reat Pisan game the _Giuoco del Ponte_
was played,[50] a model of which may be found in the Museo. This new
bridge, at any rate, does not shut out the view of the beautiful Lung'
Arno, _il bello di Pisa_, as one writer calls it. Standing there you may
see the yellow river, curved like a bow, pass through the beautiful
city, between the palaces of marble, their wrinkled image reflected in
the stream, till it is lost in the green fields on its way to the sea;
while on the other side, looking eastward, on either side the river are
the palaces of Byron and Shelley, just before the hideous iron bridge,
where Arno turns suddenly into the city from the plain and the hills. To
the south of the bridge is the Loggia dei Banchi, and farther to the
west, on the Lung' Arno, the great palace of the Gambacorti rises, now
the Palazzo del Comune, and farther still, the Madonna della Spina, a
little Gothic church of marble; while if you pass a little way westward,
the Torre Guelfa comes into sight at the bend of the river among the
ruins of the old arsenal.

It is of course to the wonderful group of buildings to the north of the
city, just within the walls, that every traveller will first make his
way. Passing from Ponte di Mezzo down the Lung' Arno Regio, past the
Palazzo Agostini, beautiful in its red brick past Palazzo Lanfreducci
with its little chain and enigmatic motto, "Alla Giornata," past the
Grand Ducal Palace, you turn at last into the Via S. Maria, a beautiful
and lovely street that winds like a stream full of shadows to the Piazza
del Duomo. On your right is the Church of S. Niccolo, founded about the
year 1000 by Ugo, Marquis of Tuscany. It seems that with Otho III there
came into Italy the Marquis Hugh. "I take it," says Villani,[51] "this
must have been the Marquis of Brandenburg, inasmuch as there is no other
marquisate in Germany." His sojourn in Italy, and especially in our city
of Florence, liked him so well that he caused his wife to come thither,
and took up his abode in Florence as Vicar of Otho the Emperor. It came
to pass as it pleased God, that when he was riding to the chase in the
country of Bonsollazzo, he lost sight of all his followers in a wood,
and came out, as he supposed, at a workshop where iron was wont to be
wrought. Here he found men black and deformed, who in place of iron
seemed to be tormenting men with fire and with hammer, and he asked them
what this might be: and they answered and said that the