Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/148

134 a balcony as gay as sedate geraniums will permit, rose the Cortese tower, and across the square by the archway was the rugged monument of hate of the Cinatti—names that convey nothing to the dilettante in historical research, save a complacent satisfaction in the knowing of them. However, at right angles with the hotel, flanking the drug and tobacco shop, were the two low towers of the Ardinghelli, the Guelphs who began it all, and, farther on, beyond the church, were the two tall towers of the Ghibelline Salvucci, who outdid their neighbors by many feet, and lashed their opponents into a stone-mason's boom. It was not until we had drunk our chocolate and devoured seven biscuits at the café on the corner that we learned our own hotel to be part of the ancient Palazzo del Podesta (the home of the Mayor, we would say), whose campanile, with the clock on one side, became the measure for all extravagant excrescences. From that hour we viewed the results of this ancient rivalry in a different light, and with some degree of anxiety whenever we came upon a new one of unusual height. At various angles of the hilly town our tower was undoubtedly squat; in other spots it soared beautifully, and in one charming locality by the penitentiary it was higher even than the Torre del Comune, which is on a hill and has every advantage, as well as being an official tower and privileged to grow as tall as it pleased.

The Palazzo Publico has more than the tower of the Comune to recommend it. After that graceful extravagance there was a little of the public funds left for frescoing, and though Mr. Sodoma and Mr. Pinturicchio and Mr. Gozzoli did not command as high prices then as they would now, having been "discovered," their services were much valued. In the thirteenth century the poet Dante was despatched from Florence to honor the city by a personal request that representatives should be sent to an assembly of the Guelphs. He was received in the Sala del Consiglio, on the second floor, and a toothless old custodian who shows the room is not quite sure whether his coming was a greater, event than the celebration of the six-hundredth anniversary of his coming in 1899, when "flags were everywhere, also notables, and fine bands." Dante's visit was in 1299. Since then the towers arose, and the city, ruined by the continual warring of the two factions, fell an easy prey to Florence, which, in her absorption of all small fry, showed the fine commercial instinct of a modern syndicate. Since then the towers have fallen—there are but thirteen of the original fifty remaining—hurled down piece after piece upon their masters' enemies, perhaps, or converted into something practical, like a bow-window or a summer kitchen.

The scattering of fifty towers along the sky-line might have failed artistically, but we grew very fond of this bakers' dozen, noting many beauties in the rough unfinished piles of masonry, and abandoning our first-formed impression of factory architecture. The German artist and his wife painted them diligently, and various English ladies made hard-pencil sketches in neat books while stopping over from train to train. But it was not the novelty of the towers that caught and held us; it was a quality less tangible, a charm not to be put into words. The whirl of the distaff in the streets had something to do with it; the view of the country from the walls, of the town from the fortress, helped us to linger; the bells that burst into spells of musical coughing, the geniality of the people, the mystery of the dark narrow ways at night, the simplicity of them when the sun shone, the delight of a couple nearing thirty in growing five centuries younger in an hour, all were added reasons that are foolish in the telling; while the joy derived from the hotel windows and the children were subjects for hysteria.

And the children!

As Guelph or Ghibelline in the old days, the youngsters may have entered into the animosity that actuated the building of towers, but it is difficult to picture an Italian lad of the fifteenth century shrieking delightedly to his neighbor that "fried rats and pickled cats are good enough for Democrats," though "ice-cream and sugar-plums are just the cheese for Republicums." No, the little chaps of that era were probably engaged in the more serious business of melting lead for father; but their posterity, not one of whom would know a