One of the most picturesque mediæval palaces in Florence is that of the Feroni, and its architectural beauty is greatly enhanced by its fine situation at the head of the Tornabuoni on the Piazza della Trinità, with the magnificent column of the Medicis just before its gate. According to Italian authority, “this palace may be called, after those of the Prætorio (_i.e._, Bargello) and the Signoria, the most characteristic building of its epoch in Florence. It is said to have been built by Arnolfo di Cambio. It once belonged to the Spini, from whom it passed to the Feroni.” When I was in Florence in 1846–47, this palace was the best hotel in Florence, and the one in which I lived. There have been great “restorations” in the city since that time, but very few which have not been most discreditably and foolishly conducted, even to the utter destruction of all that was truly interesting in them; as, for instance, “the house of Dante, torn down within a few years to be rebuilt, so that now not one stone rests upon another of the original;” and “Santa Maria Novella, where the usual monkish hatred of everything not _rococo_ and trashy has shown itself by destroying beautiful work of earlier times, or selling it to the Kensington Museum, setting up a barbarously gilt gingerbread high altar, and daubing the handsome Gothic sacristy with gaudy colours.” To which the author of Murray’s “Guide-Book for Central Italy” adds, that “perhaps on the whole list of ecclesiastical restorations there does not exist a more deplorable instance of monastic vandalism than has been perpetrated here by the architect Romoli”—a remark which falls unfortunately very far short of the truth. Such ruin is wrought _everywhere_ at present; witness the beautiful Fonte Gaja, “the masterpiece of Jacopo della Quercia in Siena (1402), which, since the change of Government, was not ‘restored,’ but _totally destroyed and carted away_, a miserable modern copy having been recently set up in its place” (Hare, “Cities of Central Italy”), all of which was probably done to “make a job” for a favoured builder. “But what can you expect,” adds a friend, “in a country where it is common to cover a beautiful dry stone wall with plaster, and then paint it over to resemble the original stone,” because, as I was naïvely told, “the rough stone itself looks _too cheap_”? Anybody who has lived long in Italy can add infinitely to such instances. The Palazzo Feroni has, however, suffered so little, for a wonder, from restoration, and still really looks so genuinely old, that it deserves special mention, and may serve as an excuse for my remarks on the manner in which ancient works are destroyed so _con amore_ by monks and modern municipalities. I may here note that this building is, in a sense, the common rendezvous for all the visitors to Florence, chiefly English and Americans, since in it are the very large circulating library and reading-rooms of Vieusseux. {212}