fetas, her kerchief of
silk (do you not remember the verses of Lorenzo), and all these you will
find to-day, fading out of use in the Uffizi, where, in a palace that
has become a museum, they are most out of place: thus they have robbed
the peasants for the sake of the gold of the tourists, the sterile
ejaculations of the critics.

It is well not to return to the city by the tramway, which rushes
through the trees of the Viale Michelangelo like I know not what hideous
and shrieking beast of prey, but to wander down towards the Piazzale,
and then, just before you came to it, on your left, by S. Salvatore, to
go down to Porta S. Miniato, that "gap in the wall," and then to pass by
the old wall itself up the hill to Porta di S. Giorgio among the olives
between the towers under the Belvedere. It is the most beautiful of all
the gates of the city, little, too, and still keeps its fresco of the
fourteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[113] Villani, _Cronica_, l. i. c. 57, translated by R.E. Selfe.
Constable, 1906.

[114] See p. 363.

XXI. FLORENCE

THE BARGELLO

If Arnolfo di Cambio is the architect not only of the Duomo but of the
Palazzo Vecchio, and if Orcagna conceived the delicate beauty of the
Loggia de' Lanzi, it is, if we may believe Vasari, partly to Arnolfo and
partly to Agnolo Gaddi that we owe Bargello, that palace so like a
fortress, at the corner of Via del Proconsolo and Via Ghibellina. Begun
in the middle of the thirteenth century for the Capitano del Popolo, it
later became the Palace of the Podesta, passing at last, under the Grand
Dukes, to the Bargello, the Captain of Justice, who turned it
barbarously enough into a prison, dividing the great rooms, as it is
said, into cells for his prisoners. To-day it is become the National
Museum, where all that could be gathered of the work of the Tuscan
sculptors is housed and arranged in order.

Often as I wander through those rooms or loiter in the shadow under the
cloisters of the beautiful courtyard, perhaps the most lovely court in
Tuscany, the remembrance of that old fierce life which desired beauty so
passionately and was so eager for every superiority, comes to me, and I
ask myself how the dream which that world pursued with so much
simplicity and enthusiasm can have led us at last to the world of
to-day, with its orderly disorder, its trams and telegraphs and
steam-engines, its material comfort which, how strangely, we have
mistaken for civilisat