[1] Cf. P. Villari: Primi due Secoli della Storia di Firenze (2^o Edizione), vol. i. p. 246.
[2] See Le Mesurier, _Genoa: Five Lectures_, Genoa, A. Donath, 1889, a useful and informing book, to which I am indebted for more than one curious fact.
[3] See Le Mesurier, _op. cit._ p. 82. Le Mesurier thinks that "this angel" refers to "the central figure in a bas-relief" above the inscription and below the right-hand window of the church.
[7] See Justi, _Velasquez and his Times_ (English translation), 1880, page 315, and Le Mesurier, _op. cit._, page 163.
It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante, among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. Forgotten, or for the most part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems to await you entrenched in silence among the wild-flowers. And there, too, on the road to Tuscany, after the pleasant weariness of the way, which is so much longer than those others, some fragment of antiquity is to be the reward of your journey, though nothing so fine as the deserted holiness of Paestum, only the dust of the white temple of Aphrodite crowning the western horn of Spezia, where it rises splendid out of the sea in the sun of Porto Venere.