Letter III.

Tuscan Scenery and Climate.

Florence, October 11, 1834.

The bridge over the Arno, immediately under my window, is the spot from which Cole’s fine landscape, which you perhaps remember seeing in the exhibition of our Academy, was taken.  It gives, you may recollect, a view of the Arno travelling off towards the west, its banks overhung with trees, the mountain-ridges rising in the distance, and above them the sky flushed with the colors of sunset.  The same rich hues I behold every evening in the quarter where they were seen by the artist when he made them permanent on his canvas.

There is a great deal of prattle about Italian skies:  the skies and clouds of Italy, so far as I have had an opportunity of judging, do not present so great a variety of beautiful appearances as our own; but the Italian atmosphere is far more uniformly fine than ours.  Not to speak of its astonishing clearness, it is pervaded by a certain warmth of color which enriches every object.  This is more remarkable about the time of sunset, when the mountains put on an aerial aspect, as if they belonged to another and fairer world; and a little after the sun has gone down, the air is flushed with a glory which seems to transfigure all that it incloses.  Many of the fine old palaces of Florence, you know, are built in a gloomy though grand style of architecture, of a dark-colored stone, massive and lofty, and overlooking narrow streets that lie in almost perpetual shade.  But at the hour of which I am speaking, the bright warm radiance reflected from the sky to the earth, fills the darkest lanes, streams into the most shadowy nooks, and makes the prison-like structures glitter as with a brightness of their own.

It is now nearly the middle of October, and we have had no frost.  The strong summer heats which prevailed when I came hither, have by the slowest gradations subsided into an agreeable autumnal temperature.  The trees keep their verdure, but I perceive their foliage growing thinner, and when I walk in the Cascine on the other side of the Arno, the rustling of the lizards, as they run among the heaps of crisp leaves, reminds me that the autumn is wearing away, though the ivy which clothes the old elms has put forth a profuse array of blossoms, and the walks murmur with bees like our orchards in spring.  As I look along the declivities of the Appenines, I see the raw earth every day more visible between the ranks of olive-trees and the well-pruned maples which support the vines.