now save for
some cloaked figure who hurried away up the Calzaioli, and two
Carabinieri who stood for a moment at the Uffizi corner and then turned
under the arches, I seemed to understand something of the spirit that
built that marvellous fortress, that thrust that fierce tower into the
sky;--yes, surely at this hour some long dead Florentine must venture
here to console the living, who, for sure, must be gay so sadly and with
so much regret.

In the Loggia de' Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in
that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of
marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable
prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not
Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus
with Medusa's head, has it not in truth turned the city to stone?

The silence was broken; something had awakened in the Piazza: perhaps a
bird fluttered from the battlements of the Palazzo, perhaps it was the
city that turned in her sleep. No, there it was again. It was a human
voice close beside me: it seemed to be weeping.

I looked around: all was quiet. I saw nothing, only there at the corner
a little light flickered before a shrine; and yes, something was moving
there, someone who was weeping. Softly, softly over the stones I made my
way to that little shrine of Madonna at the street corner, and I found,
ah! no proud and scornful noble mourning over dead Florence, but an old
woman, ragged and alone, prostrate under some unimaginable sorrow, some
unappeasable regret.

Did she hear as of old--that Virgin with narrow half-open eyes and the
sidelong look? God, I know not if she heard or no. Perhaps I alone have
heard in all the world.

XII. FLORENCE

THE BAPTISTERY--THE DUOMO--THE CAMPANILE--THE OPERA DEL DUOMO

On coming into the Piazza del Duomo, perhaps from the light and space of
the Lung' Arno or from the largeness of the Piazza della Signoria, one
is apt to think of it as too small for the buildings which it holds, as
wanting in a certain spaciousness such as the Piazza of St. Peter at
Rome certainly possesses, or in the light of the meadow of Pisa; and yet
this very smallness, only smallness when we consider the great buildings
set there so precisely, gives it an element of beauty lacking in the
great Piazza of Rome and in Pisa too--a certain delicate colour and
shadow and a sense of nearness, of homeliness almost;