As I say, it is a beautiful city, although it wuz more grand and populous when it wuz the capital of Italy. Dorothy said it was well named the City of Flowers, for there wuz flowers everywhere, the markets full of ’em, flower girls at every turn, balconies and windows overrunning with them, public gardens and private gardens sweet with their brightness and perfume.
CHAPTER XXIX
The next morning after we arrived at Florence we sallied out sightseeing. We all went out together, but separated after a while, promising to meet at luncheon time at our tarven, but we all went together as fur as the Cathedral. It is a noble buildin’, covered with red, white and black marble, elegantly ornamented with panels and sculpture. And the hull meetin’-house is so beautiful, that it wuz remarked that “it ort to be kep’ in a glass case.”
Inside, the ceiling is one hundred and thirty-five feet high––good land! I told Josiah I wuz glad I did not have to whitewash or paper it overhead, for it ’most killed us Methodist Episcopal sisters to paper our meetin’-house ceilin’ which wuz only twenty feet high, and put a hundred and fifteen feet on top of that and where would we be, we never could done it in the world. The interior is full of statutes and pictures by Michael Angelo and other great sculptors and famous painters.
The Campanile or bell tower near it is most three hundred feet high, and a beautiful view is to be seen from the top way off onto the fur-off mountains, the city and the valley of the Arno, or that is I hearn so; I didn’t climb up myself to see, bein’ more’n willin’ to take Dorothy’s word and Robert Strong’s to that effect.
The bronze doors in the Baptistry are a sight to see. Michael Angelo said they wuz worthy to be the gates of paradise, but I could tell Mr. Angelo, and would if he had said it to me, that he little knew how beautiful them gates are and we ortn’t to compare anything earthly to ’em. Jest think, Mr. Angelo, I’d say, of an immense gate being made 351 of one pearl, the idee! we can’t hardly git into our heads any idees here below, and never will till the winds of heaven blow aginst our tired senses and brighten ’em up.
But I wuzn’t neighbor to Mr. Angelo; he died several years before I wuz born, four or five hundred years before, so of course I couldn’t advise him for his good. He lost a sight and never knowed it, poor creeter!
The Ufizzi and Pitti galleries contain enough pictures and statutes to make ’em more’n comfortable, I should think; beautiful pictures and beautiful statutes I must say. One of the most interestin’ things to me in the hull collection wuz the original drawings of the old masters with their names signed to ’em in their own handwritin’. It wuz like liftin’ up the mysterious curtain a little ways and peerin’ into the past. Michael Angelo’s sketches in chalk and charcoal; Titian’s drawings, little buds, as you may say from which they bloomed into immortal beauty; Rubens, Albert Durer and a throng of others. And then there wuz the autograph portraits of the great painters, Guido, Rembrandt, De Vinci, Vandyke, Raphael, and also the greatest works of all these painters. It wuz a grand and inspirin’ sight never to be forgot. Robert Strong and Dorothy wanted to see the statute of Dante; they set store by his writings. It is a splendid statute of white marble riz up in the Piazza Sante Croce; I hearn ’em talkin’ about its bein’ on a piazza and spozed it wuz built on some stoop and mistrusted he deserved a better pillow.