es on to say, having secured possession of the site,
"built this edifice on the remains of the ancestral house as fresh
evidence of the public veneration of the divine poet". The Torre della
Castagna, across the way, has an inscription in Italian, which may be
translated thus: "This Tower, the so-called Tower of the Chestnut, is
the solitary remnant of the head-quarters from which the Priors of the
Arts governed Florence, before the power and glory of the Florentine
Commune procured the erection of the Palace of the Signoria".

Few persons in the real city of Florence, it may be said confidently,
live in a house built for them; but hereabouts none at all. In fact,
it is the exception anywhere near the centre of the city to live in
a house built less than three centuries ago. Palaces abound, cut up
into offices, flats, rooms, and even cinema theatres. The telegraph
office in the Via del Proconsolo is a palace commissioned by the
Strozzi but never completed: hence its name, Nonfinito; next it is
the superb Palazzo Quaratesi, which Brunelleschi designed, now the
head-quarters of a score of firms and an Ecclesiastical School whence
sounds of sacred song continually emerge.

Since we have Mino da Fiesole in our minds and are on the subject
of old palaces let us walk from the Dante quarter in a straight line
from the Corso, that very busy street of small shops, across the Via
del Proconsolo and down the Borgo degli Albizzi to S. Ambrogio, where
Mino was buried. This Borgo is a street of palaces and an excellent one
in which to reflect upon the strange habit which wealthy Florentines
then indulged of setting their mansions within a few feet of those
opposite. Houses--or rather fortresses--that must have cost fortunes
and have been occupied by families of wealth and splendour were
erected so close to their vis-a-vis that two carts could not pass
abreast between them. Side by side contiguity one can understand,
but not this other adjacence. Every ground floor window is barred
like a gaol. Those bars tell us something of the perils of life in
Florence in the great days of faction ambition; while the thickness
of the walls and solidity of construction tell us something too of
the integrity of the Florentine builders. These ancient palaces,
one feels, whatever may happen to them, can never fall to ruin. Such
stones as are placed one upon the other in the Pitti and the Strozzi
and the Riccardi nothing can displace. It is an odd tho