From Florence I went for a few days to Siena, where, with a completeness to which Florence offers no parallel, the Middle Ages spectacularly still survive. I visited, while I was there, the great castle of Broglio, which, standing among mountains on the brink of a wooded precipice, lifts into the air its clusters of red-brick towers like tulips. I visited also Cetinale--a strange classical villa, built by a Cardinal Chigi, and surrounded by miles of ilex woods, which are peopled with pagan statues. Returning to Florence, I discovered, with the aid of a large-scale ordnance map, a building equally strange, and so little known even to Florentines that our coachman had never heard of it, and often had to ask the way. This is Torre a Cona--half medieval castle and half classical palace. It occupies the summit of a flat-headed hill or mountain. It is surrounded by a circular park full of deer and statues. It is approached by an avenue of cypresses sixty feet in height, and between these trees, on either side of the way, are colossal horses rampant, beneath whose extended forelegs the carriage of the invader passes. I opened a large door in one wing of the house, and found myself in a miniature theater, with its semicircle of boxes decorated in green and silver. My own days at Florence, however, were on this occasion prematurely ended by the breaking of a drainpipe in the villa of my valued hostess, and my consequent migration at very short notice to Cannes. I started at night, and in the small hours of the morning I had to change trains at Genoa. As I paced the dark platform, the air was bleak and wintry, and, looking back with regret to the shining suns of Cyprus, I took my place at last in another train, shivering. For a few hours I slept. When I woke I was less uncomfortable. The air, unless this was mere fancy, had lost something of its sting. I looked out of the window, and from what I could see in the grayness I guessed that we were somewhere or other between Rappallo and Spezzia. As the light grew slowly clearer the prospects were still bleak, but yet with the following of one chill five minutes on another some change was, it seemed, in progress. The gray air acquired a tinge of purple, the chill turned to warmth, the thin purple turned to a soft, enveloping bloom; and when the train reached San Remo a sunrise worthy of midsummer was shining on a world of roses.