that tries us so much on that portion of the coastline. At Sestri Levante I wrote: “I sit down at this pleasant hotel, with the silent sea glimmering in the early night before me outside the open window, to note down our journey thus far. The day has been truly glorious, the sea without even the thinnest rim of white along the coast, and such exquisite combinations of clouds. We left Villa Quartara at ten, with Madame Vittorina and the servants in tears. Majolina comes with us; she is such a good little maid. We had three good horses, but for the Bracco Pass we shall have an extra one. There is no way of travelling like this, in an open carriage; it is so placid; there is no hurrying to catch trains and struggling in crowds, no waiting in dismal salles d’attente. And then compare the entry into the towns by the high road and through the principal streets, perhaps through a city gate, the horse’s hoofs clattering and the whip cracking so merrily and the people standing about in groups watching us pass, to sneaking into a station, one of which is just like the other, which hasn’t the slightest couleur locale about it, and is sure to have unsightly surroundings.
“Away we went merrily, I feeling very jolly. The colour all along was ravishing, as may be imagined, seeing what a perfect day it was and that this is the loveliest season of the year. We dined at dear old Ruta, where also the horses had a good rest and where I was able to sketch something down. From Ruta to Sestri I rode by Majolina on the box, by far the best position of all, and didn’t I enjoy it! The horses’ bells jingled so cheerily and those three sturdy horses took us along so well. Rapallo and Chiavari! Dear old friends, what delicious picturesqueness they had, what lovely approaches to them by roads bordered with trees! The views were simply distracting. Sestri is a gem. Why don’t water-colour painters come here in shoals? What colouring the mountains had at sunset, and I had only a pencil and wretched little sketch book.
“Spezzia, April 28th, 1869.– A repetition of yesterday in point of weather. I feel as though I had been steeped all day in some balmy liquid of gold, purple, and blue. I have a Titianesque feeling hovering about me produced by the style of landscape we have passed through and the faces of the people who are working in the patches of cultivation under the mulberries and vines, and that intense, deep blue sky with massive white clouds floating over it. We exclaimed as much at the beauty of the women as at the purple of the mountains and the green of the budding mulberries and poplars. And the men and boys; what perfect types; such fine figures and handsome faces, such healthy colour! We left the hotel at Sestri, with its avenue of orange trees in flower, at ten o’clock, and, of course, crossed the Bracco to-day. We dined at a little place called Bogliasco, in whose street, under our windows, handsome youths with bare legs and arms were playing at a game of ball which called forth fine action. I did not know at first whether to look well at them all or sketch them down one by one, but did both, and I hope to make a regular drawing of the group from the sketch I took and from memory. We stopped at the top of the hill, from which is seen La Spezzia lying below, with its beautiful bay and the Carara Mountains beyond. Here ends our drive, for to-morrow we take the train for Florence.
“Florence, April 29th.– Magnificent, cloudless weather. But, oh! what a wearisome journey we had, the train crawling from one station to another and stopping at each such a time, whilst we baked in the cushioned carriage and couldn’t even have lovely things to look at, surrounded by the usual railway eyesores. We passed close by the Pisan Campo Santo, and had a very good view of the Leaning Tower and the Duomo. Such hurrying and struggling at the Pisa station to get into the train for Florence, having, of course, to carry all our small baggage ourselves. Railway travelling in Italy is odious. It was very lovely to see Florence in the distance, with those domes and towers I know so well by heart from pictures, but we were very limp indeed, the wearisome train having taken all our enthusiasm away. Everything as we arrived struck us as small, and I am still so dazzled by the splendour of Genoa that my eyes cannot, as it were, comprehend the brown, grey and white tones of this quiet-coloured little city. I must Florentine myself as fast as I can. This hotel is on the Lung’ Arno, and charming was it to look out of the windows in the lovely evening and see the river below and the dome of the Carmine and tower of Santo Spirito against the clear sky with, further off, the hills with their convents (alas! empty now) and clusters of cypresses. No greater contrast to Genoa could be than Florence in every way. Oh! may this city of the arts see me begin (and finish) my first regular picture. April 30th.– I and Papa strolled about the streets to get a general impression of ‘Firenze la gentile,’ and looked into the Duomo, which is indeed bare and sad-coloured inside except in its delicious painted windows over the altars, the harmonious richness of which I should think could not be exceeded by any earthly means. The outside is very gay and cheerful, but some of the marble has browned itself into an appearance of wood. Oh! dear Giotto’s Tower, could elegance go beyond this? Is not this an example of the complete savoir faire of those true-born artists of old? And the ‘Gates of Paradise’! The delight of seeing these from the street is great, instead of in a museum. But Michael Angelo’s enthusiastic exclamation in their praise rather makes one smile, for we know that it must have been in admiration of their purely technical beauties, as the gates are by no means large and grand as gates, and the bronze is rather dark for an entrance into Paradise! I reverently saluted the Palazzo Vecchio, and am quite ready to get very much attached to the brown stone of Florence in time.
“Villa Lamporecchi, May 1st.– We two and Papa had a good spell at the Uffizi in the morning, and in the afternoon we took possession of this pleasing house, which is so cool and has far-spreading views, one of Florence from a terrace leading out of what I shall make my studio. A garden and vineyards sloping down to the valley where Brunelleschi’s brown dome shows above the olives.”
Our mother did many lovely water colours, one especially exquisite one of Fiesole seen in a shimmering blue midsummer light. That, and one done on the Lung’ Arno, to which Shelley’s line
“The purple noon’s transparent might”
could justly be applied, are treasured by me. She understood sunshine and how to paint it.
“May 3rd.– I already feel Florence growing upon me. I begin to understand the love English people of culture and taste get for this most interesting and gentle city. The ground one treads on is all historic, but it is in the artistic side of its history that I naturally feel the greatest interest, and it is a delightful thing to go about those streets and be reminded at every turn of the great Painters, Architects, Sculptors I have read so much of. Here a palace designed by Raphael, there a glorious row of windows carved by Michael Angelo, there some exquisite ironwork wrought by some other born genius. I think the style of architecture of the Strozzi Palace, the Ricardi, and others, is perfection in its way, though at first, with the brilliant whites, yellows and pinks of Genoa still in my eye, I felt rather depressed by the uniform brown of the huge stones of which they are built. No wonder I haunt the well-known gallery which runs over the Ponte Vecchio, lined with the sketches, studies, and first thoughts of most of the great masters. One delights almost more in these than in many of the finished pictures. They bring one much more in contact, as it were, with the great dead, and make one familiar with their methods of work. One sees what little slips they made, how they modified their first thoughts, over and over again, before finally fixing their choice. Very encouraging to the struggling beginner to see these evidences of their troubles!
“I have never, before I came here where so many of them have lived, realised the old masters as our comrades; I have never been so near them and felt them to be mortals exactly like ourselves. This city and its environs are so little changed, the greater part of them not at all, since those grand old Michael Angelesque days that one feels brought quite close to the old painters, seeing what they saw and walking on the very same old pavement as they walked on, passing the houses where they lived, and so forth.”
I was at that time bent on achieving my first “great picture,” to be taken from Keats’s poem “The Pot of Basil”; Lorenzo riding to his death between the two brothers:
So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence,
but,
