Generally Speaking, I Think That They Were Rather
Bare In Painting Or Sculpture, But They Were Such Churches As In America
One Would Go A Long Way To See And Think One's Self Well Rewarded By
Their Objects Of Interest.
I do not know what defence to offer for not
having visited the galleries of the Museo Civico, where by actual count
in the guide-book I missed one hundred and sixty-nine works of art,
though just how many masterpieces I am not able to say:
Probably one out
of every ten was a masterpiece. But, if I did not much resort to the
churches and galleries in Leghorn, I roamed gladly through its pleasant
streets and squares, and by the shores of the canals which once gave it
the name of New Venice, and which still invite the smaller shipping up
among its houses in right Venetian fashion. 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. 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.
As Pisa has ceased to be the colony of literary English it once was, in
the time of Byron and Hunt and Shelley, to name no others, so Leghorn
has ceased to be the mercantile colony of former days. It has still a
great deal of commerce with England, but this is no longer carried on by
resident merchants, though here and there an English name lingers in the
style of a business house; and the distinctive qualities of both
colonies are united in the author of a charming book who fills the post
of British consul at Leghorn. His _Tuscan Towns_ must not be confused
with another book called _Tuscan Cities,_ though, if the traveller
chooses to carry both with him about Tuscany, I will not say that he
could do better. In _Tuscan Cities_ there is nothing about Leghorn, I
believe, but in _Tuscan Towns_ there is a specially delightful chapter
about the place, its people, language, and customs which I can commend
to the reader as the best corrective of the errors I must have been
constantly falling into here.
It was in company no less enviable than this author's that I revisited
the port on a gray Sunday afternoon of my stay, and then for the first
time visited the ancient fortifications which began to be in the time of
the Countess Matilde and intermittently increased under the rule of the
Pisan, Genoese, and Florentine republics, until the Medicean grand-dukes
amplified them in almost the proportions I saw. The brutal first duke of
their line, Alessandro de' Medici, who some say was no Medici, but the
bastard of a negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the
inscription below his adoptive arms, "Under one Faith and one Law, one
Lord," and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked
Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother.
Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner
the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact,
that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni.
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