What I Remember, Volume 2

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

[Footnote 2: "Oh! Poor fellow! Have you hurt yourself? Up with you! It will be nothing! Up again on your horse, eh?">[

I remember another circumstance which occurred a few years previously to that just mentioned, and which was in its way equally characteristic. In one of the principal cafés of Florence, situated on the Piazza del Duomo—the cathedral yard—a murder was committed. The deed was done in full daylight, when the café was full of people. Such crimes, and indeed violent crimes of any sort, were exceedingly rare in Florence. That in question was committed by stabbing, and the motive of the criminal who had come to Florence for the express purpose of killing his enemy was vengeance for a great wrong. Having accomplished his purpose he quietly walked out of the café and went away. I happened to be on the spot shortly afterwards, and inquired, with some surprise at the escape of the murderer, why he had not been arrested red-handed. "He had a sword in his hand!" said the person to whom I had addressed myself, in a tone which implied that that quite settled the matter—that of course it was absolutely out of the question to attempt to interfere with a man who had a sword in his hand!

It is a very singular thing, and one for which it is difficult to offer any satisfactory explanation, that the change in Florence in respect to the prevalence of crime has been of late years very great indeed I have mentioned more than once, I think, the very remarkable absence of all crimes of violence which characterised Florence in the earlier time of my residence there. It was not due to rigorous repression or vigilance of the police, as may be partly judged by the above anecdote. There was, in fact, no police that merited the name. But anything in the nature of burglary was unheard of. The streets were so absolutely safe that any lady might have traversed them alone at any hour of the day or night. And I might add to the term "crimes of violence" the further statement that pocket-picking was equally unheard of.

Now there is perhaps more crime of a heinous character in Florence, in proportion to the population, than in any city in the peninsula. I think that about the first indication that all that glittered in the mansuetude of Firenze la Gentile was not gold, showed itself on the occasion of an attempt to naturalise at Florence the traditional sportiveness of the Roman Carnival. There and then, as all the world knows, it has been the immemorial habit for the population, high and low, to pelt the folks in the carriages during their Corso procession with bonbons, bouquets, and the like. Gradually at Rome this exquisite fooling has degenerated under the influence of modern notions, till the bouquets having become cabbage stalks, very effective as offensive missiles, and the bonbons plaster of Paris pellets, with an accompanying substitution of a spiteful desire to inflict injury for the old horse-play, it has become necessary to limit the duration of the Saturnalia to the briefest span, with the sure prospect of its being very shortly altogether prohibited. But at Florence on the first occasion, now several years ago, of an attempt to imitate the Roman practice, the conduct of the populace was such as to demand imperatively the immediate suppression of it. The carriages and the occupants of them were attacked by such volleys of stones and mud, and the animus of the people was so evidently malevolent and dangerous, that they were at once driven from the scene, and any repetition of the practice was forbidden.

It is so remarkable as to be, at all events, worth noting, that contemporaneously with this singular deterioration in respect to crime, another social change has taken place in Florence. La Gentile Firenze has of late years become very markedly the home of clericalism of a high and aggressive type. This is an entirely new feature in the Florentine social world. In the old time clerical views were sufficiently supported by the Government to give rise to the famous Madiai incident, which has been before alluded to. But clericalism in its more aggressive aspects was not in the ascendant either bureaucratically or socially. The spirit which had informed the policy and government of the famous Leopoldine laws was still sufficiently alive in the mental habitudes of both governors and governed to render Tuscany a rather suspected and disliked region in the mind of the Vatican and of the secular governments which sympathised with the Vatican's views and sentiments. The change that has taken place is therefore a very notable one. I have no such sufficiently intimate knowledge of the subject as would justify me in linking together the two changes I have noticed in the connection of cause and effect. I only note the synchronism.

On the other hand there are not wanting sociologists who maintain that the cause of the outburst of lawlessness and crime which has undeniably characterised Florence of late years is to be sought for exactly in that old-time, easy-going tolerance in religious matters, which they say is now producing a tardy but sure crop from seeds that, however long in disclosing the true nature of the harvest to be expected from them, ought never to have been expected by wise legislators to produce any other.

Non nostrum est tantas componere lites! But Florence is certainly no longer Firenze la Gentile as she so eminently was in the days when I knew her so well.

Whether any of the other cities of Italy have in any degree ceased to merit the traditional epithets which so many successive generations assigned to them—how far Genoa is still la Superba, Bologna la Grassa, Padua la Dotta, Lucca la Industriosa—I cannot say. Venezia is unquestionably still la Bella. And as for old Rome, she vindicates more than ever her title to the epithet Eterna, by her similitude to those nursery toys which, throw them about as you will, still with infallible certitude come down heads uppermost.

As for the Florence of my old recollections, there were in the early days of them many little old-world sights and sounds which are to be seen and heard no longer, and which differentiated the place from other social centres.

I remember a striking incident of this sort which happened to my mother and myself "in the days before the flood," therefore very shortly after our arrival there.