Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells
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first marts they held by the Arno for the convenience of the merchants who did not want to climb that long hill to the Etruscan citadel; and I built my wooden hut with the rest hard by the Ponte Vecchio, which was an old bridge a thousand years before Gaddi's structure. I was with them all through that dim turmoil of wars, martyrdoms, pestilences, heroisms, and treasons for a thousand years, feeling their increasing purpose of municipal freedom and hatred of the one-man power (il governod'un solo) alike under Romans, Huns, Longobards, Franks, and Germans, till in the eleventh century they marched up against their mother city, and destroyed Fiesole, leaving nothing standing but the fortress, the cathedral, and the Caffe Aurora, where the visitor lunches at this day, and has an incomparable view of Florence in the distance. When, in due time, the proud citizens began to go out from their gates and tumble their castles about the ears of the Germanic counts and barons in the surrounding country, they had my sympathy almost to the point of active co-operation; though I doubt now if we did well to let those hornets come into the town and build other nests within the walls, where they continued nearly as pestilent as ever. Still, so long as no one of them came to the top permanently, there was no danger of the one-man power we dreaded, and we could adjust our arts, our industries, our finances to the state of street warfare, even if it lasted, as at one time, for forty years. I was as much opposed as Dante himself to the extension of the national limits, though I am not sure now that our troubles came from acquiring territory three miles away, beyond the Ema, and I could not trace the bitterness of partisan feeling even to the annexation of Prato, whither it took me a whole hour to go by the stream-tram. But when the factions were divided under the names of Guelph and Ghibelline, and subdivided again into Bianchi and Neri, I was always of the Guelph and the Bianchi party, for it seemed to me that these wished the best to the commonwealth, and preserved most actively the traditional fear and hate of the one-man power. I believed heartily in the wars against Pisa and Siena, though afterward, when I visited those cities, I took their part against the Florentines, perhaps because they were finally reduced by the Medici, — a family I opposed from the very first, uniting with any faction or house that contested its rise. They never deceived me when they seemed to take the popular side, nor again when they voluptuously favored the letters and arts, inviting the city full of Greeks to teach them. I mourned all through the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent over the subjection of the people, never before brought under the one-manpower, and flattered to their undoing by the splendors of the city and the state he created for him. When our dissolute youth went singing his obscene songs through the moonlit streets, I shuddered with a good Piagnone's abhorrence; and I heard one morning with a stern and solemn joy that the great Frate had refused absolution to the dying despot who had refused freedom to Florence. Those were great days for one of my thinking, when Savonarola realized the old Florentine ideal of a free commonwealth, with the Medici banished, the Pope defied, and Christ king; days incredibly, dark and terrible, when the Frate paid for his goodwill to us with his life, and suffered by the Republic which he had restored. Then the famous siege came, the siege of fifteen months, when Papist and Lutheran united under one banner against us, and treason did what all the forces of the Empire had failed to effect. Yet Florence, the genius of the great democracy, never showed more glorious than in that supreme hour, just before she vanished forever, and the Medici bastard entered the city out of which Florence had died, to be its liege lord where no master had ever been openly confessed before. I could follow the Florentines intelligently through all till that; but then, what suddenly became of that burning desire of equality, that deadly jealousy of a tyrant's domination, that love of country surpassing the love of life? It is hard to reconcile ourselves to the belief that the right can be beaten, that the spirit of a generous and valiant people can be broken; but this is what seems again and again to happen in history, though never so signally, so spectacularly, as in Florence when the Medici were restored. After that there were conspiracies and attempts of individuals to throw off the yoke; but in the great people, the prostrate body of the old democracy, not a throe of revolt. Had they outlived the passion of their youth for liberty, or were they sunk in despair before the odds arrayed against them? I did not know what to do with the Florentines from this point; they mystified me, silently suffering under the Medici for two hundred years, and then sleeping under the Lorrainese for another century, to awake in our own time the most polite, the most agreeable of the Italians perhaps, but the most languid. They say of themselves, "We lack initiative; " and the foreigner most disposed to confess his ignorance cannot help having heard it said of them by other Italians that while the Turinese, Genoese, and Milanese, and even the Venetians, excel them in industrial enterprise, they are less even than the Neapolitans in intellectual activity; and that when the capital was removed to Rome they accepted adversity almost with indifference, and resigned themselves to a second place in everything. I do not know whether this is true; there are some things against it, as that the Florentine schools are confessedly the best in Italy, and that it would be hard anywhere in that country or another to match the group of scholars and writers who form the University of Florence. These are not all Florentines, but they live in Florence, where almost anyone would choose to live if he did not live in London, or Boston, or New York, or Helena, Montana T. There is no more comfortable city in the world, I fancy. But you cannot paint comfort so as to interest the reader of a book of travel. Even the lack of initiative in a people who conceal their adversity under very good clothes, and have abolished beggary, cannot be made the subject of a graphic sketch; one must go to their past for that.
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Yet if the reader had time, I would like to linger a little on our way down to the Via Borgo Santi Apostoli, where it branches off into the Middle Ages out of Via Tornabuoni, not far from Vieusseux's Circulating Library. For Via Tornabuoni is charming, and merits to be observed for the ensemble it offers of the contemporary Florentine expression, with its alluring shops, its confectioners and cafes, its florists and milliners, its dandies and tourists, and, ruggedly massing up out of their midst, the mighty bulk of its old Strozzi Palace, mediaeval, somber, superb, tremendously impressive of the days when really a man's house was his castle. Everywhere in Florence the same sort of contrast presents itself in some degree; but nowhere quite so dramatically as here, where it seems expressly contrived for the sensation of the traveler when he arrives at the American banker's with his letter of credit the first morning, or comes to the British pharmacy for his box of quinine pills. It is eminently the street of the tourists, who are always haunting it on some errand. The best shops are here, and the most English is spoken; you hear our tongue spoken almost as commonly as Italian, and much more loudly, both from the chest and through the nose, whether the one is advanced with British firmness to divide the groups of civil and military loiterers on the narrow pavement before the confectioner Giacosa's, or the other is flattened with American curiosity against the panes of the jewelers' windows. There is not here the glitter of mosaics which fatigues the eye on the Lungarno or in Via Borgognissanti, nor the white glare of new statuary — or statuettary, rather — which renders other streets impassable; but there is a sobered richness in the display, and a local character in the prices which will sober the purchaser.
Florence is not well provided with spaces for the outdoor lounging which Italian leisure loves, and you must go to the Cascine for much Florentine fashion if you want it; but something of it is always rolling down through Via Tornabuoni in its carriage at the proper hour of the day, and something more is always standing before Giacosa's English-tailored, Italian-mannered, to bow, and smile, and comment. I was glad that the sort of swell whom I used to love in the Piazzi at Venice abounded in the narrower limits of Via Tornabuoni. I was afraid he was dead; but he graced the curbstone there with the same lily-like disoccupation and the same sweetness of aspect which made the Procuratie Nuove like a garden. He was not without his small dog or his cane held to his mouth; he was very, very patient and kind with the aged crone who plays the part of Florentine flower-girl in Via Tornabuoni, and whom I after saw aiming with uncertain eye a boutonniere of violets at his coat-lapel; there was the same sort of calm, heavy-eyed beauty looking out at him from her ice or coffee through the vast pane of the confectioner's window, that stared sphinx-like in her mystery from a cushioned corner of Florian's; and the officers went by with tinkling spurs and sabers, and clicking boot-heels, differing in nothing but their Italian uniforms and complexions from the blonde Austrian military of those far-off days. I often wondered who or what those beautiful swells might be, and now I rather wonder that I did not ask someone who could tell me. But perhaps it was not important;