Vasari tells us that Paolo Uccello frescoed the arch “with triangles in perspective, and on the corners in the square spaces he painted the four elements, each represented by an appropriate animal. For the earth a mole, for water a fish, for fire a salamander, and for air a chameleon, which lives thereon and assumes every colour. As he had never seen a chameleon he painted a camel with its mouth wide open inhaling the air to fill its lungs. Showing certes great simplicity.” [Illustration: PIAZZA AND ARCO DE’ PERUZZI.] Many of the houses on the western side of the Via de’ Benci belonged to the Peruzzi, others were in Borgo de’ Greci, where the present palace stands, and in the Via dell’Anguillara, the Via de’ Rustici, etc., the well-known coat-of-arms with six pears is still to be seen here and there on the façades. In 1339 the Peruzzi were ruined and forced to sell their lands and many of their houses. They and their partners the Bardi had lent money to Edward III. of England, who, owing to his wars with France, was unable to pay his debts. A decree dated 6th May, 1339, orders the suspension of all payments to the King’s creditors, “not excepting his well-beloved Bardi and Peruzzi,” to whom he owed 1,355,000 golden florins. The failure of the great banking house of Bardi Peruzzi was a calamity from which Florence did not recover for some time, and Dino Compagni, who suffered severely himself, exclaims: “O cursed and insatiable avidity, born of the vice of avarice which reigns amongst our blind and mad citizens who, for the sake of gaining from those above them, place their own and other people’s money in their power. For this was lost the strength of our Republic, as but little wealth remained to our citizens, save to some artificers and money-lenders who by usury consumed and gathered to themselves the scattered remnants of the poverty of our citizens.” The Peruzzi houses must have been used by the Signoria for lodging distinguished guests, as Villani writes: “On the 10th March [1345] the wife of the Prince of Taranto, daughter to the Duke of Bourbon, who called herself Empress of Constantinople without possessing an Empire, passed through Florence on her way to France. Great honour was paid to her, she being met and accompanied by many knights and ladies. She dismounted at the house of the Peruzzi, the Commune paying all the expenses of her coming and her going and of the two days she stayed in the city;” and nearly a century later, when the Greek Emperor Paleologus and the Patriarch came to attend the council of Florence “the whole circuit of the houses of the Peruzzi were assigned to them as their residence.” It is said that the street was called Borgo de’ Greci in memory of the Emperor’s visit; Passerini, however, thinks the name was older, and derived from a family called Greci, who lived there.