itself one turns to Fiesole, the
city by the Arno sinks at once by a sudden revulsion into a mere thing
of yesterday by the side of the city on the Etruscan hill-top. Fiesole
was a town of immemorial antiquity while Florence was still, what
perhaps its poetical name imports, a field of flowers.

But why this particular height rather than any other of the dozen that
jut out into the plain? Well, there we get at another fundamental point
in hill-top town history. Fiesole had water. A spring at such a height
is comparatively rare, but it is a necessary accompaniment, or rather a
condition precedent, of all high-place villages. In the Borgo Unto you
will still find this spring--a natural fountain, the Fonte Sotterra--in
an underground passage, now approached (so greatly did the Fiesolans
appreciate its importance) by a Gothic archway. The water supplies the
whole neighbourhood; and that accounts for the position of the town on
the low _col_ just below the acropolis.

Who first chose the site it would be impossible to say; the earliest
stockaded fort at Fiesole (enclosing the town and arx above) must go
back to the very dawn of neolithic history, long before the Etruscans
had ever issued forth from their Rhaetian fastnesses to occupy the blue
and silver-grey hills of modern Tuscany. Nor do we know who built the
great Cyclopean walls, whose huge rough blocks still overhang the
modern carriage road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladies
and Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the Valley. They
are attributed to the Etruscans, of course, on much the same grounds as
Stonehenge is attributed to the Druids--because in the minds of the
people who made the attribution Etruscans and Druids were each in their
own place the _ne plus ultra_ of aboriginal antiquity. But at any rate,
at some very early time, the people who held the valley of the Arno
erected these vast megalithic walls round their city and citadel as a
protection, probably, against the people who held the Ligurian
sea-board. Throughout the early historical period at least we know that
Faesulae was an Etruscan border-town against the Ligurian freebooters,
and we can see that the arx or acropolis of Faesulae must have occupied
the hill-top now occupied by the Franciscan monastery on the height
above the town, while the houses must have spread, as they still do
within shrunken limits, about the spring and over the _col_ at its
base.

Faesulae was not