to the country and one may always see the hills and
the sky! But even in Athens, when they built the Parthenon, often, I
think, I should have found my way into the olive gardens and vineyards
about Kephisos: so to-day, leaving the dead beauty littered in the
churches, the palaces, the museums, the streets of Florence, very often
I seek the living beauty of the country, the whisper of the poplars
beside Arno, the little lovely songs of streams. And then Florence is a
city almost without suburbs;[129] at the gate you find the hills, the
olive gardens bordered with iris, the vineyards hedged with the rose.

Many and fair are the ways to Fiesole: you may go like a burgess in the
tram, or like a lord in a coach, but for me I will go like a young man
by the bye ways, like a poor man on my feet, and the dew will be yet on
the roses when I set out, and in the vineyards they will be singing
among the corn--

"Fiorin fiorello,
La mi' Rosina ha il labbro di corallo
E l'occhiettino suo sembra un gioiello."

And then, who knows what awaits one on the way?

"E quando ti riscontro per la via
Abbassi gli occhi e rassembri una dea,
E la fai consumar la vita mia."

Of the ways to Fiesole, one goes by Mugnone and one by S. Gervasio, but
it will not be by them that I shall go, but out of Barriera delle Cure;
and I shall pass behind the gardens of Villa Palmieri, whither after the
second day of the _Decamerone_ Boccaccio's fair ladies and gay lords
passed from Poggio Gherardo by a little path "but little used, which was
covered with herbs and flowers, that opened under the rising sun, while
they listened to the song of the nightingales and other birds." Thus
between the garden walls I shall come to S. Domenico.

S. Domenico di Fiesole is a tiny village half way up the hill of
Fiesole, and on one side of the way is the Dominican convent, and on the
other the Villa Medici, while in the valley of Mugnone is an abbey of
Benedictines, the Badia di Fiesole, founded in 1028. The convent of
Dominican friars, where Fra Angelico and S. Antonino, who was the first
novice here, lived, and Cosimo de' Medici walked so often, looking down
on Florence and Arno there in the evening, was founded in 1405.
Suppressed in the early part of the nineteenth century, the convent was
despoiled of its frescoes, but in 1880 it was bought back by the
Dominicans, so that to-day it is fulfilling its original purpose as a
religious house. Th