tural design.

{370}

Florence became the centre of art and letters in the Italian
renaissance.[2] Though resembling Athens in many respects, and bearing
the same relations to surrounding cities that Athens did to cities in
the classic times, her scholars were more modern than those of Greece
or Rome, and, indeed, more modern than the scholars who followed after
the Florentines, two centuries later. It was an important city, on the
Arno, surrounded by hills, a city of flowers, interesting to-day to the
modern scholar and student of history. Surrounded by walls, having
magnificent gates, with all the modern improvements of paved streets,
of sewers, gardens, and spacious parks, it represented in this early
period the ideal city life. Even to-day the traveller finds the
Palazzo Vecchio, or ancient official residence of the city fathers, and
very near this the Loggia dei Lanzi, now filled with the works of
precious art, and the Palazzo del Podesta, now used as a national
museum, the great cathedral, planned in 1294 by Arnolfo, ready for
consecration in 1498, and not yet completed, and many other remarkable
relics of this wonderful era.

The typical idea in building the cathedral was to make it so beautiful
that no other in the world could ever surpass it. Opposite the main
door were the gates of Ghiberti, which Michael Angelo, for their great
beauty, thought worthy to be the gates of paradise. They close the
entrance of the temple of Saint John the Baptist, the city's patron
saint. More than a hundred other churches, among them the Santa Croce
and the Santa Maria Novella, the latter the resting-place of the
Medici, were built in this magnificent city. The churches were not
only used for religious worship, but were important for meeting-places
of the Florentines. The Arno was crossed by four bridges, of which the
Ponte Vecchio, built in the middle of the fourteenth century, alone
remains in its original form. Upon it rest two rows of houses, each
three stories high, and over this is the passageway from the Palazzo
Pitti to the Palazzo Vecchio. In addition to the public buildings of
{371} Florence, there were many private residences and palaces of
magnificence and splendor.

_The Effect of Humanism on Social Manners_.--By the intellectual
development of Italy, fresh ideas of culture were infused into common
society. To be a gentleman meant to be conversant with poetry,
painting, and art, intelligent in conver