Читать книгу Tuscan Cities - William Dean Howells - Страница 15
XII
ОглавлениеWhat impresses one in this and the other old Florentine stories is the circumstantial minuteness with which they are told, and their report has an air of simple truth very different from the literary factitiousness which one is tempted to in following them. After six centuries the passions are as living, the characters as distinct, as if the thing happened yesterday. Each of the persons stands out a very man or woman, in that clear, strong light of the early day which they move through. From the first the Florentines were able to hit each other off with an accuracy which comes of the southern habit of living much together in public, and one cannot question these lineaments. Buondelmonte, Mosca Lamberti, Monna Gualdrada, and even that " one of the Gangolandi," how they possess the imagination! Their palaces still rise there in the grim, narrow streets, and seem no older in that fine Florentine air than houses of fifty years ago elsewhere. They were long since set apart, of course, to other uses. The chief palace of the Buondelmonti is occupied by an insurance company; there is a little shop for the sale of fruit and vegetables niched into the grand Gothic portal of the tower, and one is pushed in among the pears and endives by the carts which take up the whole street from wall to wall in passing. The Lamberti palace was confiscated by the Guelph party, and was long used by the Art of Silk for its guild meetings. Now it is a fire-engine house, where a polite young lieutenant left his architectural drawings to show us some frescos of Giotto lately uncovered there over an old doorway.
Over a portal outside the arms of the guild were beautifully carved by Donatello, as you may still see; and in a lofty angle of the palace the exquisite loggia of the family shows its columns and balustrade against the blue sky.
I say blue sky for the sake of the color, and because that is expected of one in mentioning the Florentine sky , but, as a matter of fact, I do not believe it was blue hah a dozen days during the winter of 1882-83. The prevailing weather was gray, and down in the passages about the bases of these mediaeval structures the sun never struck, and the point of the mediaeval nose must always have been very cold from the end of November till the beginning of April.
The tradition of an older life continues into the present everywhere; only in Italy it is a little more evident, and one realizes in the discomfort of the poor, who have succeeded to these dark and humid streets, the discomfort of the rich who once inhabited them, and whose cast-off manners have been left there. Monna Gualdrada would not now call out to Buondelmonte riding under her window* and make him come in and see her beautiful daughter; but a woman of the class which now peoples the old Donati houses might do it.
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.