and a Venetian Jew looks more in place before a desecrated convent than S. Francis would do.  Like the rest of Italy, Florence seems always to forget that she had a history before 1860; yet here at least she should have remembered one of her old heroes, for in the convent garden Giano della Bella, who fought at Campaldino, and was anti-clerical too and hateful to the Pope, the hero of the Ordinances of Justice, used to walk with his friends. Perisca innanzi la citta, say I, che tante opere rie si sostengano.  By this let even Venetian Jews, to say nothing of Switzer princes, know how they are like to be remembered when their little day is over.

[Illustration:  OGNISSANTI]

It was in 1256 that the Humiliati founded here in Borgo Ognissanti the Church of S. Caterina, and carved their arms, a woolpack fastened with ropes, over the door.  Originally founded by certain Lombard exiles in Northern Germany, the Humiliati were at first at any rate a lay brotherhood, which had learned in exile the craft of weaving wool.  Such wool as was to be had in Tuscany, a land of olives and vines, almost without pasture, was poor enough, and it seems to have been only after the advent of the Humiliati that the great Florentine industry began to assert itself, foreign wools being brought in a raw state to the city and sold, dressed and woven into cloth, in all the cities of Europe and the East.  This brotherhood, however, in 1140 formed itself into a Religious Order under a Bull of Innocent III, and though from that time the brethren seem no longer to have worked at their craft themselves, they directed the work of laymen whom they enrolled and employed, busying themselves for the most part with new inventions and the management of what soon became an immense business.  Their fame was spread all over Italy, for, as Villari tells us,[111] “wherever a house of their Order was established, the wool-weaving craft immediately made advance,” so that in 1239 the Commune of Florence invited them to establish a house near the city, as they did in S. Donato a Torri, which was given them by the Signoria.  By 1250 we read that the Guild Masters were already grumbling at their distance from the city, so that they removed to S. Lucia sul Prato, under promise of exemption from all taxes; and in 1256 they founded a church and convent in Borgo Ognissanti.  The Church of S. Lucia sul Prato still stands, but the Humiliati were robbed of it in 1547 by Cosimo I, who, strangely enough, had taken the old convent of S. Donato a Torri from the friars who had acquired it, in order to build a fortification, and now wished to give them the Church of S. Lucia sul Prato.  It is said that the friars began to build their convent, but four years later abandoned the work, removing to S. Jacopo on the other side Arno.  However this may be, the Franciscans certainly succeeded the Humiliati in their convent in Borgo Ognissanti about this time, and in 1627 they rebuilt S. Caterina, renaming it S. Salvadore.  To-day there is but little worth seeing in this seventeenth-century church,—­a St. Augustine by Botticelli, a St. Jerome and two large frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandajo,—­but in the old refectory of the convent, which has now become a barracks, is Domenico Ghirlandajo’s fresco of the Last Supper.