In a fresco on the ceiling of one of the private chambers, is a portrait of the late lamented Grand-duchess. On the mantelpiece in the Duke's cabinet also is a beautiful marble bust of her. It is a face and head corresponding perfectly to the character given her by common report, full of nobleness and kindness. The Duke, who loved her with a devotion rarely found in marriages of state, is inconsolable since her death, and has shut himself from all society. He hardly slept during her illness, watching by her bedside constantly. She was a religious enthusiast, and her health is said to have been first impaired by too rigid an adherence to the fasts of the church, and self-inflicted penance. The Florentines talk of her still, and she appears to have been unusually loved and honored.
I have just returned from hearing an improvisatrice. At a party last night I met an Italian gentleman, who talked very enthusiastically of a lady of Florence, celebrated for her talent of improvisation. She was to give a private exhibition to her friends the next day at twelve, and he offered politely to introduce me. He called this morning, and we went together.
Some thirty or forty people were assembled in a handsome room, darkened tastefully by heavy curtains. They were sitting in perfect silence when we entered, all gazing intently on the improvisatrice, a lady of some forty or fifty years, of a fine countenance, and dressed in deep mourning. She rose to receive us; and my friend introducing me, to my infinite dismay, as an improvisatore Americano, she gave me a seat on the sofa at her right hand, an honor I had not Italian enough to decline. I regretted it the less that it gave me an opportunity of observing the effects of the "fine phrensy," a pleasure I should otherwise certainly have lost through the darkness of the room.
We were sitting in profound silence, the head of the improvisatrice bent down upon her breast, and her hands clasped over her lap, when she suddenly raised herself, and with both hands extended, commenced in a thrilling voice, "Patria!" Some particular passage of Florentine history had been given her by one of the company, and we had interrupted her in the midst of her conception. She went on with astonishing fluency, in smooth harmonious rhyme, without the hesitation of a breath, for half an hour. My knowledge of the language was too imperfect to judge of the finish of the style, but the Italians present were quite carried away with their enthusiasm. There was an improvisatore in company, said to be the second in Italy; a young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a face that struck me as the very beau ideal of genius. His large expressive eyes kindled as the poetess went on, and the changes of his countenance soon attracted the attention of the company. She closed and sunk back upon her seat, quite exhausted; and the poet, looking round for sympathy, loaded her with praises in the peculiarly beautiful epithets of the Italian language. I regarded her more closely as she sat by me. Her profile was beautiful; and her mouth, which at the first glance had exhibited marks of age, was curled by her excitement into a firm, animated curve, which restored twenty years at least by its expression.
After a few minutes one of the company went out of the room, and wrote upon a sheet of paper the last words of every line for a sonnet; and a gentleman who had remained within, gave a subject to fill it up. She took the paper, and looking at it a moment or two, repeated the sonnet as fluently as if it had been written out before her. Several other subjects were then given her, and she filled the same sonnet with the same terminations. It was wonderful. I could not conceive of such facility. After she had satisfied them with this, she turned to me and said, that in compliment to the American improvisatore she would give an ode upon America. To disclaim the character and the honor would have been both difficult and embarrassing even for one who knew the language better than I, so I bowed and submitted. She began with the discovery of Columbus, claimed him as her countryman; and with some poetical fancies about the wild woods and the Indians, mingled up Montezuma and Washington rather promiscuously, and closed with a really beautiful apostrophe to liberty. My acknowledgments were fortunately lost in the general murmur.
A tragedy succeeded, in which she sustained four characters. This, by the working of her forehead and the agitation of her breast, gave her more trouble, but her fluency was unimpeded; and when she closed, the company was in raptures. Her gestures were more passionate in this performance, but, even with my imperfect knowledge of the language, they always seemed called for and in taste. Her friends rose as she sunk back on the sofa, gathered round her, and took her hands, overwhelming her with praises. It was a very exciting scene altogether, and I went away with new ideas of poetical power and enthusiasm.
One lodges like a prince in Florence, and pays like a beggar. For the information of artists and scholars desirous to come abroad, to whom exact knowledge on the subject is important, I will give you the inventory and cost of my whereabout.
I sit at this moment in a window of what was formerly the archbishop's palace—a noble old edifice, with vast staircases and resounding arches, and a hall in which you might put a dozen of the modern brick houses of our country. My chamber is as large as a ball-room, on the second story, looking out upon the garden belonging to the house, which extends to the eastern wall of the city. Beyond this lies one of the sweetest views in the world—the ascending amphitheatre of hills, in whose lap lies Florence, with the tall eminence of Fiesolé in the centre, crowned with the monastery in which Milton passed six weeks, while gathering scenery for his Paradise. I can almost count the panes of glass in the windows of the bard's room; and, between the fine old building and my eye, on the slope of the hill, lie thirty or forty splendid villas, half-buried in trees (Madame Catalani's among them), piled one above another on the steep ascent, with their columns and porticoes, as if they were mock temples in a vast terraced garden. I do not think there is a window in Italy that commands more points of beauty. Cole, the American landscape painter, who occupied the room before me, took a sketch from it. For neighbors, the Neapolitan ambassador lives on the same floor, the two Greenoughs in the ground-rooms below, and the palace of one of the wealthiest nobles of Florence overlooks the garden, with a front of eighty-five windows, from which you are at liberty to select any two or three, and imagine the most celebrated beauty of Tuscany behind the crimson curtains—the daughter of this same noble bearing that reputation. She was pointed out to me at the Opera a night or two since, and I have seen as famous women with less pretensions.