EXCURSIONS ROUND FLORENCE.
192
Se dentro un mur, sotto un medesmo nome,
Fosser raccolti i tuoi palazzi sparsi,
Non ti sarian a pareggiar da Roma.
Ariosto, Rime, cap. xvi.
Few travellers can forget the peculiar landscape of this district
of the Apennine, as they ascend the hill which rises from Florence.
They pass continually beneath the walls of villas bright in perfect
luxury, and beside cypress-hedges, inclosing fair terraced gardens,
where the masses of oleander and magnolia, motionless as leaves in a
picture, inlay alternately upon the blue sky their branching lightness of
pale rose-colour and deep green breadth of shade, studded with balls of
budding silver, and showing at intervals through their framework of
rich leaf and rubied flower the far-away bends of the Arno beneath its
slopes of olive, and the purple peaks of the Carrara mountains, tossing
themselves against the westem distance, where the streaks of motion-
less cloud burn above the Pisan sea. The traveller passes the Fiesolan
ridge, and all is changed. The country is on a sudden lonely. Here
and there indeed are seen the scattered houses of a farm grouped grace-
fully upon the hill-sides—here and there a fragment of tower upon a
distant rock ; but neither gardens, nor flowers, nor glittering palace
walls, only a grey extent of mountain-ground, tufted irregularly with
ilex and olive ; a scene not sublime, for its forms are subdued and low ;
not desolate, for its valleys are full of sown fields and tended pastures;
not rich nor lovely, but sunburnt and sorrowful ; becoming wilder every
instant as the road winds into its recesses, ascending still, until the
higher woods, now partly oak and partly pine, drooping back from the
central nest of the Apennine, leave a pastoral wilderness of scattered
rock and arid grass, withered away here by frost, and there by lambent
tongues of earth-fed fire. Giotto passed the first ten years of his life, a
shepherd-boy, among these hills; was found by Cimabue, near his
native village, drawing one of his sheep upon a smooth stone ; was
yielded up by his father, “a simple person, a labourer of the earth,”
to the guardianship of the painter, who, by his own work, had already
made the streets of Florence ring with joy ; attended him to Florence,
and became his disciple.—Ruskin.
About 9 miles from the Porta S. Gallo, on the road to
Bologna, is all that remains (not much) of the Palace of
Pratolino, built by Francesco de’ Medici for Bianca Cappello,
of whom it was the favourite residence. She was devoted
to magic and the composition of philters and potents, and
for generations after her death a room was shown here,
where it was said that she used to “distil a cosmetic from