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Tuscan Cities
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
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I walked through the Borgo Santi Apostoli for the last time late in March, and wandered round in the winter, still lingering in that wonderful old nest of palaces, before I came out into the cheerful bustle of Por San Maria, the street which projects the glitter of its jewelers' shops quite across the Ponte Vecchio. One of these, on the left corner, just before you reach the bridge, is said to occupy the site of the loggia of the Amidei; and if you are young and strong, you may still see them waiting there for Buondelmonte. But my eyes are not very good anymore, and I saw only the amiable modern Florentine crowd, swollen by a vast number of English and American tourists, who at this season begin to come up from Rome. There are a good many antiquarian and bric-a-brac shops in Por San Maria; but the towers which the vanished families used to fight from have been torn down, so that there is comparatively little danger from a chance bolt there.
One of the furious Ghibelline houses of this quarter were the Gherardini, who are said to have become the Fitzgeralds of Ireland, whither they went in their exile, and where they enjoyed their fighting privileges long after those of their friends and acquaintances remaining in Florence had been cut off. The city annals would no doubt tell us what end the Amidei and the Lamberti made; from the Uberti came the great Farinati, who, in exile with the other Ghibellines, refused with magnificent disdain to join them in the destruction of Florence. But the history of the Buondelmonti has become part of the history of the world. One branch of the family migrated from Tuscany to Corsica, where they changed their name to Buonaparte, and from them came the great Napoleon. As to that "one of the Gangolandi," he teases me into vain conjecture, lurking in the covert of his family name, an elusive personality which I wish some poet would divine for us. The Donati afterward made a marriage which brought them into as lasting remembrance as the Buondelmonti; and one visits their palaces for the sake of Dante rather than Napoleon. They enclose, with the Alighieri house in which the poet was born, 'the little Piazza Donati, which you reach by going up the Corso to the Borgo degli Albizzi, and over against them on that street the house of the Portinari stood, where Beatrice lived, and where it must have been that she first appeared to the rapt boy who was to be the world's Dante, " clothed in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, garlanded and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age." The palace of the Salviati — in which Cosimo I. was born, and in which his father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, taught the child courage by flinging him from an upper window into the arms of a servitor below — has long occupied the site of the older edifice; and the Piazza Donati, whatever dignity it may once have had, is now nothing better than a shabby court. The back windows of the tall houses surrounding it look into it when not looking into one another, and see there a butcher's shop, a smithy, a wagon-maker's, and an inn for peasants with stabling. On a day when I was there, a wash stretched fluttering across the rear of Dante's house, and the banner of a green vine trailed from a loftier balcony. From one of the Donati casements an old woman in a purple knit jacket was watching a man repainting an omnibus in front of the wagon-shop; a great number of canaries sang in cages all round the piazza; a wrinkled peasant with a faded green cotton umbrella under his arm gave the place an effect of rustic sojourn; and a diligence that two playful stable-boys were long in hitching up drove jingling out, with its horses in brass-studded head-stalls, past where I stood under the fine old arches of the gateway. I had nothing to object to all this, nor do I suppose that this last state of his old neighborhood much vexes the poet now. It was eminently picturesque, with a sort of simple cheerfulness of aspect, the walls of the houses in the little piazza being of different shades of buff, with window-shutters in light green opening back upon them from those casements where the shrieking canaries hung. The place had that tone which characterizes so many city perspectives in Italy, and especially Florence — which makes the long stretch of Via Borgognissanti so smiling, and bathes the sweep of Lungarno in a sunny glow wholly independent of the state of the weather. As you stroll along one of these light-yellow avenues you say to yourself, " Ah, this is Florence! " And then suddenly you plunge into the gray-brown gloom of such a street as the Borgo degli Albizzi, with lofty palaces climbing in vain toward the sun, and frowning upon the street below with fronts of stone, rude or sculptured, but always stern and cold; and then that, too, seems the only Florence. They are in fact equally Florentine; but I suppose one expresses the stormy yet poetic life of the old commonwealth, and the other the serene, sunny commonplace of the Lorrainese regime.
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