Italian Days and Ways

by Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

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."