fied "the Mountain" that they fled out of the city, but
Luca Pitti remained, trusting in Giovanni Tornabuoni and the promises of
Piero. Now mark his fall. He quickly learned the difference betwixt
victory and misfortune, betwixt honour and disgrace. His house, which
formerly was thronged with visitors and the better sort of citizens, was
now grown solitary and unfrequented. When he appeared abroad in the
streets, his friends and relations were not only afraid to accompany
him, but even to own or salute him, for some of them had lost their
honours for doing it, some their estates, and all of them were
threatened. The noble structures which he had begun were given over by
the workmen, the good deeds requited with contumely, the honours he had
conferred with infamy and disgrace. For many persons, who in the day of
his authority had loaded him with presents, required them again in his
distress, pretending they were but loans and no more. Those who before
had cried him to the skies, cursed him down as fast for his ingratitude
and violence; so that now, when it was too late, he began to repent
himself that he had not taken Soderini's advice and died honourably,
seeing that he must now live with dishonour.

So far Machiavelli. The unfinished, half-ruinous palace, designed in
1444 by Brunellesco, was a century later sold by the Pitti, quite ruined
now, to Eleonora, the wife of Grand Duke Cosimo, and was finished by
Ammanati. The great wings were added later. In May 1550, Cosimo I
entered Palazzo Pitti as his Grand-Ducal residence. To-day it is the
King of Italy's Palace in Florence.

The Galleria Palatina is a gallery of the masterpieces of the high
Renaissance, formed by the Grand Dukes, who brought here from their own
villas and from the Uffizi the greatest works in their possession. Like
other Italian galleries, it suffered from Napoleon's generals; but
though sixty or more pictures were taken to Paris, they all seem to have
been returned. Here the Grand Dukes gathered ten pictures by Titian
eight by Raphael, as well as two, the Madonna del Baldacchino and the
Vision of Ezekiel, which he designed, ten by Andrea del Sarto, six by
Fra Bartolommeo, two lovely Peruginos, two splendid portraits by Ridolfo
Ghirlandajo, four portraits by Tintoretto, several pictures by Rubens,
two portraits, one of himself, by Rembrandt, a magnificent Vandyck, and
many lesser pictures. In the royal apartments, among other interesting
or beautiful