CHAPTER XIII.
FLORENCE.
Some time before I left London, while indulging in the pernicious habit of reading in bed, I was much amused and instructed by the narrative of travel of a distinguished confrère who had set out in search of sunshine. The writer’s name is a household word in England, and in Italy it is also a ‘household word’ in the most literal manner possible, for you find a ‘Sala’ in nearly every house. I don’t remember whether the ‘Prince of Specials’ found all the sunshine he wanted, but if he did not he had better come out to Florence at once with the biggest bag he can get into the train.
I am writing at the present moment in a room looking on to the Lung’ Arno, and the sunshine is overpowering. In order to write with a slight amount of cool-headedness I have to sit in a bath and to work with an umbrella over me, which is damped at short intervals. For the past week it has been the same—a fierce, blazing, beautiful sunshine, in which you could cook a mutton-chop by holding it out of the window on the end of your walking-stick for ten minutes.
Most of the Italian cities boast of special distinctions. Just as we say ‘Genoa la Superba,’ so Florence has been dubbed ‘Firenze la Gentile,’ ‘Florence the Refined.’
Florence is beautiful to the tourist in search of art, but it is apt to grow monotonous to staid and sober citizens who do not care to risk rheumatics for life in order to see an altar-piece, or to take a certain chill as the price of gazing at the real original Venus de Medici in the icy passages known as the Uffizi. True, that the streets are full of grand and solemn old palaces that carry the mind back through the centuries; true, that every hole and corner is rich with art, but on the Philistine all this palls after a time. I can understand how classical and cultured minds can spend day after day lost in admiration before virgins and martyrs who bear the closest resemblance to each other, and I quite appreciate the rapture with which they gaze at statues which, when all is said and done, are but men and women imitated and undraped. I can worship with the best of them, say, six pictures and six statues per diem, but galleries I cannot endure, and I fear I never shall. As one jam-tart is pleasant to the tooth, and twenty produce nausea, so is one good picture pleasant to the eye, and two hundred are apt to give one headache.
Now, if you flee from galleries and churches, there is little left you in Florence town but the side of the Arno. This is the one place where all day long the sun shines out in splendour, and you can saunter and dream, and ask yourself with the Misses Leamar, ‘Why is the world so gay to-day?’ You turn away from the Arno at your peril. To enter any side street is, to an Englishman, dangerous in the extreme. The long, narrow streets shut out all sun and all light, and you pass into them from the Lung’ Arno as from the kitchen fire to the ice well. I am tired of the Lung’ Arno. I have worn the brim of my hat threadbare bowing to the thousand Florentine princes, dukes, marquises, and counts, who smile at me in the Cascine—the Hyde Park of Florence—and I am going to walk right away from the palaces, the churches, and the galleries, right away over the Arno to the high hills I can see shining in the sunlight far away. Of Art I am tired; a little Nature will do me good. I tell the people in my hotel I want a good ten-mile spin—where had I better go? The Porter crosses himself, and the Director murmurs the name of his patron saint. Ho! but here is a mad Englishman, who, having loose lire in his pocket, wants to walk ten miles. They point me out a way, however, begging me to provide myself with cognac, in case I fall by the road, and I go. I am sure the Director is debating whether he shall have a hot bath, a doctor, and some leeches ready for my return.
Once outside the hotel, the torture of my life in Florence begins. There is a carriage-stand opposite the door, and the moment I show my nose every man wildly whips his horse up, and drives full gallop at me. They are all sure that I want a carrozza. I endeavour to evade them, but they drive round and round me in a circle until I look like the ring-master at Astley’s directing the performance of ‘the flying charioteers.’ At last I make a wild dash between two vehicles and rush up the street. But the enemy is not so easily defeated. The drivers dash after me up the Lung’ Arno, and follow me over the bridge. The pride of the Florentine flymen is stung to the quick. An Inglese has escaped them. The watchword passes, and at every rank we come to the flymen there lash their horses and join in the pursuit. Before I have gone a quarter of a mile there are nearly one hundred flys pursuing me. Panting and breathless, I still urge on my wild career. The honour of England is at stake. In this unequal conflict I must conquer or die, for, as a patriot, the reputation of my countrymen for obstinacy is dear to me. Heedless of my course, I dash down narrow streets, through ancient gateways, and round old squares, and at last I reach the city walls. The Porta Romana is passed, and I am out in the suburbs. The flymen waver. It is all uphill now, and their horses—poor beasts!—are blown and leg-weary. One by one they turn round, and drive slowly back to the city. For one day, at least, I am safe from the flymen of Florence.
I walk my miles on ever-rising ground till all the fertile valley lies at my feet. I wind round and round till I reach the great height whereon stands Galileo’s observatory and the villa in which, under the cruel eyes of the Inquisition, he spent his last years. From this spot the view is worth a pilgrimage that should have lasted a lifetime instead of two hours. All the city of Florence, the distant Apennines (their crests all crowned with snow), the blue waters of the Arno lie before me. I breathe the pure, bracing air, I feel the warm sunshine on my face, and the weight of my years is lifted from me. Give me a green hill, a blue sky, and a square mile of God’s sunshine, and you may have all the pictures and all the statues in all the whole wide world.
I seem to have a speciality for coming upon horrors. In Florence the first night I go out, in a quiet, dark, back street, a gentleman walking ahead of me suddenly reels and falls dead from an apoplectic stroke. I should not allude to the circumstance but that it brought before me a quaint and solemn phase of Italian religious life. The poor man was carried into a confectioner’s shop and a messenger despatched to the Misericordia—the establishment of the Brothers of the Misericordia, a curious order, which renders the last offices to the dead. Presently there arrived a man with a torch, and, following him, half a dozen of the brothers, clothed from head to foot in a black garb and a hood and mask. Nothing is visible of them but their eyes, their features being completely concealed by the masks and hoods which cover the head and face. Weird and solemn beyond description the brothers look in the moonlight in this strange garb, and when presently they came out, bearing the dead in an open bier, and formed in procession, headed by the torch, and slowly moved away into the shadows of the dark, narrow, winding streets, I shuddered, and fancied myself back in the Middle Ages.
The history of the order is curious and interesting. It was formed during the great plague, when people died faster than professional undertakers could bury them. A body of gentlemen then undertook the task, concealing their features while plying their solemn labour, in order that they might not be recognised and shunned by the Italians, who have a great horror of death and all that appertains to it. To this day the order remains a secret one, and the outside world does not know who the masked men are who tend the dying and the dead. The greatest and the smallest belong to it, and the prince and the artisan rub shoulders in it. It is often a refuge for wealthy men who have met with great disappointments, and of talented men whose careers have been blighted, and who want something to do to keep them from nursing their grief and their wrongs.