CHAPTER XXII.
In Florence and Pisa.
FLORENCE in May is a very different place from Florence in November. Still it rained every day, or night, of the month we passed there; showers that made the earth greener, the air clearer. We were homesick for Rome, too, although our lodgings with Madame Giotti, then in Via dei Serragli—now in Piazza Soderini, were the next best thing to the sunny appartimento No. 8, Via San Sebastiano, that had been home to us for almost six months.
Madame Bettina Giotti, trim and kindly, who speaks charmingly-quaint English and “likes Americans,” was to us the embodiment of genuine hospitality, irrespective of the relations of landlady and boarder. We had a most comfortable suite of rooms, a private table, where she served us in person, and which was spread with the best food, as to quality, variety and cookery, we had upon the other side of the water—Paris not excepted.
We gave ourselves, thus situated, resolutely and systematically to sight-seeing.
The Invaluable and Boy had a pass that admitted them daily, and at all hours, to the Boboli Gardens, and we left them to their own devices while we spent whole days in the Uffizi and Pitti Galleries, roaming among the tombs of the illustrious dead in S. Croce and S. Lorenzo, studying and enjoying art everywhere in this, her home, and where men most delight to do her honor. History and religion have here their notable shrines, also. Both combine to make the extensive square before the Palazzo Vecchio a spot to which pilgrim-footsteps turn from all quarters of Christendom.
It is the ancient Forum of the Florentine Republic. The surges of commercial and political life yet beat upon and across it. The Palace is old, and replete with interest to the historical student. The Great Hall in its centre was built under the direction of Jerome Savonarola in 1495. Three years later, they put him to death at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria—the square just mentioned—and had the wind set that way, the smoke of his burning must have filled the spacious chamber planned by him while virtual Dictator of Florence. There lies upon the table beside me, a photograph of a rude picture of his martyrdom. The Palace is the same we look upon now, at the side of an area, vaster then than at present, the same lofty, square tower capping the gloomy building. The judges sit upon benches against the outer wall. A temporary gangway extends from their platform to the gibbet in the open space. On this walk the three condemned monks, in white shrouds, each between two confessors in black, toward the fire blazing under the gallows. They burned Savonarola’s body after it had suffered the extremest indignity of the law, such was their lust of rage against the man who had turned their world upside down—the Reformer born out of time by two hundred years. Until very lately it was the custom among the common people to strew with violets, on each anniversary of the event, the pavement on which he perished.
“To prove that all the winters that have snowed