Italian Hours/Italy Revisited, part IV
I had never known Florence more herself, or in other words more
attaching, than I found her for a week in that brilliant October.
She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river like the little
treasure-city she has always seemed, without commerce, without
other industry than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and
alabaster Cupids, without actuality or energy or earnestness or
any of those rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed
indispensable for civic cohesion; with nothing but the little
unaugmented stock of her mediaeval memories, her tender-coloured
mountains, her churches and palaces, pictures and statues. There
were very few strangers; one's detested fellow-pilgrim was
infrequent; the native population itself seemed scanty; the sound
of wheels in the streets was but occasional; by eight o'clock at
night, apparently, every one had gone to bed, and the musing
wanderer, still wandering and still musing, had the place to
himself--had the thick shadow-masses of the great palaces, and
the shafts of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, and
the empty bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno, and the
stillness broken only by a homeward step, a step accompanied by a
snatch of song from a warm Italian voice. My room at the inn
looked out on the river and was flooded all day with sunshine.
There was an absurd orange-coloured paper on the walls; the Arno,
of a hue not altogether different, flowed beneath; and on the
other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of extreme
antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over
the stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts; but what I saw was
their shabby backs, which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of
the river, while the fronts stood for ever in the deep damp
shadow of a narrow mediaeval street.) All this brightness and
yellowness was a perpetual delight; it was a part of that
indefinably charming colour which Florence always seems to wear
as you look up and down at it from the river, and from the
bridges and quays. This is a kind of grave radiance--a harmony of
high tints--which I scarce know how to describe. There are yellow
walls and green blinds and red roofs, there are intervals of
brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the picture is not
spotty nor gaudy, thanks to the distribution of the colours in
large and comfortable masses, and to the washing-over of the
scene by some happy softness of sunshine. The river-front of
Florence is in short a delightful composition. Part of its charm
comes of course from the generous aspect of those high-based
Tuscan palaces which a renewal of acquaintance with them has
again commended to me as the most dignified dwellings in the
world. Nothing can be finer than that look of giving up the whole
immense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and
staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this were all
but a massive pedestal for the real habitation and people weren't
properly housed unless, to begin with, they should be lifted
fifty feet above the pavement. The great blocks of the basement;
the great intervals, horizontally and vertically, from window to
window (telling of the height and breadth of the rooms within);
the armorial shield hung forward at one of the angles; the wide-
brimmed roof, overshadowing the narrow street; the rich old
browns and yellows of the walls: these definite elements put
themselves together with admirable art.
[Illustration omitted: ROMAN GATEWAY, RIMINI.]
Take a Tuscan pile of this type out of its oblique situation in the town; call it no longer a palace, but a villa; set it down by a terrace on one of the hills that encircle Florence, place a row of high-waisted cypresses beside it, give it a grassy court-yard and a view of the Florentine towers and the valley of the Arno, and you will think it perhaps even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and brilliantly warm, when I again arrived; and after I had looked from my windows a while at that quietly- basking river-front I have spoken of I took my way across one of the bridges and then out of one of the gates--that immensely tall Roman Gate in which the space from the top of the arch to the cornice (except that there is scarcely a cornice, it is all a plain massive piece of wall) is as great, or seems to be, as that from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed a steep and winding way--much of it a little dull if one likes, being bounded by mottled, mossy garden-walls--to a villa on a hill-top, where I found various things that touched me with almost too fine a point. Seeing them again, often, for a week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I never quite learned not to covet them; not to feel that not being a part of them was somehow to miss an exquisite chance. What a tranquil, contented life it seemed, with romantic beauty as a part of its daily texture!--the sunny terrace, with its tangled podere beneath it; the bright grey olives against the bright blue sky; the long, serene, horizontal lines of other villas, flanked by their upward cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills; the richest little city in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one's feet, and beyond it the most appealing of views, the most majestic, yet the most familiar. Within the villa was a great love of art and a painting-room full of felicitous work, so that if human life there confessed to quietness, the quietness was mostly but that of the intent act. A beautiful occupation in that beautiful position, what could possibly be better? That is what I spoke just now of envying--a way of life that doesn't wince at such refinements of peace and ease. When labour self-charmed presents itself in a dull or an ugly place we esteem it, we admire it, but we scarce feel it to be the ideal of good fortune. When, however, its votaries move as figures in an ancient, noble landscape, and their walks and contemplations are like a turning of the leaves of history, we seem to have before us an admirable case of virtue made easy; meaning here by virtue contentment and concentration, a real appreciation of the rare, the exquisite though composite, medium of life. You needn't want a rush or a crush when the scene itself, the mere scene, shares with you such a wealth of consciousness.
It is true indeed that I might after a certain time grow weary of a regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and looking across at Fiesole or down the rich-hued valley of the Arno; of pausing at the open gates of villas and wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth of loggias; of walking home in the fading light and noting on a dozen westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite sunset. But for a week or so all this was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if you're an aching alien half the talk is about villas. This one has a story; that one has another; they all look as if they had stories--none in truth predominantly gay. Most of them are offered to rent (many of them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred dollars a year. In imagination you hire three or four; you take possession and settle and stay. Your sense of the fineness of the finest is of something very grave and stately; your sense of the bravery of two or three of the best something quite tragic and sinister. From what does this latter impression come? You gather it as you stand there in the early dusk, with your eyes on the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous windows, the iron cages fastened to the lower ones. Part of the brooding expression of these great houses comes, even when they have not fallen into decay, from their look of having outlived their original use. Their extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present fate. They weren't built with such a thickness of wall and depth of embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American families. I don't know whether it was the appearance of these stony old villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is that, having always found this note as of a myriad old sadnesses in solution in the view of Florence, it seemed to me now particularly strong. "Lovely, lovely, but it makes me 'blue,'" the sensitive stranger couldn't but murmur to himself as, in the late afternoon, he looked at the landscape from over one of the low parapets, and then, with his hands in his pockets, turned away indoors to candles and dinner.