s ancient conditions
and presented it to the city as a permanent monument of the past.

Here we see a mediaeval Florentine palace precisely as it was when its
Florentine owner lived his uncomfortable life there. For say what one
may, there is no question that life must have been uncomfortable. In
early and late summer, when the weather was fine and warm, these
stone floors and continuous draughts may have been solacing; but in
winter and early spring, when Florentine weather can be so bitterly
hostile, what then? That there was a big fire we know by the smoky
condition of Michelozzo's charming frieze on the chimney piece; but
the room--I refer to that on the first floor--is so vast that this
fire can have done little for any one but an immediate vis-a-vis;
and the room, moreover, was between the open world on the one side,
and the open court (now roofed in with glass) on the other, with
such additional opportunities for draughts as the four trap-doors
in the floor offered. It was through these traps that the stone
cannon-balls still stacked in the window seats were dropped, or a few
gallons of boiling oil poured, whenever the city or a faction of it
turned against the householder. Not comfortable, you see, at least
not in our northern sense of the word, although to the hardy frugal
Florentine it may have seemed a haven of luxury.

The furniture of the salon is simple and sparse and very hard. A bust
here, a picture there, a coloured plate, a crucifix, and a Madonna
and Child in a niche: that was all the decoration save tapestry. An
hour glass, a pepper mill, a compass, an inkstand, stand for utility,
and quaint and twisted musical instruments and a backgammon board
for beguilement.

In the salle-a-manger adjoining is less light, and here also is
a symbol of Florentine unrest in the shape of a hole in the wall
(beneath the niche which holds the Madonna and Child) through which
the advancing foe, who had successfully avoided the cannon balls
and the oil, might be prodded with lances, or even fired at. The
next room is the kitchen, curiously far from the well, the opening
to which is in the salon, and then a bedroom (with some guns in it)
and smaller rooms gained from the central court.

The rest of the building is the same--a series of self-contained
flats, but all dipping for water from the same shaft and all depending
anxiously upon the success of the first floor with invaders. At the
top is a beautiful loggia with