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long years, so they said, and it was for sale for thirty-five thousand
dollars.
We went to the Church of Santa Croce, from time to time, in Florence, to
weep over the tombs of Michael Angelo, Raphael and Machiavelli,
(I suppose they are buried there, but it may be that they reside
elsewhere and rent their tombs to other parties--such being the fashion
in Italy,) and between times we used to go and stand on the bridges and
admire the Arno. It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great
historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating
around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water
into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a
river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the
delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good
to wade.
How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices
sometimes! I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence
and find it all beautiful, all attractive. But I do not care to think of
it now, at all, nor of its roomy shops filled to the ceiling with snowy
marble and alabaster copies of all the celebrated sculptures in Europe
--copies so enchanting to the eye that I wonder how they can really be
shaped like the dingy petrified nightmares they are the portraits of. I
got lost in Florence at nine o'clock, one night, and staid lost in that
labyrinth of narrow streets and long rows of vast buildings that look all
alike, until toward three o'clock in the morning. It was a pleasant
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