Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/361

Rh they were worthy to be portals of paradise! Dante too speaks of this Baptistry in his Inferno as "St. John's fair dome of me beloved." Inside, the walls are lined and the pavement inlaid with marble. It is dedicated to St. John the Baptist and all Florentines are baptised here. Before the principal gate are two columns on which was formerly suspended the immense chain with which the Pisans in 1406 attempted to close their harbour against the Florentines and the Genoese, and which was brought to Florence as a trophy of victory.

Scarcely, five minutes' walk from the cathedral is the church of San Lorenzo, close to which are the New Sacristy and the Medicean Chapel. This chapel is a wonderful octagon building, the inner walls of which are covered with agate and jasper and amaranth and lapiz lazuli and about eighteen different kinds of rich marble! The cost of this hall of valuable stones must have been enormous, it is said, it amounted to 22 millions of franks! The New Sacristy contains the sarcophagi of the Duke of Nemours and the Duke of Urbino. Over the tombs are the statue of Night and Day and of Dawn and Twilight, both by Michael Angelo, and considered among his master works. The statues are still unfinished as Michael Angelo left for Rome before finishing the works, and no profane hand has since touched what that great master left unfinished.

From these tombs of the "great ones of the earth" I turned with far deeper interest to the ashes of some of the really greatest men that the world has ever produced.