The next room appears to have been his parlor, and the furniture is exactly as it stood when he died. In one corner is placed a bust of him in his youth, with his face perfect; and opposite, another, taken from a cast after his nose was broken by a fellow painter in the church of the Carmine. There are also one or two portraits of him, and the resemblance through them all, shows that the likeness we have of him in the engravings are uncommonly correct.
In the inner room, which was his studio, they show his pallet, brushes, pots, maul-sticks, slippers, and easel—all standing carelessly in the little closets around, as if he had left them but yesterday. The walls are painted in fresco, by Angelo himself, and represent groups of all the distinguished philosophers, poets and statesmen of his time. Among them are the heads of Petrarch, Dante, Galileo, and Lorenzo de Medici. It is a noble gallery! perhaps a hundred heads in all.
The descendant of Buonarotti is now an old man, and fortunately rich enough to preserve the house of his great ancestor as an object of curiosity. He has a son, I believe studying the arts at Rome.
On a beautiful hill which ascends directly from one of the southern gates of Florence, stands a church built so long ago as at the close of the first century. The gate, church, and hill, are all called San Miniato, after a saint buried under the church pavement. A large, and at present flourishing convent, hangs on the side of the hill below, and around the church stand the walls of a strong fortress, built by Michael Angelo. A half mile or more south, across a valley, an old tower rises against the sky, which was erected for the observations of Galileo. A mile to the left, on the same ridge, an old villa is to be seen in which Boccaccio wrote most of his "Hundred Tales of Love." The Arno comes down from Vallombrosa, and passing through Florence at the foot of San Miniato, is seen for three miles further on its way to Pisa; the hill, tower, and convent of Fiesole, where Milton studied and Catiline encamped with his conspirators, rise from the opposite bank of the river; and right below, as if you could leap into the lantern of the dome, nestles the lovely city of Florence, in the lap of the very brightest vale that ever mountain sheltered or river ran through. Such are the temptations to a walk in Italy, and add to it the charms of the climate, and you may understand one of a hundred reasons why it is the land of poetry and romance, and why it so easily becomes the land of a stranger's affection.
The villas which sparkle all over the hills which lean unto Florence, are occupied mainly by foreigners living here for health or luxury, and most of them are known and visited by the floating society of the place. Among them are Madame Catalani, the celebrated singer, who occupies a beautiful palace on the ascent of Fiesole, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of the "Imaginary Conversations," as refined a scholar perhaps as is now living, who is her near neighbor. A pleasant family of my acquaintance lives just back of the fortress of San Miniato, and in walking out to them with a friend yesterday, I visited the church again, and remarked more particularly the features of the scene I have described.
The church of San Miniato was built by Henry I. of Germany, and Cunegonde his wife. The front is pretty—a kind of mixture of Greek and Arabic architecture, crusted with marble. The interior is in the style of the primitive churches, the altar standing in what was called the presbytery, a high platform occupying a third of the nave, with two splendid flights of stairs of the purest white marble. The most curious part of it is the rotunda in the rear, which is lit by five windows of transparent oriental alabaster, each eight or nine feet high and three broad, in single slabs. The sun shone full on one of them while we were there, and the effect was inconceivably rich. It was like a sheet of half molten gold and silver. The transparency of course was irregular, but in the yellow spots of the stone the light came through like the effect of deeply stained glass.
A partly subterranean chapel, six or eight feet lower than the pavement of the church, extends under the presbytery. It is a labyrinth of marble columns which support the platform above, no two of which are alike. The ancient cathedral of Modena is the only church I have seen in Italy built in the same manner.
The midnight mass on "Christmas eve," is abused in all catholic countries, I believe, as a kind of saturnalia of gallantry. I joined a party of young men who were leaving a ball for the church of the Annunciata, the fashionable rendezvous, and we were set down at the portico when the mass was about half over. The entrances of the open vestibule were thronged to suffocation. People of all ages and conditions were crowding in and out, and the sound of the distant chant at the altar came to our ears as we entered, mingled with every tone of address and reply from the crowd about us. The body of the church was quite obscured with the smoke of the incense. We edged our way on through the press, carried about in the open area of the church by every tide that rushed in from the various doors, till we stopped in a thick eddy in the centre, almost unable to stir a limb. I could see the altar very clearly from this point, and I contented myself with merely observing what was about me, leaving my motions to the impulse of the crowd.