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Duomo.

About the Duomo there is stir and strife at all times; crowds come and
go; men buy and sell; lads laugh and fight; piles of fruit blaze gold
and crimson; metal pails clash down on the stones with shrillest
clangour; on the steps boys play at dominoes, and women give their
children food, and merry maskers grin in carnival fooleries; but there
in their midst is the Duomo all unharmed and undegraded, a poem and a
prayer in one, its marbles shining in the upper air, a thing so majestic
in its strength, and yet so human in its tenderness, that nothing can
assail, and nothing equal it.

Other, though not many, cities have histories as noble, treasuries as
vast; but no other city has them living and ever present in her midst,
familiar as household words, and touched by every baby's hand and
peasant's step, as Florence has.

Every line, every rood, every gable, every tower, has some story of the
past present in it. Every tocsin that sounds is a chronicle; every
bridge that unites the two banks of the river unites also the crowds of
the living with the heroism of the dead.

In the winding dusky irregular streets, with the outlines of their logge
and arcades, and the glow of colour that fills their niches and
galleries, the men who "have gone before" walk with you; not as
elsewhere mere gliding shades clad in the pallor of a misty memory, but
present, as in their daily lives, shading their dreamful eyes against
the noonday sun or setting their brave brows against the mountain wind,
laughing and jesting in their manful mirth and speaking as brother to
brother of great gifts to give the world. All this while, though the
past is thus close about you the present is beautiful also, and does not
shock you by discord and unseemliness as it will ever do elsewhere. The
throngs that pass you are the same in likeness as those that brushed
against Dante or Calvacanti; the populace that you move amidst is the
same bold, vivid, fearless, eager people with eyes full of dreams, and
lips braced close for war, which welcomed Vinci and Cimabue and fought
from Montaperto to Solferino.

And as you go through the streets you will surely see at every step some
colour of a fresco on a wall, some quaint curve of a bas-relief on a
lintel, some vista of Romanesque arches in a palace court, some dusky
interior of a smith's forge or a wood-seller's shop, some Renaissance
seal-ring glimmering on a trader's stall, some lovely hues of fruits and