But one can forget and forgive all the church’s gaudiness and floridity when the choir is in good voice and the strings play Palestrina as they did last Easter Sunday.  The Annunziata is famous for its music, and on the great occasions people crowd there as nowhere else.  At High Mass the singing was fine but the instrumental music finer.  One is accustomed to seeing vicarious worship in Italy; but never was there so vicarious a congregation as ours, and indeed if it had not been for the sight of the busy celibates at the altar one would not have known that one was worshipping at all.  The culmination of detachment came when a family of Siamese or Burmese children, in native dress, entered.  A positive hum went round, and not an eye but was fixed on the little Orientals.  When, however, the organ was for a while superseded and the violas and violins quivered under the plangent melody of Palestrina, our roving attention was fixed and held.

I am not sure that the Andrea in the cloisters is not the best of all his work.  It is very simple and wholly beautiful, and in spite of years of ravage the colouring is still wonderful, perhaps indeed better for the hand of Time.  It is called the “Madonna del Sacco” (grain sack), and fills the lunette over the door leading from the church.  The Madonna—­Andrea’s favourite type, with the eyes set widely in the flat brow over the little trustful nose—­has her Son, older than usual, sprawling on her knee.  Her robes are ample and rich; a cloak of green is over her pretty head.  By her sits S. Joseph, on the sack, reading with very long sight.  That is all; but one does not forget it.

For the rest the cloisters are a huddle of memorial slabs and indifferent frescoes.  In the middle is a well with nice iron work.  No grass at all.  The second cloisters, into which it is not easy to get, have a gaunt John the Baptist in terra-cotta by Michelozzo.

On leaving the church, our natural destination is the Spedale, on the left, but one should pause a moment in the doorway of the courtyard (if the beggars who are always there do not make it too difficult) to look down the Via de’ Servi running straight away to the cathedral, which, with its great red warm dome, closes the street.  The statue in the middle of the piazza is that of the Grand Duke Ferdinand by Giovanni da Bologna, cast from metal taken from the Italians’ ancient enemies the Turks, while the fountains are by Tacca, Giovanni’s pupil, who made the bronze boar at the Mercato Nuovo.  “The Synthetical Guide Book,” from which I have already quoted, warns its readers not to overlook “the puzzling bees” at the back of Ferdinand’s statue.  “Try to count them,” it adds. (I accepted the challenge and found one hundred and one.) The bees have reference to Ferdinand’s emblem—­a swarm of these insects, with the words “Majestate tantum”.  The statue, by the way, is interesting for two other reasons than its subject.  First, it is that to which Browning’s poem, “The Statue and the Bust,” refers, and which, according to the poet, was set here at Ferdinand’s command to gaze adoringly for ever at the della Robbia bust of the lady whom he loved in vain.  But the bust no longer is visible, if ever it was.  John of Douay (as Gian Bologna was also called)—­