Verona is more Italian in appearance than Florence. The principal street runs along either side of the river Arno, and is crowded for some distance with little picture and jewelry shops; but farther on toward the _cascine_, or park, the street widens, and is enriched with handsome modern buildings, most of which are hotels. This drive to the _cascine_ and the grand hotel was made when Victor Emmanuel allowed the impression to exist that Florence would remain the capital of Italy. This drive is thronged with carriages about four o’clock in the afternoon. It was here I remember to have had the carriage of the Medici family pointed out to me. Within sat two ladies with dark, lustrous eyes, jet hair, and a great deal of lemon color on their bonnets. The livery was also lemon color, and the carriage contained the coat of arms on a lemon-colored panel. The Italians are very partial to this shade of yellow. The beds are draped with material of this same intense hue—very becoming to brunettes, but ruinous, as the young ladies would say, to blondes. Every one knows of the old Palazzo Vecchio, which rises away above every object in the city of Florence. Its walls are so thick that in them there are places for concealment—little cells—and in one of these the great reformer of Florence, Savonarola, was kept until they burned him at the stake in front of the palace. “Santa Croce” is the name of the church which contains the tombs of Michael Angelo, Alfieri Galileo, and Machiavelli. Byron, moved with this idea, writes: “In Santa Croce’s holy precincts lie Ashes which make it holier, dust which is Even in itself an immortality.” Every American goes to Powers’s studio to see the original of the Greek Slave. Next to the Venus of Milo it seems the loveliest study in marble of the female figure. But “our lady of Milo,” as Hawthorne calls her—there is no beauty to hers! The Baptistery in Florence is a curious octagonal church, built in the twelfth century, and has the celebrated bronze doors by Ghiberti, representing twelve eventful scenes from the Bible. Those to the south are beautiful enough, said Michael Angelo, to be the gates of paradise.