CHAPTER I
The People and Commune of Florence
"La bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma, Fiorenza."
–Dante.
BEFORE the imagination of a thirteenth century poet, one of the sweetest singers of the dolce stil novo, there rose a phantasy of a transfigured city, transformed into a capital of Fairyland, with his lady and himself as fairy queen and king:
"Amor, eo chero mea donna in domino,
l'Arno balsamo fino,
le mura di Fiorenza inargentate,
le rughe di cristallo lastricate,
fortezze alte e merlate,
mio fedel fosse ciaschedun Latino."[2]
But is not the reality even more beautiful than the dreamland Florence of Lapo Gianni's fancy? We stand on the heights of San Miniato, either in front of the Basilica itself or lower down in the Piazzale Michelangelo. Below us, on either bank of the silvery Arno, lies outstretched Dante's "most famous and most beauteous daughter of Rome," once the Queen of Etruria and centre of the most wonderful culture that the world has known since Athens, later the first capital of United Italy, and still, though shorn of much of her former splendour and beauty, one of the loveliest cities of Christendom. Opposite to us, to the north, rises the hill upon which stands Etruscan Fiesole, from which the people of Florence originally came: "that ungrateful and malignant people," Dante once called them, "who of old came down from Fiesole." Behind us stand the fortifications which mark the death of the Republic, thrown up or at least strengthened by Michelangelo in the city's last agony, when she barred her gates and defied the united power of Pope and Emperor to take the State that had once chosen Christ for her king.
"O foster-nurse of man's abandoned glory
Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour;
Thou shadowest forth that mighty shape in story,
As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender:
The light-invested angel Poesy
Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee.
"And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught
By loftiest meditations; marble knew
The sculptor's fearless soul–and as he wrought,
The grace of his own power and freedom grew."
Between Fiesole and San Miniato, then, the story of the Florentine Republic may be said to be written.
The beginnings of Florence are lost in cloudy legend, and her early chroniclers on the slenderest foundations have reared for her an unsubstantial, if imposing, fabric of fables–the tales which the women of old Florence, in the Paradiso, told to their house-holds–