The travellers made a brief halt at Malta, whence they took steamer to Naples, and from there went by rail to Florence. There they stayed, living in the Via Maggio, from the 26th of August to the 30th of October. Neither in his letters nor in the sketches which he afterward published under the title of “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere” can one find more than a slight record of Lowell’s sojourn in a city which was especially endeared to him by that study of Dante which had been his real introduction to the great world. “I liked my Florentine better than my Roman walks,” he said; “apart from any difference in the men, I had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the _Sasso di Dante_, than at Horace’s Sabine farm, or by the tomb of Virgil;”[91] for he found it harder “to bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of centuries,” and the marked individuality of mediæval Italian towns attracted him all the more for their being modern and Christian. In Florence there was an added pleasure in the companionship of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Shaw, and in the society of William Page. In a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written from Rome half a year later, Lowell writes: “Once when I was in Florence, Page and Shaw and I took a walk out of the city to see a famous _Cenacolo_ of Andrea del Sarto in the refectory of a suppressed convent, about a mile and a half outside the Porta Santa Croce. We took a roundabout course among the hills, going first to Galileo’s tower, and then to that of the old Church of San Miniato which Michelangelo defended. Thence we descended steeply toward the Arno, crossed it by a ferry-boat, and then found ourselves opposite a _trattoria_. It was a warm October day, and we unanimously turned in at the open door. There were three rooms, one upstairs, where one might dine ‘more obscurely and courageously’ the kitchen, and the room in which we were. As I sat upon the corner of the bench, I looked out through some grape-trailers which hung waving over the door, and saw first the Arno, then, beyond it a hill on which stood a villa with a garden laid out in squares with huge walls of box and a clump of tall black cypresses in the middle, then, to the right of this, the ruined tower of San Miniato, and beyond it that from which Milton had doubtless watched the moon rising ‘o’er the top of Fesole.’ This was my landscape. Behind me was the kitchen. The cook in his white linen cap was stirring alternately a huge cauldron of soup and a pan of sausages, which exploded into sudden flame now and then, as if by spontaneous combustion. A woman wound up at short intervals a jack which turned three or four chickens before the fire, and attended a kind of lake of hot fat in which countless tiny fishes darted, squirmed, and turned topsy-turvy in a way so much more active and with an expression of so much more enjoyment than is wont to characterize living fish, that you would have said they had now for the first time found their element, and