Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells
tell us, the factions that had long tormented Florence took new names, and those who had sided with the Buondelmonti and the Donati for the Pope against the Emperor became Guelphs, while the partisans of the Amidei and the Empire became Ghibellines, and began that succession of reciprocal banishments which kept a good fourth of the citizens in exile for three hundred years.
XII
What 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.
XIII
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.
I was not sorry to find this the tone of Piazza Donati, into which I had eddied from the austerity of Borgo degli Albizzi. It really belongs to a much remoter period than the older-looking street — to the Florence that lingers architecturally yet in certain narrow avenues to the Mercato Vecchio, where the vista is broken by innumerable pent-roofs, balconies, and cornices; and a throng of operatic figures in slouch hats and short cloaks are so very improbably bent on any realistic business, that they seem to be masquerading there in the mysterious fumes of the cook-shops. Yet I should be loath, for no very tangible reason, to have Piazza Donati like one of these avenues or in any wise different from what it is; certainly I should not like to have the back of Dante's house smartened up like the front, which looks into the Piazza San Martino. I do not complain that the restoration is bad; it is even very good, for all that I know; but the unrestored back is better, and I have a general feeling that the past ought to be allowed to tumble down in peace, though I have no doubt that whenever this happened I should be one of the first to cry out against the barbarous