Tuscan Cities

The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia,
among which I have been spending the last few days. The most
striking fact as to Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset,
is that, being in Tuscany, it should be so scantily Tuscan. The
traveller curious in local colour must content himself with the
deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The streets, away from
the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular; Liverpool might
acknowledge them if it weren't for their clean-coloured, sun-
bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which
is death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit
of the old idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is
singularly destitute. It has neither a church worth one's
attention, nor a municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim
the distinction, unique in Italy, of being the city of no
pictures. In a shabby corner near the docks stands a statue of
one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany, appealing to posterity
on grounds now vague--chiefly that of having placed certain Moors
under tribute. Four colossal negroes, in very bad bronze, are
chained to the base of the monument, which forms with their
assistance a sufficiently fantastic group; but to patronise the
arts is not the line of the Livornese, and for want of the
slender annuity which would keep its precinct sacred this curious
memorial is buried in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the
other hand there is a very well-conditioned and, in attitude and
gesture, extremely natural and familiar statue of Cavour in one
of the city squares, and in another a couple of effigies of
recent Grand Dukes, represented, that is dressed, or rather
undressed, in the character of heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn is a
city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a journey from the
sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I never took the
time to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I
bore the originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about
them as possible; for it seemed to me that as patres
patrae, in their degree, they might have decreed that the
great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle less ugly.
There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experience of Italy
almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the future not be above
sparing a light regret to several of the hours of which the one I
speak of was composed. I shall remember a large cool bourgeois
villa in the garden of a noiseless suburb--a middle-aged Villa
Franco (I owe it as a genial pleasant pension the tribute
of recognition), roomy and stony, as an Italian villa should be.
I shall remember that, as I sat in the garden, and, looking up
from my book, saw through a gap in the