un over the hills. Lounging
about this old fortress of a city, one is caught rather by the aspect of
natural things--Val d'Arno, far and far away, and at last a glimpse of
the Apennines; Val di Mugnone towards Monte Senario, the night of
cypresses about Vincigliata, the olives of Maiano--than by the churches
scattered among the trees or hidden in the narrow ways that everywhere
climb the hills to lose themselves at last in the woodland or in the
cornlands among the vines. You wander behind the Duomo into the Scavi,
and it is not the Roman Baths you go to see or the Etruscan walls and
the well-preserved Roman theatre: you watch the clouds on the mountains,
the sun in the valley, the shadows on the hills, listen to a boy singing
to his goats, play with a little girl who has slipped her hand in yours
looking for soldi, or wonder at the host of flowers that has run even
among these ruins. Even from the windows of the Palazzo Pretorio, which
for some foolish reason you have entered on your way to the hills, you
do not really see the statues and weapons of these forgotten Etruscan
people, but you watch the sun that has perhaps suddenly lighted up the
Duomo, or the wind that, like a beautiful thought, for a moment has
turned the hills to silver. Or if it be up to S. Francesco you climb,
the old acropolis of Fiesole, above the palace of the bishop and the
Seminary, it will surely be rather to look over the valley to the
farthest hills, where Val di Greve winds towards Siena, than to enter a
place which, Franciscan though it be, has nothing to show half so fair
as this laughing country, or that Tuscan cypress on the edge of that
grove of olives.

That love of country life, no longer characteristic of the Florentines,
which we are too apt to consider almost wholly English, was long ago
certainly one of the most delightful traits of the Tuscan character; for
Siena was not behind Florence in her delight in the life of the
villa.[131] It is perhaps in the Commentaries of Pius II that a love of
country byways, the lanes and valleys about his home, through which,
gouty and old, he would have himself carried in a litter, is expressed
for the first time with a true understanding and appreciation of things
which for us have come to mean a good half of life. No such lovely
descriptions of scenery may be found perhaps in any Florentine writer
before Lorenzo Magnifico, unless indeed it be in the verse of Sacchetti.
Yet the Florentine burges