WITH all the treasures of my historic reading in mind from the lives of the Medici and Savonarola to that of Michelangelo and the Florentine school of artists, I was keen to see what Florence would be like. Mrs. Q. had described it as the most individual of all the Italian cities that she had seen. She had raved¹ over its narrow, dark, cornice-shaded streets, its fortress-like palaces, its highly individual churches and cloisters², the way the drivers of the little open vehicles plied³ everywhere cracking their whips, until, she said, it sounded like a Fourth of July in Janesville. I was keen to see how large the dome⁴ of the cathedral would look and whether it would really tower conspicuously⁵ over the remaining buildings of the city, and whether the Arno would look as picturesque⁶ as it did in all the photographs. The air was so soft and the sun so bright, although sinking low in the west, as the train entered the city, that I was pleased to accept, instead of the ancient atmosphere which I had anticipated, the wide streets and rows of four- and six-family apartment houses which characterize all the newer sections. They have the rich browns and creams of the earlier portion of Florence; but they are very different in their suggestion of modernity. The distant hills, as I could see from the car windows, were dotted with houses and villas⁷ occupying delightful⁸ positions above the town. Suddenly I saw the Duomo; and although I knew it only from photographs I recognized it in an instant. It spoke⁹ for itself in a large, dignified¹⁰ way. Over the housetops it soared like a great bubble;372 and some pigeons flying in the air gave it the last touch of beauty. We wound around the city in a circle—I could tell this by the shifting position of the sun—through great yards of railway-tracks with scores of engines and lines of small box-cars; and then I saw a small stream and a bridge,—nothing like the Arno, of course,—a canal; and the next thing we were rolling into a long crowded railway-station, the guards calling Firenze. I got up, gathered my overcoat and bags into my arms, signaled a facino and gave them to him; and then I sought a vehicle that would convey me to the hotel for which I was bound—the Hotel de Ville on the Arno. I sat behind a fat driver while he cracked his whip endlessly above the back of a lazy horse, passing the while the showy façade of Santa Maria Novella, striped with strange bands of white and bluish gray or drab,—a pleasing effect for a church. I could see at once that the Florence of the Middle Ages was a much more condensed affair than that which now

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