Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved. The Story of Florence All rights reserved First Edition, September 1900. Second Edition, December 1900. [Illustration: _Pallas taming a Centaur, by Botticelli._ (THE TRIUMPH OF LORENZO.)] The Story of Florence by Edmund G. Gardner Illustrated by Nelly Erichsen London: J. M. Dent & Co. Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street Covent Garden W.C. 1900 To MY SISTER MONICA MARY GARDNER PREFACE The present volume is intended to supply a popular history of the Florentine Republic, in such a form that it can also be used as a guide-book. It has been my endeavour, while keeping within the necessary limits of this series of _Mediæval Towns_, to point out briefly the most salient features in the story of Florence, to tell again the tale of those of her streets and buildings, and indicate those of her artistic treasures, which are either most intimately connected with that story or most beautiful in themselves. Those who know best what an intensely fascinating and many-sided history that of Florence has been, who have studied most closely the work and characters of those strange and wonderful personalities who have lived within (and, in the case of the greatest, died without) her walls, will best appreciate my difficulty in compressing even a portion of all this wealth and profusion into the narrow bounds enjoined by the aim and scope of this book. Much has necessarily been curtailed over which it would have been tempting to linger, much inevitably omitted which the historian could not have passed over, nor the compiler of a guide-book failed to mention. In what I have selected for treatment and what omitted, I have usually let myself be guided by the remembrance of my own needs when I first commenced to visit Florence and to study her arts and history.