By continuing straight on we should come to that crowded and fussy little street which crosses the river by the Ponte Vecchio and eventually becomes the Roman way; but let us instead turn to the right this side of the market, down the Via Porta Rossa, because here is the Palazzo Davanzati, which has a profound interest to lovers of the Florentine past in that it has been restored exactly to its ancient state when Pope Eugenius IV lodged here, and has been filled with fourteenth and fifteenth century furniture.  In those days it was the home of the Davizza family.  The Davanzati bought it late in the sixteenth century and retained it until 1838.  In 1904 it was bought by Professor Elia Volpi, who restored its ancient conditions and presented it to the city as a permanent monument of the past.

Here we see a mediaeval Florentine palace precisely as it was when its Florentine owner lived his uncomfortable life there.  For say what one may, there is no question that life must have been uncomfortable.  In early and late summer, when the weather was fine and warm, these stone floors and continuous draughts may have been solacing; but in winter and early spring, when Florentine weather can be so bitterly hostile, what then?  That there was a big fire we know by the smoky condition of Michelozzo’s charming frieze on the chimney piece; but the room—­I refer to that on the first floor—­is so vast that this fire can have done little for any one but an immediate vis-a-vis; and the room, moreover, was between the open world on the one side, and the open court (now roofed in with glass) on the other, with such additional opportunities for draughts as the four trap-doors in the floor offered.  It was through these traps that the stone cannon-balls still stacked in the window seats were dropped, or a few gallons of boiling oil poured, whenever the city or a faction of it turned against the householder.  Not comfortable, you see, at least not in our northern sense of the word, although to the hardy frugal Florentine it may have seemed a haven of luxury.

The furniture of the salon is simple and sparse and very hard.  A bust here, a picture there, a coloured plate, a crucifix, and a Madonna and Child in a niche:  that was all the decoration save tapestry.  An hour glass, a pepper mill, a compass, an inkstand, stand for utility, and quaint and twisted musical instruments and a backgammon board for beguilement.

In the salle-a-manger adjoining is less light, and here also is a symbol of Florentine unrest in the shape of a hole in the wall (beneath the niche which holds the Madonna and Child) through which the advancing foe, who had successfully avoided the cannon balls and the oil, might be prodded with lances, or even fired at.  The next room is the kitchen, curiously far from the well, the opening to which is in the salon, and then a bedroom (with some guns in it) and smaller rooms gained from the central court.

The rest of the building is the same—­a series of self-contained flats, but all dipping for water from the same shaft and all depending anxiously upon the success of the first floor with invaders.  At the top is a beautiful loggia with Florence beneath it.