Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ it; but something of it is always rolling down through Via Tornabuoni in its carriage at the proper hour of the day, and something more is always standing before Giacosa's English-tailored, Italian-mannered, to bow, and smile, and comment. I was glad that the sort of swell whom I used to love in the Piazzi at Venice abounded in the narrower limits of Via Tornabuoni. I was afraid he was dead; but he graced the curbstone there with the same lily-like disoccupation and the same sweetness of aspect which made the Procuratie Nuove like a garden. He was not without his small dog or his cane held to his mouth; he was very, very patient and kind with the aged crone who plays the part of Florentine flower-girl in Via Tornabuoni, and whom I after saw aiming with uncertain eye a boutonniere of violets at his coat-lapel; there was the same sort of calm, heavy-eyed beauty looking out at him from her ice or coffee through the vast pane of the confectioner's window, that stared sphinx-like in her mystery from a cushioned corner of Florian's; and the officers went by with tinkling spurs and sabers, and clicking boot-heels, differing in nothing but their Italian uniforms and complexions from the blonde Austrian military of those far-off days. I often wondered who or what those beautiful swells might be, and now I rather wonder that I did not ask someone who could tell me. But perhaps it was not important; perhaps it might even have impaired their value in the picture of a conscientious artist who can now leave them, without a qualm, to be imagined as rich and noble as the reader likes. Not all the frequenters of Doney's famous café were both, if one could trust hearsay. Besides those who could afford to drink the first sprightly runnings of his coffee-pot, it was said that there was a genteel class, who, for the sake of being seen to read their newspapers there, paid for the second decantation from its grounds, which comprised what was left in the cups from the former. This might be true of a race which loves a goodly outside perhaps a little better than we do; but Doney's is not the Doney's of old days, nor its coffee so very good at first hand. Yet if that sort of self-sacrifice goes on in there, I do not object; it continues the old Latin tradition of splendor and hunger which runs through so many pleasant books, and is as good in its way as a beggar at the gate of a palace. It is a contrast; it flatters the reader who would be incapable of it; and let us have it. It is one of the many contrasts in Florence which I spoke of, and not all of which there is time to point out. But if you would have the full effect of the grimness and rudeness of the Strozzi Palace (drolly parodied, by the way, in a structure of the same street which is like a Strozzi Palace on the stage), look at that bank of flowers at one corner of its base, — roses, carnations, jonquils, great Florentine anemones, — laying their delicate cheeks against the savage blocks of stone, rent and burst from their quarry, and set here with their native rudeness untamed by hammer or chisel.

      XI

      The human passions were wrought almost as primitive into the civic structure of Florence, down in the thirteenth century, which you will find with me at the bottom of the Borgo Santi Apostoli, if you like to come. There and thereabouts dwell the Buondelmonti, the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti, and other noble families, in fastnesses of stone and iron as formidable as the castles from which their ancestors were dislodged when the citizens went out into the country around Florence, and destroyed their strongholds and obliged them to come into the city; and thence from their casements and towers they carried on their private wars as conveniently as ever, descending into the streets, and battling about among the peaceful industries of the vicinity for generations. It must have been inconvenient for the industries, but so far as one can understand, they suffered it just as a Kentucky community now suffers the fighting out of a family feud in its streets, and philosophically gets under shelter when the shooting begins. It does not seem to have been objected to some of these palaces that they had vaulted passageways under their first stories, provided with trap-doors to let the besieged pour hot water down on the passers below; these avenues were probably strictly private, and the citizens did not use them at times when family feeling ran high. In fact, there could have been but little coming and going about these houses for any who did not belong in them. A whole quarter, covering the space of several American city blocks, would be given up to the palaces of one family and its adherents, in a manner which one can hardly understand without seeing it. The Peruzzi, for example, enclosed a Roman amphitheater with their palaces, which still follow in structure the circle of the ancient edifice; and the Peruzzi were rather peaceable people, with less occasion for fighting-room than many other Florentine families, — far less than the Buondelmonti, Uberti, Amidei, Lamberti, Gherardini, and others, whose domestic fortifications seem to have occupied all that region lying near the end of the Ponte Vecchio. They used to fight from their towers on three corners of Por San Maria above the heads of the people passing to and from the bridge, and must have occasioned a great deal of annoyance to the tourists of that day. Nevertheless, they seem to have dwelt in very tolerable enmity together till one day when a Florentine gentleman invited all the noble youth of the city to a banquet at his villa, where, for their greater entertainment, there was a buffoon playing his antics. This poor soul seems not to have been a person of better taste than some other humorists, and he thought it droll to snatch away the plate of Uberto degl' Infangati, who had come with Buondelmonte, at which Buondelmonte became furious, and resented the insult to his friend, probably in terms that disabled the politeness of those who laughed, for it is recorded that Oddo di Arrigo dei Fifanti, " a proud and resolute man," became so incensed as to throw a plate and its contents into Uberto's face. The tables were overturned, and Buondelmonte stabbed Oddo with a knife; at which point the party seems to have broken up, and Oddo returned to Florence from Campi, where the banquet was given, and called a family council to plot vengeance. But a temperate spirit prevailed in this senate, and it was decided that Buondelmonte, instead of dying, should marry Oddo's niece, Reparata degli Amidei, differently described by history as a plain girl, and as one of the most beautiful and accomplished damsels of the city, of a noble and consular family. Buondelmonte, a handsome and gallant cavalier, but a weak will, as appears from all that happened, agreed to this, and everything was happily arranged, till one day when he was riding by the house of Forese Donati. Monna Gualdrada Donati was looking out of the window, and possibly expecting the young man. She called to him, and when he had alighted and come into the house, she began to mock him.

      " Cheer up, young lover! Your wedding day is coming, and you will soon be happy with your bride."

      "You know very well," said Buondelmonte, "that this marriage was a thing I could not get out of."

      " Oh, indeed! " cried Monna Gualdrada. " As if you did not care for a pretty wife!" And then it was, we may suppose, that she hinted those things she is said to have insinuated against Reparata's looks and her fitness otherwise for a gentleman like Buondelmonte. "If I had known you were in such haste to marry — but God's will be done! We cannot have things as we like in this world!" And Machiavelli says that the thing Monna Gualdrada had set her heart on was Buondelmonte's marriage with her daughter, "but either through carelessness, or because she thought it would do any time, she had not mentioned it to anyone." She added, probably with an affected carelessness, that the Donati were of rather better lineage than the Amidei, though she did not know whether he would have thought her Beatrice as pretty as Reparata. Then suddenly she brought him face to face with the girl, radiantly beautiful, the most beautiful in Florence. " This is the wife I was keeping for you," said Monna Gualdrada; and she must have known her ground well, for she let the poor young man understand that her daughter had long been secretly in love with him. Malespini tells us that Buondelmonte was tempted by a diabolical spirit to break faith at this sight; the devil accounted for a great many things then to which we should not now, perhaps, assign so black an origin. "And I would very willingly marry her," he faltered, "if I were not bound by that solemn promise to the Amidei; " and Monna Gualdrada now plied the weak soul with such arguments and reasons, in such wise as women can use them, that he yielded, and giving his hand to Beatrice, he did not rest till they were married. Then the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti, and the Fifanti, and others who were outraged in their cousinship or friendship by this treachery and insult to Reparata, assembled in the church of Santa Maria sopra Porta to take counsel again for vengeance. Some were of opinion that Buondelmonte should be cudgeled, and thus publicly put to shame; others that he should be wounded and disfigured in the face; but Mosca Lamberti rose and said: " There is no need of all these words. If you strike him or disfigure him, get your graves ready to hide in. СКАЧАТЬ