If I have found my expectations of Italian scenery, in some respects, below the reality, in other respects they have been disappointed.  The forms of the mountains are wonderfully picturesque, and their effect is heightened by the rich atmosphere through which they are seen, and by the buildings, imposing from their architecture or venerable from time, which crown the eminences.  But if the hand of man has done something to embellish this region, it has done more to deform it.  Not a tree is suffered to retain its natural shape, not a brook to flow in its natural channel.  An exterminating war is carried on against the natural herbage of the soil.  The country is without woods and green fields; and to him who views the vale of the Arno “from the top of Fiesole,” or any of the neighboring heights, grand as he will allow the circle of the mountains to be, and magnificent the edifices with which the region is adorned, it appears, at any time after midsummer, a huge valley of dust, planted with low rows of the pallid and thin-leaved olive, or the more dwarfish maple on which the vines are trained.  The simplicity of nature, so far as can be done, is destroyed; there is no fine sweep of forest, no broad expanse of meadow or pasture ground, no ancient and towering trees clustered about the villas, no rows of natural shrubbery following the course of the brooks and rivers.  The streams, which are often but the beds of torrents dry during the summer, are confined in straight channels by stone walls and embankments; the slopes are broken up and disfigured by terraces; and the trees are kept down by constant pruning and lopping, until half way up the sides of the Appenines, where the limit of cultivation is reached, and thence to the summit is a barren steep of rock, without herbage or soil.  The grander features of the landscape, however, are fortunately beyond the power of man to injure; the lofty mountain-summits, bare precipices cleft with chasms, and pinnacles of rock piercing the sky, betokening, far more than any thing I have seen elsewhere, a breaking up of the crust of the globe in some early period of its existence.  I am told that in May and June the country is much more beautiful than at present, and that owing to a drought it now appears under a particular disadvantage.

The Academy of the Fine Arts has had its exhibition since I arrived.  In its rooms, which were gratuitously open to the public, I found a large crowd of gazers at the pictures and statues.  Many had come to look at some work ordered by an acquaintance; others made the place a morning lounge.  In the collection were some landscapes by Morghen, the son of the celebrated engraver, very fresh and clear; a few pieces sent by Bezzoli, one of the most eminent Italian painters of his time; a statue of Galileo, not without merit, by Costoli, for there is always a Galileo or two, I believe, at every exhibition of the kind in Florence; portraits good, bad, and indifferent, in great abundance, and many square feet of canvas spoiled by attempts at historical painting.