My friend Federico wandering through Tuscany on one of those delightful excursions that he loves, passing from town to town and village to village picking up "old things" _en route_, called at a dealer’s shop in Bagni di Lucca. In the miscellaneous collection of antiquities there offered for sale he found nothing to please him. To console him in the hour of disappointment, the little dealer, named Grosso, said: "I know of a beautiful Montelupo plate that will take your fancy. Come with me; it is away up the hills, a pleasant ride for us. Give me a few francs for my trouble, and you can buy the plate." So they took a vettura and rode up the mountains in quest of the Montelupo plate. After an hour’s delightful drive they stopped at a contadino’s cottage on the roadside, and there, boldly on view to the passer-by and stuck on the weather-beaten front of the cottage over the doorway, was the Montelupo plate, the very heart’s desire of the two adventurers. It was a brave plate, round as the sun and about thirteen inches in diameter. In the centre of it, painted in flaming colours, trotted a soldier on horseback with drawn sword in hand, but no painted foeman visible into which to bury the thirsty blade. The interior of the plate surrounding the warrior was a mass of rich deep orange ground; the colour much esteemed by collectors of this rural pottery. The contadinos in Tuscany once owned numerous specimens of these rustic dishes, which were used daily by them in their homes as common household crockery. They were nothing thought of in those far-off days of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were made for the peasants’ service, and if a plate was broken another was bought for half a franc in the next market town. The day came when the supply stopped and the plates could not be replaced. Some other novelty in kitchenware had the run of the market, and nobody wanted Montelupo plates. Fashion set in about twenty years ago to collect this crude, curious, neglected pottery, so grotesque and humorous in design and coarse in workmanship, but when reposing against the wall of a well-lit room certainly showy and decorative for all time. They carry amusing and picturesque subjects, comical or satirical in treatment. Not very artistic, but cleverly and freely drawn with a few bold lines to catch the peasant’s sense of humour, which was easily tickled. The plates revel in brightness and colour. Colour holds the eye and courts our admiration, and fancy prices rule the market. The rarest plates to find are those burlesquing the Churchman. The soldier, the farmer, and the serving-maid took the joke kindly, but the plates in which the monk was caricatured offended the Church dignitaries, and these specimens were bought up mysteriously, quickly destroyed, and now cannot be found.