The Via de’ Fossi will bring us again to the Piazza Goldoni and the Arno, and a few yards farther along there is a palace to be seen, the Corsini, the only palazzo still inhabited by its family to which strangers are admitted—­the long low white facade with statues on the top and a large courtyard, on the Lungarno Corsini, just after the Piazza Goldoni.  It is not very interesting and belongs to the wrong period, the seventeenth century.  It is open on fixed days, and free save that one manservant receives the visitor and another conducts him from room to room.  There are many pictures, but few of outstanding merit, and the authorship of some of these has been challenged.  Thus, the cartoon of Julius II, which is called a Raphael and seems to be the sketch for one of the well-known portraits at the Pitti, Uffizi, or our National Gallery, is held to be not by Raphael at all.  Among the pleasantest pictures are a Lippo Lippi Madonna and Child, a Filippino Lippi Madonna and Child with Angels, and a similar group by Botticelli; but one has a feeling that Carlo Dolci and Guido Reni are the true heroes of the house.  Guido Reni’s Lucrezia Romana, with a dagger which she has already thrust two inches into her bosom, as though it were cheese, is one of the most foolish pictures I ever saw.  The Corsini family having given the world a pope, a case of papal vestments is here.  It was this Pope when Cardinal Corsini who said to Dr. Johnson’s friend, Mrs. Piozzi, meeting him in Florence in 1785, “Well, Madam, you never saw one of us red-legged partridges before, I believe”.

There may be more beautiful bridges in the world than the Trinita, but I have seen none.  Its curve is so gentle and soft, and its three arches so light and graceful, that I wonder that whenever new bridges are necessary the authorities do not insist upon the Trinita being copied.  The Ponte Vecchio, of course, has a separate interest of its own, and stands apart, like the Rialto.  It is a bridge by chance, one might almost say.  But the Trinita is a bridge in intent and supreme at that, the most perfect union of two river banks imaginable.  It shows to what depths modern Florence can fall—­how little she esteems her past—­that the iron bridge by the Cascine should ever have been built.

The various yellows of Florence—­the prevailing colours—­are spread out nowhere so favourably as on the Pitti side of the river between the Trinita and the Ponte Vecchio on the backs of the houses of the Borgo San Jacopo, and just so must this row have looked for four hundred years.  Certain of the occupants of these tenements, even on the upper floors, have fishing nets, on pulleys, which they let down at intervals during the day for the minute fish which seem to be as precious to Italian fishermen as sparrows and wrens to Italian gunners.