FLORENCE in May is a very different place from Florence in November. Still it rained every day, or night, of the month we passed there; showers that made the earth greener, the air clearer. We were homesick for Rome, too, although our lodgings with Madame Giotti, then in Via dei Serragli—now in Piazza Soderini, were the next best thing to the sunny appartimento No. 8, Via San Sebastiano, that had been home to us for almost six months.

Madame Bettina Giotti, trim and kindly, who speaks charmingly-quaint English and “likes Americans,” was to us the embodiment of genuine hospitality, irrespective of the relations of landlady and boarder. We had a most comfortable suite of rooms, a private table, where she served us in person, and which was spread with the best food, as to quality, variety and cookery, we had upon the other side of the water—Paris not excepted.

We gave ourselves, thus situated, resolutely and systematically to sight-seeing.

The Invaluable and Boy had a pass that admitted them daily, and at all hours, to the Boboli Gardens, and we left them to their own devices while we spent whole days in the Uffizi and Pitti Galleries, roaming among the tombs of the illustrious dead in S. Croce and S. Lorenzo, studying and enjoying art everywhere in this, her home, and where men most delight to do her honor. History and religion have here their notable shrines, also. Both combine to make the extensive square before the Palazzo Vecchio a spot to which pilgrim-footsteps turn from all quarters of Christendom.

It is the ancient Forum of the Florentine Republic. The surges of commercial and political life yet beat upon and across it. The Palace is old, and replete with interest to the historical student. The Great Hall in its centre was built under the direction of Jerome Savonarola in 1495. Three years later, they put him to death at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria—the square just mentioned—and had the wind set that way, the smoke of his burning must have filled the spacious chamber planned by him while virtual Dictator of Florence. There lies upon the table beside me, a photograph of a rude picture of his martyrdom. The Palace is the same we look upon now, at the side of an area, vaster then than at present, the same lofty, square tower capping the gloomy building. The judges sit upon benches against the outer wall. A temporary gangway extends from their platform to the gibbet in the open space. On this walk the three condemned monks, in white shrouds, each between two confessors in black, toward the fire blazing under the gallows. They burned Savonarola’s body after it had suffered the extremest indignity of the law, such was their lust of rage against the man who had turned their world upside down—the Reformer born out of time by two hundred years. Until very lately it was the custom among the common people to strew with violets, on each anniversary of the event, the pavement on which he perished.

Savonarola had had his autos-da-fÉ in places as public as the Piazza della Signoria—pyres, on which women cast rouge-pots, and false hair, and all manner of meretricious personal adornments; to whose flames bad books and licentious paintings and statues were resigned by converted authors and owners. The thunders of his invectives against spiritual wickedness in high places, reached and jarred the proudest throne in Christian Europe. To the proffered bribe of a cardinal’s hat, he returned word—“I will have no red hat, but one reddened with mine own blood—the crown given to the saints.”

Pope and rabble granted his wish.

From the scene of his death we drove straight to the Convent of San Marco, his home. Upon the walls and roof of the monastery, the friars fought like trapped wolves on the night of the requisition for their brother. It was he, not they, who surrendered the body of Savonarola to save the sacred place from sack and fire. It was, then, outside of the town that is now packed in dense, high blocks and far-reaching streets all around church and cloisters. These last surround a quadrangle of turf and flowers. The street-gate shut behind us with a resonant clang, and conventual loneliness and quietness were about us. Above the sacristy-door is a fresco of Peter the Martyr, his hand laid upon his mouth, signifying that silence was the rule of the Dominican order. The spirit of the brotherhood lingers here yet, impressing itself upon all who pass within the monastic bounds. We spoke and stepped softly, without bidding on the subject, in going from one to another of the frescoes on the inner walls of the porticoes or open cloisters. They are nearly all from the hand—and heart—of John of Fiesole, known best as Fra Angelico, the monk of sweet and holy memory, who prayed while he painted; whose demons were all amiable failures; whose angel-faces came to him in celestial trances. The unoccupied cells of the monks on the second floor—square closets, each containing a single window, are adorned with pictures of the Passion from his brush. Faded, now—never elaborate in color or finish, each tells its story, and with power. How much more eloquent must that story have been when the solitary inmate of the chamber knelt upon the bare floor, the awful silence that could be heard shutting down upon him—the one token of human sympathy left him, the agonizing image above his oratory!

In Savonarola’s room are his chair, haircloth shirt, MSS., crucifix, and, among other relics, a piece of wood from his gibbet. His portrait hangs over his writing-table. It is a harsh, strong, dark visage in striking profile, the monk’s cowl drawn tightly around it. We obtained photographs of it in the convent, and one of Fra Angelico, a mild, beautiful face, with a happy secret in the large, luminous eyes. Mrs. Browning interprets it:

Yet he was, in religious phrase, the “dear brother” of Savonarola, and, for long in daily companionship with him.

Fra Benedetto, the brother, according to the flesh, of John of Fiesole, was, likewise, an artist. In the library of the convent, together with many other illuminated missals, are the Gospels, exquisitely embellished by him, with miniatures of apostles and saints. A smaller hall, near the library, is lined with an imposing array of flags of all the towns and corporations of Italy, collected here after the Dante Festival, May 14th, 1865.

Dante’s monument, inaugurated at that date, on the six hundredth anniversary of his birth, stands in the Piazza S. Croce, facing the church. A lordly pile in his honor, on the summit of which he sits in sombre sovereignty, takes up much space in the right aisle of this famous fane—“the Pantheon of Modern Italy.” His remains are at Ravenna. The epitaph on his tomb-stone, dictated by himself, styles Florence the “least-loving of all mothers.” She exiled him, setting a price upon his head; made him for nineteen years, he says, “a vessel without sail or rudder, driven to divers ports, estuaries and shores by that hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty.” When she relaxed her persecutions so far as to recall him upon condition of confession and fine, he refused to enter her gates. Upon bended knee, Florence prayed Ravenna to surrender his remains to his “Mother-city” less than a century after he died, a petition oft and piteously renewed. But the plucky little town holds him yet to her heart, and Florence accounts as holy, for his sake, such things as the dirty bench fastened in the wall of a house opposite the Campanile and Cathedral, whereon he used to sit day after day to watch the building of the latter.

The centuries through which this work was dragged were a woful drawback to its external comeliness. Since we saw it, as we learn from the indignant outcries of art-critics, it has been “cleaned.” “A perfectly uninjured building,” wails one, “with every slenderest detail fine and clear as the sunshine that streams on it in mid-summer—is drenched in corrosive liquids until all the outer shell of the delicate outlines is hacked and chipped away, the laborers hammering on at all these exquisite and matchless sculptures as unconcernedly as they would hammer at the blocks of macigno with which they would repave the streets!” I confess—albeit, as I have intimated before,—not an art-critic, that in perusing the above, the “corrosive liquids” ate into my finest sensibilities, and the “hammering” was upon my very heart. But my recollection of the condition of the building in 1877 is not of harmony, or such fineness and clearness as our plaintiff describes. These existed unquestionably in form and proportion. But the walls of black and white marble were “streaky,” soiled and clean portions, fitted together without intervening shading, denoting where the builders of one age left off and those of the next began anew. An attempt to cleanse it, set on foot some years previous, had marred the Duomo yet more. The effect was that of a “half-and-half” penitentiary garment. Those who know edifices like this and the Milan Cathedral, and that one of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” Giotti’s Campanile, from photographs, have one advantage over bona fide travelers. The stains and cracks of time are softened into mellow uniformity in the sun-picture that yet preserves faithfully each grace of design and workmanship. He who dreams over the stereoscopic view which brings out carvings and angles, and the expression of the whole building with magic accuracy, is spared the pain of seeing that the miracle of architectural genius in marble or bronze is undeniably and vulgarly dirty. This is especially true of the Baptistery. The bronze doors (I am not going to repeat Michael Angelo’s remark touching them upon the thousandth part of a chance that one man or woman in the United States may not have heard it) are so encrusted with the dust of as many ages as they have hung in their present place that one cannot distinguish between Noah drunk and Noah sober; between Cain slaying his brother and Adam tilling the ground. The interior would be vastly improved, not by hammering workmen, and corrosive liquids, but by a genuine New England house-cleaning. A hogshead of disinfectants would not dispel the mouldy, sickly odor that clings to the walls and unclean floor. All the children born in Florence of Roman Catholic parents are brought hither for baptism. We never peeped in at the mighty door without seeing one or more at the font. After one closer view of the parties to the ceremony, we refrained from approaching that part of the building while it was thus occupied.

We had been for a long drive in the Cascine—the Central Park of the Florentines—extended into the country, and, our hands full of wild flowers, the odors of field and hedge and garden lingering in our senses, alighted at the Baptistery, attracted by the spectacle of a group dimly visible from the sunlit street. It had seemed a pretty fancy to us, this gathering all the lambs of Firenze into one visible earthly fold, and one that peopled the dusky Rotunda with images of innocence and beauty. We would make these definite and lasting by witnessing the solemn rite. A priest in a dirty gown mumbled prayers from a dog-eared book; a grimy-faced boy in a dirtier white petticoat and a dirtiest short-gown, trimmed with cotton-lace, swung a censer too indolently to disturb the foul air. A woman in clothes that were whole, but not clean, held the bambino. I do not like to call it a baby. It was wound from feet to arm-pits, as are all the Italian children of the lower classes, in swaddling-linen, fold upon fold, until the lower part of the body is as stiff as that of a corpse. These wrappings are never loosened during the day. I cannot answer for the fashion of their night-gear. The unhappy little mummy in question was, in complexion, a livid purple, and gasped, all the while, as in the article of death. The cradle-bands had apparently come down to it through a succession of brother and sister bambini, with scanty interference on the part of washerwomen, and bade fair to become its winding-sheet if not soon removed. The priest made the sign of the cross in holy water on the forehead, wrinkled like that of an old man, never pausing in his Latin rattle and swing; the acolyte gave a last, lazy toss to the censer, drawling, “A-a-men!” The woman, as nonchalant as they, covered in the child from the May air with a wadded quilt, wrapping it over the face as Hazael laid the wet cloth upon his master’s, possibly to the same end. The touching rite was disposed of, and the priest shuffled out of one door, the acolyte went whistling out of another.

The accomplished author of “Roba di Roma,” says of swaddling-bands—“There are advantages as well as disadvantages in this method of dressing infants. The child is so well-supported that it can be safely carried anyhow, without breaking its back, or distorting its limbs. It may be laid down anywhere, and even be borne on the head in its little basket without danger of its wriggling out.”

He doubts, moreover, whether the custom be productive of deformity. Perhaps not. But, our attention having been directed by the ceremony just described to what was, to our notion, a barbarous invention for the promotion of infanticide, we noted, henceforward, the proportion of persons diseased and deformed in the lower limbs among the Florentine street population. The result amazed and shocked us. On the afternoon of which I speak, we counted ten cripples upon one block, and the average number of these unfortunates upon others was between seven and eight. Join to the tight bands about their trunks and legs the close linen, or cotton or woollen caps, worn upon their heads, and the lack of daily baths and fresh clothing, and it is easy to explain why cutaneous diseases should be likewise prevalent.

The mural tablets of Florence are a study,—sometimes, a thrilling one. As when, for example, in driving or walking through the old street, neither wide, light, nor picturesque, of S. Martino, we came upon a tall, stone house with queer latticed windows very high up in the thick walls,—and deciphered above the doorway these words:—

“In questa casa degli Alighieri nacque il divina poeta.”
(“In this house of the Alighieri was born the divine poet.”)

There is the tenderness of remorse in the “least-loving mother’s” every mention of her slighted son—now “chapeled in the bye-way out of sight”—to wit,—sleepy little Ravenna.

Bianca Capello—fair, fond and false—lived in what is now a very shabby palace in Via Maggio, bearing the date, “1566.” Amerigo Vespucci was esteemed worthy of a tablet upon a building in the Borgo Ognissanti. Galileo’s house is near the Boboli Gardens, and, removed by a block or two, is the Museum of Natural Sciences, enshrining, as its gem, the Tribuna of Galileo, enriched by his portrait, his statue, paintings illustrative of his life, and instruments used by him in making mathematical and astronomical calculations. His tomb is in the church of S. Croce, almost covered with ascriptions to his learning, valuable scientific discoveries, etc., etc. Of tomb and epitaph the Infallible Mother is the affectionate warden, guarding them, it is to be presumed, as jealously as she once did the canon he was convicted of insulting. “The world moves,” and so must The Church, or be thrown off behind.

“Casa Guidi”! “Twixt church and palace of a Florence street!” From which the clear-eyed poetess bent to gaze upon the hosts who,—

on a day which “had noble use among God’s days!” How well we had known them, and the face that will look from them no more—while as yet the sea divided us from the land of her love and adoption!

Surely, never had poet more prosaic dwelling-place. Casa Guidi is a plain, four-story house, covered with yellowish stucco, lighted by formal rows of rectangular windows, without a morsel of moulding or the suspicion of an arch to relieve the tameness of the front elevation. It opens directly upon the sidewalk of as commonplace a street as Florence can show to the disappointed tourist. Yet we strolled often by it, lingeringly and lovingly; studied with thoughts, many and fond, the simple tablet between the first and second-story casements:

This is a free English translation, but it does not—it cannot, being English—say to ear and soul what the musical flow of the original conveys.

She is buried in that part of grateful Florence known as the English Cemetery. It is smaller than that in Rome, and not comparable to it in loveliness or interest. We coveted for the woman and the poet a corner of the old Aurelian wall beside Shelley instead of the small plot of the main alley of this village of the dead;—Keats’ coverlet of violets rather than the marble sarcophagus, with a pillared base, set hard and flat upon her grave. One panel bears her medallion profile in basso-rilievo, and the initials “E. B. B., 1861.” There was no need to write more. We would have been better satisfied with less—marble! Buttercups and daisies pressed over the closed, cold mouth of the tomb, and a tea-rose tree at the head had strewed it with blushing petals.

Florence is the acknowledged Queen of Modern Art and gives lessons in the same to all civilization. Yet this English Burial-ground can show almost as many specimens of poor taste and mediocre manipulation as there are monuments within its gates;—a puzzle and a pain to those who have luxuriated in galleries and loggie, the very atmosphere of which ought to be, not only inspiration, but education.

Galileo’s Observatory, where he watched the stars pale before the dawn for many happy nights,—and the Villa, in which he lived for the last eleven years of his mortal life,—blind, illustrious, and, if we may believe him, contented;—whither Milton came to visit and console him and was moved to congratulation at the sight of his deep tranquillity,—stand upon a hill from whose brow Florence is, indeed, la Bella. Galileo’s lamp hangs in the Cathedral of Pisa.

Our excursion to this city was in mid-May. It is distant from Florence but four hours by rail. The intervening country is one of the loveliest tracts in Northern Italy. The wheat-fields were ripening into palest green, and every breath of wind that ruffled this revealed the scarlet sheen of the poppy underrobe. The railway banks were beds of mountain-pinks, separated by acres of buttercups and blue flax, clumps of wild roses and geraniums. Up to this we had felt no oppressive heats, fast though the season was advancing, and to-day, while the train was in motion, we rather enjoyed the blaze of sunshine under which the landscape glowed, while we gazed, into more vivid coloring. But the radiations from the white streets of Pisa were blinding. The breeze lost itself among the flat outskirts of the town, and was never suspected inland.

We took carriages at the hotel and drove, untempted to loiterings in the shadeless thoroughfares, directly to the Cathedral. It is fortunate for travelers who come to Pisa in spring or summer, that the four principal objects of interest, all that one cares to see in the whilom “queen of the western waves,” are grouped within a radius of fifty yards from the Duomo. Seeking its shadow from the pitiless sun, we looked up at the Leaning Tower “over the way.” It did not lean as emphatically as we had hoped for, nor was it as high as it should have been. But from the first glimpse of it, its lightness and grace were an agreeable surprise. And it was clean! Seven hundred years have not defiled it to the complexion of the Florentine Duomo, or even to the cloudiness of “that model and mirror of perfect architecture,” Giotto’s Tower. Its eight-storied colonnades of creamy tints passing into white, were cast up upon the deep blue background like the frost arcades raised at night by winter fairies. It was loftier, presently, and as it heightened, inclined more gracefully toward the earth.

“Like an ice-cream obelisk melting at the base,” suggested a heated spectator pensively.

We walked around the beautiful, majestic wonder; gazed up at its bent brow from the overhanging side; measured the dip of the foundation by the deepening of the area in which it is set, and laughed at ourselves for the natural recoil from walls that seemed to be toppling over upon us. While the young people, in the convoy of a guide, climbed the three hundred—save six—stairs winding up to the summit of the Campanile, Caput and I gladly took refuge in the cool dimness of the Cathedral. Seated upon a bench exactly over the spot where Galileo used to set his chair in order to gaze at the mighty chandelier pendent from the ceiling, we, too, watched it.

It is a grand sight—that great bronze lamp, its scores of disused candle-sockets hanging empty from the three broad bands. Five naked boys brace themselves upon their chubby feet against the lower band, and do Caryatide-duty for the upper. Scrolls, branches, and knops are exquisitely wrought, and the length of the chandelier must be at least twelve feet. The sacristan told us, in a subdued voice, how Galileo had the “habitude” of resorting to the church, day after day, and sitting “just here” to think and to pray. How his eyes, fixed mechanically upon the lamp, noted, one day, that the inclination of the long, slender rod to which it is attached was not quite the same at different hours; of his excitement as he divined the cause of the variation; that, after this, he haunted the Duomo continually until he thought out the truth—“or”—crossing himself, apologetically—“the Blessed Virgin revealed it to her faithful worshipper.”

Having Protestant and inconvenient memories, we had our thoughts respecting the reception the discovery, to which the Virgin helped her protÉgÉ, had from her other faithful sons. But we liked the story all the same. We were still more pleased when he deserted us to escort two German priests, the only other persons present beside ourselves, to the contemplation of a large picture of the birth of Our Lady. There are many paintings in the Cathedral and some good ones. Ninety-nine and a half per cent. are in honor of the Virgin Mary. The Madonna and Child over the bÉnitier near the entrance are attributed to Michael Angelo.

We saw all these things while waiting for our juniors; then, went back to our bench and our contemplation of the lamp, until they rejoined us.

The Campo Santo is a quadrangle enclosed by chapels, with corridors open toward the burial-ground, and paved with flat tomb-stones. When the Crusaders of the thirteenth century lost the Holy Land, a pious archbishop of Pisa had between fifty and sixty ship-loads of earth brought hither from Mount Calvary, and made into a last bed for those who loved Jerusalem and mourned her loss. The sacred soil had the property of converting bodies laid within it into dust so quickly and thoroughly that others could follow them within a short time without inconvenience to dead or living. The Campo Santo became tremendously fashionable, and graves were bought at terrifically high prices when one considers the dubious character of the privilege connected with the situation. No interments have been made here for so long that the quadrangle is a smooth lawn edged with flower-borders.

The frescoes of chapels or corridors are the leading curiosity of the place. Guide-books and local inventories, without a gleam of humor, write these down as “remarkable,” “admirable,” “celebrated.” Only by beholding them can one bring himself to believe in the horrible grotesqueness of these Biblical and allegorical scenes. Hideous and blasphemous as they were to me, I bought several photographs that my home-friends might credit my story of mediÆval religious art. The lower part of one I draw, at random, from my collection, represents the Creation of Adam. The Creator, a figure with a nimbus about his head, a train of attendants similarly crowned, behind him,—lifts a nude, inert man from the earth. A toothed parapet separates this scene in the Drama of Life from one above, where the same crowned Figure, in the presence of a larger retinue, draws Eve from the side of sleeping Adam. She stares about her in true feminine curiosity, clasping her hands in a gesture of amazement, or delight, designed, no doubt, to contrast strongly, as it does, with the stupid, half-awake air with which Adam comes into the world. The sleeping bridegroom is disturbed by the extraction of his rib, for, without awaking, he puts his hand under his arm, touching Eve’s toe as it leaves his side. The gravest Puritan cannot but see that he is tickled by the operation. The lower section of this panel has Adam, clothed in skins, digging with a rude hoe, in the parallelograms and circles of an Italian garden. The sequence of the narrative is interrupted here to put the curse of labor in more significant juxtaposition with the gift of a wife. At the right-hand corner of the photograph appears what properly belongs to the third place in the series;—the guilty pair crouching together, after the transgression, amid the trees of the garden, and betrayed in their covert by a darting ray of light from heaven. Below this are Adam and Eve, driven by two angels in knight’s armor through the Norman-Gothic door of a machicolated tower. Cain and Abel, quarreling beside an altar modeled after the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, are crowded into the background.

The lack of room for the amplification of subjects and the artist’s conceptions of these, led to a terrific “mix” upon the walls, which are literally loaded with frescoes. The entire Book of Genesis is illustrated upon the surface of the North wall, my photograph being a fair specimen of the style of the decorations. The partisans of Pietro di Paccio and of Buffalmacco claim for their respective masters the honor of the upper line of scenes. A Florentine, Benozzo Gozzoli, began with Noah’s drunkenness,—a favorite theme in wine-growing countries—and ran the Jewish history down to the interview of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. To him was awarded the distinction of a grave beneath the history of Joseph.

The two German priests were going into convulsions of merriment before a monstrous spectacle of the Last Judgment and Hell, in which devils in green, red and yellow, are fighting over souls of equivocal reputation, with angels in blue-and-white liveries. The spirits in dispute have so dire a time between them that the terrors of the fate which befall them, when relinquished by the angels, must be materially mitigated by recollections of the escaped horrors of dismemberment. The Inferno of Dante’s countryman the artist, whose name is unknown, is a huge chaldron, crammed with heretics, apostates and Jews. The Chief Cook, his very horns a-tingle with delight, is ramming down some and stirring up others with a big pudding-stick. The priests laughed themselves double over our dumb disgust. Probably they credited the fidelity of the representation less than even we.

The Baptistery is a four-storied rotunda. The lower story is set around with half-columns; the second, with smaller whole pillars. Above this rise two tiers of pointed arches, the first row enclosing niches in which are half-length figures of saints. The upper arches are windows. A fine dome covers all. An octagonal font occupies the centre of the one vaulted chamber whose ceiling is the roof. It is raised by two steps from the floor, and is of white marble carved into patterns as delicate and intricate as the richest lace-work. The pulpit is scarcely less lovely, being adorned with bas-reliefs descriptive of the Life of our Lord from the Annunciation to the Last Judgment. It is a hexagon and there are five of these panels, the sixth side opening upon the steps. The reticulated marble is singularly pure in quality and wrought into elaborateness of finish that has never been excelled.

We were examining it and objurgating the ubiquitous Goth who has mutilated several of the finest figures, when the custodian, standing a little apart from us, sounded three notes in a sonorous baritone. Angel-voices caught them up and repeated them in every variety of harmonious intonation; then, a loftier choir echoed the strains; another and another, and still another until the rejoicings were lost in the heaven of heavens.

We sank upon the steps of the font, and listened, as, in obedience to our wordless gesture, the man, once and again, gave the signal for the unearthly chorus. The voices were human, if human tones are ever perfect in sweetness, roundness and harmony, the transition of the theme from each band of singers to a higher, a complete illusion of the enchained senses. The responses, clear, tender, thrilling, invoked such images as we had seen in the Uffizi and Pitti galleries—concentric circles of cherubim and seraphim and rapturous redeemed ones, with uplifted faces and glad, eager eyes, reflecting the effulgence of the Great White Throne and Him that sat thereon.

Carlo Dolci knew how to paint such, and Raphael, and Fra Angelico. We had heard their quiring while looking upon the pictured canvas. We saw them as we hearkened to the hymning that ascended to the stars.