The Autumn in Florence - Page 2

the golden age--just the
beauty of which indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured
into your lap, and not in the least in its own importunity on
that head--have needfully lingered on, have seen the ancient
walls pulled down and the compact and belted mass of which the
Piazza della Signoria was the immemorial centre expand, under the
treatment of enterprising syndics, into an ungirdled organism of
the type, as they viciously say, of Chicago; one of those places
of which, as their grace of a circumference is nowhere, the
dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated. Florence loses
itself to-day in dusty boulevards and smart beaux
quartiers, such as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were to
set the fashion of to a too mediæval Europe--with the effect of
some precious page of antique text swallowed up in a marginal
commentary that smacks of the style of the newspaper. So much for
what has happened on this side of that line of demarcation which,
by an odd law, makes us, with our preference for what we are
pleased to call the picturesque, object to such occurrences even
as occurrences. The real truth is that objections are too
vain, and that he would be too rude a critic here, just now, who
shouldn't be in the humour to take the thick with the thin and to
try at least to read something of the old soul into the new
forms.

There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city
(once it's a question of your actively circulating) to pretend to
comfort you more by its extent than by its limits; in addition to
which Florence was anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly,
a daughter of change and movement and variety, of shifting
moods, policies and régimes--just as the Florentine character,
as we have it to-day, is a character that takes all things easily
for having seen so many come and go. It saw the national capital,
a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno, and took no
further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the odd
visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome.
The new boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said,
but they don't go; which, after all, it isn't from the æsthetic
point of view strictly necessary they should. A part of the
essential amiability of Florence, of her genius for making you
take to your favour on easy terms everything that in any way
belongs to her, is that she has already flung an element of her
grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such modern
arrangements as the Piazza d' Azeglio and the viale or
Avenue of the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think--for
what they are!--and do so even in a degree, by some fine local
privilege just because they are