-span new iron bridge, is the mediaeval tower of the galley prison, which we found exquisitely picturesque in the light of our last morning ; and then, stretching up towards the heart of the town from this tower, were the ship-yards, with the sheds in which the old republic built the galleys she launched on every sea then known. They are used now for military stables ; they are not unlike the ordinary horse-car stables of our civilization ; and the grooms, swabbing the legs of the horses and combing their manes, were naturalized to our homesick sympathies by the homely community of their functions with those I had so often stopped to admire in my own land. There is no doubt but the toilet of a horse is something that interests every human being. RELIEF FROM PIAZZA DELIA SIGNORIA. INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. WITH rather less than the ordinary stupidity of tourists, wretched slaves of routine as they are, we had imagined the possibility of going to Lucca overland ; that is, of driving fifteen miles across the country instead of taking the train. It would be as three hours against twenty minutes, and as fifteen francs against two ; but my friend was young and I was imprudent, and we boldly ventured upon the expedition. I have never regretted it, which is what can be said of, alas, how few pleasures ! On the contrary, it is rapture to think of it still. Already, at eight o'clock of the April morning, the sun had filled the city with a sickening heat, which intimated pretty clearly what it might do for Pisa in August ; but when we had mounted superbly to our carriage-seats, after pensioning all the bystanders, and had driven out of the city into the green plain beyond the walls, we found it a delicious spring day, warm, indeed, but full of a fervent life. We had issued from the gate nearest the Four Fabrics, and I ad- vise the reader to get that view of them if he can. To the backward glance of the journeyer toward Lucca, they have the unity, the en- semble, the want of which weakens their effect to proximity. Beside us swept the great level to the blue-misted hills on our right ; before us it stretched indefinitely. From the grass, the larks were quiver- ing up to the perfect heaven, and the sympathy of Man with the tender and lovely mood of Nature was expressed in the presence of 222 TUSCAN CITIES. the hunters with their dogs, who were exploring the herbage in quest of something to kill. Perhaps I do man injustice. Perhaps the rapture of the blameless litterateur and artist, who drove along crying out over the exquisite beauty of the scene, was more justly representative of our poor race. 1 am vexed now, when I think how brief this rapture was, and how much it might have been prolonged if we had bargained with our driver to go slow. We had bargained for everything else ; but who could have imagined that one Italian could ever have been fast enough for two Americans ? He was even too fast. He had a just pride in his beast, as tough as the iron it was the color of, and when implored, in the interest of natural beauty, not to urge it on, he misunderstood ; he boasted that it could keep up that pace all day, and he incited it in the good Tuscan of Pisa to go faster yet. Ah me ! What enchanting villas he whirled us by ! What gray chateaux ! What old wayside towers, hoary out of all remembrance ! What delightfully stupid-looking little stony picturesque villages, in every one of which that poor artist and I would have been glad to spend the whole day ! But the driver could not snatch the broad and constant features of the landscape from us so quickly ; these we had time to peruse and imprint forever on our memories : the green expanses, the peach-trees pink in their bloom ; the plums and cherries putting on their bridal white; the gray road, followed its whole length by the vines trained from trees to tall stakes across a space which they thus embowered continuously from field to field. Every- where the peasants were working the soil ; spading, not plowing their acres, and dressing it to the smoothness of a garden. It looked rich and fertile, and the whole land wore an air of smiling prosperity which I cannot think it put on expressly for us. Pisa seemed hardly to have died out of the horizon before her ancient enemy began to rise from the other verge, beyond the little space in which they used to play bloodily at national hostilities. The plain narrowed as we approached, and hills hemmed us in on three sides, with snow-capped heights in the background, from which the air blew cooler and cooler. It was only eleven o'clock, and we INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 223 would gladly have been all day on the road. But we pretended to be pleased with the mistaken zeal that had hurried us ; it was so amiable, we could not help it ; and we entered Lucca with the smiling resolution to make the most of it. II. Lucca lies as flat as Pisa, but in shape it is as regularly oblong as that is square, and instead of the brick wall, which we had grown fond of there and in Siena, it has a girdle of gray stone, deeply moated without, and broadly levelled on top, where a lovely driveway winds round the ancient town. The wall juts in a score of angles, and the projecting spaces thus formed are planted with groups of forest trees, lofty and old, and giving a charm to the promenade exquisitely wild and rare. To our approach, the clustering city towers and roofs promised a picturesqueness which she kept in her own fashion when we drove in through her gates, and were set down, after a dramatic rattling and banging through her streets, at the door of the Universo, or the Croce di Malta, I do not really remember which hotel it was. But I remember very well the whole domestic force of the inn seemed to be concentrated in the distracted servant who gave us our rooms, and was landlord, porter, accountant, waiter, and chambermaid all in one. It was an inn apparently very little tainted by tourist custom, and Lucca is certainly one of the less discovered of the Tuscan cities. At the table d'hdte 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 conservative in Italy of the good old ducal days of Lucca, when she had her own mild little despot, and they were now going to the Baths of Lucca to place themselves for the summer. They were types of a class which is numerous all over the continent, and which seems thoroughly 'content with expatriation. The Europeanized American is always 224 TUSCAN CITIES. apologetic ; he says that America is best, and he pretends that he is going back there ; but the continentalized Englishman has apparently no intention of repatriating himself. He has said to me frankly in one instance that England was beastly. But I own I should not like to have said it to him. In their talk of the ducal past of Lucca these English people struck again the note which my first impression of Lucca had sounded. Lucca was a sort of republic for nearly a thousand years, with less interruption from lords, bishops, and foreign dominions than most of her sister commonwealths, and she kept her ancient liberties down to the time of the French revolution four hundred years longer than Pisa, and two hundred and fifty years longer than Florence and Siena ; as long, in fact, as Venice, which she resembled in an arbitrary change effected from a democratic to an aristocratic constitution at the moment when the change was necessary to her existence as an independent state. The duchy of Lucca created by the Congress of Vienna, 1817, and assigned to the Bourbons of Parma, lasted only thirty years, when it was merged by previous agreement in the grand duchy of Tuscany, the Bourbons going back to Parma, in which Napoleon's Austrian widow had meantime enjoyed a life interest. In this brief period, however, the old repub- lican city assumed so completely the character of a little principality, that in spite of the usual Via Garibaldi and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I could not banish the image of the ducal state from my mind. Yet I should be at a loss how to impart this feeling to every one, or to say why a vast dusty square, planted with pollarded sycamores, and a huge, ugly palace with but a fairish gallery of pictures, fronting upon the dust and sycamores, should have been so expressive of a ducal residence. There was a statue of Maria Louisa, the first ruler of the temporary duchy, in the midst of these sycamores, and I had a persistent whimsey of her reviewing her little ducal army there, as I sat and looked out from the open door of the restaurant where my friend and I were making the acquaintance of a number of strange dishes and trying our best to be friends with the Lucchese conception of a beefsteak. INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 225 It was not because I had no other periods to choose from ; in Lucca you can be overwhelmed with them. Her chronicles do not indeed go back into the mists of fable for her origin, but they boast an Etruscan, a Eoman antiquity which is hardly less formidable. Here ifi #1 A vr in a. u. 515 there was fixed a col- ony of two thousand citizens ; here in 698 the great Caesar met with - rr ''/- Pompey and Crassus, and settled who should rule in Eome. After the Eomans, 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 magis- trates of her people's choice, and to have her wars within and without, to be torn with faction and menaced with conquest in the right Italian fashion. Once she was sacked by the Pisans under the terrible Uguccione della Fagginola, in 1314; and more than once she was sold. She was sold for thirty-five thousand florins to two ambi- tious and enterprising gentlemen, the Eossi brothers, of Parma, who, 15 226 TUSCAN CITIES. however, were obliged to relinquish her to the Scaligeri of Verona. This was the sorrow and shame that fell upon her after a brief fever of conquest and glory, brought her by the greatest of her captains, the famous Castruccio Castracani, the condottiere, whose fierce, death- white face, bordered by its pale yellow hair, looks more vividly out of the history of his time than any other. For Castruccio had been in prison, appointed to die, and when the rising of the Lucchese delivered him, and made him Lord of Lucca, Uguccione's fetters were still upon him. He was of the ancient Ghibelline family of the Antelminelli, who had prospered to great wealth in England, where they spent a long exile and where Castruccio learned the art of war. After his death one of his sons sold his dominion to another for twenty-two thousand florins, from whom his German garrison took v it and sold it for sixty thousand to Gherardo Spinola ; he, in turn, disposed of it to the Eossi, at a clear loss of thirty-eight thousand florins. The Lucchese suffered six years under the Scaligeri, who sold them again the market price this time is not quoted to the Florentines, whom the Pisans drove out. These held her in a servi- tude so cruel that the Lucchese called it their Babylonian captivity, and when it was ended after twenty years, through the intervention of the Emperor Charles IV., in 1369, they were obliged to pay the German a hundred thousand florins for their liberty, which had been sold so many times for far less money. An ancient Lucchese family, the Guanigi, whose Gothic palaces are still the most beautiful in the city, now rose to power, and held it till 1430 ; and then the city finally established the republican gov- ernment, which in its democratic and oligarchic form continued till 1799. The noblest event of this long period was the magnanimous at- tempt of the gonfaloniere, Francesco Burlamacchi, who in 1546 dreamed of driving the Medici from power and re-establishing the republic throughout Tuscany. Burlamacchi was of an old patrician family, but the love of freedom had been instilled in him by his uncle, Filippo Burlamacchi, that Fra Pacifico who wrote the first life of Savonarola and was one of his most fervent disciples. The INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 227 gonfaloniere's plot was discovered ; and he was arrested by the timid Lucchese Senate, which hastened to assure the ferocious Cosimo I. that they were guiltless of complicity. The imperial commissioner came from Milan to preside at his trial, and he was sentenced to suffer death for treason to the empire. He was taken to Milan and beheaded ; but now he is the greatest name in Lucca, and his statue in the piazza, fronting her ancient communal palace, appeals to all who love freedom with the memory of his high intent. He died in the same cause which Savonarola laid down his life for, and not less generously. Poor little Lucca had not even the courage to attempt to save him ; but doubtless she would have tried if she had dared. She was under the special protection of the emperors, having paid Maximilian and then Charles V. good round sums for the confirmation of her early liberties ; and she was so anxious to be well with the latter, that when she was accused to him of favoring the new Lutheran heresy she hastened to persecute the Protestants with the same cowardice that she had shown in abandoning Burlamacchi. It cost, indeed, no great effort to suppress the Protestant congrega- tion at Lucca. Peter Martyr, its founder, had fled before, and was now a professor at Strasburg, whence he wrote a letter of severe upbraiding to the timorous flock who suffered themselves to be fright- ened back to Eome. Some of them would not renounce their faith, preferring exile, and of these, who emigrated by families, were the Burlamacchi, from whom the hero came. He had counted somewhat upon the spirit of the Eeformation to help him in his design against the Medici, knowing it to be the spirit of freedom, but there is no one evidence that he was himself more a Protestant than Savonarola was. Eight years after his death the constitution of Lucca was changed, and she fell under the rule of an aristocracy nicknamed the Lords of the Little King, from the narrow circle in which her senators suc- ceeded one another. She had always been called Lucca the Indus- trious ; in her safe subordination, she now worked and throve for two hundred and fifty years, till the French republicans came and toppled 228 TUSCAN CITIES. her oligarchy over at a touch. James Howell, writing one of his delightful letters from Florence in 1621, gives us some notion of Lucca as she appeared to the polite traveller of that day. " There is a notable active little Kepublic towards the midst of Tuscany," he says, " called Lucca, which, in regard she is under the Emperour's protection, he dares not meddle with, though she lie as a Partridg under a Faulcon's wings, in relation to the grand Duke ; besides there is another reason of the State why he meddles not with her, because she is more beneficial unto him now that she is free, and more industrious to support this freedom, than if she were become his vassal ; for then it is probable she would grow more careless and idle, and so would not vent his comodities so soon, which she buys for ready mony, wherein most of her wealth consists. There is no State that winds the peny more nimbly and makes a quicker return." Lasells, who visited Lucca a little earlier, tells us that it "hath thirty thousand Muskets or half Muskets in its Arsenal, eight thou- sand Pikes, two thousand Brest Pieces of Musket proof, and store of great Artillery. The whole State, for a need, can arm eighteen thou- sand men of service ; " but Lucca appears to have become the joke and by-word of her neighbors more and more as time went on. At Florence they told of a prima-donna who, when she gesticulated in opera at Lucca, flung her arms beyond the borders of the republic. An ignominious peace, timid, selfish, prudent, was her condition from the time the aristocratic change took place. For two centuries she was preparing for that Bourbon despotism which characterized her even physically to my fancy. " An absolute government," says my Lucchese guide-book, " but of mild temper, which might have been more beneficent if it had been inspired by views less narrow. Yet it was a notable period of our history for municipal activity and for public works, which in proportion to the smallness of the country may also be called great ; the city secured by vast and well-planned defences against the inundations of the Serchio; the country trav- ersed in every direction by carriage-roads ; abundance of the best water for use and beauty brought to the city by a monumental work INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 229 of art ; an ample highway across the Apennines, to communicate with Modena and Lombardy ; bridges, ornamental and convenient, of stone and iron." III. Of mediaeval Lucca I have kept fresh- est the sense of her Gothic church archi- tecture, with its delicate difference from that of Pisa, which it resembles and excels. It is touched with the Lom- bardic and Byzantine character, while keeping its own ; here are the pillars resting on the backs of lions and leop- ards ; here are the quaint mosaics in the facades. You see the former in the cathedral, which is not signally remark- able, like that of Florence, or Siena, or Pisa, and the latter in the beautiful old church of San Frediano, an Irish saint who for some reason figured in Lucca ; he was bishop there in the fifth century, and the foundation of 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 Palazzo Pretorio. This structure was dedicated to the occu- pation of the Podesta of Lucca, in pur- suance of the republic's high-languaged decree, recognizing the fact that " among the ornaments with which cities embel- lish themselves, the greatest expenditure should always be devoted to those where the deities are worshipped, the magistracy the clock tower of lucca. ik 1 l-vcu 230 TUSCAN CITIES. administers justice, and the people convenes." The Palazzo Pretorio is now the repository of a public archaeological collection, and the memory of its original use has so utterly perished that the com- bined intellects of two policemen, whom we appealed to for infor- mation, could not assign to it any other function than that of lottery office, appointed by the late grand duke. The popular in- tellect at Lucca is not very vivid, so far as we tested it, and though 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 amiable, and she had three pretty daughters in the bon-bon de- partment, who looked the friendliest disposition to know about it if they could. I speak of them at once, because I did not think the Lucchese generally such handsome people as the Pisans, and I wish to be generous before I am just. Why, indeed, should I be severe with the poor Lucchese in any way, even for their ignorance, when the infallible Baedeker himself speaks of the statue in the Piazza S. Michele as that of " S. Burlamacchi" ? The hero thus canonized stood frowning down upon a grain and seed market when we went to offer him our homage, and the peasants thought we had come to buy, and could not understand why we should have only a minor curiosity about their wares. They took the wheat up in their brown hands to show us, and boasted of its superior quality. "We said we were strangers, and explained that we had no intention of putting in a crop of that sort; but they only laughed blankly. In spite of this prevailing ignorance, penetrating even to the Baedeker in our hands, Lucca was much tableted to the memory of her celeb- rities, especially her literary celebrities, who need tablets as greatly as any literary celebrities I know. There was one literary lady whose tablet I saw in a church, and whom the local Scientific and Literary Academy proclaimed " the marvel of her age " for her learn- ing and her gifts in improvisation. The reader will readily identify her from this ; or if he cannot, the greater shame to him ; he might as well be a Lucchese. INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 231 " All there are barrators, except Bontura ; No into yes for money there is changed," says Dante of this Lucca in which I found an aspect of busy commonplace, an air of thrift and traffic, and in which I only feign to have discovered an indifference to finer things. I dare say Lucca is full of intelligence and polite learning; but she does not imbue her policemen and caffctieras with it, as Boston does. Yet I would willingly be at this moment in a town where I could step out and see an old Eoman amphitheatre, built bodily up into the modern city, and showing its mighty ribs through the houses surrounding the market-place, a market-place quaint beyond any other, with its tile-roofed stands and booths. There is much more silk in Lucca than in Boston, if we have the greater culture ; and the oil of Lucca is sublime; and yes, I will own it! Lucca has the finer city wall. The town showed shabby and poor from the driveway along the top of this, for we saw the backyards and rears of the houses ; but now and then we looked down into a stiff, formal, delicious palace garden, full of weather-beaten statues, old, bad, ridiculous, divinely dear and beautiful! I cannot say that I have been hardly used, when I remember that I have seen such gardens as those ; and I humbly confess it a privi- lege to have walked in the shadow of the Guanigi palaces at Lucca, in which the gothic seems to have clone its best for a stately and lovely effect. I even climbed to the top of one of their towers, which I had wondered at ever since my first sight of Lucca because of the little grove it bore upon its crest. I asked the custodian of the palace what it was, and he said it was a little garden, which I sus- pected already. But I had a consuming desire to know what it looked like, and what Lucca looked like from it ; and I asked him how high the tower was. He answered that it was four hundred feet high, which I doubted at first, but came to believe when I had made the ascent. I hated very much to go up that tower; but when the custodian said that an English lady eighty years old had gone up the week before, I said to myself that I would not be outdone by any old lady of eighty, and I went up. The trees were really rooted in 232 TUSCAN CITIES. little beds of earth up there, and had been growing for ten years ; the people of the house sometimes took tea under them in the summer evenings. This tower was one of three hundred and seventy in which Lucca abounded before the Guanigi levelled them. They were for the con- Wv , m !"1 '- THE GUANIGI TOWER. venience of private warfare ; the custodian showed me a little chamber near the top, where he pretended the garrison used to stay. I en- joyed his statement as much as if it were a fact, and I enjoyed still INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA. 233 more the magnificent prospect of the city and country from the towers ; the fertile plain with the hills all round, and distant moun- tains snow-crowned except to the south where the valley widened toward Florence ; the multitudinous roofs and bell-towers of the city, which filled its walls full of human habitations, with no breadths of orchard and field as at Pisa and Siena. The present Count Guanigi, so the custodian pretended, lives in another palace, and lets this in apartments ; you may have the finest A STAIRWAY, LUCCA. 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. 234 TUSCAN CITIES. We did, however, see one Lucchese palace throughout ; the Palazzo Mansi, in which there is an admirable gallery of Dutch pictures inherited by the late marquis through a Dutch marriage made by one of his ancestors. 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 sides of the palace court. From a third, standing in an arcaded passage, you look across this court, gray with the stone of which the edifice is built, to a rich brown mass of tiled roofs, and receive a perfect impression of the pride and state in which life was lived in the old days in Lucca. It is a palace in the classic taste ; it is excellent in its way, and it expresses as no other sort of edifice can the splendors of an aris- tocracy, 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 Ameri- can, a citizen of this enormous democracy, but if I were strictly cross- examined, would I not like also to be a Lord of the Little King in Lucca, a marquis, and a Mansi ? PISTOJA, PR A TO, AND FIESOLE. PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. i. It was on the last day of March, after our 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 prevalent tone, amid the tints of the peach and pear blossoms. Dandelions thickly strewed the railroad-sides ; the grass was pow- dered with the little daisies, white with crimson-tipped petals ; the garden-borders were full of yellow flowering seed-turnips. The peasants were spading their fields ; as we ran along, it came noon, and they began to troop over the white roads to dinner, past villas frescoed with false balconies and casements, and comfortable brown- ish-gray farmsteads. On our right the waves of distant purple hills swept all the way to Pistoja. I made it part of my business there to look up a young married couple, Americans, journeying from Venice to Florence, who stopped at Pistoja twenty years before, and saw the gray town in the gray light of a spring morning between four and six o'clock. I remem- bered how strange and beautiful they thought it, and from time to time I started with recognition of different objects as if I had been one of that pair ; so young, so simple-heartedly, greedily glad of all that eld and story which Italy constantly lavished upon them. I could not find them, but I found phantom traces of their youth in the ancient town, and that endeared it to me, and made it lovely through every hour of the long rainy day I spent there. To other eyes it might have seemed merely a stony old town, dull and cold 238 TUSCAN CITIES. under the lowering sky, with a locked-up cathedral, a bare baptis- tery, and a medieval public palace, and a history early merged in that of Florence ; but to me it must always have the tender interest of the pleasure, pathetically intense, which that young couple took in it. They were very hun- gry, and they could get no breakfast in the drowsy town, not even a cup of coffee, but they did not mind that; they wandered about, famished but blest, and by one of the happy accidents that usually be- friended them, they found their way up to the Piazza del Duo- mo and saw the Communal Palace so thoroughly, in all its gothic fulness and mediae- val richness of detail, that I seemed never to have risen from the stone benching around the interior of the court on which they sat to study the escutcheons carven and painted on the walls. I could swear that the bear on the arms of Pistoja was the same that they saw and noted with the amusement which a bear in a check- ered 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. ARMORIAL BEARINGS OF THE PODESTAS IN THE PALAZZO COMMUNALE AT PISTOJA. PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 239 We need not otherwise go deeply into the history of Pistoja. We know already how one of her family feuds introduced the factions of the Bianchi and Neri in Florence, and finally caused the exile of Dante; and we may inoffensively remember that Cataline met his defeat and death on her hills A. u. 691. She was ruled more or less tumultuously by princes, popes, and people till the time of her great siege by the Lucchese and Florentines and her own Guelph exiles in 1305. Famine began to madden the besieged, and men and women stole out of the city through the enemy's camp and scoured the country for food. When the Florentines found tins' out they lay in wait for them, and such as they caught they mutilated, cutting off their noses, or arms, or legs, and then exposing them to the sight of those they had gone out to save from starvation. After the city fell the Florentine 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 governor, and men, women, children, priests, and monks joined in driving him out. .After the heroic struggle they re-estab- lished their own republic, which presently fell a prey to the feud of two of her families, in whose private warfare she suffered almost as much as from her foreign enemies. Between them the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi burned a thousand houses within her walls, not counting those without, and the latter had plotted to deliver over their country to the Visconti of Milan, when the Florentines inter- vened and took final possession of Pistoja. We had, therefore, not even to say that we were of the Cancellieri party in order to enter Pistoja, but drove up to the Hotel di Londra without challenge, and had dinner there, after which we repaired to the Piazza del Duomo ; and while the artist got out a plate and began to etch in the rain, the author bestirred himself to find the sacristan and get into the cathedral. It was easy enough to find the sacristan, 240 TUSCAN CITIES. but when he had been made to put his head out of the fifth-story window he answered, with a want of enterprise 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 hour I re- venged myself upon him by not finding it very interesting, though I think now the fault must have been in me. There is enough estimable detail of art, especially the fourteenth- century monument to 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 im- mortalized in his subtle and metaphysical verses ; she was the daugh- ter of Filippo Vergiolesi, the leader of the Ghibellines in Pistoja, and she died of hope- less love for Cino, when the calamities of their country drove him into exile at the time of the siege. He remains the most tangible if not the greatest name of Pistoja ; he was the first of those who polished the Tuscan speech ; he was a wonder of jurisprudence in his time, restoring the Eoman law and commenting nine books of the Code ; and the wayfarer, whether grammarian, attorney, littera- teur, or young lady may well look on his monument with sympathy. PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIE SOLE. 241 But I brought away no impression of pleasure or surprise from the cathedral generally, and in fact the works of art for which one may chiefly, if not solely, desire to see Pistoja again, are the Delia Eobbias, which immortally beautify the Ospedale del Ceppo. They represent with the simplest reality, and in the proportions of life, the seven works of mercy of St. Andrea Franchi, bishop of Pistoja, in 1399. They form a frieze or band round the edifice, and are of the glazed terra cotta in which the Delia Eobbias commonly wrought. The saint is seen visiting "The Naked," "The Pilgrims," "The Sick," "The Impris- oned," " The Dead," " The An Hungered," " The Athirst ; " and be- tween the tableaux are the figures of " Faith," " Charity," " Hope," " Prudence," and " Justice." There is also " An Annunciation," " A Visitation," " An Assumption ; " and in three circular reliefs, adorned with fruits and flowers after the Delia Eobbia manner, the arms of the hospital, the city, and the Medici ; but what takes the eye and the heart are the good bishop's works of mercy. In these color is used as it must be in that material, and in the broad, unmingled blues, reds, yellows, and greens, primary, sincere, you have satisfying actuality of effect. I believe the critics are not decided that these are the best works of the masters, but they gave me more pleasure than any others, and I remember them with a vivid joy still. It is hardly less than startling to see them first, and then for every suc- ceeding moment it is delightful. Giovanni della Eobbia and his brother, the monk Frate Ambrogio, and Andrea and his two sons, Luca and Girolomo, are all supposed to have shared in this work, which has, therefore, a peculiar interest, though it is not even men- tioned by Vasari, and seems to have suffered neglect by all the earlier connoisseurs. It was skilfully restored in 1826 by a Pistojese archi- tect, who removed the layer of dust that had hardened upon the glaze and hid the colors ; and in 1839 the French Government asked leave to reproduce it in plaster for the Beaux Arts; from which copy another was made for the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. It is, by all odds, the chiefest thing in Pistoja, where the reader, when he goes to look at it, may like to recall the pretty legend of the dry tree- stump (ceppo~) breaking into bud and leaf, to indicate to the two good 16 242 TUSCAN CITIES. Pistojese of six hundred years ago where to found the hospital which this lovely frieze adorns. Apparently, however, Pistoja does not expect to be visited for this or any other reason. I have already held up to obloquy the want of public spirit in the sacristan of the cathedral, and I have now to report an equal indifference on the part of the owner of a beautiful show-villa which a cabman persuaded me drive some miles out of the town through the rain to see. When we reached its gate, we were told that the villa was closed ; simply that closed. But I was not wholly a loser, for in celebration of my supposed disappoint- ment my driver dramatized a grief which was as fine a theatrical spectacle as I have seen. PISTOJA, PR A TO, AND FIE SOLE. 243 Besides, I was able to stop on the way back at the ancient church of Santf Andrea, where I found myself as little expected, indeed, as elsewhere, but very prettily welcomed by the daughter of the sacris- tan, whose father was absent, and who made me free of the church. I thought that I wished to see the famous pulpit of Giovanna da Pisa, son of Niccolo, and the little maid had to light me a candle to look at it with. She was not of much help otherwise ; she did not at all understand the subjects, neither the Nativity, nor the Adoration of the Magi ("Who were the three Magi Kings?" she asked, and was so glad when I explained), nor the Slaughter of the Innocents, nor the Crucifixion, nor the Judgment. These facts were as strange to her as the marvellous richness and delicacy of the whole work, which, for opulence of invention and perfect expression of intention, is surely one of the most wonderful things in all that wonderland of Italy. She stood by and freshly admired, while I lectured her upon it as if I had been the sacristan and she a simple maid from America, and got the hot wax of the candle all over my fingers. She affected to refuse my fee. " Le pare ! " she said, with the sweetest pretence of astonishment (which, being interpreted, is some- thing like " The idea ! " ) ; and when I forced the coin into her un- willing hand, she asked me to come again, when her father was at home. Would I could ! There is no such pulpit in America, that I know of; and even Pistoja, in the rain and mud, nonchalant, unenter- prising, is no bad place. I had actually business there besides that of a scribbling dille- tante, and it took me, on behalf of a sculptor who had some medal- lions casting, to the most ancient of the several bronze foundries in Pistoja. This foundry, an irregular group of low roofs, was enclosed in a hedge of myrtle, and I descended through flowery garden-paths to the office, where the master met me with the air of a host, instead of that terrifying no-adinittance-except-on-business address, which I have encountered in my rare visits to foundries in my own coun- try. Nothing could have been more fascinating than the interior of the workshop, in which the bronze figures, groups, reliefs, stood about 244 TUSCAN CITIES. in every variety of dimension and all stages of finish. When I con- fessed my ignorance, with a candor which I shall not expect from the reader, of how the sculpturesque forms to their last fragile and delicate detail were reproduced in metal, he explained that an exact copy was first made in wax, which was painted with successive coats of liquid mud, one dried upon another, till a sufficient thickness was secured, and then the wax was melted out, and the bronze was poured in. I said how very simple it was when one knew, and he said, yes, very simple ; and I came away sighing for the day when our foun- dries shall be enclosed in myrtle hedges, and reached through garden- paths. I suppose I shall hardly see it, however, for it had taken almost a thousand years for that foundry in Pisa to attain its idyllic setting. Patience ! II. On my way home from Lucca, I stopped at Prato, whither I had been tempted to go all winter by the steam-tramway trains snuffling in and out of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. I found it a flat, dull, commonplace-looking town at first blush, with one wild, huge, gaunt piazza, planted with straggling sycamores, and banged all round by copper-smiths, whose shops seemed to alternate with the stables occupying its arcades. Multitudinous hanks of new- dyed yarn blew in the wind 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 Koinan profile, in the railway carriage, assured me between the prayers he kept saying to himself, there was work for all and all were at work. Secular report was not so flattering to Prato. I was told that business was but dull there since the death of the English gentleman, one Mr. Askew, who has done so much for it, and who lies buried in the odor of sanctity in the old Carmelite convent. I saw his grave there when I went to look at the frescos, under the tutelage of an PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FJESOLE. 245 old, sleek, fat monk, roundest of the round dozen of brothers remain- ing since the suppression. I cannot say now why I went to see these frescos, but I must have been told by some local guide they were worthy to be seen, for I find no mention of them in the books. My old monk admired them without stint, and had a particular delight in the murder of St. Martin, who was stabbed in the back at the altar. He rubbed his hands gleefully and pointed out the flying acolyte : " Sempre scappa, ma e sempre Id ! " (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 suppress that brother along with the convent; though I was glad to hear his praises of the Englishman who had befriended the little town so wisely ; and I was not troubled to learn that this good man was a convert to the religion of his beneficiaries. All that I ever knew of him I heard from the monk and read from his gravestone ; but until he came nothing so definite had been done, probably, to mend the prosperity of Prato, broken by the sack in 1512, when the Spaniards, retiring from their defeat at Eavenna 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 marching upon Florence to restore the Medici. They were very hungry, and as fearless as they were pitiless ; and when they had made a breach in the wall, they poured into the town and began to burn and to kill, to rob and to ravish. "Five thousand persons," says a careful and temperate history, " without resisting, without defending themselves, without provocation, were inhumanly slaughtered in cold blood ; neither age nor sex was spared, nor sanctity respected ; every house, every church, every con- vent was pillaged, devastated, and brutally defiled. Only the cathe- dral, thanks to the safeguard posted there by the Cardinal Legate Giovanni de Medici, was spared, and this was filled with women, gathered there to weep, to pray, to prepare for death. For days the 246 TUSCAN CITIES. barbarous soldiery rioted in the sack of the hapless city, which, with its people decimated and its territory ravaged, never fully rose again from its calamity ; more than three centuries passed before its popu- lation reached the number it had attained before the siege." At that time Prato had long been subject to Florence, but in its day Prato had also been a free and independent republic, with its factions and its family feuds,' like another. The greatest of its fami- lies were the Guazziolitri, of Guelph politics, who aspired to its sove- reignty, but were driven out and all their property confiscated. They had built for their palace and fortress the beautiful old pile which now serves the town for municipal uses, and where there is an inter- esting little gallery, though one ought rather to visit it for its own sake, and the stately image it keeps in singular perfection of a gran- deur of which we can now but dimly conceive. I said that Prato was dull and commonplace, but that only shows how pampered and spoiled one becomes by sojourn in Italy. Let me explain now that it was only dull and commonplace in compari- son with other towns I had been seeing. If we had Prato in America we might well visit it for inspiration from its wealth of pictur- esqueness, and history, and of art. "We have, of course, nothing to compare with it ; and one ought always to remember, in reading the notes of the supercilious American tourist in Italy, that he is sneering with a mental reservation to this effect. More memory, more art, more beauty clusters about the Duomo at Prato than about I do not wish to be extravagant the New Old South in Boston or Grace Church in New York. I am afraid, indeed, we should not find in the interior even of these edifices such frescos as those of Lippo Lippi and Ghirlandajo in the cathedral at Prato ; and as for the Delia Eobbia over the door and the pulpit of Donatello on the corner without, where they show the Virgin's girdle on her holiday, what shall one say ? We have not even a girdle of the Virgin ! These are the facts that must still keep us modest and make us beg not to be taken too positively, when we say Prato is not interesting. In that pulpit, with its " marble brede" of dancing children, one sees almost at his best a sculptor PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 247 whose work, after that of Mino da Fiesole, goes most to the heart of the beholder. I hung about the piazza, delighting in it, till it was time to take the steam-tramway to Florence, and then I got the local postman to carry my bag to the cars for me. lie was the gentlest of postmen, and the most grateful for my franc, and he explained as we walked how he was allowed by the Government to make what sums he could in this way between his distributions of the mail. His salary was fifty francs a month, and he had a family. I dare say he is removed by this time, for a man with an income like that must seem an Offensive Partisan to many people of opposite politics in Prato. The steam-tramway train consisted of two or three horse-cars coupled together, and drawn by the pony-engine I was familiar with in our Piazza. This is a common means of travel between all large Italian cities and outlying small towns, and I wonder why we have not adopted it in America. We rattled pleasantly along the level of the highway at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and none of the horses seemed to be troubled by us. They had probably been educated up to the steam-tram, and I will never believe that Ameri- can horses are less capable of intellectual development than the Italian. III. We postponed our visit to Fiesole, which we had been meaning to make all winter, until the last days of our Florentine sojourn, and it was quite the middle of April when we drove up to the Etruscan city. "Go by the new road and come back by the old," said a friend who heard we were really going at last. " Then you will get the whole thing." We did so ; but I am not going to make the reader a partner of all of our advantages ; I am not sure that lie would be grateful for them ; and to tell the truth, I have forgotten which road Boccaccio's villa was on and which the villa of the Medici. Wherever they are 248 TUSCAN CITIES. they are charming. The villa of Boccaccio is now the Villa Palmieri ; I still see it fenced with cypresses, and its broad terrace peopled with weather-beaten statues, which at a distance I could not have sworn were not the gay ladies and gentlemen who met there and A STREET IN FIESOLE. told their merry tales while the plague raged in Florence. It is not only famous as the supposed scene of the Decamerone, but it takes its name from a learned gentleman who wrote a poem there, in which he maintained that at the time of Satan's rebellion the angels who remained neutral became the souls now inhabiting our bodies. For PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 249 this uncomfortable doctrine his poem, though never printed, was con- demned by the Inquisition and justly. The Villa Medici, once Villa Mozzi, and now called Villa Spence, after the English gentle- man who inhabits it, was the favorite seat of Lorenzo before he US ! V: 1 r-f A FLORENTINE VILLA. placed himself at Villa Carreggi ; hither he resorted with his wits, his philosophers, his concubines, buffoons, and scholars ; and here it was that the Pazzi hoped to have killed him and Giuliano at the time of their ill-starred conspiracy. You come suddenly upon it, deeply dropped amidst its gardens, at a turn of the winding slopes which make the ascent to Fiesole a constantly changing delight and wonder. Fiesole was farther than she seemed in the fine, high air she breathes, and we had some long hours of sun and breeze in the ex- quisite spring morning before the first Etruscan emissaries met us with the straw fans and parasols whose fabrication still employs their remote antiquity. They were pretty children and young girls, and 250 TUSCAN CITIES. they were preferable to the mediaeval beggars who had swarmed upon us at the first town outside the Florentine limits, whither the Pia Casa di Eecovero could not reach them. From every point the world-old town, fast seated on its rock, looked like a fortress, inex- pugnable and picturesque ; but it kept neither promise, for it yielded to us without a struggle, and then was rather tame and common- place, commonplace and tame, of course, comparatively. It is not A COURTYARD, FIESOLE. everywhere that you have an impressive Etruscan wall ; a grass- grown Roman amphitheatre, lovely, silent ; a museum stocked with classic relics and a custodian with a private store of them for sale, not to speak of a cathedral begun by the Florentines just after they destroyed Fiesole in 1000. Fiesole certainly does not, however, in- vite one by its modern aspect to think of the Etruscan capital which Cicero attacked in the Roman Senate for the luxury of its banquets and the lavish display of its inhabitants. It was but a plain and simple repast that the Cafe Aurora afforded us, and the Fiesolans PISTOJA, PRATO, AND FIESOLE. 251 seemed a plain and simple folk ; perhaps in one of them who was tipsy an image of their classic corruptions survived. The only excitement of the place we seemed to have brought with us ; there had, indeed, been an election some time before, and the dead walls it seems odd that all the walls in Fiesole should not be dead by this time were still placarded with appeals to the enlightened voters to cast their ballots for Peruzzi, candidate for the House of Deputies and a name almost as immemorial as their town's. However luxurious, the Fiesolans were not proud ; a throng of them followed us into the cathedral, where we went to see the beau- tiful monument of Bishop Salutali by 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 superabund- antly supplied with straw fans and parasols, they stood sweetly aside aud enjoyed our pleasure in the views of Florence. This ineffable prospect But let me rather stand aside with the Fiesolans, and leave it to the reader! MR. HOWELLS'S LATEST NOVELS. Each in i vol., i2mo, $1.50. The set, in a neat box, $7.50. " He is equal as an artist to the best French writers. His books are not only artistically fine, but morally wholesome." Magazin fur die Literatur. " Mr. Howells is eminently refined. . . . He has the true Addisonian touch ; hits his mark in the white ; and, instead of provoking uproarious laughter, strives to evoke that satisfied smile which testifies to the quiet enjoyment of the reader- His humor is the humor of a poet." E. P. Whipple. THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM. "No serial since 'Daniel Deronda ' has called forth so much discussion." Publisher's Weekly. " A marked event in national literature. It has, above all, the invaluable quality of truth." Inter-Ocean. " It is the most vigorous work which he has yet presented to us." New-York Tribune. " The reading world is more interested in ' Silas Lapham ' than in any novel that has before come from his pen." Boston Herald. A WOMAN'S REASON. " One of the most finished productions in fiction." The Independent. " There is a charming play of fancy ; there are what we may call flashes of imagination, . . . fascinating from the first paragraph." New-York Tribune. A MODERN INSTANCE. "Since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' there has appeared no American work of fiction of greater power to affect public sentiment." Century Magazine. " A foremost place in the fiction of the day. . . . Worthy of a place beside some of the finest of George Eliot's creations." The Scotsman {Edinburgh). DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE. " The romance of the jeune et jolie doctress honiozopathe , Grace Breen, is written with delicacy and esprit." Journal de St. Petcrsbourg. " True to life, delicate, full of very fine touches, sweet-tempered, and really representative of our time and our people.'" Boston Advertiser. " Grace Breen is one of the most lovable of his creations. She carries our hearts as surely as The Lady of the Aroostook ; and not less admirably than that exquisite heroine does she illus- trate the keen insight into feminine character and poetic perception of feminine ways which delight us in all of Mr. Howells's stories." New-York Tribune. A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY. A romance of American life in Venice. In the same volume are included the amusing story " At the Sign of the Savage," and the study of Venetian life, entitled " 7bnelli's Marriage." " In delicacy and felicity of motive it reminds one of ' The Lady of the Aroostook.' ... It is irradiated by the play of an exquisite fancy, and adorned with the graces of a pure and elegant style." New- York Tribune. " This last production by Mr. Howells signally exhibits his wonderful ability in delineating all the lights and shades of feminine feeling, and preserving, among a labyrinth of seeming contra- dictions, the personal identity of the creatures of his lively imagination, who are living entities, and not cold abstractions." Boston Transcript. MR. HOWELLS'S COMEDIES. Each in i vol. Little-Classic size. $1.25. OUT OF THE QUESTION. " As full of subtle and delicate humor as anything he has written. We do not know of anything in English literature which in its way is superior to this." Worcester Spy. A COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT. " Rare insight into character, and ability to portray it by effective and discriminating touches. MR. HOWELLS'S PLAYS. Each in 1 vol. 32mo. 50 cents. " Written with all the exquisite literary skill of which Mr. Howells is so thoroughly a master, and every page sparkles with touches of dainty humor." Syracuse Journal. THE SLEEPING-CAR. THE ELEVATOR. THE PARLOR-CAR. THE REGISTER. MR. HOWELLS'S POEMS. " In his prose Mr. Howells is a poet; in his poems there is all the grace of his prose, and a deeper sentiment concealed beneath the melodious lines." Cleveland Herald. A LITTLE GIRL AMONG THE OLD MASTERS. With Introduction and Comment by W. D. Howells. 56 illustrations. $2.00. Curious Giottesque sketches, by a bright little maiden, sojourning at Florence, Siena, and other ancient Italian cities. THREE VILLAGES. 1 vol. Little-Classic size. $1.25. Rare and delightful pen sketches, as dainty and delicate as his " Venetian Days " and " Italian Journeys." The villages are Gnadenhiiten (the Moravians), in Ohio, and Shirley (the Shakers) and Lexington, in Massachusetts. CHOICE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES. A collection of the most entertaining autobiographies, carefully edited by Mr. Howells, and with Critical and Biographical Essays. Little-Classic size. S vols. Each, $1.25. I., II. Memoirs of Frederica Sophia Wilhelmina, Margravine of Baireuth. III. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Thomas Ellwood. IV. Vittorio Alfieri. V. Carlo Goldoni. VI. Edward Gibbon. VII., VIII. Francois Marmontei.. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below REC Form L-9-35m-8 '28 L 006 312 823 5 i pair A A 000 124 349 3 I