At Pontassieve we stopped a while for coffee at an inn at the corner of the square of pollarded limes, and while it was preparing watched the little crumbling town at work, particularly the cooper opposite, who was finishing a massive cask within whose recesses good Chianti is doubtless now maturing; and then on the white road again, to the turning, a mile farther on, to the left, where one bids the Arno farewell till the late afternoon.  Steady climbing now, and then a turn to the right and we see Pelago before us, perched on its crags, and by and by come to it—­a tiny town, with a clean and alluring inn, very different from the squalor of Pontassieve:  famous in art and particularly Florentine art as being the birthplace of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the Baptistery doors.  From Pelago the road descends with extreme steepness to a brook in a rocky valley, at a bridge over which the real climb begins, to go steadily on (save for another swift drop before Tosi) until Vallombrosa is reached, winding through woods all the way, chiefly chestnut—­those woods which gave Milton, who was here in 1638, his famous simile. [6] The heat was now becoming intense (it was mid-September) and the horses were suffering, and most of this last stage was done at walking pace; but such was the exhilaration of the air, such the delight of the aromas which the breeze continually wafted from the woods, now sweet, now pungent, and always refreshing, that one felt no fatigue even though walking too.  And so at last the monastery, and what was at that moment better than anything, lunch.

The beauty and joy of Vallombrosa, I may say at once, are Nature’s, not man’s.  The monastery, which is now a Government school of forestry, is ugly and unkempt; the hotel is unattractive; the few people one meets want to sell something or take you for a drive.  But in an instant in any direction one can be in the woods—­and at this level they are pine woods, soft underfoot and richly perfumed—­and a quarter of an hour’s walking brings the view.  It is then that you realize you are on a mountain indeed.  Florence is to the north-west in the long Arno valley, which is here precipitous and narrow.  The river is far below—­if you slipped you would slide into it—­fed by tumbling Apennine streams from both walls.  The top of the mountain is heathery like Scotland, and open; but not long will it be so, for everywhere are the fenced parallelograms which indicate that a villa is to be erected.  Nothing, however, can change the mountain air or the glory of the surrounding heights.

Another view, unbroken by villas but including the monastery and the Foresters’ Hotel in the immediate foreground, and extending as far as Florence itself (on suitable days), is obtained from Il Paradisino, a white building on a ledge which one sees from the hotel above the monastery.  But that is not by any means the top.  The view covers much of the way by which we came hither.