tary empire, Faesulae must
have kept up its importance unchanged. The remains of the Roman theatre
on the slope behind the cathedral--great stone semicircles carved on a
scale to seat a large audience--betoken a considerable Roman town. And
from a very early period it seems to have possessed a Christian church,
whose first bishop, according to a tradition as good as most, was a
convert of St. Peter's, and was martyred, says his legend, in the
Neronian persecution. The existing cathedral, its later representative,
is still an early and very simple Tuscan basilica, with picturesque
crypt and raised choir, of a very plain Romanesque type. It looks like
a fitting church for the mother-town of Florence; it seems to recall in
its own cold and austere fabric the more ancient claims of the sombre
Etruscan hill-top city.

It was the middle ages, however, that finally brought down Fiesole in
earnest to the plain. Pisa had been the earliest Tuscan town to attain
importance and maritime supremacy after the dark days of barbarian
incursion; but as soon as land-transit once more assumed general
importance, Florence, seated on the great route from the north to Rome
by Siena, and commanding the passage of the Arno and the gate of the
Apennines, naturally began to surpass in time its distanced rival. As
early as the Roman days a bridge is said to have spanned the Arno on
the site of the existing Ponte Vecchio. The mediaeval walls enclosed the
southern _tete du pont_ within their picturesque circuit, thus securing
the passage of the river and giving Florence its little Janiculus, the
Oltrarno, with its southern exit by the Porta Romana. The real 'makers
of Florence' were the humble workmen who thus extended the firm hold of
the growing republic to the southern bank. By so doing, they gave their
city undoubted command of the imperial route from Germany Romeward, and
brought in their train Dante and Giotto, Brunelleschi and Donatello,
Fra Angelico and Savonarola, the Medici and the Pitti, Michael Angelo
and Raffaele, and all the glories of the Renaissance epoch. For as at
Athens, so in Florence, art and literature followed plainly in the wake
of commerce. But the rise of Florence was the fall of Fiesole. Already
in the eleventh century the undutiful daughter had conquered and
annexed her venerable mother; and in proportion as the mercantile
importance of the city in the plain waxed greater and greater, that of
the city on the hill-top must