A modern trio in an old town

by Katharine Haviland-Taylor

We went in, past the beggars who sat on the steps with open, upturned palms, past an old lady who was selling baskets, and swore at us dreadfully when we refused to buy them—among her swearing was a curse which consists of “Darn the fishes,” and that is very, very wicked in Italian!—and then, inside we saw the—Sarcophagus, Sam called it, and loitered around, and then went back out into the glare and stifling heat that was over everything outside.

We found Mr. Wake and Viola across the big Piazza, loitering in the shade, and Mr. Wake said that it was too hot for anything but his own shady garden and iced tea, and so we left the funny, pretty little town and started down a narrow roadway that ran between high walls, or slopes that were covered with olive trees.

Every color was accentuated. . . . Houses that were faint pink, seemed salmon; greens almost clashed; the dust of the roadway was a vivid yellow, and down in the hollow below us, Florence spread out, a steaming, gleaming mass of tightly packed palaces, shining spires, and gleaming towers.

“Ah, Giotto,” said Mr. Wake, as we halted at a bend in the way and looked down at our own city. He said this, for he loved the tower that Giotto had planned and had seen half built before his death. “Ever hear,” said Mr. Wake, “of how the little Giotto was found, and how he was helped to become the great artist that he was?”

I hadn’t, and I said so. Viola thought she had, but she said she forgot so many things, when Mr. Wake questioned her a little.

“Well,” he said, “since Viola has forgotten, and Jane frankly admits she doesn’t know, indulge an old man in his love of the telling of picturesque stories.”

“I love them,” I said, for I really did. His stories were about people who had lived and died, and they never had Irish or Hebrew or Swedish people in them to make him try a dialect. I don’t care so very much for that sort. And Mr. Wake didn’t even try to be funny, which is unusual in a man.

“Well,” he said, as he took off his hat and mopped his brow, “one day when Cimabue, who was a great artist, and a fine chap, was strolling through the country he came to a clearing in which a little boy was tending sheep. And perhaps because he was in an ill humor—probably thinking all art was going to the bad, for he was a critic too, you know, and critics have thought that since the beginning of paint—anyway, I feel that an ill humor set upon him, and that he was, because of it, minded to stop, and divert himself by talking a bit to a little country lad.

“And he said ‘Hello,’ in Italian of course, and the little boy answered ‘Master, I salute you—’ and Cimabue drew near. And when near, he looked down at a rock upon which the little boy had drawn a picture with a bit of soft, crumbling stone. The picture was good, and Cimabue felt a thrill sweep over him—the selfsame sort of thrill that I feel when Sam shows my dull eyes a bit of his genius—and he took the little boy with him, after he saw his people, and the little boy grew up to paint pictures of people. Before he painted—early in thirteen hundred, legend has it, all the pictures had been of stiff, remote, too holy Saints. But little Giotto, who had learned love and wisdom of the fields and trees and birds and beasts, painted Madonnas who smiled, and little babies who held out their arms to be taken, and proud Josephs who seem to say, ‘Please look at my family.’ . . . Painted, what Ruskin called, ‘Mamma and Papa and the baby.’ . . . I thank you, ladies and gentleman,” he ended, with mock ceremony, “for your kind attention!”

Then he paused outside of a wall that had once been pink, but had been washed by the rain and faded by sun until it was only a faint peach in a few sheltered spots, and here he rang a bell.