In and out of Florence; a new introduction to a well-known city

Prefatory Note

This Is a sort of guide-book or Introduction to Florence, both for those who actually are coming or have come to It, and for those who can come only In the spirit. And It tells something about Florence and the Florentines of to-day as well as about those glorious people of the earlier centuries.

Finally, It tells also something of how one may become for oneself with least trouble and expense and most advantage and Interest temporarily a Florentine. Or at least It describes how this was really done, to the unreckonable great joy of the doers, not only through their days In Florence, but for what promises to be all of their days of memory hereafter.

M. V.

The author and publishers wish to express their appreciation of the courtesy of the well-known Florentine firms, the Fratelli Alinari (i, Via Strozzi) and G. Brogi (i, Via Tornabuoni), in permitting them to reproduce the copyrighted photographs used in this book.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. In Florence and House-Hunting . . . . i

II. Our Villa 15

Chapter I In Florence And House-hunting

ONE may well be disposed to risk much for one's first glimpse of Florence, but hardly a wife. And Rowena's symptoms, violent and astounding ever since passing Prato, had become of a sudden truly alarming. When finally she lunged far out over the drop glass in the compartment door and with a manner of Columbus discovering America, cried out, "Florence!" I could no longer restrain myself, but frantically clutched both hands full of skirt and dragged back for dear life. Also I wanted a turn at looking out myself.

It is not the lifting dome of Brunelleschi that one sees first on approaching Florence, as it is Michelangelo's great egg of St. Peter's that is first descried on the road to Rome. It is rather the egregiously re-made Galileo tower thrusting itself heavily skyward from Arcetri hill. It was this sad reminder of Florentine decadence, this sacred relic sold by the city to a restoration-mad collector and seller of antiquities, that gave Rowena the signal to cry, "Florence!"

" Florence ! And the magnificence and passionate agitation of Italy's prime sends its fragrance towards us like a blossom-laden bough." Florence, Mecca of that sect of believers, persistent even in these breathless days of machines and money-madness, the believers in the reality of the ideal. Florence, reliquary, holding such choice treasures of the beati of art and poetry that hundreds of thousands come to press their reverent lips to its surface. Florence, adorned, inlaid, canopied cradle of the noblest of the family of creative man reborn. " Why be astonished," asks reverent Hopital, " by the magic that Florence exercises on cultivated spirits? It attracts them by all that captivates the imagination, appeals to the intelligence, makes palpitate the heart. Its history is a little world where the greatest interests of earth have contended, where all the passions of man have burned. Its science and literature have moved all there is of good and bad in us; and finally its art is, if not the most perfect, at least the most intellectual and most immaterial, and that which gives our thinking faculties the most powerful stimulus." From Nature's majesty in Switzerland and her rippling, glinting beauty at Bellagio; from the enchantment of Venice fairyland, and the soft luxury of earth's brown lap in Arno valley, one comes wellattuned to Florence and eager to see and feel her achievement of spirit and genius. Even on one visiting her for the first time and guiltless of any knowledge of her beyond a vague idea of the eminent role she has played in the eternal human tragedy, Florence makes from the first an ineffaceable impression. She is an old city, this City of the Lily, but she still lives in all her grace of form and color. She is like a flower, some one has said, which, when fully blown, instead of withering on its stalk, turned as it were into stone. And she is such a concentration of the achieved things of the spirit, such a materialization of inspired visions put into enduring form and color; she is so immediately revealing and satisfying! In Rome one sightsees through the centuries; in Venice, one dreams in a color-shifting fairyland made musical by moving water; in Florence one lives in the Italy that gave the world a new life. One merges into the very atmosphere of inspiration; one becomes as much of a poet and artist as he ever can be.

But one cannot live on wonder and inspiration alone. Even John in the desert land had his locusts and wild honey. The pilgrim arriving in Florence, the goal of his longings and hopes ; this pilgrim, climbing out of the express from Bologna, has first of everything to face the sordid earthly considerations of a place to lay his head and food to fill his mouth.

A hotel for a few days, a pension for a few weeks, a house or apartment for a few months. We were for months and a house. But most arrivals are for days or weeks. The hotels most frequented are those along the Arno, especially those that stretch along the north bank from the Ponte Santa Trinita to the Piazza Manin. The best hotels are here, with others good but cheaper. And in the same general region are many pensions. But when a city is completely run to pensions, as Florence is, no quarter will hold them all. There are many desirable ones out in the clean new quarter around the English cemetery; perhaps it will be less disconcerting to say around the Piazza Donatello. The artistic and the literary rather gather here.

It is a common belief that the hotels and pensions on the other side of the Arno are cheaper, and perhaps, the pensions anyway, as good. So, if you are willing to walk across a bridge for most of your sightseeing you may save a lira a day. And who is not willing to walk across a city bridge?

Bridges of London ! bridges of Paris ! bridges of Florence ! Fascinating, unique Ponte Vecchio ! Graceful Santa Trinita ! Historic alle Grazie I What time you will waste in crossing these bridges ! You will come too late to the church with the frescoed chapel; it has just closed for midday. You will miss the tram for Fiesole; ten minutes of waiting. You will get to your pension tardy for the table-d'hote; the soup, never hot, will now not even be warm.

But what this lost time will have won ! Sometimes we loitered on alle Grazie to hang over the railing and look north to the Fiesole and Settignano hills with their wondrous colors of twilight as the sun slanted across their climbing villages, their clustered villas, their silver-gray slopes of olive. And we mused, as we loitered, over a history of seven centuries, for the piers and arches under our feet were built in 1237. Originally called Rubaconte in honor of the Podesta of Florence at the time of its building, the bridge gets its present name from a tabernacle of the Madonna delle Grazie which was in the little church that used to stand at one end of it. About fifty years after the building of the bridge occurred the greatest historical event in its memory: the celebration of the ephemeral peace between the Guelphs and Ghibellines arranged by Pope Gregory X on his journey through Florence to the Council of Lyons.

"At the end of July, 1273, the Florentines assembled on the banks of the Arno, which at this point broadened into a sort of lake, to witness the Pope, who, followed by his Court and accompanied by King Charles of Naples and the Emperor Baldovino of Constantinople with their imposing retinues, appeared on the middle of the bridge, blessed the crowd, and obliged the opposing parties to kiss and embrace, subsequently ending the ceremonies of the day by laying the cornerstone of the church called San Gregorio della Pace.

" The impression produced by the magnificence of this solemn function and the manner in which it took place remained for a long time; and the church of Saint Gregory of Peace existed for many centuries, even to our own time. But the peace which it was intended to commemorate lasted exactly four days, after which Florence again became divided by the quarrels and fights of the Guelph and Ghibelline factions, and Pope Gregory, discouraged and mortified, left the city." — Carocci.

Through several centuries the bridge carried numerous little houses built on its piers. These included six little chapels, three small convents, and several picturesque birdcage-like houses, in one of which lived Benedetto Menzini, a satirical poet of much reputation in the seventeenth century. In one of the convents were " confined for education, from choice or political motives, princesses of some great Italian families. Among them were the celebrated Caterina Sforza, who died there, Caterina and Eleonora Cybo di Messa, Lelia Orsini di Pitigliano, and the unfortunate Camilla Martelli, wife of Cosimo I dei Medici." Other times our way was across crowded, fascinating Ponte Vecchio. It was on this bridge that Cosimo

" Other times our way was across crowded, fascinating Ponte Vecchio."

dei Medici found Camilla Martelli, his unfortunate wife, who soon got shut up in the convent on alle Grazie. And it was at the south end that Ariosto lived for half a century in the Hospice of the Knights of Malta. And there occurred the murder of young Buondelmonte, that set off the long cruel struggle of the Whites and the Blacks.

But it will be Ponte Vecchio's interest of to-day that will overpower most of us; the solid rows on either side, except for a short way in the middle, of little houses in which the Florentine goldsmiths and jewel workers, disciples of Cellini, contrive and display their wares. The fascination of those little shops; the seizing scenery of those windows; the enticing ways of these politest of present-day Florentines ! There is a current rumor that wherever in Florence you may get false wares under fair names, here on the old bridge there is honor among — jewelers. What is called ruby is not " reconstructed"; what is declared emerald is not " doublette." Let us believe it. And such delicate manipulation of gold and silver; such revealing display of the blandishment of precious stones and pearl, of coral and colored glass, will not often elsewhere come under one's eye.

In the little open space in the middle of the bridge we may turn our eyes from the glitter of jewels to the fascinations of the sliding river, the distant hills, the guarding walls of old buildings that follow its banks. Here there is set a bust of the patron saint of all the inhabitants of the bridge, Benvenuto Cellini, that swaggering master-jeweler and master-wit of the olden days. If one would see Cellini as goldsmith instead of sculptor, he should spend an hour or two in that lower room in the Pitti Palace where are the golden cups, finger basins, and the dinner service of the Medici.

Just under Cellini's bust there occasionally sits an old woman with a tray of little wooden cages too small for birds, but which house, nevertheless, a lively lot of musicians. They are singing crickets. Like the Japanese, the Italians have killed many of their wild songbirds and supplement their field music with that from cages. Perhaps it was from this need that came the inspiration of one of the Ponte Vecchio wonder-workers to devise the glittering marvel of bird-song shown us one day.

It was a bejeweled casket which when opened let spring up a tiny bird figure, resplendently draped in fragments of humming-birds' feathers, and pouring forth from vibrating beak and bobbing head a clear and liquid little song. We let our curiosity even go the length of asking the price of this toy. And then we watched with awe-struck eyes as the gemmy thing was put carefully back into the steel safe.

Finally, the Ponte Santa Trinita, the beautiful bridge, with its perfectly satisfying curve and line. Seen from the Ponte Vecchio, from Lung' Arno Acciajuoli or Guicciardini, or from the roadway winding down from San Miniato to Porta San Niccolo, it proves in how simple a thing, just a curve, just a group of lines, genius can show itself.

Whenever we crossed it we bought a few flowers from Antonetta, the lavender woman. You can see in her face the beauty she once had. Four years ago, Rowena knew her a beautiful woman. She added to the workingman husband's wages the soldi got from selling flowers. And there were many soldi; for she was so joyous and smiling, so polite and friendly, that all who often crossed the bridge knew her. The tourists kodaked her and she was the flower woman of Florence.

Then the husband died, and the soldi for flowers and from the kodaking tourists were all there were for her and the two children; one a crippled girl, the other a hunchback son. Her face took on a look of seriousness. So the tourists stopped kodaking her. Then the girl cripple fell into a wasting, lingering Illness. The flower woman had to stay at home much of the time to care for her, and the regular patrons turned to other venders. Then the little girl died and she could again give all her time to flowerselling. But it was too late to gather her patrons again; and she had lost her old place in the line at the supply gardens. So she gave up bouquets and fresh roses and carnations and began to sell lavender. Then the hunchback boy, who had always earned a few soldi, dropped one day into the cloudy waters of the river that ran under the bridge.

Antonetta's face to-day is no longer beautiful; her joyousness is gone. She lives in a stanzaccio that costs her ten dollars a year for rent. She eats — what does she eat? And she pays this rent and for that which she eats by selling lavender, sometimes flowers; " elle meurt de I'hiver en of rant le printemps." In

Antonetta, the flower woman.

lo In Florence and House-Hunting

four years so much has happened, all of it bad, and she is trying, perhaps, when she stands unnoticing, to solve the problem of a God who is all-kind and a life that seems all unkindness.

Whether you choose your hotel or pension on this side or that side of the river, one thing you will find out speedily. That is, that the estimate of prices given you before leaving home by the friend who spent a month in Florence four or five years ago will have to be revised. The pensions are in this year, 1909, at least one lira a day more expensive than they were in 1904, and by another five years they will hkely have added another lira to the tariff. Still, one can live to-day very comfortably and decently in good Florence pensions for five lire (one dollar) a day, and in better ones, of course, for six or seven or eight lire. The hotels make pension rates from nine to twelve to fourteen Hre a day.

If you Hve long in any pension, however good, you will still have need of knowing where you can get a good cup of coffee or chocolate with biscotti; or perhaps a glass of German beer with a club sandwich. The restaurants and cafes of Florence are not such attractive or admirable places as those of Rome or Venice or Milan. Where, indeed, in any European city will one find a better cafe than the Nazionale in Rome, or a more attractive one than Florian's on St. Mark's? But with Giacosa's and Doney's restaurants on the Via Tornabuoni, the more Bohemian Lapi's and Paoli's tucked away in their side streets, and the Gambrinus and Reinlnghaus cafes on the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, Florence can very well

In Florence and House-Hunting ii

help out one's pension fare by anything from an ice to a dinner. And to pick and choose, plate in hand, before the open case of varied and wonderful pasti in a bakery like Luigi Gilli's, is a special kind of joy that comes only next to the successful running down of an out-of-the-way Botticelli.

If one likes seeing a touch of Bohemia, or what seems to be that, as he seeks his five-o'clock rest and refreshment, he can take an outside seat at the Reininghaus, more familiarly called Jacquetta Rossa, or Red Jacket, by reason of the golf jackets affected by the waiters. Here gather most of the pallid faces with burning bright eyes, the long hair, the unusual hats and clothes, and the speakers of ultra-foreign tongues, that Florence has to exhibit. Art students and musicians, poets and near-poets, anarchists plotting for the woe of monarchs and the weal of the proletariat, make this their picturesque rendezvous.

The thing about any European cafe in good situation, that is, on a public square or populous streets, that makes it worth more than its merely material refreshment to the tourist, is, of course, the revelation it makes of the native people and their visitors. Idling at a cafe table on the sidewalk with eyes open is to assist at the unrolling of a panorama of the life of a foreign folk. The faces and dress, the speech and gesture, the wit or stupidities, the customs and behavior of all sorts and conditions of people are revealed with the winking swiftness and staccato emphasis of a cinematograph.

Perhaps you are not in Florence for days or weeks, but for months. Then you will want as we did, not a hotel or even a pension, but housekeeping apartments, or better, a villa beyond the barriers. To satisfy this need one must inquire, inquire. Ask of all acquaintances, of all Florentines you come into speaking contact with, of pension mistresses, of shopkeepers, of your barber and your banker. And, of course, go to the agents. Their names are in the Florence Herald, the English newspaper of the Anglo-American colony. Also there are always advertisements in this paper of apartments and villas to let. Take tram rides and walking trips about town and out of town, watching for the " to let " signs. And someway, finally, there will turn up just what is wanted.

There are always some apartments to be had along the Arno, and if one's stay is not to run into late summer or early fall, they are, if for no other reason than the view, perhaps the most desirable. Friends of ours have a dainty set of rooms on the top floor of a building on Lung' Arno Acciajuoli. From their little balcony — I should pay the whole rent of the suite for that balcony and one sleeping room ! — what incomparable seeing! Straight down, the green Arno, with its bridges, a skiff here and there, perhaps a pair of white four-oar shells with crews in bright-colored jerseys. Across, that last remaining stretch of old Florence bordering the water's edge. Everywhere else along the river the old houses have been torn down and the Lung' Arno promenades built in. It is a fascinating block of angular, irregular, smallwindowed, towering soiled whitish and yellow walls, behind which the little furnaces of the silversmiths are roaring and scores of bare-armed, deft-fingered workmen are hammering and beating, drawing out and twisting the shining silver strands in a haze of heat and smoke. And then looking up the river into the face of San Miniato del Monte and on beyond and above to the hills, and finally to the mountain crests by Vallombrosa ; and the other way down the river with Bellosguardo and Oliveto for near background and the high Carrara in the far distance.

That last remaining stretch of old Florence bordering the water's edge."

Think of the lights of morning and evening on the pictures in this gallery !

But better than three or five rooms in town is a house of one's own with a garden and a pony stable; a villa on a hill-slope above Florence, in a plantation of olive and vine. And so we set out in search for a villa. The little rest of this chapter is the tale of Rowena's success. For she did the searching and she found the villa.

There were villas too large and too expensive; others too small, and one for a song; just the taxes apparently, but with drawbacks, of course. Finally, and sooner than you would think, the exactly right one appeared. The discovery was by a friend; the consummation by an agent. The business details were an agreement to rent for at least three months and payment In advance for the rent for these months; the necessity of taking on the gardener attached to the place and paying his wages at an already fixed rate; the assisting at the making of, and the signed agreement to, an Inventory of all the household furnishings; the waiving of any furnishings in the way of linen and table silver (these we had to rent specially), and the waiving of any rights to the vegetables or fruits that the garden might produce unless from seeds of our own planting, but a recognition of our rights to all the flowers. We might, I presume, have picked all the pear blossoms, but we could not pick the pears if we let the flowers stay on the trees ! To all these matters we agreed; paid our three months' rent with a commission to the agent — it seems the lessee and not the lessor pays the commission over here — and faced the business of finding servants and establishing ourselves.

Chapter II Our Villa

MRS. ROSS, the active authoress who has compiled a voluminous red book called " Florentine Villas," as well as another about Florentine palaces, catalogues twenty-three really and truly villas of the castle or palace type that inhabit the hilltops and slopes girdling Florence. All these approved villas, with perhaps one or two exceptions, date from the fifteenth century or earlier, and in their histories the names of emperors, popes, and cardinals stand out in imposing relief. Hardly less conspicuous, and much more familiar and enhancing, are the names of many of the poets and painters whose memories and priceless bequests of song and picture and marble make Florence the magic city she is. That the present owners of these villas are mostly Englishmen and Germans of less conspicuous claims to fame only tells of the decadence of Italy, and need detract not the least from the abiding interest of the storied palaces.

But these twenty-three villas are in truth but a tithe of the reality. There are hosts of others, less princely in their proportions, perhaps, and more uncertain in their fragrance of fame, but none the less beautiful and not infrequently of most interesting i6 Our Villa

association. Their gleaming white and pink walls rise well above the olive orchards and vineyards that cover all the hill-slopes and valley floor about Florence. There are literally hundreds of them, each with its own beauty of scene and setting, its own vagaries of tower or crenelated wall, loggia or carved buttress.

And each sits in a garden; whether on hilltop or dropping slope or in the flat-floored valley, there is always the lush growth of tree and shrub and bedded plants; the garden of walks and arbors, terraces and bowers; of quaint bits of stone stairway and wall, fountains and grotto pools. And hardly one that does not rear beside its cool white walls a group, a row, perhaps only a pair, of dark steeple-like cypresses. As we stand on the roof-terrace of our house and let our eyes range the miles of girdling hill-slopes about the nestling city, these countless white villa spots, with their guarding sentinel black cypresses, dot the whole landscape.

I have said that many of the uncatalogued villas have their associations interesting or dear to the visitor in Florence. It is very true. Not a giant's stone's throw from our own perching home on Settignano hill-side is a modest gray stone house with square battlement tower which once belonged to the Buonarotti family, and where the great Michelangelo himself " drew in with his foster-mother's milk the mallet and chisel with which he afterward carved his statues." For this nurse mother was the daughter of a stone-cutter. On the floor of this villa the boy Michel drew his first picture.

Photo. Author

Iron Gate in Wall near D'Annunzio's Villa

Indeed, we neighbor abundantly with distinction. A few rods further down the hill-side from the old Buonarotti house is the former country home of' Eleonora Duse, with its quiet inclosed garden sweet with roses. It was her fancy to have only roses in the garden and clambering up the rough walls to her deep-set windows. In one of these stood a tall vase with a single white rose whenever the maestra was in residence. What a pretty conceit for a house flag ! The house is low and rambling, looking rather like an unusually large contadino's house than the more pretentious villa. In its door-post is cut " La Porzuincola."

A high-walled narrow roadway, dropping deviously down the hill, runs by the house and is opened on by the broad front doors. Just across the roadway from these doors is a beautiful small iron gate let into the stone wall of the adjoining podere (farm), with a bright-colored little Holy Mary set into the heavy stone cross-piece above the gate. On the podere side of the gate is cut " Pensa! " This podere is leased by Gabriele d'Annunzio, and in his absence is mostly given over to a horde of pampered dogs of a dozen breeds. They have their own cuoco and cameriere (cook and waiter), says our Beppi, and Beppi knows. He knows the household intimacies of every home on Settignano hill, as does every Settignanese, of course. On the posts of the great iron gate that guards the dark tree-grown garden of the establishment of dogs and literature are cut "Noli me tangere " — this under the bell-pull — and " Cave Canes ac Dominum" — on the other post. There i8 Our Villa

seems to be a breath of irreverence in the genius of Italian literary decadence !

A strong contrast of association is furnished by the very next house in the same podere with d'Annunzio's establishment. This is the Villa Viviani, a high, square, pink-walled affair overlooking Florence and facing Fiesole and the rugged Apuan Alps in the distant west. It was in this villa that Mark Twain finished " Pudd'nhead Wilson," that best, because most human thing of his, and wrote in its preface: " Given under my hand this 2d day of January, 1 893, at the Villa Viviani, village of Settignano, three miles back from Florence on the hills; the same certainly affording the most charming view to be found on this planet and with it the most dream-like and enchanting sunsets to be found on any planet or even in any solar system."

If we do not tramp the hill-slopes for distinguished villas, but stay at home and sit on our roof-terrace under the shadow of the big red-brown water hrocca that holds our acqiia da hagna, and gives our villa its name, still we find no end of sights to thrill us.

Along the curve of the hill-ring toward Fiesole our eyes follow over soft gray olives and tall close-robed somber cypresses to houses where history inhabits; where picture and poetry germed and blossomed; houses resonant with memories of great men and women.

There with its crenelated skyline is the very house where Boccaccio's gay youths and ladies amorose told their tales of love, while the death chants of the black-cowled Misericordia rose dolorous from plaguestruck Florence below. And just beyond is a cypressguarded villa that belonged to the great Medici themselves : a house in which poets and painters lived with those extraordinary patrons of the arts, those merchant princes whose life was for so long the very life of Florence.

Among these older houses are newer ones with their names of more modern times. Landor's villa, Salvini's home, Hawthorne's across the valley, and the others. A score might be catalogued to tell of the drawing and holding power these Florentine hill-slopes have had, and still have, over the sensitive spirits of art and song.

But this chapter was really to be a most specifically descriptive and practical one, to serve as introduction to this tale of how one lives modestly in a villino at Florence. It was to tell of the outsides and insides, and the conveniences and inconveniences, the differences and similarities of a Florentine dwelling when compared with " home." So there is necessity of a sort of word-picture of a villa; a catalogue of dimensions and relations, and an inventory of parts and appurtenances. As a matter of fact, such an inventory, even to each stray unbound Tauchnitz in its bookshelves and fugitive cork-screw and can-opener in the pantries, has to be made out and mutually agreed to as correct by contracting owner and lessee, and has to be faced with full seriousness and responsibility by the lessee at the time of his surrender of the premises to the owner.

Our villa is a house and garden, a pony stable, and a gardener's lodge. And it has a stone laundrytub that is the most picturesque thing about the premises — at least it is when Marina, the lovely laundress — the phrase is as true as it is alliterative — is bending over it. The villa lies on the up and down road that winds along the hill-side from Settignano village to Villa Gamberaia, the show place of the whole Settignano hill. This little stretch of roadway from the village to our gate is not the least of our joys. It dips and lifts its curving way along the verge of the hill lined by low stone walls, one of which grows higher and higher as we near the villa, and is crested for many rods with climbing roses; and gives from every yard of its way the most wonderful views of the Arno and Florence in its hill-rimmed cup. The villa was formerly a group of three contadinos' (farmers') houses, which through the persistent and expensive efforts of two successive English owners have been merged into one. One can pick out the original units with some accuracy by standing on the roof-terrace and attending to the levels and directions of the various parts of the tiled roof. But the merger of the houses has been a successful one and there are no indications of faction or falling apart of the original trio. One of them, at least, is of decent age, as a sort of cornerstone is inscribed " 1639." An inscribed plate put up by his nephew on the highway side of the house attests that in one of them lived, a generation or two ago, a painter of some note, one Malatesta. The wife of this nephew is now our teacher of Italian, and thus do we curiously maintain the association of our villa with the family of Malatesta.