Chapter 24

Some of the Quaker City's passengers had arrived in Venice from
Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were
expected every day. We heard of no casualties among them, and no
sickness.

We were a little fatigued with sight seeing, and so we rattled through a
good deal of country by rail without caring to stop. I took few notes.
I find no mention of Bologna in my memorandum book, except that we
arrived there in good season, but saw none of the sausages for which the
place is so justly celebrated.

Pistoia awoke but a passing interest.

Florence pleased us for a while. I think we appreciated the great figure
of David in the grand square, and the sculptured group they call the Rape
of the Sabines. We wandered through the endless collections of paintings
and statues of the Pitti and Ufizzi galleries, of course. I make that
statement in self-defense; there let it stop. I could not rest under the
imputation that I visited Florence and did not traverse its weary miles
of picture galleries. We tried indolently to recollect something about
the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other historical cut-throats whose
quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine
history, but the subject was not attractive. We had been robbed of all
the fine mountain scenery on our little journey by a system of
railroading that had three miles of tunnel to a hundred yards of
daylight, and we were not inclined to be sociable with Florence. We had
seen the spot, outside the city somewhere, where these people had allowed
the bones of Galileo to rest in unconsecrated ground for an age because
his great discovery that the world turned around was regarded as a
damning heresy by the church; and we know that long after the world had
accepted his theory and raised his name high in the list of its great
men, they had still let him rot there. That we had lived to see his dust
in honored sepulture in the church of Santa Croce we owed to a society of
literati, and not to Florence or her rulers. We saw Dante's tomb in that
church, also, but we were glad to know that his body was not in it; that
the ungrateful city that had exiled him and persecuted him would give
much to have it there, but need not hope to ever secure that high honor
to herself. Medicis are good enough for Florence. Let her plant Medicis
and build grand monuments over them to testify how gratefully she was
wont to lick the hand that scourged her.

Magnanimous Florence! Her jewelry marts are filled with artists in
mosaic. Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world. Florence
loves to have that said. Florence is proud of it. Florence would foster
this specialty of hers. She is grateful to the artists that bring to her
this