Tuscan Cities by William Dean Howells

Author:William Dean Howells [Howells, William Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857731609
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

XL.

Few of my readers, I hope, have failed to feel the likeness of these broken and ineffectual sketches to the pictures in stone which glare at you from the windows of the mosaicists on the Lungarno and in the Via Borgognissanti; the wonder of them is greater than the pleasure. I have myself had the fancy, in my work, of a number of small views and figures of mosaic, set in a slab of black marble for a table-top, or – if the reader does not like me to be so ambitious – a paper-weight; and now I am tempted to form a border to this capo d’opera, bizarre and irregular, such as I have sometimes seen composed of the bits of pietra viva left over from a larger work. They are mere fragments of color, scraps and shreds of Florence, which I find still gleaming more or less dimly in my note-books, and I have no notion of making any ordered arrangement of them.

But I am sure that if I shall but speak of how the sunshine lies in the Piazza of the Annunziata at noonday, falling on the feebly dribbling grotesques of the fountain there, and on John of Bologna’s equestrian grand duke, and on that dear and ever lovely band of babes by Luca della Robbia in the façade of the Hospital of the Innocents, I shall do enough to bring it all back to him who has once seen it, and to justify myself at least in his eyes.

The beautiful pulpit of Donatello in San Lorenzo I find associated in sensation with the effect, from the old cloistered court of that church, of Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotto’s tower showing in the pale evening air above all the picturesque roofs between San Lorenzo and the cathedral; and not remote from these is my pleasure in the rich vulgarity and affluent bad taste of the modern decoration of the Caffè del Parlatnmto, in which one takes one’s ice under the china of all these pretty girls, popping their little sculp tured heads out of the lunettes below the frieze, with the hats and bonnets of fifteen years ago on them.

Do you remember, beloved brethren and sisters of Florentine sojourn, the little windows beside the grand portals of the palaces, the cantine, where you could buy a graceful wicker-covered flask of the prince’s or marquis’s wine? “Open from ten till four – till one on holidays,” they were lettered; and in the Borgo degli Albizzi I saw the Cantina Filicaja, though it had no longer the old sigh for Italy upon its lips: –

“Deh, fossi tu men bella o almen più forte!”

I am far from disdaining the memory of my horse-car tour of the city, on the track which followed so nearly the line of the old city wall that it showed me most of the gates still left standing, and the last grand duke’s arch of triumph, very brave in the sunset light. The tramways make all the

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