Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo:  where is their dust to-day?  As we look at their work in the galleries and churches, who cares what has happened to them, or whether such graves as theirs are rifled or no?  Yet not one of them but has done more for Italy than Vittorio Emmanuele; not one of them, O Italia Nuova, but is to-day filling your pockets with gold, while he is nothing in the Pantheon; yet their graves are rifled and forgotten, and him you have placed on the Capitol.

It is to another Benedictine convent you come down Via Pietrapiana, past Borgo Allegri, whence the Florentines say they bore Cimabue’s Madonna in triumph to S. Maria Novella.  It is a pity, truly, that it is not his picture that is in the Rucellai Chapel to-day, and that the name of the Borgo does not come from that rejoicing, but from the Allegri family, who here had their towers.  Yet here Cimabue lived, and Ghiberti and Antonio Rossellino.  Who knows what beauty has here passed by?

The Benedictine Church and Convent at end of Via Pietrapiana is dedicated to S. Ambrogio.  It was the first convent of nuns built in Florence, and dates certainly from the eleventh century.  Like the rest, it has been suppressed, and indeed destroyed.  To-day it is nothing, having suffered restoration, beside the other violations.  Within, Verrocchio was buried, and in the Cappella del Miracolo, where in the thirteenth century a priest found the chalice stained with Christ’s blood, is the beautiful altar by Mino da Fiesole.  The church is full of old frescoes by Cosimo Rosselli, Raffaellino del Garbo, and such, and is worth a visit, if only for the work of Mino and the S. Sebastian of Leonardo del Tasso.

It is to another desecrated Benedictine convent you come when, passing through Via dei Pilastrati and turning into Via Farina, you come at last in Via della Colonna to S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi.  This too is now a barracks and a school.  It was not, however, the nuns who commissioned Perugino to paint for them his masterpiece, the Crucifixion, in the refectory, but some Cistercian monks who had acquired the convent in the thirteenth century.  Perugino was painting there in 1496.  More than a hundred years later, Pope Urban VIII, who had some nieces in the Carmelite Convent on the other side Arno, persuaded the monks to exchange their home for the Carmine.  S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, who was born Lucrezia, had died in 1607, and later been canonised, so that when the nuns moved here they renamed the place after her.  The body of S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, however, no longer lies in this desecrated convent, for the little nuns have carried it away to their new home in Piazza Savonarola.  There in that place, always so full of children, certain Florentine ladies have nobly built a little church and quiet house, where those who but for them might have been in the street may still innocently pray to God.