and then on a hill
before me, not far away, a little town nestling round another fortress,
maybe less dilapidated than Montelupo, Capraja, that goat which
caused Montelupo to be built. For in the days when Florence disputed Val
d'Arno and the plains of Empoli with many nobles, the Conti di Capraja
lorded it here, and, as the Florentines said:

"Per distrugger questa Capra non ci vuol altro che un Lupo."

To-day Montelupo is but a village; yet once it was of importance not
only as a fortress, for that she ceased to be almost when the Counts of
Capraja were broken, and certainly by 1203, when Villani tells us that
the Florentines destroyed the place because it would not obey the
commonwealth; but as a city of art, or at any rate of a beautiful
handicraft. Even to-day the people devote themselves to pottery, but of
old it was not merely a matter of commerce, but of beauty and
craftsmanship.

It was through a noisy gay crowd of these folk, the young men lounging
against the houses, the girls talking, talking together, arm in arm, as
they went to and fro before them, with a wonderful sweet air of
indifference to those who eyed them so keenly and yet shyly too, and
without anything of the brutal humour of a northern village, that in the
later afternoon I again sought the highway. And before I had gone a mile
upon my road the whole character of the way was changed; no longer was I
crossing a great plain, but winding among the hills, while Arno, noisier
than before, fled past me in an ever narrower bed among the rocks and
buttresses of what soon became little more than a defile between the
hills. Though the road was deep in dust, there was shadow under the
cypresses beside the way, there was a whisper of wind among the reeds
beside the river, and the song of the cicale grew fainter and the hills
were touched with light; evening was coming.

And indeed, when at last I had left the splendid villa of Antinori far
behind, evening came as I entered Lastra, and by chance taking the wrong
road, passing under a most splendid ilex, huge as a temple, I climbed
the hill to S. Martino a Gangalandi. Standing there in the pure calm
light just after sunset, the whole valley of Florence lay before me. To
the left stood Signa, piled on her hill like some fortress of the Middle
Age; then Arno, like a road of silver, led past the Villa delle Selve to
the great mountain Monte Morello, and there under her last spurs lay
Florence herself, cl