[128] Cf. _Lettere di Pietro Aretino_ (1609), vol. iii. p. 238. XXV. TO FIESOLE AND SETTIGNANO How weary one grows of the ways of a city,--yes, even in Florence, where every street runs into the country and one may always see the hills and the sky! But even in Athens, when they built the Parthenon, often, I think, I should have found my way into the olive gardens and vineyards about Kephisos: so to-day, leaving the dead beauty littered in the churches, the palaces, the museums, the streets of Florence, very often I seek the living beauty of the country, the whisper of the poplars beside Arno, the little lovely songs of streams. And then Florence is a city almost without suburbs;[129] at the gate you find the hills, the olive gardens bordered with iris, the vineyards hedged with the rose. Many and fair are the ways to Fiesole: you may go like a burgess in the tram, or like a lord in a coach, but for me I will go like a young man by the bye ways, like a poor man on my feet, and the dew will be yet on the roses when I set out, and in the vineyards they will be singing among the corn-- "Fiorin fiorello, La mi' Rosina ha il labbro di corallo E l'occhiettino suo sembra un gioiello." And then, who knows what awaits one on the way? "E quando ti riscontro per la via Abbassi gli occhi e rassembri una dea, E la fai consumar la vita mia." Of the ways to Fiesole, one goes by Mugnone and one by S. Gervasio, but it will not be by them that I shall go, but out of Barriera delle Cure; and I shall pass behind the gardens of Villa Palmieri, whither after the second day of the _Decamerone_ Boccaccio's fair ladies and gay lords passed from Poggio Gherardo by a little path "but little used, which was covered with herbs and flowers, that opened under the rising sun, while they listened to the song of the nightingales and other birds." Thus between the garden walls I shall come to S. Domenico.