dei Colli now winds serpentine on its
beautiful way round the glens and ravines, the Arno runs, a broad
torrent flood in times of freshet: the Arno, unbridged as yet (in the
days I speak of) by the Ponte Vecchio, an impassable frontier between
the wide territory of prehistoric Fiesole and the narrow fields of some
minor village, long since forgotten, on the opposite bank. The great
alluvial plain lies north of the river; the three streams whose silt
contributes to form it flow into the main channel from Pistoja and
Prato. To live across the river on the south bank would have been
absolutely impossible for the owners of the plain. But Fiesole occupies
a central spur of the northern heights, overlooking the valley to east
and west, and must therefore have been always the natural place from
which to command the plain of Arno. A little above and a little below
Florence gorges once more hem the river in. So that the plain of
Florence (as we call it nowadays), the plain of Fiesole, as it once
was, formed at the beginning a little natural principality by itself,
of which Fiesole was the obvious capital and stronghold.

For in order to understand Fiesole aright, we must always manage in our
own minds to get rid entirely of that beautiful mushroom growth,
Florence, and to think only of the most ancient epoch. While we are in
Florence itself, to be sure, it seems to us always, by comparison with
our modern English towns, that Florence is a place of immemorial
antiquity. It was civilized when Britain was a den of thieves. While in
feudal England Edward I. was summoning his barons to repress the rising
of William Wallace, in Florence, already a great commercial town,
Arnolfo di Cambio had received the sublime orders of the Signoria to
construct for the Duomo 'the most sumptuous edifice that human
invention could desire or human labour execute,' and had carried out
those orders with consummate skill. While Edward III. was dreaming of
his lawless filibustering expeditions into France, Ciotto was
encrusting the face of his glorious belfry with that magnificent
decoration of many-coloured marbles which makes northern churches look
so cold and grey and barbaric by comparison. While Englishmen were
burning Joan of Arc at Rouen, Fra Angelico was adorning the walls of
San Marco with those rapt saints and those spotless Madonnas. Even the
very back streets of Florence recall at every step its mediaeval
magnificence. But when from Florence