Florence is the acknowledged Queen of Modern Art and gives lessons in the same to all civilization. Yet this English Burial-ground can show almost as many specimens of poor taste and mediocre manipulation as there are monuments within its gates;—a puzzle and a pain to those who have luxuriated in galleries and loggie, the very atmosphere of which ought to be, not only inspiration, but education.
Galileo’s Observatory, where he watched the stars pale before the dawn for many happy nights,—and the Villa, in which he lived for the last eleven years of his mortal life,—blind, illustrious, and, if we may believe him, contented;—whither Milton came to visit and console him and was moved to congratulation at the sight of his deep tranquillity,—stand upon a hill from whose brow Florence is, indeed, _la Bella_. Galileo’s lamp hangs in the Cathedral of Pisa.
Our excursion to this city was in mid-May. It is distant from Florence but four hours by rail. The intervening country is one of the loveliest tracts in Northern Italy. The wheat-fields were ripening into palest green, and every breath of wind that ruffled this revealed the scarlet sheen of the poppy underrobe. The railway banks were beds of mountain-pinks, separated by acres of buttercups and blue flax, clumps of wild roses and geraniums. Up to this we had felt no oppressive heats, fast though the season was advancing, and to-day, while the train was in motion, we rather enjoyed the blaze of sunshine under which the landscape glowed, while we gazed, into more vivid coloring. But the radiations from the white streets of Pisa were blinding. The breeze lost itself among the flat outskirts of the town, and was never suspected inland.
We took carriages at the hotel and drove, untempted to loiterings in the shadeless thoroughfares, directly to the Cathedral. It is fortunate for travelers who come to Pisa in spring or summer, that the four principal objects of interest, all that one cares to see in the whilom “queen of the western waves,” are grouped within a radius of fifty yards from the Duomo. Seeking its shadow from the pitiless sun, we looked up at the Leaning Tower “over the way.” It did not lean as emphatically as we had hoped for, nor was it as high as it should have been. But from the first glimpse of it, its lightness and grace were an agreeable surprise. And it was _clean_! Seven hundred years have not defiled it to the complexion of the Florentine Duomo, or even to the cloudiness of “that model and mirror of perfect architecture,” Giotto’s Tower. Its eight-storied colonnades of creamy tints passing into white, were cast up upon the deep blue background like the frost arcades raised at night by winter fairies. It was loftier, presently, and as it heightened, inclined more gracefully toward the earth.