359 CHAPTER XXI. FLORENCE-BACCHUS IN TUSCANY-THE VENUS DE' MEDICI -AND ITALY IN GENERAL. RESOLVING to remain a while in Italy, though not in Genoa, we took our departure from that city in the summer of the year 1823, and returned into Tuscany in order to live at Florence. We liked Genoa on some accounts, and none the less for having a son born there, who, from that hour to this, has been a comfort to us. But in Florence there were more conveniences for us, more books, more fine arts, more illustrious memories, and a greater concourse of Englishmen; so that we might possess, as it were, Italy and England together. In Genoa we no longer possessed a companion of our own country; for Mrs. Shelley had gone to England; and we felt strange enough at first, thus seeking a home by ourselves in a foreign land. Unfortunately, in the first instance, the movement did us no good; for it was the height of summer when we set out, and in Italy this is not the time for being in motion. The children, however, living temperately, and not yet being liable to cares which temperance could not remove, soon recovered. It was otherwise with the parents; but there is a habit in being ill, as in everything else; and we disposed ourselves to go through our task of endurance as cheerfully as might be. In Genoa you heard nothing in the streets but the talk of money. I hailed it as a good omen in Florence, that the first two words which caught my ears were flowers and women (Fiori and Donne). The night of our arrival we put up at an hotel in a very public street, and were kept awake (as agreeably as illness would let us be) by songs and guitars. It was one of our pleasantest experiences of the south; and, for the moment, we lived in the Italy of books. One performer to a jovial accompaniment sang a song about somebody's fair wife, which set the street in roars of laughter. This was written in the year 1849, and held good till the year 1852, when, alas! he died. From the hotel we went to a lodging in the street of Beautiful Women-Via delle Belle Donne-a name which it is a sort of tune to pronounce. We there heard one night a concert in the street; and looking out, saw music-stands, books, &c. in regular order, and amateurs performing as in a room. Opposite our lodgings was an inscription on a house, purporting that it was the hospital of the Monks of Vallombrosa. Wherever you turned was music or a graceful memory. From the Via delle Belle Donne we went to live in the Piazza Santa Croce, in a corner house on the left side of it, near to the church of that name, which contains the ashes of Galileo, Michael Angelo, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli, Alfieri, and others. Englishmen call it the Florentine Westminster Abbey, but it has not the venerable look of the Abbey, nor, indeed, any resemblance at all-but that of a building half-finished; though it is several hundred years old. There are so many of these unfinished old edifices in Florence, owing to decline in the funds left for their completion, that they form a peculiar feature in this otherwise beautiful city, and a whole volume has been devoted to the subject. On the other side of this sepulchre of great men is the monastery in which Pope Sixtus the Fifth went stooping as if in decrepitude"looking," as he said afterwards, " for the keys of St. Peter." We lodged in the house of a Greek, who came from the island of Andros, and was called Dionysius; a name which has existed there, perhaps, ever since the god who bore it. Our host was a proper Bacchanalian, always drunk, and spoke faster than I ever heard. He had a "fair Andrian" for his mother, old and ugly, whose name was Bella. The church of Santa Croce would disappoint you as much inside as out, if the presence of the remains of great men did not always cast a mingled shadow of the awful and beautiful over one's thoughts. Any large space, also, devoted to the purposes of religion disposes the mind to the loftiest of speculations. The vaulted sky out of doors appears small, compared with the opening into immensity represented by that very enclosure-that larger dwelling than common, entered by a little door. The door is like a grave, and the enclosure like a vestibule of heaven. Agreeably to our old rustic propensities, we did not stop long in the city. We left Santa Croce to live at Maiano, a village on the slope of one of the Fiesolan hills, about two miles off. It gives its name to one of the earliest of the Italian poets, precursor of the greater Dante, called Dante of Maiano. He had a namesake living on the spot, in the person of a little boy-a terrible rover out of bounds, whom his parents were always shouting for with the apostrophe of "O Dante!" He excelled in tearing his clothes and getting a dirty face and hands. I heard his mother one evening hail his return home with the following welcome :—“ O Dante, what a brute beast you are!" I thought how probable it was, that the Florentine adversaries of the great poet, his namesake, would have addressed their abuser in precisely the same terms, after reading one of his infernal flayings of them in the Lakes of Tartarus. Dante and Alfieri were great favourites with a Hebrew family (jewellers, if I remember), who occupied the ground-floor of the house we lived in, the Villa Morandi, and who partook the love of music in common with their tribe. Their little girls declaimed out of Alfieri in the morning, and the parents led concerts in the garden of an evening. They were an interesting set of people, with marked characters; and took heartily to some specimens which I endeavoured to give them of the genius of Shakspeare. They had a French governess, who, though a remarkably good speaker of English in general, told me one day, in eulogizing the performance of one of the gentlemen who was a player on the bassoon, that "his excellence lay in the bason." It was the grandfather of this family whom I have described in another work (Men, Women, and Books), as hailed one May morning by the assembled merry-makers of the hamlet, in verses which implied that he was the efficient cause of the exuberance of the season. The manners of this hamlet were very pleasant and cheerful. The priest used to come of an evening, and take a Christian game at cards with his Hebrew friends. A young Abate would dance round a well with the daughters of the vine-growers, the whole party singing as they footed. I remember the burden of one of the songs "Ne di giorno, ne di sera, Non passiamo la selva nera.” One evening all the young peasantry in the neighbourhood assembled in the hall of the village, by leave of the proprietor (an old custom), and had the most energetic ball I ever beheld. The walls of the room seemed to spin round with the waltz, as though it would never leave off-the whirling faces all looking grave, hot, and astonished at one another. Among the musicians I observed one of the apprentices of my friend the bookseller, an evidence of a twofold mode of getting money not unknown in England. I recollected his face the more promptly, inasmuch as not many days previous he had accompanied me to my abode with a set of books, and astonished me by jumping on a sudden from one side of me to the other. I asked what was the matter, and he said, "A viper, sir," (una vipera, signore). He seemed to think that an Englishman might as well settle the viper as the bill. . Notwithstanding these amusements at Maiano, I passed a very disconsolate time; yet the greatest comfort I experienced in Italy (next to writing a book which I shall mention) was living in that neighbourhood, and thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano, supposed to have been situated at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet. That many-hearted writer (whose sentiment outweighed his levity a hundred fold, as a fine face is oftener serious than it is merry) was so fond of the place, that he has not only laid the two scenes of the Decameron on each side of it, with the valley which his company resorted to in the middle, but has made the two little streams that embrace Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and heroine of his Nimphale Fiesolano. A lover and his mistress are changed into them, after the fashion of Ovid. The scene of another of his works is on the banks of the Mugnone, a river a little distant; and the Decameron is full of the neighbouring villages. Out of the windows of one side of our house we saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to which, according to his biographers, his "joyous company" resorted in the first instance. A house belonging to the Macchiavelli was nearer, a little to the left; and farther to the left, among the blue hills, was the white village of Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born. The house is still in possession of the family. From our windows on the other side we saw, close to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the Boccaccio-house before mentioned still closer, the Decameron's Valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked over towards the quarter of the Mugnone and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the mountains of Pistoia. Lastly, from the. terrace in front, Florence lay clear and cathedralled before us, with the scene of Redi's Bacchus rising on the other side of it, and the Villa of Arcetri, illustrious for Galileo. Hazlitt, who came to see me there (and who afterwards, with one of his felicitous images, described the state of mind in which he found me, by saying that I was "moulting"), beheld the scene around us with the admiration natural to a lover of old folios and great names, and confessed, in the language of Burns, that it was a sight to enrich the eyes. But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I lived with the true human being, with his friends of the Falcon and the Basil, and my own not unworthy melancholy; and went about the flowering lanes and hills, solitary indeed, and sick to the heart, but not unsustained. In looking back to such periods of one's existence, one is surprised to find how much they surpass many seasons of mirth, and what a rich tone of colour their very darkness assumes, as in some fine old painting. My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the cloister of the Doccia, and sat on the pretty melancholy platform behind it, reading or looking through the pines down to Florence. In the Valley of Ladies I found some English trees (trees, not vine and olive), and even a meadow; and these, while I made them furnish me with a bit of my old home in the north, did no injury to the memory of Boccaccio, |