After I had written the foregoing legend, I found the following:
La Colonna di Santa Trinità.
“The pillar di Santa Trinità was in times a meeting-place for fairies (Fate), whither they went afoot or in their
carriages. At the base of the column there was a great stone, and there they exchanged greetings or consulted about their affairs. They were all great ladies, of kindly disposition. And when it came that any one was cast into the city prison, they inquired into the affair, and then a fate would go as a magistrate in disguise and question the accused. Now they always knew whether any one spoke the truth, and if the prisoner did so, and was deserving mercy, they delivered him; but if he lied, they left him to be hanged, with a buon pro vi faccia!—Much good may it do you!
“Of evenings they assembled round the rock at the foot of the column in a great company, and had great merriment and love-making. Then in the crowd a couple would descend, or one after another into their vaults below, and then come again, often taking with them mortals who were their friends or favourites.
“Their chief was a matron who always held a pair of scales. Now when they were to judge the fate of any one, they took with great care the earth from one of his footprints, and weighed it most scrupulously, for thereby they could tell whether in his life he had done more good or evil, and it was thus that they settled the fate of all the accused in the prisons.
“And it often came to pass that when prisoners were young and handsome, these fate or fairy-witches took them from their cells in the prison through subterranean ways to their vaults under the Trinità, and passed the time merrily enough, for all was magnificent there.
“But woe unto those, no matter how handsome they might be, who betrayed the secrets and the love of the fate. Verily they had their reward, and a fine long repentance with it, for they were all turned into cats or mice, and condemned to live in the cellars and subterranean passages of the old Ghetto, which is now destroyed—and a nasty place it was. In its time people often wondered that there were so many cats there, but the truth is that they were all people who had been enchanted by those who were called in olden time le Gran Dame di Firenze—the Great Ladies of Florence.
“And the image holding the scales is called la Giustizia, but it really represents the Matrona, or Queen of the Fate, who of old exercised such strict justice with her scales in Florence.”
This is, I am confident, a tradition of great antiquity, for all its elements are of a very ancient or singularly