In those days—­temporibus illis, as the historians of long-forgotten centuries say—­there used to be a very general exodus of the English colony at Florence to the baths of Lucca during the summer months.  Almost all Italians, who can in anywise afford to do so, leave the great cities nowadays for the seaside, even as those do who have preceded them in the path of modern luxurious living.  But at the time of which I am writing the Florentines who did so were few, and almost confined to that inner circle of the fashionable world which partly lived with foreigners, and had adopted in many respects their modes and habits.  Those Italians, however, who did leave their Florence homes in the summer, went almost all of them to Leghorn.  The baths of Lucca were an especially and almost exclusively English resort.

It was possible to induce the vetturini who supplied carriages and horses for the purpose, to do the journey to the baths in one day, but it was a very long day, and it was necessary to get fresh horses at Lucca.  There was no good sleeping-place between Florence and Lucca—­nor indeed is there such now—­and the journey from the capital of Tuscany to that of the little Duchy of Lucca, now done by rail in less than two hours, was quite enough for a vetturino’s pair of horses.  And when Lucca was reached there were still fourteen miles, nearly all collar work, between that and the baths, so that the plan more generally preferred was to sleep at Lucca.

The baths (well known to the ancient Romans, of course, as what warm springs throughout Europe were not?) consisted of three settlements, or groups of houses—­as they do still, for I revisited the well-remembered place two or three years ago.  There was the “Ponte,” a considerable village gathered round the lower bridge over the Lima, at which travellers from Florence first arrived.  Here were the assembly rooms, the reading room, the principal baths, and the gaming-tables—­for in those pleasant wicked days the remote little Lucca baths were little better than Baden subsequently and Monte Carlo now.  Only we never, to the best of my memory, suicided ourselves, though it might happen occasionally, that some innkeeper lost the money which ought to have gone to him, because “the bank” had got hold of it first.

Then secondly there was the “Villa,” about a mile higher up the lovely little valley of the Lima, so called because the Duke’s villa was situated there.  The Villa had more the pretension—­a very little more—­of looking something like a little bit of town.  At least it had its one street paved.  The ducal villa was among the woods immediately above it.