en she in good faith, and not for
fun, had a horseshoe for luck; which, however, being of an artistic turn,
she had elegantly gilded, and also, like a true Italian, wore an amulet.
She, too, knew many fairy tales, but they were chiefly such as may be
found among the _Racconti delle Fate_, and the variants which are now so
liberally published. She had, however, a rare, I may almost say a
refined, taste in these, as the poems which I have given indicate.

I must also express my obligations to Miss Roma Lister, a lady born in
Italy of English parentage, who is an accomplished folk-lorist and
collector, as was shown by her paper on the _Legends of the Castelli
Romani_, read at the first meeting of the Italian Folk-Lore Society,
founded by Count Angelo de Gubernatis, the learned and accomplished
Oriental scholar, and editor of _La Rivista_. I would here say that her
researches in the vicinity of Rome have gone far to corroborate what I
published in the "Etruscan-Roman Remains." I must also thank Miss Teresa
Wyndham for sundry kind assistances, when I was ill in Siena.

There is no city in the world where, within such narrow limit, Art,
Nature, and History have done so much to make a place beautiful and
interesting as Florence. It is one where we feel that there has been
vivid and varied _life_--life such as was led by Benvenuto Cellini and a
thousand like him--and we long more than elsewhere to enter into it, and
know how those men in quaint and picturesque garb thought and felt four
hundred years ago. Now, as at the present day politics and news do not
enter into our habits of thought more than goblins, spirits of fountains
and bridges, legends of palaces and towers, and quaint jests of friar or
squire, did into those of the olden time, I cannot help believing that
this book will be not only entertaining, but useful to all who would
study the spirit of history thoroughly. The folk-lore of the future has
a far higher mission than has as yet been dreamed for it; it is destined
to revive for us the inner sentiment or habitual and peculiar life of man
as he was in the olden time more perfectly than it has been achieved by
fiction. This will be done by bringing before the reader the facts or
_phenomena_ of that life itself in more vivid and familiar form.
Admitting this, the reader can hardly fail to see that the writer who
gathers up with pains whatever he can collect of such materials as this
book contains does at least