Once at Fiesole, by whatever means you reach it, do not neglect to climb the monastery steps to the very top.  It is a day of climbing, and a hundred or more steps either way mean nothing now.  For here is a gentle little church with swift, silent monks in it, and a few flowers in bowls, and a religious picture by that strange Piero di Cosimo whose heart was with the gods in exile; and the view of Monte Ceceri, on the other side of Fiesole, seen through the cypresses here, which could not be better in disposition had Benozzo Gozzoli himself arranged them, is very striking and memorable.

Fiesole’s darling son is Mino the sculptor—­the “Raphael of the chisel”—­whose radiant Madonnas and children and delicate tombs may be seen here and there all over Florence.  The piazza is named after him; he is celebrated on a marble slab outside the museum, where all the famous names of the vicinity may be read too; and in the church is one of his most charming groups and finest heads.  They are in a little chapel on the right of the choir.  The head is that of Bishop Salutati, humorous, wise, and benign, and the group represents the adoration of a merry little Christ by a merry little S. John and others.  As for the church itself, it is severe and cool, with such stone columns in it as must last for ever.

But the main interest of Fiesole to most people is not the cypress-covered hill of S. Francesco; not the view from the summit; not the straw mementoes; not the Mino relief in the church; but the Roman arena.  The excavators have made of this a very complete place.  One can stand at the top of the steps and reconstruct it all—­the audience, the performance, the performers.  A very little time spent on building would be needed to restore the amphitheatre to its original form.  Beyond it are baths, and in a hollow the remains of a temple with the altar where it ever was; and then one walks a little farther and is on the ancient Etruscan wall, built when Fiesole was an Etruscan fortified hill city.  So do the centuries fall away here!  But everywhere, among the ancient Roman stones so massive and exact, and the Etruscan stones, are the wild flowers which Luca Signorelli painted in that picture in the Uffizi which I love so much.

After the amphitheatre one visits the Museum—­with the same ticket—­a little building filled with trophies of the spade.  There is nothing very wonderful—­nothing to compare with the treasures of the Archaeological Museum in Florence—­but it is well worth a visit.

On leaving the Museum on the last occasion that I was there—­in April—­I walked to Settignano.  The road for a while is between houses, for Fiesole stretches a long way farther than one suspects, very high, looking over the valley of the Mugnone; and then after a period between pine trees and grape-hyacinths one turns to the right and begins to descend.  Until Poggio del Castello, a noble villa, on an isolated eminence, the descent is very gradual, with views of Florence round the shoulder of Monte Ceceri; but afterwards the road winds, to ease the fall, and the wayfarer turns off into the woods and tumbles down the hill by a dry water-course, amid crags and stones, to the beginnings of civilization again, at the Via di Desiderio da Settignano, a sculptor who stands to his native town in precisely the same relation as Mino to his.