by this way, so that if possible I always return by Lung' Arno, past
Torrino di S. Rosa and the barracks of S. Friano and the grain store of
Cosimo III, past the houses of the Soderini to Ponte alla Carraia, which
fell on Mayday 1304, sending so many to that other world they had come
out to see, and so past the house of Piero Capponi, the hero of 1494 who
kept the Medici at bay, and threatened Charles VIII in the council; then
turning down Via Coverelli one comes to Santo Spirito.

It was the Augustinian Hermits who, coming to Florence about 1260,
bought a vineyard close to where Via Maggio, an abbreviation of Via
Maggiore, now is, from the Vellati family. Here they built a monastery
and a church, and dedicated them to the Santo Spirito, so that when the
city was divided into quartieri this Sestiere d'Oltrarno became
Quartiere di S. Spirito. In 1397, as it is said, they determined to
rebuild the place on a bigger scale, and to this end appointed
Brunellesco their architect. The church was begun in 1433, and was
burned down in 1471, during the Easter celebrations, which were
particularly splendid in that year owing to the visit of Galeazzo Maria
Sforza. It was rebuilt, however, in the next twenty years from the
designs of Brunellesco, and is to-day the most beautiful
fifteenth-century church in Florence, full of light and sweetness, very
spacious, too, and with a certain fortunate colour about it that gives
it an air of cheerfulness and serenity beyond anything of the kind to be
found in the Duomo or S. Lorenzo. And then, the Florentines have been
content to leave it alone,--at any rate, so far as the unfinished facade
is concerned. It is in the form of a Latin cross, and suggests even yet
in some happy way the very genius of the Latin people in its temperance
and delight in the sun and the day. The convent, it is true, has been
desecrated, and is now a barracks; most of the altars have been robbed
of their treasures; but the church itself remains to us a very precious
possession from that fifteenth century, which in Italy certainly was so
fortunate, so perfect a dawn of a day that was a little disappointing,
and at evening so disastrous.

Of the works of art remaining in the nave, that spacious nave where one
could wander all day long, only the copy of Michelangelo's Pieta in St.
Peter's will, I think, detain us for more than a moment. What is left to
us of that far-away flower-like beauty of fifteenth-century painting