University of Virginia Library

28. LETTER XXVIII.

I have got into the “back-stairs interest,” as the
politicians say, and to-day I wound up the staircase
of the Pitti Palace, and spent an hour or two in its
glorious halls with the younger Greenough, without
the insufferable and usually inevitable annoyance of a
cicerone. You will not of course, expect a regular
description of such a vast labyrinth of splendor. I
could not give it to you even if I had been there the
hundred times that I intend to go, if I live long enough
in Florence. In other galleries you see merely the
arts, here you are dazzled with the renewed and costly
magnificence of a royal palace. The floors and ceilings
and furniture, each particular part of which it
must have cost the education of a life to accomplish,
bewilder you out of yourself quite; and, till you can
tread on a matchless pavement or imitated mosaic,
and lay your hat on a table of inlaid gems, and sit on
a sofa wrought with you know not what delicate and
curious workmanship, without nervousness or compunction,
you are not in a state to appreciate the pictures
upon the walls with judgment or pleasure.

I saw but one thing well — Titian's Bella, as the
Florentines call it. There are two famous Venuses
by the same master, as you know in the other gallery,
hanging over the Venus de Medicis — full-length figures
reclining upon couches, one of them usually
called Titian's mistress. The Bella in the Pitti gallery,
is a half-length portrait, dressed to the shoulders,
and a different kind of picture altogether. The others
are voluptuous, full-grown women. This represents
a young girl of perhaps seventeen; and if the
frame in which it hangs were a window, and the loveliest
creature that ever trod the floors of a palace
stood looking out upon you, in the open air, she could
not seem more real, or give you a stronger feeling of
the presence of exquisite, breathing, human beauty.
The face has no particular character. It is the look
with which a girl would walk to the casement in a
mood of listless happiness, and gaze out, she scarce
knew why. You feel that it is the habitual expression.
Yet, with all its subdued quiet and sweetness,
it is a countenance beneath which evidently sleeps
warm and measureless passion, capacities for loving
and enduring and resenting everything that makes up
a character to revere and adore. I do not know how
a picture can express so much — but it does express all
this, and eloquently too.

In a fresco on the ceiling of one of the private
chambers, is a portrait of the late lamented granddutchess.
On the mantelpiece in the duke's cabinet also is

a beautiful marble bust of her. It is a face and head
corresponding perfectly to the character given her by
common report, full of nobleness and kindness. The
duke, who loved her with a devotion rarely found in
marriages of state, is inconsolable since her death, and
has shut himself from all society. He hardly slept
during her illness, watching by her bedside constantly.
She was a religious enthusiast, and her health is said
to have been first impaired by too rigid an adherence
to the fasts of the church, and self-inflicted penance.
The Florentines talk of her still, and she appears to
have been unusually loved and honored.

I have just returned from hearing an improvisatrice.
At a party last night I met an Italian gentleman, who
talked very enthusiastically of a lady of Florence,
celebrated for her talent of improvisation. She was
to give a private exhibition to her friends the next day
at twelve, and he offered politely to introduce me. He
called this morning, and we went together.

Some thirty or forty people were assembled in a
handsome room, darkened tastefully by heavy curtains.
They were sitting in perfect silence when we
entered, all gazing intently on the improvisatrice, a
lady of some forty or fifty years, of a fine countenance,
and dressed in deep mourning. She rose to receive
us; and my friend introducing me, to my infinite dismay,
as an improvisatore Americano, she gave me a seat
on the sofa at her right hand, an honor I had not Italian
enough to decline. I regretted it the less that it gave
me an opportunity of observing the effects of the
“fine phrensy,” a pleasure I should otherwise certainly
have lost through the darkness of the room.

We were sitting in profound silence, the head of
the improvisatrice bent down upon her breast, and her
hands clasped over her lap, when she suddenly raised
herself, and with both hands extended, commenced in
a thrilling voice, “Patria!” Some particular passage
of Florentine history had been given her by one of
the company, and we had interrupted her in the midst
of her conception. She went on with astonishing fluency,
in smooth harmonious rhyme, without the hesitation
of a breath, for half an hour. My knowledge
of the language was too imperfect to judge of the
finish of the style, but the Italians present were quite
carried away with their enthusiasm. There was an
improvisatore in company, said to be the second in
Italy; a young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a
face that struck me as the very beau ideal of genius.
His large expressive eyes kindled as the poetess went
on, and the changes of his countenance soon attracted
the attention of the company. She closed and
sunk back upon her seat, quite exhausted; and the
poet, looking round for sympathy, loaded her with
praises in the peculiarly beautiful epithets of the Italian
language. I regarded her more closely as she sat
by me. Her profile was beautiful; and her mouth,
which at the first glance had exhibited marks of age,
was curled by her excitement into a firm animated
curve, which restored twenty years at least by its expression.

After a few minutes one of the company went out
of the room, and wrote upon a sheet of paper the last
words of every line for a sonnet; and a gentleman
who had remained within, gave a subject to fill it up.
She took the paper, and looking at it a moment or
two, repeated the sonnet as fluently as if it had been
written out before her. Several other subjects were
then given her, and she filled the same sonnet with the
same terminations. It was wonderful. I could not
conceive of such facility. After she had satisfied
them with this, she turned to me and said, that in
compliment to the American improvisatore she would
give an ode upon America. To disclaim the character
and the honor would have been both difficult and
embarrassing even for one who knew the language
better than I, so I bowed and submitted. She began
with the discovery by Columbus, claimed him as her
countryman; and with some poetical fancies about the
wild woods and the Indians, mingled up Montezuma
and Washington rather promiscuously, and closed
with a really beautiful apostrophe to liberty. My acknowledgments
were fortunately lost in the general
murmur.

A tragedy succeeded, in which she sustained four
characters. This, by the working of her forehead
and the agitation of her breast, gave her more trouble,
but her fluency was unimpeded; and when she closed,
the company was in raptures. Her gestures were
more passionate in this performance, but, even with
my imperfect knowledge of the language, they always
seemed called for and in taste. Her friends rose as
she sunk back on the sofa, gathered round her, and
took her hands, overwhelming her with praises. It
was a very exciting scene altogether, and I went away
with new ideas of poetical power and enthusiasm.

One lodges like a prince in Florence, and pays like
a beggar. For the information of artists and scholars
desirous to come abroad, to whom exact knowledge on
the subject is important, I will give you the inventory
and cost of my whereabout.

I sit at this moment in a window of what was formerly
the archbishop's palace — a noble old edifice,
with vast staircases and resounding arches, and a hall
in which you might put a dozen of the modern brick
houses of our country. My chamber is as large as a
ball-room, on the second story, looking out upon the
garden belonging to the house, which extends to the
eastern wall of the city. Beyond this lies one of the
sweetest views in the world — the ascending amphitheatre
of hills, in whose lap lies Florence, with the tall
eminence of Fiesolé in the centre, crowned with the
monastery in which Milton passed six weeks, while
gathering scenery for his Paradise. I can almost
count the panes of glass in the windows of the bard's
room; and, between the fine old building and my eye,
on the slope of the hill, lie thirty or forty splendid
villas, half-buried in trees (Madame Catalani's among
them), piled one above another on the steep ascent,
with their columns and porticoes, as if they were
mock temples in a vast terraced garden. I do not
think there is a window in Italy that commands more
points of beauty. Cole, the American landscape
painter, who occupied the room before me, took a
sketch from it. For neighbors, the Neapolitan ambassador
lives on the same floor, the two Greenoughs
in the ground-rooms below, and the palace of one of
the wealthiest nobles of Florence overlooks the garden,
with a front of eighty-five windows, from which you
are at liberty to select any two or three, and imagine
the most celebrated beauty of Tuscany behind the
crimson curtains — the daughter of this same noble
bearing that reputation. She was pointed out to me
at the opera a night or two since, and I have seen as
famous women with less pretensions.

For the interior, my furniture is not quite upon the
same scale, but I have a clean snow-white bed, a calico-covered
sofa, chairs and tables enough, and pictures
three deep from the wall to the floor.

For all this, and the liberty of the episcopal garden,
I pay three dollars a month! A dollar more is charged
for lamps, boots, and service, and a dark-eyed landlady
of thirty-five, mends my gloves, and pays me two visits
a day — items not mentioned in the bill. Then for
the feeding, an excellent breakfast of coffee and toast
is brought me for six cents; and, without wine, one
may dine heartily at a fashionable restaurant for twelve
cents, and with wine, quite magnificently for twenty-five.
Exclusive of postage and pleasures, this is all
one is called upon to spend in Florence. Three hundred
dollars a year would fairly and largely cover the

expenses of a man living at this rate; and a man who
would not be willing to live half as well for the sake
of his art, does not deserve to see Italy. I have stated
these unsentimental particulars, because it is a
kind of information I believe much wanted. I should
have come to Italy years ago if I had known as much,
and I am sure there are young men in our country
dreaming of this paradise of art in half despair, who
will thank me for it, and take up at once “the pilgrim's
sandal-shoon and scollop-shell.”