s tomb, on the pillar, is the pretty but rather
Victorian "Madonna del Latte," surrounded by angels, by Bernardo
Rossellino (1409-1464), brother of the author of the great tomb at
S. Miniato. This pretty relief was commissioned as a family memorial
by that Francesco Nori, the close friend of Lorenzo de' Medici, who
was killed in the Duomo during the Pazzi conspiracy in his effort to
save Lorenzo from the assassins.

The tomb of Alfieri, the dramatist, to which we now come, was
erected at the cost of his mistress, the Countess of Albany,
who herself sat to Canova for the figure of bereaved Italy. This
curious and unfortunate woman became, at the age of nineteen, the
wife of the Young Pretender, twenty-seven years after the '45, and
led a miserable existence with him (due chiefly to his depravity,
but a little, she always held, to the circumstance that they chose
Good Friday for their wedding day) until Alfieri fell in love with
her and offered his protection. Together she and the poet remained,
apparently contented with each other and received by society, even
by the English Royal family, until Alfieri died, in 1803, when after
exclaiming that she had lost all--"consolations, support, society,
all, all!"--and establishing this handsome memorial, she selected the
French artist Fabre to fill the aching void in her fifty-years-old
heart; and Fabre not only filled it until her death in 1824, but
became the heir of all that had been bequeathed to her by both the
Stuart and Alfieri. Such was the Countess of Albany, to whom human
affection was so necessary. She herself is buried close by, in the
chapel of the Castellani.

Mrs. Piozzi, in her "Glimpses of Italian Society," mentions seeing
in Florence in 1785 the unhappy Pretender. Though old and sickly,
he went much into society, sported the English arms and livery,
and wore the garter.

Other tombs in the right aisle are those of Machiavelli, the
statesman and author of "The Prince," and Rossini, the composer of
"William Tell," who died in Paris in 1868, but was brought here for
burial. These tombs are modern and of no artistic value, but there
is near them a fine fifteenth-century example in the monument by
Bernardo Rossellino to another statesman and author, Leonardo Bruni,
known as Aretino, who wrote the lives of Dante and Petrarch and a
Latin history of Florence, a copy of which was placed on his heart at
his funeral. This tomb is considered to be Rossellino's masterpie