d look a half-hour forth on Fiesole

--that was Andrea's way and not an unwise one. For Fiesole at
nearer view can easily disappoint. It is beautifully set on its
hill and it has a fascinating past; but the journey thither on
foot is very wearisome, by the electric tram vexatious and noisy,
and in a horse-drawn carriage expensive and cruel; and when you
are there you become once more a tourist without alleviation and
are pestered by beggars, and by nice little girls who ought to
know better, whose peculiar importunacy it is to thrust flowers
into the hand or buttonhole without any denial. What should have
been a mountain retreat from the city has become a kind of Devil's
Dyke. But if one is resolute, and, defying all, walks up to the
little monastery of S. Francesco at the very top of the hill, one
may rest almost undisturbed, with Florence in the valley below, and
gardens and vineyards undulating beneath, and a monk or two ascending
or descending the steps, and three or four picture-postcard hawkers
gambling in a corner, and lizards on the wall. Here it is good to be
in the late afternoon, when the light is mellowing; and if you want
tea there is a little loggia a few yards down this narrow steep path
where it may be found. How many beautiful villas in which one could
be happy sunning oneself among the lizards lie between this point
and Florence! Who, sitting here, can fail to think that?

In walking to Fiesole one follows the high walls of the Villa Palmieri,
which is now very private American property, but is famous for ever as
the first refuge of Boccaccio's seven young women and three young men
when they fled from plague-stricken Florence in 1348 and told tales for
ten halcyon days. It is now generally agreed that if Boccaccio had any
particular house in his mind it was this. It used to be thought that
the Villa Poggio Gherardo, Mrs. Ross's beautiful home on the way to
Settignano, was the first refuge, and the Villa Palmieri the second,
but the latest researches have it that the Palmieri was the first and
the Podere della Fonte, or Villa di Boccaccio, as it is called, near
Camerata, a little village below S. Domenico, the other. The Villa
Palmieri has another and somewhat different historical association,
for it was there that Queen Victoria resided for a while in 1888. But
the most interesting thing of all about it is the circumstance that
it was the home of Matteo Palmieri, the poet, and Botticelli's friend
a