The day was oppressively warm, but we came up with a poor man driving his mule laden with pears and figs, the most delicious, and dismounted to rest under the shade of some of the bare crags which hereabouts rise, divested of plant or tree, broken into seeming pinnacles and towers, till we found we excited attention, and thought it unwise to do so any longer, as the Appennines have been of late in their loneliest parts scarcely safe for travellers. Hereabouts there is an inn, good apparently, but which I should hardly choose from its utter solitude, and we soon arrived at the summit of this mountain, the highest on our route; formerly dangerous, as the wind, which rushes down the gorge in sudden gusts, often swept off carriages. It is now, at the places of peril, protected by high walls, of the necessity of which we were aware, even to-day, as it blew freshly there, though the temperature below was burning and breathless. A long winding descent, commanding lovely views into wooded defiles, succeeded, and we passed the spot where the old road crosses ours; it was abandoned because impossible to protect it in the snow season.
Arrived at Montecarelli, a lone inn in a pretty situation; the village itself is some hundred yards farther. I cannot say that we dined or rested well, though the beds were clean and the people civil, and certainly honest, for neither here nor at Lojano could door or window be fastened or even closed. We were kept waking by carts and roulage waggons arriving late and starting early, aided by the poor patient oxen, labouring on with their meek heads bound to the yoke, and the lantern tied between them. As they took their short snatches of rest in the stable which held our travellers, and accidents were not impossible, and the pump beneath our bedroom was all night in motion, we gladly went on at dawn to escape the heat, at least in part. Our last day’s journey was the most interesting. Montecarelli left behind, we wound through groves of old oak up and down abrupt hills, catching glimpses through the trees into valleys on either side; to the west the sky was blue and pure, but eastward, as the sun rose, it shone on the surface of the mist which lay like a broad lake in the hollow, the green tops of the hills surmounting it like its islands. The clouds are more agreeable as well as picturesque far than near; for, riding through them, the country was completely veiled, and the chill unpleasant and penetrating. About four miles from Montecarelli, we passed Le Maschere, which appears a good inn; and near it the charming villa of some Florentine, its garden walls covered with roses, adjoining a ruined arch and grey tower, whence, following the slope of the hill, descends a noble cypress avenue. The views, as we issued from fog and into a burning atmosphere, grew at each step more Italian in their character, with villas on the wooded eminences, and here and there the umbrella pine rising above its fellow trees. Having left behind Cafaggiolo, where on the right hand there is a turreted castle, which belongs to the duke and resembles a fortress, our road descended to a valley, skirting a bright and narrow river, enclosed between hills where we journeyed beneath a sun it was difficult to believe that of October.
Here again by the road-side we found vineyards and their refreshment, and figures or pictures of saint and Virgin perched on poles among the vines to protect them from blight or storm; those I ate had been under the care of St. Antonio, and he had proved a good husbandman. Our horses suffered again from the small fly, and we were glad to ascend the mountain and exchange their presence and the extreme heat for its fresher air. Climbing slowly, as the way was steep, suddenly from behind a cabin at the angle issued forth to meet us an ill-dressed suspicious looking party; the eight or ten foremost carrying guns, the stragglers who followed, thick sticks; and as one must needs be imaginative in the Appennines, we began to think that robbers we had heard of were indeed abroad, and (having no arms) to speculate on the speed of our horses, and the necessity of galloping through the group, as we had no intention of riding back again. Having mustered courage to run away, we were prevented making any undue exertion by the banditti turning peaceably down a bye-path; we asked a little girl, who stood at the lone cabin door, who they were, and she said Cacciatori, sportsmen.
At last the steep succession of sunny hills ascended, refreshed by no shade, and riding under heat such as I never yet felt, we saw Florence below with her domes and towers rising out of the mist the heat made, backed by mountain above mountain, broken and numerous as the billows of a troubled ocean. On either side, as we rode down this last hill, the country was covered with vine and olive, sounding prettier in description than they look in reality; and the terraced gardens of the villas we passed were gay with a profusion of summer flowers, and the laurier-rose with its double and beautiful blossom, growing in the open ground and shooting up against the blue sky. In compensation, the heat was scarcely to be borne; the horses devoured with flies, ourselves blinded with sunshine, and (having left two miles from the city the Campo Santo with its cluster of sombre pines on the right hand, and entered, one after the other, several villages) persecuted by beggars and by a succession of vile odours, which all the winds of the Appennines cannot waft away.
On the left hand, before entering Florence, to which it is the nearest villa of importance, the avenue, whose grass grown road is lined with broken statues, leads to the deserted Palazzo Borghese. Riding beneath the triumphal arch, raised in 1739 (in honour of the Emperor Francis the First when he came hither, yet only grand duke of Tuscany, and in imitation of the Arch of Constantine), we passed through the ancient Porta San Gallo, whose date is 1284, and into the city. A boy guided us over the flat and dangerous pavement to the Palazzo Bertolini, now the hôtel du Nord, and opened about a week since by the ci-devant cook of Jerome Bonaparte, having moderate terms and fine apartments, only too comfortable, as this weather we would gladly dispense with their thick carpets. Our dresses changed and dinner ended, and the horses, for which there was no room here, lodged at Huband’s livery stables, I was too impatient to remain enclosed in the hôtel till morning, and, notwithstanding fatigue and the unusual heat which keeps Italians within doors, went out to receive my first impression of Florence; and though to me, as it does to many, it brought disappointment, with its streets crooked and narrow, its quays so inferior to those of Paris, and its Arno now shrunk in its bed to little better than a ditch, its ancient buildings and irregular squares have historical interest and picturesque combination, which make full atonement.
The Piazza della Santa Trinità, on which our inn is situated, is near the Palazzo Vecchio and far famed Duomo. On our way to the last, we crossed the Place, at an angle of which the former stands, not in the centre, as a decree ordained that the spot once covered by the razed palace of the Uberti should remain vacant for ever, in memory of the traitor’s infamy. Built in the year 1298, it frowns unshaken by time, a square fortress with embattled walls of jutting stones, surmounted by one high tower, and the nine escutcheons which bear the coats of arms of the city’s various possessors ranged below the battlement. Crouching on the steps is the lion of Florence, holding its place in the city’s armorial bearings, from as early a period as the lily which blooms on the two first of these recording escutcheons. The arms of Napoleon and the grand dukes are last in order, and among those which mark the factions of Guelph and Gibelline, those of Charles of Anjou and King Robert of Naples; of the wool-carders and the Medici, the merchant monarchs. There is one bearing the monogram of the Saviour, for Nicholas Capponi, in the year 1527, and at a period of excitement when no temporal sovereign seemed strong enough to sway the disobedient Florentines, proclaimed Jesus Christ their king, in a grand council composed of a thousand voters, of whom twenty, opposing the election, formed a minority!! The colossal statues which guard the entrance, the fine fountain with its Neptune and marine horses, beside its steps to the left, and beyond on the Place the royal statue of Cosmo mounted on his war-horse, to the right, as we stood opposite the citadel, the Loggia d’Orgagna with its three arches, light and yet solid, which once served for tribune to the orators of the republic, and now shelters the beautiful Sabine group of John of Bologna—the Judith beheading Holophernes, and the proud Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini, with the stern palace and the ancient prison tower, which rises above the roofs of the irregular houses opposite—and the two parallel lines of colonnaded buildings, which extend from the Palazzo and the Loggia to the quay, and contain in their attics the Galleria de’ Medici, make this the most striking portion of Florence. We saw it to advantage beneath the bluest of skies, and a sun which shone red and intense on the burning pavement, as if it had been August, calling up, alas! the succession of ill scents which betray an Italian town.
Passing the post-office, and turning down the Via de’ Calzajoli, we arrived shortly on the Piazza del Duomo. The cathedral and its elegant bell-tower, beside it, but detached, and St. John the Baptistery, opposite the unfinished façade of the cathedral, which has been painted in fresco, now washed away by rain, occupy the centre of a fine open space, which shows to advantage their beauties or peculiarities. Is it sacrilege to think that its monstrous dome seems to weigh down the remainder of the building; that its mass of black and white marble wants relief, or what the French call mouvement, to give it light and shadow; that the octagon temple, with its pointed roof, once pagan, cased in marble, and become that of St. John, is heavy and ungraceful? St. John possesses the bronze doors, so beautiful in their workmanship: that facing St. Maria del Fiore executed, when but twenty years old, by Ghiberti, whose model was preferred to those of Donatelli and Brunelleschi, and of which Michael Angelo said, that it was worthy to be the portal of paradise. On either side of this door hang, as a trophy, chains once belonging to the gates of Pisa, and suspended here in memorial of the victory gained over Pisa by the Florentines in the year 1362.
Entering this square from the Piazza del Gran Duca, there is on the left hand a small church, its exterior not distinguished from the houses which adjoin it. It was growing dusk, and at the door stood attendants with torches, I fancied for some festival within, but, while we lingered, there issued thence a funereal procession, the most solemn I have seen; the mourners in their long sable robes, and hoods forming masks, with openings for the eyes only, two and two, bearing torches in their hands, following the priests, carrying banners, and the coffin, with its velvet draperies, and followed in turn by the clerical attendants, in white robes and crimson capes, slowly sweeping round the Duomo on their way to the Campo Santo; all burials being performed at night and without the town.