“There are in the Boboli Gardens two statues of two imprisoned kings, and it is said that every night a beautiful fairy of the grotto clad in white rises from the water, emerging perfectly dry, and converses with the captive kings for one hour, going alternately from one to the other, as if bearing mutual messages, and then returns to the grotto, gliding over the ground without touching the grass with her feet, and after this vanishes in the water.”
“This tale is, as I conceive,” writes the observant Flaxius, “an allegory, or, as Petrus Berchorius would have called it, a moralisation, the marrow whereof is as follows: The two captive kings are Labour and Capital, who have, indeed, been long enchained, evil tongues telling each that the other was his deadly foe, while the fairy is Wise Reform, who passes her time in consoling and reconciling them. And it shall come to pass that when the go-betweens or brokering mischief-makers are silenced, then the kings will be free and allied.”
“Then indeed, as you may see,
All the world will happy be!”
Vivat Sequenz! Now for the next story.
HOW LA VIA DELLA MOSCA GOT ITS NAME
“Puer—abige Muscas!”
—Cicero de Orat., 60.
The following story contains no new or original elements, as it is only an ordinary tale of transformation by witchcraft, but as it accounts for the origin of the name of a street in Florence I give it place:—
La Via della Mosca.