in the spring and
summer, is a happy enough description. But in the winter it fails. A
name appropriate to all the seasons would be the City of the Miracle,
the miracle being the Renaissance. For though all over Italy traces
of the miracle are apparent, Florence was its very home and still
can point to the greatest number of its achievements. Giotto (at the
beginning of this quickening movement) may at Assisi have been more
inspired as a painter; but here is his campanile and here are his
S. Maria Novella and S. Croce frescoes. Fra Angelico and Donatello
(in the midst of it) were never more inspired than here, where they
worked and died. Michelangelo (at the end of it) may be more surprising
in the Vatican; but here are his wonderful Medici tombs. How it came
about that between the years 1300 and 1500 Italian soil--and chiefly
Tuscan soil--threw up such masters, not only with the will and spirit
to do what they did but with the power too, no one will ever be able
to explain. But there it is. In the history of the world two centuries
were suddenly given mysteriously to the activities of Italian men of
humane genius and as suddenly the Divine gift was withdrawn. And to see
the very flower of these two centuries it is to Florence we must go.

It is best to enter the Piazza del Duomo from the Via de' Martelli,
the Via de' Cerretani, the Via Calzaioli, or the Via Pecori, because
then one comes instantly upon the campanile too. The upper windows--so
very lovely--may have been visible at the end of the streets, with
Brunelleschi's warm dome high in the sky beside them, but that was
not to diminish the effect of the first sight of the whole. Duomo and
campanile make as fair a couple as ever builders brought together: the
immense comfortable church so solidly set upon the earth, and at its
side this delicate, slender marble creature, all gaiety and lightness,
which as surely springs from roots within the earth. For one cannot
be long in Florence, looking at this tower every day and many times a
day, both from near and far, without being perfectly certain that it
grows--and from a bulb, I think--and was never really built at all,
whatever the records may aver.

The interior of the Duomo is so unexpected that one has the
feeling of having entered, by some extraordinary chance, the wrong
building. Outside it was so garish with its coloured marbles, under
the southern sky; outside, too, one's ears were filled with all the
shatteri