In the evening Signor Ludovico di Ferrari of Cremona, a gentleman well known to me, sent me a box of quince marmalade, musk flavoured, and some lemons, besides some oranges of extraordinary size. A little before daybreak I was seized with cramp in the calf of the right leg. The pain was sharp, intermittent and not continuous, and lasted about half-an-hour. I had a similar attack not long ago, but then it passed in a twinkling. Just at this season we began to be conscious of the heat and of the noise of the grasshoppers, but neither trouble was worse than in France. The air up to the present has seemed fresher than in Gascony. In free nations you do not find, as otherwhere, the sharp division of classes, and here even the lowest bear themselves with a certain dignity. Even in asking alms they will always ask as if they had a right. “Give me something, will you?” “Give me something, do you understand?” Whereas in Rome they cry, “Do me a kindness for your own sake.”[59] On Wednesday, June 21, I left Della Villa early in the morning, having received from the ladies and gentlemen there sojourning every mark of friendship that I could desire as I said good-bye. I travelled through a hilly country, fair and well wooded, for twelve miles as far as Pescia, a small town under Florence on the river Pescia, with fine houses and wide streets. Here the famous wine of Trebbiano is grown in a vineyard surrounded by thick olive woods. The people show great friendship to France, which accounts for their adoption of a dolphin as a crest.[60] After dinner we traversed a fair plain, thickly set with villages and houses. I had resolved to visit Monte Catino, where is the hot salt spring of Tettuccio,[61] a place a mile to the right of the direct road, about seven miles from Pescia, but through my heedlessness I forgot all about it till I got to Pistoia, a distance of eleven miles. I found lodging outside the town, where I was visited by a son of M. de Ruspigliosi. Any one who travels in Italy otherwise than by hiring horses is a bad manager, for to me it seems far less irksome to change horses here and there, than to be in the hands of a single _vetturino_ for a long journey. The twenty miles between Pistoia and Florence cost for horse hire only four julli. From Pistoia we passed Prato and came to Castello in time for dinner. We alighted at an inn opposite to the Grand Duke’s palace, and after dinner we went to view more particularly the garden belonging thereto, which I found to be less fair in reality than I had figured it, an experience I had often met before. The last time I saw it was in winter,[62] when it was bare and desolate, and then I imaged its loveliness in the sweet of the year, but my fancy ran away with me. We had come seventeen miles to Castello, and after dinner we rode the remaining three and arrived at Florence. [Illustration: FLORENCE _Reproduced from Civitates Orbis Terrarum_