Cook's Tour de Force.
Florence is undoubtedly one of the best places in the world for studying pictures. Resolve to visit the Pitti Palace. Now I shall see something like a palace—the home of the Medici, adorned with all the beauty of architecture and sculpture which they loved so well! No monotonous, painted barrack like Buckingham Palace, no shabby brick house like St. James's. And now I shall see a collection of pictures worthily housed in a magnificent building! No contemptible piece of architecture like our National Gallery, where you fall over the staircase directly you go in at the door, and where, when you have recovered yourself, you find three staircases, facing you like the heads of Cerberus at another entrance, and always go up the wrong one, and have to come down again and clamber up another before you find what you want. Even then, if you seek the watercolours of the greatest English landscape painter, you must go down yet another staircase into the cellar.
Ascertain the position of the Pitti Palace, and stroll gently towards it. There is plenty of time, for the daylight will last another three hours. Cross the Ponte Vecchio, and reach a large open space opposite a magnificent jail. Yes! Even the jails here are magnificent! Continue strolling on until I arrive at the open country. Ask the way to the Palace, and am told that it is about two kilomètres back along the way I have come. Curious that I should not have noticed it. Return, looking carefully right and left, but do not see it anywhere, and again arrive opposite the jail. Ask a man I meet how that prison calls itself. He informs me courteously that it is the Palazzo Pitti. That! That dismal, monotonous, gloomy, brown structure? Why, Buckingham Palace is a joy for ever compared to it, and even Wormwood Scrubbs Prison reveals unsuspected charms! Would like to sit down to recover from the shock, but as one is more likely to find a public seat in a London square than in an Italian piazza, this is impossible. Therefore, totter to the great central entrance. Perhaps the grand staircase leading to the galleries may be as attractive as the exterior is forbidding.
Dynamite with care
Discover that the entrance to the galleries is by a small side door, where I leave my walking-stick, and climb a narrow, steep staircase. Then climb a narrower and steeper staircase, and finally reach a staircase so steep and narrow that it might more accurately be called a ladder. Begin to think I have mistaken the way. Perhaps I shall find myself in the attics of the Palace, and be arrested as an anarchist. Have left my stick below, and have not even a passport with which to protect myself. Step cautiously up the first rounds of the ladder, when suddenly a large body completely fills the space above, and comes slowly down. It is impossible to go on; it is impossible to remain where I am. Must therefore go down to the least narrow staircase, and wait till the obstruction has passed. Do so. Awful pause....
[What the obstruction was, "A First Impressionist" will tell us in our next.—Ed.]
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