Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells
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old palace springs seven stories into the sunshine, disreputably shabby from basement to attic, but beautiful, with the rags of a plebeian washday caught across it from balcony to balcony, as if it had fancied trying to hide its forlornness in them. Around me are peasants and donkey-carts and Florentines of all sizes and ages; my ears are filled with the sharp din of an Italian crowd, and my nose with the smell of immemorial, innumerable market-days, and the rank, cutting savor of frying fish and cakes from a score of neighboring cook-shops; but I am happy — happier than I should probably be if I were actually there. Through an archway in the street behind me, not far from an admirably tumbledown shop full of bric-a-brac of low degree, all huddled — old bureaus and bedsteads, crockery, classic lamps, assorted saints, shovels, flat-irons, and big-eyed madonnas — under a sagging pent-roof, I enter a large court, like Piazza Donati. Here the Medici, among other great citizens, had their first houses; and in the narrow street opening out of this court stands the little church which was then the family chapel of the Medici, after the fashion of that time, where all their marriages, christenings, and funerals took place. In time this highly respectable quarter suffered the sort of social decay which so frequently and so capriciously affects highly respectable quarters in all cities; and it had at last fallen so low in the reign of Cosimo I., that when that grim tyrant wished cheaply to please the Florentines by making it a little harder for the Jews than for the Christians under him, he shut them up in the old court. They had been let into Florence to counteract the extortion of the Christian usurers, and upon the condition that they would not ask more than twenty per cent, interest How much more had been taken by the Christians one can hardly imagine; but if this was a low rate to Florentines, one easily understands how the bankers of the city grew rich by lending to the necessitous world outside. Now and then they did not get back their principal, and Edward III. of England has still an outstanding debt to the house of Peruzzi, which he bankrupted in the fourteenth century. The best of the Jews left the city rather than enter the Ghetto, and only the baser sort remained to its captivity. Whether any of them still continue there, I do not know; but the place has grown more and more disreputable, till now it is the home of the forlornest rabble I saw in Florence, and if they were not the worst, their looks are unjust to them. They were mainly women and children, as the 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 Buondelmonti; and, disliking them as I did, I was glad to see it in the possession of that squalor so different from the cheerful and industrious 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 development 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, " ail wore a prosperous and contented aspect; the parties that had so long disquieted the city were at peace; imprisoned, or banished, or dead, those who would not submit to the Medicean domination; tranquility and calm were everywhere. 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 inventions, the most famous was that of the carnival songs (canti carnascialeschi), 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 explicitly warns his readers against Roscoe'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 commonwealth; 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 Giotta, revived, and on all sides rose exquisite palaces and churches. But artists, scholars, politicians, nobles, and plebeians were rotten at heart, lacking in every public and private virtue, every moral sentiment. Religion 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 became 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 shown 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 discussed 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 generosity 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, skillful in dealing with ambassadors, most skillful 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 voice nasal; but his eye was quick and keen, his forehead was 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