Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
History
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
But it is not to see a church that we have wandered up to Fiesole, for
in the country certainly the churches are less than an olive garden, and
the pictures are shamed by the flowers that run over the hills. Lounging
about this old fortress of a city, one is caught rather by the aspect of
natural things--Val d'Arno, far and far away, and at last a glimpse of
the Apennines; Val di Mugnone towards Monte Senario, the night of
cypresses about Vincigliata, the olives of Maiano--than by the churches
scattered among the trees or hidden in the narrow ways that everywhere
climb the hills to lose themselves at last in the woodland or in the
cornlands among the vines. You wander behind the Duomo into the Scavi,
and it is not the Roman Baths you go to see or the Etruscan walls and
the well-preserved Roman theatre: you watch the clouds on the mountains,
the sun in the valley, the shadows on the hills, listen to a boy singing
to his goats, play with a little girl who has slipped her hand in yours
looking for soldi, or wonder at the host of flowers that has run even
among these ruins. Even from the windows of the Palazzo Pretorio, which
for some foolish reason you have entered on your way to the hills, you
do not really see the statues and weapons of these forgotten Etruscan
people, but you watch the sun that has perhaps suddenly lighted up the
Duomo, or the wind that, like a beautiful thought, for a moment has
turned the hills to silver. Or if it be up to S. Francesco you climb,
the old acropolis of Fiesole, above the palace of the bishop and the
Seminary, it will surely be rather to look over the valley to the
farthest hills, where Val di Greve winds towards Siena, than to enter a
place which, Franciscan though it be, has nothing to show half so fair
as this laughing country, or that Tuscan cypress on the edge of that
grove of olives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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