shadow over the
Bargello, it is the tower of liberty that rises over Palazzo Vecchio,
and the whole tragedy of the beautiful city seems to be expressed for us
in the fact that while the one became a prison the other came to house
the gaoler.

So this city of warm brick, with its churches of marble, its old ways,
its palaces of stone, its convents at the gates, comes to hold for us,
as it were, the very dream of Italy, the dream that was too good to
last, that was so soon to be shattered by the barbarian. Yet in that
little walk through the narrow winding ways from the west to the east of
the city, all the eloquence and renown, the strength and beauty of Italy
seem to be gathered for you, as in a nosegay you may find all the beauty
of a garden. And of all the broken blossoms that you may find by the
way, not one is more fragrant and fair than the sweet bride of
Michelangelo, S. Maria Novella.

Standing in a beautiful Piazza, itself the loveliest thing therein,
dressed in the old black and white habit, it dreams of the past: it is
full of memories too, for here Boccaccio one Tuesday morning, just after
Mass in 1348, amid the desolation of the city, found the seven beloved
ladies of the _Decamerone_ talking of death; here Martin V, and Eugenius
IV, fugitives from the Eternal City, found a refuge; here Beata Villana
confessed her sins; here Vanna Tornabuoni prayed and the Strozzi made
their tombs. Full of memories--and of what else, then, but the past
can she dream? For her there is no future. Her convent is suppressed,
the great cloister has become a military gymnasium. What has she, then,
in common with the modern world, with the buildings of Piazza Vittorio
Emmanuele, for instance?--the past is all that we have left her.

[Illustration: S. MARIA NOVELLA]

Begun in 1278, as some say, from the design of Fra Ristoro and Fra
Sisto, the facade, one of the most beautiful in the world, is really the
fifteenth-century work of Leon Alberti working to the order of Giovanni
Rucellai--you may see their blown sail everywhere--with that profound
and unifying genius which involved everything he touched in a sort of
reconciliation, thus prophesying to us of Leonardo da Vinci. For Alberti
has here very fortunately made the pointed work of the Middle Age
friends with Antiquity, Antiquity seen with the eyes of the Renaissance,
full of a new sort of eagerness and of many little refinements. In the
fagade of his masterpiece, the Tempio M