On market-days the town assumed a look of greater liveliness. Two-wheeled country carts came toiling up the hill. They were left on the terrace below or on one side of the market-place, and their inmates stood about in groups with the men of the town who had stopped work for the day. A number of stalls were set up on the market-place and wares of many kinds were displayed. There were stalls of butchers’ meat, loaded with the tiniest of lambkins, a sorry sight; there were stalls with a show of ribbons and laces, all of the cheapest; stalls with bales of homespun; stalls with hats and caps of felt. And on the ground brown and yellow and red earthenware was heaped up or spread about, jars and platters, and pots and pans, in the plainest of forms but most decorative in colour.
On such a day selling extended down the side streets. And the vendor of cheap literature was seen suspending tracts and booklets in rows by means of bits of string, while the hawker of cheap jewellery took advantage of a projecting window-ledge to set out his little trays. The display of outlandish wares invariably causes one’s money to burn, and one of us was tempted to buy a silver finger-ring with a crucified Christ--a pattern peculiar to Tuscany, I believe--while the other, from a mass of twopenny romances and stories of the saints, picked out the romance of Pia dei Tolomei, the story of a faithful wife’s cruel treatment and violent death. This was she, unforgotten in popular literature as it seemed, who started up before Dante in Purgatory and prayed him to recall her memory on earth.
But it was at night, when the dark of the evening filled the streets with gloom, when the last carts had rattled down the steep streets and were speeding away along the white country roads in the darkness, when men passed along the walls like shadows, and silence had laid her hold on the concerns of this world, that fancy began to stir and breathe more freely, and stepped forth to take her pleasure with the figures of the past.
One evening I had stayed in the Franciscan church looking at the altar-pieces of the Della Robbias, the Nativity and the Deposition--the latter a gift to the church from Cardinal Bibbiena--till the twilight drove me out and I went to walk on the terrace of the town, which commanded a view of the panorama of the hills. There had been a thunderstorm, and heavy rain-clouds hung over the Apennines. Their lower slopes were shrouded in mist, but spanned from side to side by a rainbow. Towards the south the skyline above the valley of the Arno was piled with masses upon masses of clouds. Further yet, towards the west, the sun had just set behind a rocky height, but its reflection was caught by the white vapour that filled the undulating plain and extended upwards into the numerous branching valleys beneath the snow-capped heights of the Pratomagno, revealing line upon line of rocky crag and sloping hillside. It was a sight that stirred emotion and roused the imagination. And wandering back through the dark, solitary streets, I seemed to see some of the figures of the shadowy past, whose mortal remains long ago had fallen to dust and decay, nay, for aught we knew, had gone to build up new forms of life again and again under the transforming agency of time.