names of the vicinity may be read too; and in the church
is one of his most charming groups and finest heads. They are in a
little chapel on the right of the choir. The head is that of Bishop
Salutati, humorous, wise, and benign, and the group represents the
adoration of a merry little Christ by a merry little S. John and
others. As for the church itself, it is severe and cool, with such
stone columns in it as must last for ever.

But the main interest of Fiesole to most people is not the
cypress-covered hill of S. Francesco; not the view from the summit;
not the straw mementoes; not the Mino relief in the church; but
the Roman arena. The excavators have made of this a very complete
place. One can stand at the top of the steps and reconstruct it
all--the audience, the performance, the performers. A very little time
spent on building would be needed to restore the amphitheatre to its
original form. Beyond it are baths, and in a hollow the remains of a
temple with the altar where it ever was; and then one walks a little
farther and is on the ancient Etruscan wall, built when Fiesole was an
Etruscan fortified hill city. So do the centuries fall away here! But
everywhere, among the ancient Roman stones so massive and exact,
and the Etruscan stones, are the wild flowers which Luca Signorelli
painted in that picture in the Uffizi which I love so much.

After the amphitheatre one visits the Museum--with the same ticket--a
little building filled with trophies of the spade. There is nothing
very wonderful--nothing to compare with the treasures of the
Archaeological Museum in Florence--but it is well worth a visit.

On leaving the Museum on the last occasion that I was there--in
April--I walked to Settignano. The road for a while is between
houses, for Fiesole stretches a long way farther than one suspects,
very high, looking over the valley of the Mugnone; and then after a
period between pine trees and grape-hyacinths one turns to the right
and begins to descend. Until Poggio del Castello, a noble villa,
on an isolated eminence, the descent is very gradual, with views of
Florence round the shoulder of Monte Ceceri; but afterwards the road
winds, to ease the fall, and the wayfarer turns off into the woods and
tumbles down the hill by a dry water-course, amid crags and stones,
to the beginnings of civilization again, at the Via di Desiderio da
Settignano, a sculptor who stands to his native town in precisely
the same relation