Identifier: cu31924028396004 (find matches)
Title: Italian hours
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: James, Henry, 1843-1916 Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926, illus
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin company
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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ddark alleys that bore through a density of massive basements,and curve and climb and plunge as they go, all to the truestmediaeval tune, you may feast your fill. These are the local, thearchitectural, the compositional commonplaces. Some of thelittle streets in out-of-the-way corners are so rugged and brownand silent that you may imagine them passages long since hewnby the pick-axe in a deserted stone-quarry. The battered blackhouses, of the colour of buried things — things buried, that is,in accumulations of time, closer packed, even as such are, thanspadefuls of earth — resemble exposed sections of natural rock;none the less so when, beyond some narrow gap, you catch theblue and silver of the sublime circle of landscape. But I ought nt to talk of mouldy alleys, or yet of azure dis-tances, as if they formed the main appeal to taste in this accom-plished little city. In the Sala del Cambio, where in ancient daysthe money-changers rattled their embossed coin and figured up ( 334 )
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ETRUSCAN GATEWAY, PERUGIA. A CHAIN OF CITIES their profits, you may enjoy one of the serenest aesthetic pleasuresthat the golden age of art anywhere offers us. Bank parlours,I believe, are always handsomely appointed, but are even thoseof Messrs. Rothschild such models of mural bravery as this littlecounting-house of a bygone fashion ? The bravery is Peruginosown; for, invited clearly to do his best, he left it as a lesson tothe ages, covering the four low walls and the vault with scriptu-ral and mythological figures of extraordinary beauty. They areranged in artless attitudes round the upper half of the room — thesibyls, the prophets, the philosophers, the Greek and Romanheroes — looking down with broad serene faces, with small mildeyes and sweet mouths that commit them to nothing in particularunless to being comfortably and charmingly alive, at the incon-gruous proceedings of a Board of Brokers. Had finance a veryhigh tone in those days, or were genius and faith then simply asfr

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