After being gratified for some hours with the cultivated beauty of the scene (rendered more striking by contrast with our late perils), we came to the brow of the hill overlooking Florence, which lay under us, a scene of enchantment, a city planted in a garden, and resembling a rich and varied suburb. The whole presented a brilliant amphitheatre of hill and vale, of buildings, groves, and terraces. The circling heights were crowned with sparkling villas; the varying landscape, above or below, waved in an endless succession of olive-grounds. The olive is not unlike the common willow in shape or colour, and being still in leaf, gave to the middle of winter the appearance of a grey summer. In the midst, the Duomo and other churches raised their heads; vineyards and olive-grounds climbed the hills opposite till they joined a snowy ridge of Apennines rising above the top of Fesole; one plantation or row of trees after another fringed the ground, like rich lace; though you saw it not, there flowed the Arno; every thing was on the noblest scale, yet finished in the minutest part—the perfection of nature and of art, populous, splendid, full of life, yet simple, airy, embowered. Florence in itself is inferior to Bologna, and some other towns; but the view of it and of the immediate neighbourhood is superior to any I have seen. It is, indeed, quite delicious, and presents an endless variety of enchanting walks. It is not merely the number or the exquisiteness or admirable combination of the objects, their forms or colour, but every spot is rich in associations at once the most classical and romantic. From my friend L. H.’s house at Moiano, you see at one view the village of Setiniano, belonging to Michael Angelo’s family, the house in which Machiavel lived, and that where Boccaccio wrote, two ruined castles, in which the rival families of the Gerardeschi and the —— carried on the most deadly strife, and which seem as though they might still rear their mouldering heads against each other; and not far from this the _Valley of Ladies_ (the scene of _The Decameron_), and Fesole, with the mountains of Perugia beyond. With a view like this, one may think one’s sight ‘enriched,’ in Burns’s phrase. On the ascent towards Fesole is the house where Galileo lived, and where he was imprisoned after his release from the Inquisition, at the time Milton saw him.[40] In the town itself are Michael Angelo’s house, the Baptistery, the gates of which he thought worthy to be the gates of Paradise, the Duomo, older than St. Peter’s, the ancient Palace of the Medici family, the Palace Pitti, and here also stands the statue that ‘enchants the world.’ The view along the Arno is certainly delightful, though somewhat confined, and the bridges over it grotesque and old, but beautiful.