The Streets Of Leghorn Are
Not So Straight As They Are Long, But Many Are Very Straight, And The
Others Are Curved Rather Than Crooked.
The longest and straight-est were
streets of low dwelling-houses, uncommon in Italian towns, where each
family lived under its own roof with a little garden behind, and a
respective entrance, as people still mostly do in our towns.
From the
force of the mid-April sun in these streets I realized what they might
be in summer, and, if I lived in Leghorn, I would rather live on the
sea-front, in one of the comfortable, square, stone villas which border
it. But everywhere Leghorn seemed a pleasant place to live, and
convenient, with lively shops and cafes and trams and open spaces, and
statues and monuments in them. The city, I understood, is of somewhat
radical politics, tending from clericalism to socialism; and, like every
other Italian city, it is full of patriotic monuments. There is a Victor
Emmanuel on horseback, plump and squat, but heroic as always, and a
Garibaldi struggling in vain for beauty in his poncho and his round,
flat cap; there is a Mazzini, there is a Cavour, and, above all, there
is a Guerrazzi, no great thing as to the seated figure, but most
interesting, most touching in two of the bas-reliefs below. One
represents him proclaiming the provisional government at Florence in
1849, after the expulsion of the grand-duke, where the fact is studied,
with the wonderful realism of the Italians, in all its incidents and the
costumes of the thronging spectators.
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