The Story of Florence Part 18

From the world, to follow her, I fled while yet a girl, and in her habit I enclosed myself, and promised the way of her company.

Thereafter men more used to ill than good tore me away from the sweet cloister; and G.o.d doth know what my life then became."--_Paradiso_ iii. Wicksteed's translation.

It was at Poggio Imperiale, then called the Poggio dei Baroncelli, that a famous combat took place during the early days of the siege, in which Ludovico Martelli and Dante da Castiglione fought two Florentines who were serving in the imperial army, Giovanni Bandini and Bertino Aldobrandini. Both Martelli, the original challenger, and Aldobrandini were mortally wounded. Martelli's real motive in sending the challenge is said to have been that he and Bandini were rivals for the favours of a Florentine lady, Marietta de' Ricci. Among the many beautiful villas and gardens which stud the country beyond Poggio Imperiale, are Galileo's Tower, from which he made his astronomical observations, and the villa in which he was visited by Milton. Near Santa Margherita a Montici, to the east, is the villa in which the articles of capitulation were arranged by the Florentine amba.s.sadors with Ferrante Gonzaga, commander of the Imperial troops, and Baccio Valori, commissary of the Pope. But already Malatesta had opened the Porta Romana and turned his artillery against the city which he had solemnly sworn to defend.

Beyond the Porta Romana the road to the right of Poggio Imperiale leads to the valley of the Ema, above which the great Certosa rises on the hill of Montaguto. Shortly before reaching the monastery the Ema is crossed--an insignificant stream in which Cacciaguida (in _Paradiso_ xvi.) rather paradoxically regrets that Buondelmonte was not drowned on his way to Florence: "Joyous had many been who now are sad, had G.o.d committed thee unto the Ema the first time that thou camest to the city." The Certosa itself, that "huge battlemented convent-block over the little forky flas.h.i.+ng Greve," as Browning calls it, was founded by Niccol Acciaiuoli, the Florentine Grand Seneschal of Naples, in 1341; it is one of the finest of the later mediaeval monasteries. Orcagna is said to have built one of the side chapels of the church, which contains a fine early Giottesque altarpiece; and in a kind of crypt there are n.o.ble tombs of the Acciaiuoli--one, the monument of the founder, being possibly by Orcagna, and one of the later ones ascribed (doubtfully) to Donatello. In the chapter-house are a Crucifixion by Mariotto Albertinelli, and the monument of Leonardo Buonafede by Francesco da San Gallo. From the convent and further up the valley, there are beautiful views. About three miles further on is the sanctuary and shrine of the Madonna dell' Impruneta, built for the miraculous image of the Madonna, which was carried down in procession to Florence in times of pestilence and danger.

Savonarola especially had placed great faith in the miraculous powers of this image and these processions; and during the siege it remained in Florence ceremoniously guarded in the Duomo, a kind of mystic Palladium.

Between the Porta Romana and Porta San Frediano some tracts of the city wall remain, but the whole is painfully prosaic. The Porta San Frediano itself is a ma.s.sive structure, erected between 1324 and 1327, possibly by Andrea Pisano; it need hardly be repeated that we cannot judge of the original mediaeval appearance of the gates of Florence, with their towers and ante-portals, even from the least mutilated of their present remnants. It was through this gate that the Florentine army pa.s.sed in triumph in 1363 with their long trains of captured Pisans; and here, after Pisa had shaken off for a while the yoke, Charles of France rode in as a conqueror on November 17, 1494, Savonarola's new Cyrus, and was solemnly received at the gate by the Signoria. Within the gate a strip of wall runs down to the river, with two later towers built by Medicean grand dukes. At the end is a chapel built in 1856, and containing a Pieta from the walls of a demolished convent--ascribed without warrant to Domenico Ghirlandaio.

It was somewhere near here that S. Frediano, coming from Lucca to pay his annual visit to the shrine of San Miniato, miraculously crossed the Arno in flood. Outside the gate, a little off the Leghorn road to the left, is the suppressed abbey of Monte Oliveto, and beyond it, to the south, the hill of Bellosguardo--both points from which splendid views of Florence and its surroundings are obtained.

These dream-like glimpses of the City of Flowers, which every coign of vantage seems to give us round Florence--might we not, sometimes, imagine that we had stumbled unawares upon the Platonic City of the Perfect? There are two lines from one of Dante's canzoni in praise of his mystical lady that rise to our mind at every turn:--

"Io non la vidi tante volte ancora, ch'io non trova.s.si in lei nuova bellezza,"

CHAPTER XIII

_Conclusion_

The setting of Florence is in every way worthy of the gem which it encloses. On each side of the city and throughout its province beautiful walks and drives lead to churches, villas and villages full of historical interest or enriched with artistic treasures. I can here merely indicate a very few such places.

To the north of the city rises Fiesole on its hill, of which the historical connection with Florence has been briefly discussed in chapter i. At its foot stands the Dominican convent, in which Fra Giovanni, whom we know better as the Beato Angelico, took the habit of the order, and in which both his brother, Fra Benedetto, and himself were in turn priors. Savonarola's fellow martyr, Fra Domenico da Pescia, was likewise prior of this house. The church contains a Madonna by Angelico, with the background painted in by Lorenzo di Credi (its exquisitely beautiful predella is now one of the chief ornaments of the National Gallery of London), a Baptism of Christ by Lorenzo di Credi, and an Adoration of the Magi designed by Andrea del Sarto and executed by Sogliani. A little to the left is the famous Badia di Fiesole, originally of the eleventh century, but rebuilt for Cosimo the Elder by Filippo Brunelleschi. It was one of Cosimo's favourite foundations; Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Academy frequently met in the loggia with its beautiful view towards the city. In the church, Lorenzo's second son, Giovanni, was invested with the Cardinalate in 1492; and here, in 1516, his third son, Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, the best of the Medici, died. On the way up to Fiesole itself is the handsome villa Mozzi, built for Giovanni di Cosimo de'

Medici by Michelozzo. It was in this villa that the Pazzi had originally intended to murder Lorenzo and the elder Giuliano, but their plan was frustrated by the illness of Giuliano, which prevented his being present.

In Fiesole itself, the remains of the Etruscan wall and the old theatre tell of the cla.s.sical Faesulae; its Tuscan Romanesque Duomo (of the eleventh and twelfth centuries) recalls the days when the city seemed a rival to Florence itself and was the resort of the robber barons, who preyed upon her ever growing commerce. It contains sculptures by Mino da Fiesole and that later Fiesolan, Andrea Ferrucci (to whom we owe the bust of Marsilio Ficino), and a fine terracotta by one of the Della Robbias. From the Franciscan convent, which occupies the site of the old Roman citadel, a superb view of Florence and its valley is obtained. From Fiesole, towards the south-east, we reach Ponte a Mensola (also reached from the Porta alla Croce), the Mensola of Boccaccio's _Ninfale fiesolano_, above which is Settignano, where Desiderio was born and Michelangelo nurtured, and where Boccaccio had a podere. The Villa Poggio Gherardo, below Settignano, shares with the Villa Palmieri below Fiesole the distinction of being traditionally one of those introduced into the _Decameron_.

Northwestwards of the Badia of Fiesole runs the road from Florence to Bologna, past the village of Trespiano, some three or four miles from the Porta San Gallo. In the twelfth century Trespiano was the northern boundary of Florentine territory, as Galluzzo--on the way towards the Certosa and about two miles from the Porta Romana--was its southern limit. Cacciaguida, in _Paradiso_ xvi., refers to this as an ideal golden time when the citizens.h.i.+p "saw itself pure even in the lowest artizan." A little way north of Trespiano, on the old Bolognese road, is the Uccellatoio--referred to in canto xv.--the first point from which Florence is visible. Below Trespiano, at La Lastra, rather more than two miles from the city, the exiled Bianchi and Ghibellines, with auxiliaries from Bologna and Arezzo, a.s.sembled in that fatal July of 1304. The leaders of the Neri were absent at Perugia, and, at the first sight of the white standards waving from the hill, terror and consternation filled their partisans throughout the city. Had their enterprise been better organised, the exiles would undoubtedly have captured Florence. Seeing that they were discovered, and urged on by their friends within the city, without waiting for the Uberti, whose cavalry was advancing from Pistoia to their support and whose appointed day of coming they had antic.i.p.ated, Baschiera della Tosa, in spite of the terrible heat, ordered an immediate advance upon the Porta San Gallo. The walls of the third circle were only in part built at that epoch, and those of the second circle still stood with their gates. The exiles, for the most part mounted, drew up round San Marco and the Annunziata, "with white standards spread, with garlands of olive and drawn swords, crying _peace_," writes Dino Compagni, who was in Florence at the time, "without doing violence or plundering anyone.

A right goodly sight was it to see them, with the sign of peace thus arrayed. The heat was so great, that it seemed that the very air burned." But their friends within did not stir. They forced the Porta degli Spadai which stood at the head of the present Via dei Martelli, but were repulsed at the Piazza San Giovanni and the Duomo, and the sudden blazing up of a palace in the rear completed their rout. Many fell on the way, simply from the heat, while the Neri, becoming fierce-hearted like lions, as Compagni says, hotly pursued them, hunting out those who had hidden themselves among the vineyards and houses, hanging all they caught. In their flight, a little way from Florence, the exiles met Tolosato degli Uberti hastening up with his Ghibellines to meet them on the appointed day. Tolosato, a fierce captain and experienced in civil war, tried in vain to rally them, and, when all his efforts proved unavailing, returned to Pistoia declaring that the youthful rashness of Baschiera had lost him the city. Dante had taken no part in the affair; he had broken with his fellow exiles in the previous year, and made a party for himself as he tells us in the _Paradiso_.

To the west and north-west of Florence are several interesting villas of the Medici. The Villa Medicea in Careggi, the most famous of all, is not always accessible. It is situated in the loveliest country, within a short walk of the tramway station of Ponte a Rifredi. Built originally by Michelozzo for Cosimo the Elder, it was almost burned down by a band of republican youths shortly before the siege. Here Cosimo died, consoling his last hours with Marsilio Ficino's Platonics; here the elder Piero lived in retirement, too shattered in health to do more than nominally succeed his father at the head of the State. On August 23rd 1466, there was an attempt made to murder Piero as he was carried into Florence from Careggi in his litter. A band of armed men, in the pay of Luca Pitti and Dietisalvi Neroni, lay in wait for the litter on the way to the Porta Faenza; but young Lorenzo, who was riding on in advance of his father's cortege, came across them first, and, without appearing to take any alarm at the meeting, secretly sent back a messenger to bid his father take another way.

Under Lorenzo himself, this villa became the centre of the Neo-Platonic movement; and here on November 7th, the day supposed to be the anniversary of Plato's birth and death, the famous banquet was held at which Marsilio Ficino and the chosen spirits of the Academy discussed and expounded the _Symposium_. Here on April 8th 1492, the Magnifico died (see chap. iii.). In the same neighbourhood, a little further on in the direction of Pistoia, are the villas of Petraia and Castello (for both of which _permessi_ are given at the Pitti Palace, together with that for Poggio a Caiano), both reminiscent of the Medicean grand ducal family; in the latter Cosimo I. lived with his mother, Maria Salviati, before his accession to the throne, and here he died in 1574.

Also beyond the Porta al Prato (about an hour and a half by the tramway from behind Santa Maria Novella), is the Villa Reale of Poggio a Caiano, superbly situated where the Pistoian Apennines begin to rise up from the plain. The villa was built by Giuliano da San Gallo for Lorenzo, and the Magnifico loved it best of all his country houses. It was here that he wrote his _Ambra_ and his _Caccia col Falcone_; in both of these poems the beautiful scenery round plays its part. When Pope Clement VII. sent the two boys, Ippolito and Alessandro, to represent the Medici in Florence, Alessandro generally stayed here, while Ippolito resided within the city in the palace in the Via Larga.

When Charles V. came to Florence in 1536 to confirm Alessandro upon the throne, he declared that this villa "was not the building for a private citizen." Here, too, the Grand Duke Francesco and Bianca Cappello died, on October 19th and 20th, 1587, after entertaining the Cardinal Ferdinando, who thus became Grand Duke; it was said that Bianca had attempted to poison the Cardinal, and that she and her husband had themselves eaten of the pasty that she had prepared for him. It appears, however, that there is no reason for supposing that their deaths were other than natural. At present the villa is a royal country house, in which reminiscences of the Re Galantuomo clash rather oddly with those of the Medicean Princes. All round runs a loggia with fine views, and there are an uninteresting park and garden. The cla.s.sical portico is noteworthy, all the rest being of the utmost simplicity.

Within the palace a large room, with a remarkably fine ceiling by Giuliano da San Gallo, is decorated with a series of frescoes from Roman history intended to be typical of events in the lives of Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent. Vasari says that, for a villa, this is _la piu bella sala del mondo_. The frescoes, ordered by Pope Leo X. and the Cardinal Giulio, under the direction of Ottaviano dei Medici, were begun by Andrea dei Sarto, Francia Bigio and Jacopo da Pontormo, left unfinished for more than fifty years, and then completed by Alessandro Allori for the Grand Duke Francesco. The Triumph of Cicero, by Francia Bigio, is supposed to typify the return of Cosimo from exile in 1434; Caesar receiving tribute from Egypt, by Andrea del Sarto, refers to the coming of an emba.s.sy from the Soldan to Lorenzo in 1487, with magnificent gifts and treasures. Andrea's fresco is full of curious beasts and birds, including the long-eared sheep which Lorenzo naturalised in the grounds of the villa, and the famous giraffe which the Soldan sent on this occasion and which, as Mr Armstrong writes, "became the most popular character in Florence,"

until its death at the beginning of 1489. The Regent of France, Anne of Beaujeu, made ineffectual overtures to Lorenzo to get him to make her a present of the strange beast. This fresco was left unfinished on the death of Pope Leo in 1521, and finished by Alessandro Allori in 1582. The charming mythological decorations between the windows are by Jacopo da Pontormo. The two later frescoes by Alessandro Allori, painted about 1580, represent Scipio in the house of Syphax and Flamininus in Greece, which typify Lorenzo's visit to Ferrante of Naples, in 1480, and his presence at the Diet of Cremona in 1483, on which latter occasion, as Mr Armstrong puts it, "his good sense and powers of expression and persuasion gave him an importance which the military weakness of Florence denied to him in the field"--but the result was little more than a not very honourable league of the Italian powers against Venice. The Apples of the Hesperides, and the rest of the mythological decorations in continuation of Pontormo's lunette, are also Allori's. The whole has an air of regal triumph without needless parade.

The road should be followed beyond the villa, in order to ascend to the left to the little church among the hills. A superb view is obtained over the plain to Florence beyond the Villa Reale lying below us. Behind, we are already among the Apennines. A beautiful glimpse of Prato can be seen to the left, four miles away.

Prato itself is about twelve miles from Florence. It was a gay little town in the fifteenth century, when it witnessed "brother Lippo's doings, up and down," and heard Messer Angelo Poliziano's musical sighings for the love of Madonna Ippolita Leoncina. A few years later it listened to the voice of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, and at last its bright day of prosperity ended in the horrible sack and carnage from the Spanish soldiery under Raimondo da Cardona in 1512. Its Duomo--dedicated to St. Stephen and the Baptist--a Tuscan Romanesque church completed in the Gothic style by Giovanni Pisano, with a fine campanile built at the beginning of the fourteenth century, claims to possess a strange and wondrous relic: nothing less than the Cintola or Girdle of the Blessed Virgin, delivered by her--according to a pious and poetical legend--to St. Thomas at her a.s.sumption, and then won back for Christendom by a native of Prato, Michele Dagonari, in the Crusades. Be that as it may, what purports to be this relic is exhibited on occasions in the Pulpito della Cintola on the exterior of the Duomo, a magnificent work by Donatello and Michelozzo, in which the former master has carved a wonderful series of dancing genii hardly, if at all, inferior to those more famous bas-reliefs executed a little later for the cantoria of Santa Maria del Fiore. Within, over the entrance wall, is a picture by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio of the Madonna giving the girdle to the Thomas who had doubted. And in the chapel on the left (with a most beautifully worked bronze screen, with a lovely frieze of cupids, birds and beasts--the work of Bruno Lapi and Pasquino di Matteo, 1444-1461), the Cintola is preserved amid frescoes by Agnolo Gaddi setting forth the life of Madonna, her granting of Prato's treasure to St Thomas at the a.s.sumption, and its discovery by Michele Dagonari.

The church is rich in works of Florentine art--a pulpit by Mino da Fiesole and Antonio Rossellino; the Madonna dell' Ulivo by Giuliano da Maiano; frescoes said to be in part by Masolino's reputed master Starnina in the chapel to the right of the choir. But Prato's great artistic glory must be sought in Fra Lippo Lippi's frescoes in the choir, painted between 1452 and 1464. These are the great achievements of the Friar's life. On the left is the life of St. Stephen, on the right that of the Baptist. They show very strongly the influence of Masaccio, and make us understand why the Florentines said that the spirit of Masaccio had entered into the body of Fra Filippo. Inferior to Masaccio in most respects, Filippo had a feeling for facial beauty and spiritual expression, and for a certain type of feminine grace which we hardly find in his prototype. The wonderful figure of the dancing girl in Herod's banquet, and again her nave bearing when she kneels before her mother with the martyr's head, oblivious of the horror of the spectators and merely bent upon showing us her own sweet face, are characteristic of Lippo, as also, in another way, his feeling for boyhood shown in the little St. John's farewell to his parents. The Burial of St. Stephen is full of fine Florentine portraits in the manner of the Carmine frescoes. The dignified ecclesiastic at the head of the clergy is Carlo dei Medici, the illegitimate son of Cosimo. On the extreme right is Lippo himself.

Carlo looks rather like a younger, more refined edition of Leo X.

It was while engaged upon these frescoes that Lippo Lippi was commissioned by the nuns of Santa Margherita to paint a Madonna for them, and took the opportunity of carrying off Lucrezia Buti, a beautiful girl staying in the convent who had sat to him as the Madonna, during one of the Cintola festivities. Lippo appears to have been practically unfrocked at this time, but he refused the dispensation of the Pope who wished him to marry her legally, as he preferred to live a loose life. Between the station and the Duomo you can see the house where they lived and where Filippino Lippi was born.

Opposite the convent of Santa Margherita is a tabernacle containing a wonderfully beautiful fres...o...b.. Filippino, a Madonna and Child with Angels, adored by St. Margaret and St. Catherine, St. Antony and St.

Stephen. All the faces are of the utmost loveliness, and the Catherine especially is like a foretaste of Luini's famous fresco at Milan. In the town picture gallery there are four pictures ascribed to Lippo Lippi--all four of rather questionable authenticity--and one by Filippino, a Madonna and Child with St. Stephen and the Baptist, which, although utterly ruined, appears to be genuine. The Protomartyr and the Precursor seem always inseparable throughout the faithful little city of the Cintola.

Prato can likewise boast some excellent terracotta works by Andrea della Robbia, both outside the Duomo and in the churches of Our Lady of Good Counsel and Our Lady of the Prisons. This latter church, the Madonna delle Carceri, reared by Giuliano da San Gallo between 1485 and 1491, is perhaps the most beautiful and most truly cla.s.sical of all Early Renaissance buildings in Tuscany.

Ten miles beyond Prato lies Pistoia, at the very foot of the Apennines, the city of Dante's friend and correspondent, Messer Cino, the poet of the golden haired Selvaggia, he who sang the dirge of Caesar Henry; the centre of the fiercest faction struggles of Italian history. It was the Florentine traditional policy to keep Pisa by fortresses and Pistoia by factions. It lies, however, beyond the scope of the present book, with the other Tuscan cities that owned the sway of the great Republic. San Gemignano, that most wonderful of all the smaller towns of Tuscany, the city of "the fair towers," of Santa Fina and of the gayest of mediaeval poets, Messer Folgore, comes into another volume of this series.

But it is impossible to conclude even the briefest study of Florence without a word upon that Tuscan Earthly Paradise, the Casentino and upper valley of the Arno, although it lies for the most part not in the province of Florence but in that of Arezzo. It is best reached by the diligence which runs from Ponta.s.sieve over the Consuma Pa.s.s--where Arnaldo of Brescia, who lies in the last horrible round of Dante's Malebolge, was burned alive for counterfeiting the golden florins of Florence--to Stia.[57] A whole chapter of Florentine history may be read among the mountains of the Casentino, writ large upon its castles and monasteries. If the towers of San Gemignano give us still the clearest extant picture of the life led by the n.o.bles and magnates when forced to enter the cities, we can see best in the Casentino how they exercised their feudal sway and maintained for a while their independence of the burgher Commune. The Casentino was ruled by the Conti Guidi, that great clan whose four branches--the Counts of Romena, the Counts of Porciano, the Counts of Battifolle and Poppi, the Counts of Dovadola (to whom Bagno in Romagna and Pratovecchio here appear to have belonged)--sprang from the four sons of Gualdrada, Bellincion Berti's daughter. Poppi remains a superb monument of the power and taste of these "Counts Palatine of Tuscany"; its palace on a small scale resembles the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Romena and Porciano, higher up stream, overhanging Pratovecchio and Stia, have been immortalised by the verse and hallowed by the footsteps of Dante Alighieri. Beneath the hill upon which Poppi stands, an old bridge still spans the Arno, upon which the last of the Conti Guidi, the Count Francesco, surrendered in 1440 to the Florentine commissary, Neri Capponi. After the second expulsion of the Medici from Florence, Piero and Giuliano for some time lurked in the Casentino, with Bernardo Dovizi at Bibbiena.

[57] The lover of Florentine history cannot readily tear himself away from the Casentino. The Albergo Amorosi at Bibbiena, almost at the foot of La Verna, makes delightful headquarters. There is an excellent _Guida ill.u.s.trata del Casentino_ by C. Beni. For the Conti Guidi, Witte's essay should be consulted; it is translated in _Witte's Essays on Dante_ by C. M. Lawrence and P. H. Wicksteed. La Verna will be fully dealt with in the a.s.sisi volume of this series, so I do not describe it here.

Throughout the Casentino Dante himself should be our guide. There is hardly another district in Italy so intimately connected with the divine poet; save only Florence and Ravenna, there is, perhaps, none where we more frequently need to have recourse to the pages of the _Divina Commedia_. With the _Inferno_ in our hands, we seek out Count Alessandro's castle of Romena and what purports to be the Fonte Branda, below the castle to the left, for whose waters--even to cool the thirst of h.e.l.l--Maestro Adamo would not have given the sight of his seducer sharing his agony. With the _Purgatorio_ we trace the course of the Arno from where, a mere _fiumicello_, it takes its rise in Falterona, and runs down past Porciano and Poppi to sweep away from the Aretines, "turning aside its muzzle in disdain." There is a tradition that Dante was imprisoned in the castle of Porciano. We know that he was the guest of various members of the Conti Guidi at different times during his exile; it was from one of their castles, probably Poppi, that on March 31st and April 16th, 1311, he directed his two terrible letters to the Florentine government and to the Emperor Henry. It was in the Casentino, too, that he composed the Canzone _Amor, dacche convien pur ch'io mi doglia_, "Love, since I needs must make complaint," one of the latest and most perplexing of his lyrics.

The battlefield of Campaldino lies beyond Poppi, on the eastern side of the river, near the old convent and church of Certomondo, founded some twenty or thirty years before by two of the Conti Guidi to commemorate the great Ghibelline victory of Montaperti, but now to witness the triumph of the Guelfs. The Aretines, under their Bishop and Buonconte da Montefeltro, had marched up the valley along the direction of the present railway to Bibbiena, to check the ravages of the Florentines who, with their French allies, had made their way through the mountains above Pratovecchio and were laying waste the country of the Conti Guidi. It was on the Feast of St. Barnabas, 1289, that the two armies stood face to face, and Dante riding in the Florentine light cavalry, if the fragment of a letter preserved to us by Leonardo Bruni be authentic, "had much dread and at the end the greatest gladness, by reason of the varying chances of that battle."

There are no relics of the struggle to be found in Certomondo; only a very small portion of the cloisters remains, and the church itself contains nothing of note save an Annunciation by Neri di Bicci. But about an hour's walk from the battlefield, perhaps a mile from the foot of the hill on which Bibbiena stands, is a spot most sacred to all lovers of Dante. Here the stream of the Archiano, banked with poplars and willows, flows into the Arno; and here, at the close of that same terrible and glorious day, Buonconte da Montefeltro died of his wounds, gasping out the name of Mary. At evening the nightingales are loud around the spot, but their song is less sweet then the ineffable stanzas in the fifth canto of the _Purgatorio_ in which Dante has raised an imperishable monument to the young Ghibelline warrior.

But, more famous than its castles or even its Dantesque memories, the Casentino is hallowed by its n.o.ble sanctuaries of Vallombrosa, Camaldoli, La Verna. Less noted but still very interesting is the Dominican church and convent of the Madonna del Sa.s.so, just below Bibbiena on the way towards La Verna, hallowed with memories of Savonarola and the Piagnoni, and still a place of devout pilgrimage to Our Lady of the Rock. There is a fine a.s.sumption in its church, painted by Fra Paolino from Bartolommeo's cartoon. Vallombrosa and Camaldoli, founded respectively by Giovanni Gualberto and Romualdus, have shared the fate of all such inst.i.tutions in modern Italy.

La Verna remains undisturbed, that "harsh rock between Tiber and Arno," as Dante calls it, where Francis "received from Christ the final seal;" the sacred mountain from which, on that September morning before the dawn, so bright a light of Divine Love shone forth to rekindle the mediaeval world, that all the country seemed aflame, as the crucified Seraph uttered the words of mystery--_Tu sei il mio Gonfaloniere_: "Thou art my standard-bearer." To enter the precincts of this sacred place, under the arch hewn out from between the rocks, is like a first introduction to the spirit of the _Divina Commedia_.

"Non est in toto sanctior orbe mons."

For here, at least, is one spot left in the world, where, although Renaissance and Reformation, Revolution and Risorgimento, have swept round it, the Middle Ages still reign a living reality, in their n.o.blest aspect, with the _poverelli_ of the Seraphic Father; and the mystical light, that shone out on the day of the Stigmata, still burns: "while the eternal ages watch and wait."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FLORENCE]

CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF ARCHITECTS, SCULPTORS & PAINTERS

(_Names of non-Italians in italics_)

ARCHITECTS AND SCULPTORS

Niccol Pisano (circa 1206-1278), 32, 254, 349.

Fra Sisto (died 1289), 359.

Fra Ristoro da Campi (died 1283), 359.

Arnolfo di Cambio (1232?-1300 or 1310), 41, 65, 66, 146-149, 184, 205, 211, 228, 231, 242, 248, 265, 269, 274, 333, 334, 372.

Giovanni Pisano (circa 1250-after 1328), 32, 254, 416.

Giotto da Bondone. See under Painters.

Andrea Pisano (1270-1348), 65, 67, 225, 254, 255, 260-263, 408.