There was sin in that look, though not perhaps by the standard of those days. It was an Anjou princess who won immortality in the Church of San Lorenzo on that Holy Thursday when she was dreaming of nothing but a lover--perhaps not even of so much as that. She was the Princess Maria, natural daughter of King Robert the Wise, he whose tomb we saw in the Church of Santa Chiara. She had a husband; but no one asks or remembers his name. It is with Boccaccio that her memory is linked for evermore. She was certainly of rare beauty. Her lover, than whom no man ever wrote more delicately, tries to fix it for all time. "Hair so blonde that the world holds nothing like it shadows a white forehead of noble width, beneath which are the curves of two black and most slender eyebrows ... and under these two wandering and roguish eyes ... cheeks of no other colour than milk." Item two lips, indifferent red! Why, what a shiver it gives one to realise that not Boccaccio himself can convey to us any real picture of his love! Even the magic of his style, informed by all the passion of his burning heart, can give us nothing better than a catalogue of charms such as any village lover of to-day might write! The dead are dead; and no wizard can set them before us as they lived. Yet granting that, it is still the spirits of these lovers which haunt the Church of San Lorenzo, filling the large old temple with a throb of human passion to this hour. I saunter round endeavouring to fix my mind on the details of the architecture, which are worth more notice than they commonly receive from all save students. But it is useless. Every time I raise my eyes I seem to see the subtle radiance of sympathy flash across the church from the eyes of the princess, stirring strange, uneasy feelings, born of young hot blood, and the sensuous essence of the chanting heard in the restless days of spring. The architecture may wait the coming of some cooler head. I stroll out into the courtyard, full of memories of kings and poets and of Anjou Courts, when the world was splendid, and life was full of colour, and the city not more unhappy than it is to-day. Among the letters of Petrarch is one written from the monastery attached to this church. The poet lodged there during a visit to Naples in 1342, after the death of King Robert, and gives a vivid description of a great hurricane which struck the city on the 25th of November in that year. The storm had been predicted by a preacher, whose denunciation struck such terror into the Neapolitans, easily stirred to religious apprehensions, that ere dark a troop of women stripped half naked and clasping their children to their breasts were rushing through the streets from church to church, flinging themselves prostrate before the altars, bathing the sacred images with tears, and crying aloud to the Saviour to have mercy on mankind.