Most favourable for the celebration of the anniversary of Dante’s birth, was lastly, that it happened at Florence, the very town in all the world best adapted for the celebration of such an event.
Fancy a national festival at Paris or London! The size of those towns does not admit of a general decoration; but even if such a miracle could be performed, nobody would ever see a tenth part of it, as one would be nearly dead with fatigue getting half way from the Marble Arch to St. Paul’s. Another serious drawback are the immense multitudes that inhabit these monster towns, and create unpleasant crowds, which, to all that have not nerves of iron, and great physical strength, destroy all feeling of enjoyment. None of these unfavourable conditions existed in Florence. It is but a little place, though such a gem of a town, and can therefore be uniformly decorated, changed into a gigantic palace, through whose halls and corridors the inhabitants and visitors, that do not number by millions, gaily move. And such a place Florence appeared on that day. All the houses had red, green, or yellow silk hangings falling down from their windows, and were besides richly decorated with pictures, busts, flags, flowers, and evergreens. The noble architecture of the town, the nice clean streets, which are neither too narrow to look sombre, nor too broad not to be easily spanned by garlands of flowers, all united to produce the happiest effect. On all the principal places, statues of great Italians had been placed, or trophies in remembrance of some great national event, which happened on that particular spot. There was a great number of them; for the Florentines boast, and not without some reason, that if a stone were to mark every glorious memory of the town, there would hardly be a stone in Florence that did not deserve special distinction. I could not attempt to find out what all the statues and trophies meant, but even if I had looked at them all, and remembered every inscription, I could not enumerate them here, else what is to be but a chapter would become a volume.
I must however mention a fine statue of Galileo, on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, with the following inscription:—
“A Galileo.
Finirà la tua gloria
quando il genere umano
cessi di vedere il sole ed abitare la terra.”[G]
[G] Thy glory will end, when the human race shall have ceased to see the sun, and to inhabit the earth.
Near the Ponte alla Carraia, there was a statue to Goldoni, the great writer of comedies, and on the Piazza del Duomo, those of the famous architects Arnolfo and Brunelesco. On the houses where celebrated men were born, lived, or died, tablets were placed recording their names and deeds, ornamented with banners, wreaths of flowers and laurels, and often with the bust or portrait of the illustrious dead.
The Bruneleschi palace, where Michael Angelo lived and died, and which still contains his books, furniture, etc., interested me much. On a house in the Corso, I noticed the following inscription:—
O voi che per la via d’amor passate
volgete uno sguardo alle mure
ove naque nell’ aprile del 1266
Beatrice Portinari,
prima e purissima fiamma,
che accese il genio
del Divino Poeta
Dante Alighieri.[H]
[H] You that walk in the path of love, cast a look upon these walls, where in April 1266, was born Beatrice Portinari, etc.
The house of Giovanni Battista Strozzi, named the Blind, the great scholar and philosopher of the 17th century, was beautifully decorated. I remarked also Frescobaldi’s, the friend of Dante, which stands in the Via Maggio, and not far from it, on the Piazza Santa Trinità, the house in which Robert Dudley, an English mathematician of the 17th century lived, whose memory still survives in Florence.