iance
between the Guidi and the Ubaldini on 8th June 1302, "Actum in choro
Sancti Gaudentii de pede Alpium."

Nothing remains of the place as it was in those days, I suppose, save
the church, and that has been for the most part rebuilt; but the choir
stands, so that we may say here, on 8th June 1302, Dante took quill and
signed and spoke with his fellow-exiles.

Thence I followed the way to Dicomano by Sieve, at the foot of the
Consuma, and then up stream to Borgo S. Lorenzo, the capital of the
Mugello, and so by the winding road above the valley under the hills to
Fiesole, to Florence, wrapped in rain, through which an evening sun was
breaking.

FOOTNOTES:

[132] Now in S. Trinita in Firenze.

[133] Mr. Montgomery Carmichael (_On the Old Road_, etc., p. 293),
quoting from Don Diego de' Franchi (_Historia del Patriarcha S.
Giovangualberto_, p. 77: Firenze, 1640), says that S. Romuald and S.
Giovanni Gualberto vowed eternal friendship between their Orders, "and
for a long time, if a Camaldolese was visiting Vallombrosa, he would
take off his own and put on a Vallombrosan habit as a symbol that the
monks of the two Orders were brothers."

[134] _Guida Illustrata del Casentino da C. Beni_: Firenze, 1889. This
perhaps the best guide-book in the Tuscan language, is certainly the
best for the Casentino. Those who cannot read it must fall back on the
charming and delightful book by Miss Noyes, _The Casentino and its
Story_: Dent, 1905. It is too good a book to be left useless in its
heavy bulky form. Perhaps Miss Noyes will give us a pocket edition.

XXVII. PRATO

Prato is like a flower that has fallen by the wayside that has faded in
the dust of the way. She is a little rosy city, scarcely more than a
castello, full of ruined churches; and in the churches are ruined
frescoes, ruined statues, broken pillars, spoiled altars. You pass from
one church to another--from S. Francesco, with its facade of green and
white, its pleasant cloister and old frescoes, to La Madonna delle
Carceri, to S. Niccolo da Tolentino, to S. Domenico--and you ask
yourself, as you pass from one to another, what you have come to see:
only this flower fallen by the wayside.

But in truth Prato is the child of Florence, a rosy child among the
flowers--in the country, too, as children should be. Her churches are
small. What could be more like a child's dream of a church than La
Madonna delle Carceri? And the Palazzo Pretorio--it is a toy