Signoria; nor all the rivals of the Medici hung from the windows of the Palazzo Vecchio or beheaded in the Bargello. Think of the tonsured friars and grave citizens of this medieval city, under Savonarola’s fiery incitement, their heads garlanded with flowers, mingling with the overwrought children called to help in purifying the city, dancing like David before the ark and shouting “Long live Christ and the Virgin, our rulers”; of the days when Alessandro Medici and his boon companion and cousin, Lorenzo, rode about the city on a mule together, defiling the virtue of innocent girls, roistering in houses of ill repute, and drinking and stabbing to their hearts’ content; of Fra Girolamo preaching to excited crowds in the Duomo and of his vision of a black cross over Rome, a red one over Jerusalem; of Machiavelli writing his brochure “The Prince”; and of Michelangelo defending the city walls as an engineer. Can any other city match this spectacular, artistic, melodramatic progress in so short a space of time, or present the galaxy of artists, the rank company of material masters such as the Medici, the Pazzi, the Strozzi, plotting and counter-plotting to the accompaniment of lusts and murders? Other cities have had their amazing hours, all of them, from Rome to London. But Florence! It has always seemed to me that the literary possibilities of Florence, in spite of the vast body of literature concerning it, have scarcely been touched. The art section alone is so vast and so brilliant that one of the art merchants told me while I was there that at least forty thousand of the city’s one hundred and seventy thousand population is foreign (principally English and American), drawn to it by its art merits, and that the tide of travel from April to October is amazing. I can believe it. You will hear German and English freely spoken in all the principal thoroughfares. Because of a gray day and dull, following the warmth and color and light of Perugia and Rome, Florence seemed especially dark and somber to me at first; but I recovered. Its charm and beauty grew on me by degrees so that by the time I had done inspecting Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, San Marco, the Cathedral group and the Bargello, I was really desperately in love with the art of it all, and after I had investigated the galleries, the Pitti, Uffizi, Belle Arti, and the Cloisters, I was satisfied that I could find it in my heart to live here and work, a feeling I had in many other places in Europe.