you say to yourself, " Ah, this is Florence! " And then suddenly you plunge into the gray-brown gloom of such a street as the Borgo degli Albizzi, with lofty palaces climbing in vain toward the sun, and frowning upon the street below with fronts of stone, rude or sculptured, but always stern and cold; and then that, too, seems the only Florence. They are in fact equally Florentine; but I suppose one expresses the stormy yet poetic life of the old commonwealth, and the other the serene, sunny commonplace of the Lorrainese regime.
I was not sorry to find this the tone of Piazza Donati, into which I had eddied from the austerity of Borgo degli Albizzi. It really belongs to a much remoter period than the older-looking street — to the Florence that lingers architecturally yet in certain narrow avenues to the Mercato Vecchio, where the vista is broken by innumerable pent-roofs, balconies, and cornices; and a throng of operatic figures in slouch hats and short cloaks are so very improbably bent on any realistic business, that they seem to be masquerading there in the mysterious fumes of the cook-shops. Yet I should be loath, for no very tangible reason, to have Piazza Donati like one of these avenues or in any wise different from what it is; certainly I should not like to have the back of Dante's house smartened up like the front, which looks into the Piazza San Martino. I do not complain that the restoration is bad; it is even very good, for all that I know; but the unrestored back is better, and I have a general feeling that the past ought to be allowed to tumble down in peace, though I have no doubt that whenever this happened I should be one of the first to cry out against the barbarous indifference that suffered it. I dare say that in a few hundred years, when the fact of the restoration is forgotten, the nineteenth-century medievalism of Dante's house will be acceptable to the most fastidious tourist. I tried to get into the house, which is open to the public at certain hours on certain days, but I always came at ten on Saturday, when I ought to have come at two on Monday, or the like; and so at last I had to content myself with the interior of the little church of San Martino, where Dante was married, half a stone's cast from where he was born. The church was closed, and I asked a cobbler, who had brought his work to the threshold of his shop hard by, for the sake of the light, where the sacristan lived. He answered me unintelligibly, without leaving off for a moment his furious hammering at the shoe in his lap. He must have been asked that question a great many times, and I do not know that I should have taken any more trouble in his place; but a woman in a fruit-stall next door had pity on me, knowing doubtless that I was interested in San Martino on account of the wedding, and sent me to No. 1. But No. 1 was a house so improbably genteel that I had not the courage to ring; and I asked the grocer alongside for a better direction. He did not know how to give it, but he sent me to the local apothecary, who in turn sent me to another number. Here another shoemaker, friendlier or idler than the first, left off gossiping with some friends of his, and showed me the right door at last in the rear of the church. My pull at the bell shot the sacristan's head out of the fourth-story window in the old way that always delighted me, and f perceived even at that distance that he was a man perpetually fired with zeal for his church by the curiosity of strangers, I could certainly see the church, yes; he would come down instantly and open it from the inside if I would do him the grace to close his own door from the outside. I complied willingly, and in another moment I stood within the little temple, where, upon the whole, for the sake of the emotion that divine genius, majestic sorrow, and immortal fame can accumulate within one's average commonplaceness, it is as well to stand as any other spot on earth. It is a very little place, with one-third of the space divided from the rest by an iron-tipped wooden screen. Behind this is the simple altar, and here Dante Alighieri and Gemma Donati were married. In whatever state the walls were then, they are now plainly whitewashed, though in one of the lunettes forming a sort of frieze half round the top was a fresco said to represent the espousals of the poet. The church was continually visited, the sacristan told me, by all sorts of foreigners, English, French, Germans, Spaniards, even Americans, but especially Russians, the most impassioned of all for it. One of this nation, one Russian eminent even among his impassioned race, spent several hours in looking at that picture, taking his stand at the foot of the stairs by which the sacristan descended from his lodging into the church. He showed me the very spot; I do not know why, unless he took me for another Russian, and thought my pride in a compatriot so impassioned might have some effect upon the fee I was to give him. He was a credulous sacristan, and I cannot find any evidence in Miss Horner's faithful and trusty "Walks in Florence" that there is a fresco in that church representing the espousals of Dante. The paintings in the lunettes are by a pupil of Masaccio's, and deal with the good works of the twelve good men of San Martino, who, ever since 1441, have had charge of a fund for the relief of such shamefaced poor as were unwilling to ask alms. Prince Strozzi and other patricians of Florence are at present among these Good Men, so the sacristan said; and there is an iron contribution-box at the church door, with an inscription promising any giver indulgence, successively guaranteed by four popes, of twenty-four hundred years; which seemed really to make it worth one's while.
XIV
In visiting these scenes, one cannot but wonder at the small compass in which the chief facts of Dante's young life, suitably to the home-keeping character of the time and race, occurred. There he was born, there he was bred, and there he was married to Gemma Donati after Beatrice Portinari died. Beatrice's father lived just across the way from the Donati houses, and the Donati houses adjoined the house where Dante grew up with his widowed mother. He saw Beatrice in her father's house, and he must often have been in the house of Manetto de' Donati as a child. As a youth he no doubt made love to Gemma at her casement; and here they must have dwelt after they were married, and she began to lead him a restless and unhappy life, being a fretful and foolish woman, by the accounts.
One realizes all this there with a distinctness which the clearness of the Italian atmosphere permits. In that air events do not seem to age any more than edifices; a life, like a structure, of six hundred years ago seems of yesterday, and one feels toward the Donati as if that troublesome family were one's own contemporaries. The evil they brought on Dante was not domestic only, but they and their party were the cause of his exile and his barbarous sentence in the process of the evil times which brought the Bianchi and Neri to Florence.
There is in history hardly anything so fantastically malicious, so tortuous, so perverse, as the series of chances that ended in his banishment. Nothing could apparently have been more remote from him, to all human perception, than that quarrel of a Pistoja family, in which the children of Messer Cancelliere's first wife, Bianca, called themselves Bianchi, and the children of the second called themselves Neri, simply for contrary-mindedness' sake. But let us follow it, and see how it reaches the poet and finally delivers him over to a life of exile and misery. One of these Cancellieri of Pistoja falls into a quarrel with another and wounds him with his sword. They are both boys, or hardly more, and the father of the one who struck the blow bids him go to his kinsmen and beg their forgiveness. But when he comes to them the father of the wounded youth takes him out to the stable, and striking off the offending hand on a block there, flings it into his face. " Go back to your father and tell him that hurts are healed with iron, not with words." The news of this cruel deed throws all Pistoja into an incomprehensible mediaeval frenzy. The citizens arm and divide themselves into Bianchi and Neri; the streets become battlefields. Finally some cooler heads ask Florence to interfere. Florence is always glad to get a finger into the affairs of her neighbors, and to quiet Pistoja she calls the worst of the Bianchi and Neri to her. Her own factions take promptly to the new names; the Guelphs have long ruled the city; the Ghibellines have been a whole generation in exile. But the Neri take up the old Ghibelline role of invoking foreign intervention, with Corso Donati at their head, — a brave man, but hot, proud, and lawless. Dante is of the Bianchi party, which is that of the liberals and patriots, and in this quality, he goes to Rome to plead with the Pope to use his good offices for the peace and freedom of Florence. In his absence he is banished for two years and heavily fined; then he is banished for life, and will be burned if he comes back. His party comes into power, but the sentence is never repealed, and in the despair of exile Dante, too, invokes the stranger's help. He becomes Nero; he dies Ghibelline.
I walked up from the other Donati houses through the Via Borgo degli Albizzi to the Piazza San Pier Maggiore to look at the truncated tower of Corso
