The Sculptor Has Hesitated At No
Top-Hat Or Open Umbrella; There Are Barefooted Boys And Bareheaded Young
Girls, As Well As Bearded Elders; If My Memory Serves, The Scene Is Not
Without A Dog Or Two.
But it is the other relief which is so simply and
so deeply affecting - the interior of a narrow cell, with one chair and a
rude table, at which the patriot novelist wrote his greatest work, _The
Siege of Florence,_ and with him standing a little way from it.
In spite
of the small space and the almost vacant stage, the scene is full of
most moving drama, and records a whole Italian epoch, now happily past
forever.
These are modern sculptures, and they scarcely contest the palm with the
monument of the four galley-slaves and the Medicean grand-duke. In
another piazza two princes of the Lorrainese family, if I remember
rightly, face each other over its oblong - classic motives, with the
figures much undraped, and one of them singularly impressive from the
mutton-chop whiskers which modernized him. There are several theatres,
and among them a Goldoni theatre, as there should be in a city where the
sweet old playwright sojourned for a time and has placed the action of
his famous comedy, "La Locandiera." But I was told that the local
theatres were not so much frequented by polite people, especially for
opera, as the theatre in Pisa, which, if poorer, is prouder in its
society than its old-time vassal by the sea, and attracts the fashion of
Leghorn during the season.
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