wondering why the house
of Savoy should have brought this vandalism from Switzerland. Nor is
this strange monarchy content with broken promises and stolen dowries;
in its grasping barbarism it must rename the most famous and splendid
ways of Italy after itself: thus the Corso of Rome has become Corso
Umberto Primo, and we live in daily expectation that Piazza Signoria of
Florence will become Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele II. If that has not yet
befallen, it is surely an oversight; the Government has been so busy
renaming Roman places--the Villa Borghese, for instance--that Florence
has so far nearly escaped. Not altogether, however: beyond the Carraja
bridge, just before the Pescaia in the Piazza Manin, is the suppressed
convent (now a barracks) of the Humiliati, that democratic brotherhood
which improved the manufacture of wool almost throughout Italy. What has
the Venetian Jew, Daniel Manin, to do with them? Yet he is remembered by
means of a bad statue, while the Humiliati and the Franciscans are
forgotten: yet for sure they did more for Florence than he. But no doubt
it would be difficult to remind oneself tactfully of those one has
robbed, and a Venetian Jew looks more in place before a desecrated
convent than S. Francis would do. Like the rest of Italy, Florence seems
always to forget that she had a history before 1860; yet here at least
she should have remembered one of her old heroes, for in the convent
garden Giano della Bella, who fought at Campaldino, and was
anti-clerical too and hateful to the Pope, the hero of the Ordinances of
Justice, used to walk with his friends. _Perisca innanzi la citta_, say
I, _che tante opere rie si sostengano_. By this let even Venetian Jews,
to say nothing of Switzer princes, know how they are like to be
remembered when their little day is over.

[Illustration: OGNISSANTI]

It was in 1256 that the Humiliati founded here in Borgo Ognissanti the
Church of S. Caterina, and carved their arms, a woolpack fastened with
ropes, over the door. Originally founded by certain Lombard exiles in
Northern Germany, the Humiliati were at first at any rate a lay
brotherhood, which had learned in exile the craft of weaving wool. Such
wool as was to be had in Tuscany, a land of olives and vines, almost
without pasture, was poor enough, and it seems to have been only after
the advent of the Humiliati that the great Florentine industry began to
assert itself, foreign wools being brought in a raw state t