Italian Days and Ways

XVI
FIESOLE

Fiesole, Tuesday, May 17th.

We women, in the absence of our cavaliers, who will be away for two days upon some special military service, have planned to spend a day in fairyland and an evening in Bohemia. Is not that a sufficiently sensational beginning to please one of our own newspapers at home? This morning, Bertha and Mrs. Robins having joined us, we all set forth in a tram from the Piazza della Signoria for Fiesole. Half-way up the hillside we stopped at the Domenico, where Fra Angelico lived as a monk, gathering here, as one of his brothers relates, "in abundance the flowers of art which he seemed to have plucked from Paradise." One of the richest of these treasures, the Coronation of the Virgin, has been carried away to the Louvre, but there is still in the choir of the Domenico a lovely memorial of him—a Virgin Enthroned between St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist. Behind the group are five guardian angels with tributes of flowers in their hands. This and a Baptism of Christ, by Lorenzo di Credi, are the treasures of the Domenico. We stopped at La Badia and enjoyed the fine view from its terrace, and walked slowly past the Villa Landore, now shut in by tall cypresses, where Walter Savage Landor once lived. Here in these beautiful grounds described by Boccaccio in his "Valley of Ladies," surrounded by his little children and his many pets, Porigi the house-dog, the cat Cincirillo, whose original sin showed itself in a decided taste for birds, the tame martin, and the leveret, Landor spent the most peaceful years of a life that was far from happy. "Aerial Fiesole" he might well name this lovely hillside garden, in which he promised Mr. Francis Hare and his bride "grapes, figs, and nightingale concerts galore." At the Medici Villa, a favorite residence of Lorenzo the Magnificent, we admired once again the unerring taste of old Cosimo, who chose for a summer residence this favorite spot which overhangs Florence. Brunelleschi's superb dome, Giotto's belfry, Santa Maria Novella, beautiful as a bride, Santa Croce, San Marco, and San Spirito, all stood out in fairy-like beauty this lovely May morning.

After stopping at the cathedral on the Piazza of Fiesole, and at Santa Maria Primerana to look at a tabernacle by one of the Della Robbias and a painting by Andrea da Fiesole, Angela insisted that we had done our whole duty as sight-seers and might now begin to enjoy ourselves in earnest. To this Bertha heartily agreed, suggesting that as we had come to Fiesole for a day of rest and recreation in the open, we should lunch on the terrace of the little hotel, and spend the afternoon in the ancient theatre.

We have learned in Florence, even better than in vast Rome, whose historic past appealed to us so insistently on all sides, that it is not in the galleries and churches, interesting as they are, that we find the most pleasure, but in the market-places and on the streets, with their chatter and life, or in sitting, as we sat to-day, on the hotel terrace, with the fertile plain spread before us and the garden at our feet, in which the peasants were singing at their tasks. Beyond are villa-dotted hills, and still beyond, the chain of distant mountains veiled in purple light, which melts into the azure sky with an indescribable charm of its own.

Florence is on the other side of Fiesole, and from the terrace we had a rural view, with nothing but hill, valley, and mountain, excepting the villas, of course, among these Vincigliata, which Katharine says we must see if we would know what a castle of the middle ages is like. Vincigliata is built on the ruins of a castle of the Bisdomini, and contains great collections of ancient furniture and armor. We shall drive out to Vincigliata in a coach and four some day, as this is a favorite afternoon excursion from the Pension C.

Having finished our luncheon, which was quite Italian and really delicious, we strolled down to the old amphitheatre, where we sit on the stone seats and look away toward Florence while Mrs. Robins reads to us Browning's "Old Pictures in Florence" and "Andrea del Sarto," both poems so full of the atmosphere of the beautiful city.

The other day when we were at the Annunziata, at the corner of the Via della Mandorla, we saw the little house where Andrea and his fair and false Lucrezia sat in the evenings and looked over toward "yonder sober, pleasant Fiesole." We seem to see the old-world pair sitting there

 
"Inside that melancholy little house
We built to be so gay with,"
 

Andrea with the face of an artist and dreamer, a trifle weak withal, and she with the

 
"Perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth,
And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird
The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare."
 

How beautiful this Lucrezia was we know from many a picture of Andrea's. Zelphine and I think that the Madonna del Sacco must have been likest to her. The superb beauty of flesh and blood, line and color, so satisfies us that we do not miss the soul that seems to have been wanting in the original; or did Andrea, artist-like, give to the pictured Lucrezia graces with which his imagination endowed her? We hope so, for if he saw her as Browning represents her in his poem, he must have been indeed the most unhappy of men.

While I write, Angela and Zelphine try to get snap-shots of us as we sit under the trees, and Katharine warns us that we shall soon have to turn our faces homeward, if we wish to be in time for the dinner in Bohemia to which she invites us.

Pension C., Tuesday Evening.

Our evening in Bohemia was, in its way, quite as much of a success as the day in fairyland. Katharine conducted us through winding streets, whose twistings and turnings we shall never be able to follow without Ariadne's thread, to a café in a cellar, where artists most do congregate. A friend of Katharine's, an exceedingly pretty and vivacious Englishwoman, joined us at table, and amused us very much by telling us that she had sometimes been taken for an American and was said to talk like an American, which evidently pleased her very much. Did I think so? I laughed, and said that she would have to talk many different ways in order to verify the description, as that was a part of our infinite variety. She said that she had recently met a unique American man.

"Why unique?" asked Bertha.

"In being selfish," was the prompt reply. "All the American men I had met before were unselfish, chivalrous, ready to do anything and everything for the comfort and pleasure of the women of their party; but this man, this unique specimen, seemed to forget that we existed."

Now was not that a pleasant hearing, and are you not proud of the reputation of your compatriots?

While we were discussing national traits the cook, in white cap and apron, was broiling our beefsteak and cooking vegetables over his little charcoal fire; these he served to us smoking hot and delicious. The wine was brought on the table in a huge bottle, which was weighed before and afterwards, like the unfortunates who are fattened on cereals and predigested foods, with this difference, that the bottle lost in weight instead of gaining, and we paid for the shortage. We had an omelette soufflée of the lightest for our dessert, after which a man in a white paper cap handed around a tray of sweets, all manner of delicious confections on sticks, for each of which we paid one soldo. It was all delightfully novel and Bohemian, and as we strolled home by the Arno, with the sound of its rushing water in our ears, its shining breast gleaming like silver in the moonlight, we sang old songs, like college-girls, and were so happy that one drop more would have caused our cup of content to overflow in tears—and if tears had been shed it would have been because some of those we care for were not here to share with us the pleasure of this day of days and this night of perfect beauty.

May 18th.

If we think of Dante and Savonarola as we cross the Piazza of the Signoria and walk through the narrow winding streets that lead from it, every old building and quaint corner recalls some line or verse of the Brownings, husband or wife. In the Via Belle Donne we naturally thought of them, as it was in this little street, which opens into the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, that the poet lovers first made their home, and in the Cascine, where we saw some of the lovely Florentine beauties, as Mrs. Browning described them, "lean and melt to music as the band plays," and above all at the Belvedere, that crowns the many terraces of the Boboli Gardens, from which height Florence, with her domes and towers and palaces, framed in by hills of blue velvet, answers to the poet's own picture of the beautiful city, and

 
"Of golden Arno, as it shoots away
Through Florence' heart beneath her bridges four!"
 

To-day has been devoted to Browning pilgrimages. An American woman at our table rashly asserted that Mr. Browning had made a mistake in his "Statue and the Bust" by placing the lady with the "pale brow spirit-pure" at the window of the Riccardi Palace, as it would be quite impossible for the great Duke Ferdinand to look up from the Piazza of the Annunziata at the casement of the Palazzo Riccardi, now the Prefettura, which is way over on the Piazza San Lorenzo. This statement may seem to you a trifle confusing; but it was sufficiently clear to rouse Zelphine's ire, and after breakfast we set forth determined to clear up the seeming inconsistency. In the Piazza of the Annunziata Duke Ferdinand still "rides by with the royal air," as John of Bologna has represented him, "in subtle mould of brazen shape," his face turned directly toward the one window of the palace, from which a terra-cotta bust should look forth.

"This all answers perfectly to the description," said Angela, "except that there is no bust of the lady at the casement; it seems as if Mr. Browning had made a mistake this time. I really don't care very much, but I can't stand having that flippant, red-haired woman get the better of you, Z."

"She shall not," said Zelphine, with determination in every line of her lithe figure. "Vieusseux to the rescue!"

Zelphine set forth to gain what information might be had from the library shelves, while Angela and I crossed over to the Piazza San Lorenzo, and spent a delightful hour in studying the wonderful frescoes that adorn the chapel of the debatable Palazzo Riccardi.

Here is that most remarkable procession of the Magi winding along a rocky hillside, the perspective of the most original character: Cosimo, Pater Patriæ, well in the foreground, the Three Kings represented by the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Emperor of the East, and, youngest of the three, Lorenzo the Magnificent, on a white charger. You know the painting well, but no photograph can give you any conception of the richness of color and exquisite details of this impossible, fairy-like landscape, in which distant mountains, hovering angels, birds, beasts, and flowers unknown to this lower world, add to the variety and charm of Gozzoli's great work. It is of this fresco that Mr. Ruskin wrote, "Bright birds hover here and there in the serene sky, and groups of angels, hand joined with hand and wing with wing, glide and float through the glades of the unentangled forest."

Angela and I were so absorbed in the beauty of the painting that we had quite forgotten about Zelphine's quest, when a voice at our side exclaimed, triumphantly:

"I have solved the riddle. The palace on the Square of the Annunziata was a Riccardi palace at the time of Mr. Browning's poem, and at the window toward which Duke Ferdinand's eyes are turned there was a bust of a lady as late as 1887. The present Palazzo Riccardi, now the Prefettura, was once a Medici palace; it was sold many years later to the Riccardi family. Here Duke Ferdinand made his feast on the night of the wedding, the one and only time that the lovers met:

 
"'Face to face the lovers stood,
A single minute and no more,
While the bridegroom bent as a man subdued—
Bowed till his bonnet touched the floor—
For the Duke on the lady a kiss conferred,
As the courtly custom was of yore.'
 

"Cannot you see it all?" continued Zelphine, breathlessly, quite regardless of the interest that her animated face and eager words were exciting in the little group around us,

 
"'the pile which the mighty shadow makes,
For Via Largo is three-parts light,
But the palace overshadows one,
Because of a crime which may God requite!'
 

"This crime was the murder of Duke Alessandro by his distant cousin Lorenzino, and this, you see, fixes the fact beyond dispute that the feast was given by the Duke in this great Riccardi palace on the Square of San Lorenzo. Isn't it all wonderful and thrilling, and is there any place in the world so filled to the very brim with interest and romance as Florence?"

"No place except Rome," said Angela, true to her first love.

"Yes, but the history seems less remote here; everything seems nearer and closer, more intimate—you understand what I mean, Margaret."

When Zelphine appeared at the lunch table, flushed with the joy of victory and quite ready to annihilate her scoffing adversary, whom Angela disrespectfully designated as "Red-top," she found, to her dismay, that the lady had left for Venice before noon. This is surely one of the incompletenesses of life. To think of that misguided woman proceeding on her way to scatter misinformation broadcast, when Zelphine could have set her right in five minutes!

When Bertha heard of Zelphine's disappointment, she was most sympathetic, and proposed, as a congenial and solacing occupation, that we should return that afternoon to the Square of San Lorenzo and try to find the old stall where Mr. Browning, on a memorable June day, bought for a lira the little volume that contained the whole story of "The Ring and the Book."

The piazza, a market for old clothes, old furniture, and all manner of cooking-utensils, still answers to Mr. Browning's description, and here, close to the statue, which is of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, father of the first Cosimo, is just such a table full of nondescript rubbish as the one upon which the poet found the parchment-covered book which furnished him with his plot. Then at Bertha's suggestion, to humor our fancies as to the associations of the time and place, we followed in the poet's footsteps, as he described himself, walking and reading,

 
"on, through street and street,
At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge;
Till, by the time I stood at home again
In Casa Guidi by Felice Church,
Under the doorway where the black begins
With the first stone-slab of the staircase cold,
I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth
Gathered together, bound up in this book."
 

To my surprise, when we reached the doorway of the Casa Guidi, Bertha also entered "where the black begins," and began to ascend "the staircase cold."

"Where are you going?" we called after her, standing within the doorway.

"Follow me," said Bertha. "I have some friends who live in an apartment in the Casa Guidi, and we are all invited to afternoon tea here."

"Why didn't you tell us before?" asked Angela, "so that we might have made ourselves a little smart?"

"Because I wanted to give you all a surprise. My friend asked me to bring you any afternoon, so I sent a messenger to tell her that we were coming, to make sure of her being at home, as she often spends the afternoon up in the Boboli Gardens with her baby."

Alas! Bertha's artist friends do not live in the Browning apartment, as that, by some irony of fate, is in the possession of an Austrian family; but as Zelphine said, with a rapturous look in her eyes, it was worth much to pass over the stairs that had known the footsteps of the two poets. Mr. and Mrs. Cobbe's apartment is on what we should call the fourth floor, which here they more encouragingly designate the third. Charming airy rooms, at the top of many stairs, we found the home of the two American artists, where a warm welcome awaited us. Later, refreshments were served to us in the large room that corresponds to Mrs. Browning's drawing-room on the floor below; but whether we ate and drank ordinary cakes and tea, or were regaled with nectar and ambrosia, Zelphine and I cannot tell you. It was all so delightfully homelike and yet so filled with associations that this afternoon in the Casa Guidi will always be one of our most cherished memories, and we parted with our compatriots feeling that the old palace was an appropriate setting for artist as well as for poet lovers.

Pension C., Florence, May 20th.

What will you say when I tell you that since writing my last letter to you I have received a proposal of marriage? M. le Marquis de B. di T., of ancient Roman lineage and irreproachable family connections, laid his heart, his hand, and his fortune at my feet—for Angela. Are you amused at my rôle? I assure you that it was not in the smallest degree amusing at the time, and the fact that the prétendant acted in a highly honorable manner, and did not consult Angela definitively before speaking to her stern guardian, added to the difficulties of my position. I explained, at some length, that affairs of the heart are arranged by the young people themselves in America, always, of course, with the consent of their parents and guardians—for this last unqualified statement I trust that I may be forgiven—to which I added that if Miss Haldane returned the Count's affection, we would both write to her father. After delivering myself of a series of appropriate phrases I sent for Angela, and awaited the result of the interview between the two young persons with some anxiety, as you may believe. You will be laughing at me and reflecting upon the inconsistency of women when I tell you that I felt quite disturbed over Angela's absolute and unequivocal dismissal of the Count's suit. He has been growing in favor with me ever since that fairy-like afternoon at the Boboli Gardens, and when he came to take a solemn and ceremonious farewell of me, assuring me that he had spent the happiest hours of his life in our society, and was so exquisitely courteous, so evidently anxious to save me from embarrassment, I found myself liking him almost as much as Ludovico. We shall miss him sadly, and, to add to our sorrows, Ludovico, loyal friend that he is, has gone with the Count.

"Did you send him away, too, heartless one?" I asked Angela.

She looked at me reproachfully, her lovely blue eyes full of tears, and replied, with gentle dignity, "How can you be so unkind, Margaret? You know very well that I did not."

It appears that this is all that Zelphine and I are to hear on this most exciting subject, although we are naturally devoured with curiosity to know more. If only Count B. had not declared himself just at this time, when we were all so happy together in this beautiful Florence! I am quite sure that the affair was brought to a crisis by Angela's charming appearance last Sunday in a ravishing costume of pale blue muslin, her golden crescent of hair adorned with one of the Tuscan hats that we buy for next to nothing at the Mercato Vecchio. This particular hat was of silvery blue turned up with white roses, and became her almost as well as a coronet—so I am sure the Count thought. To-day there is nothing gay in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, as the skies, suiting themselves to our mood, are heavy and gray, and the Arno is dull green instead of lovely blue.

The Convent of San Marco was decided upon as an appropriate place in which to spend this morning, and there, walking through the cloisters, adorned with their exquisite frescoes, Zelphine and I to some extent renewed our interest in life. Angela has gone off on a sketching trip to Certosa with Katharine Clarke. She has been wishing ever since she first saw it to get a sketch of the Michael Angelo well in the convent garden, and then I think that she is glad to be away from our questioning eyes for a day. Poor child! she looks pale and wan; the excitement of the last weeks has been too much for her. We are thinking seriously of leaving for Venice soon. Of course we have not seen half the things we wish to see in Florence, but we can never be quite as happy here as we have been, and Miss Morris writes from Venice, urging us to join her there for the full o' the moon.

Zelphine and I talked over our plans as we strolled through the cloisters, and in the little convent garden tried to fancy the great preacher of San Marco sitting under the "damask rose-tree," with his disciples gathered around him. The spirit of Savonarola dominates San Marco as that of St. Francis holds one spellbound in Assisi.

Some of the little cells of the brothers are adorned with exquisite frescoes by Fra Angelico, which must often have cheered their sad hearts. We stood in Savonarola's own small room, which is marked by a memorial tablet, and here in the adjoining chapel are his rosary and the crucifix before which he knelt in prayer.

Curious and unexpected, savoring more of the pride of life than of the humility of the spirit, in one of the cells of San Marco is an elaborate genealogical tree giving the descent of the monks. It was with some difficulty that we deciphered the name of Savonarola, now almost obliterated by the kisses of the faithful.

One of the most beautiful paintings in the convent is a Last Supper, by Ghirlandajo, in the smaller refectory. This picture, with its lovely details, decorated background, and well-spread board, does not represent poor men or fishermen at meat; but in Italy one becomes accustomed to the rich surroundings of Madonnas, saints, and apostles. Realism is not demanded; it is enough if one finds reverence and devotion; and as Mr. Henry James says of this picture, "the figures in their varied naturalness have a dignity and sweetness of attitude which admits of numberless reverential constructions." The grouping is charming, and through open arcades one looks beyond at a garden of full-fruited orange-trees, clusters of fruit are scattered over the table, strange birds fly through the air, and a peacock perched on the wall looks down upon the sacred feast. I shall always recall this painting, so lovely in composition, so rich in color, when I think of San Marco—this and Fra Angelico's beautiful Annunciation, which is familiar to us all. We shall not see them soon again, or any of the other pictures that we love so well in the Uffizi and the Pitti and the Belle Arti; instead, we shall be studying the Carpaccios in Venice.

May 23d.

The skies have cleared to-day and life looks brighter, yet this is the anniversary of a most tragic event, the execution of Savonarola. The great Piazza della Signoria has been crowded with people all morning; there have been processions, and services in the churches, and hundreds of men and women going to offer their tribute of flowers to the memory of the great martyr for conscience' sake, until the tablet that marks the spot where Savonarola's body was burned is heaped with wreaths, crosses, and bunches of roses of various colors. Some of these offerings have cards attached to them with Savonarola's name written on them; upon others are inscriptions and sentiments, the one that most impressed us being "To Savonarola, a Martyr to Democratic Christianity." If time has its revenges, it has also its justifications!