ilt? The
Pitti Palace, which would hold the palace of the Strozzi in its court,
was built by a private citizen, Luca Pitti, for himself. According to
modern requirements it is too large for a king. I often thought that,
were I an American millionaire, I would secure the services of a hundred
of the most accomplished students of Europe and set them to examine
simultaneously the business archives of Florence, and thus provide (as
in a short time they might do) a mass of digested materials on which a
complete economic history of Florentine wealth might be founded.

From Florence I went for a few days to Siena, where, with a completeness
to which Florence offers no parallel, the Middle Ages spectacularly
still survive. I visited, while I was there, the great castle of
Broglio, which, standing among mountains on the brink of a wooded
precipice, lifts into the air its clusters of red-brick towers like
tulips. I visited also Cetinale--a strange classical villa, built by a
Cardinal Chigi, and surrounded by miles of ilex woods, which are peopled
with pagan statues. Returning to Florence, I discovered, with the aid of
a large-scale ordnance map, a building equally strange, and so little
known even to Florentines that our coachman had never heard of it, and
often had to ask the way. This is Torre a Cona--half medieval castle and
half classical palace. It occupies the summit of a flat-headed hill or
mountain. It is surrounded by a circular park full of deer and statues.
It is approached by an avenue of cypresses sixty feet in height, and
between these trees, on either side of the way, are colossal horses
rampant, beneath whose extended forelegs the carriage of the invader
passes. I opened a large door in one wing of the house, and found myself
in a miniature theater, with its semicircle of boxes decorated in green
and silver.

My own days at Florence, however, were on this occasion prematurely
ended by the breaking of a drainpipe in the villa of my valued hostess,
and my consequent migration at very short notice to Cannes. I started at
night, and in the small hours of the morning I had to change trains at
Genoa. As I paced the dark platform, the air was bleak and wintry, and,
looking back with regret to the shining suns of Cyprus, I took my place
at last in another train, shivering. For a few hours I slept. When I
woke I was less uncomfortable. The air, unless this was mere fancy, had
lost something of its sting. I looked out of t