Identifier: menmannersofoldf00biag (find matches)
Title: Men and manners of old Florence
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Biagi, Guido, 1855-1925
Subjects:
Publisher: Chicago, A. C. McClurg and co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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nth centuryhad none of those lines and colours which now lendsuch grace to its hills, such brilliant freshness to itsplains. If we climb the hill of Fiesole to-day, we lookdown upon a city which seems built of ivory andstone; the silver streak of the Arno winds westwardthrough the shadowy valley like a dream, and spring-time gives a fresh setting of flowers and leaves to thesun-kissed monuments of her ancient glory. Then,however, the fair and gay Florentine city, the fountof valour and of joy, the flower of cities, Fiorenza,as she was called by a thirteenth-century poet, ChiaroDavanzati, rose proud and dark and threatening, herhundred and fifty great towers and her battlementedwalls surrounded by a moat, against a sombre back-ground of hills not yet brightened by houses and olivegardens, but covered with cypresses, tall and straightas lances, with oak and ash and fir-trees swaying andrustling in the keen tramontana wind. To the northwere Monte Morello, IUccellatoio and the other spurs
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WITHIN HER ANCIENT BOUNDARY 17 of the Apennine range, turning to the fury of thewind their sides clothed with those thick woods ofpine and fir which, later on, were cut down to providebeams and roofs for the new churches about to bebuilt in the city. The Fiorenza of that time, enclosedwithin her stone walls, protected by bastions and fortswith their countless little towers and spires, seemedlike a beautiful woman warrior buckled in ;her ironarmour bristling with sharp points. And only inlater times, when the New Age had calmed her war-like spirit and softened the savage beauty of both souland body, did she show her smiling face to the sunand set free her young limbs from their iron bonds. The few pictorial representations of that periodwhich are still in existence, such as the frescoes ofthe Bigallo and the miniatures in the Biadajolo, or,the various reconstructions attempted by scholars likeVincenzo Borghini, that sixteenth-century forerunnerof modern historical critics, show us the

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