Thence I followed the way to Dicomano by Sieve, at the foot of the Consuma, and then up stream to Borgo S. Lorenzo, the capital of the Mugello, and so by the winding road above the valley under the hills to Fiesole, to Florence, wrapped in rain, through which an evening sun was breaking.

FOOTNOTES: 

[132] Now in S. Trinita in Firenze.

[133] Mr. Montgomery Carmichael (On the Old Road, etc., p. 293), quoting from Don Diego de’ Franchi (Historia del Patriarcha S. Giovangualberto, p. 77:  Firenze, 1640), says that S. Romuald and S. Giovanni Gualberto vowed eternal friendship between their Orders, “and for a long time, if a Camaldolese was visiting Vallombrosa, he would take off his own and put on a Vallombrosan habit as a symbol that the monks of the two Orders were brothers.”

[134] Guida Illustrata del Casentino da C. Beni:  Firenze, 1889.  This perhaps the best guide-book in the Tuscan language, is certainly the best for the Casentino.  Those who cannot read it must fall back on the charming and delightful book by Miss Noyes, The Casentino and its Story:  Dent, 1905.  It is too good a book to be left useless in its heavy bulky form.  Perhaps Miss Noyes will give us a pocket edition.

XXVII.  PRATO

Prato is like a flower that has fallen by the wayside that has faded in the dust of the way.  She is a little rosy city, scarcely more than a castello, full of ruined churches; and in the churches are ruined frescoes, ruined statues, broken pillars, spoiled altars.  You pass from one church to another—­from S. Francesco, with its facade of green and white, its pleasant cloister and old frescoes, to La Madonna delle Carceri, to S. Niccolo da Tolentino, to S. Domenico—­and you ask yourself, as you pass from one to another, what you have come to see:  only this flower fallen by the wayside.

But in truth Prato is the child of Florence, a rosy child among the flowers—­in the country, too, as children should be.  Her churches are small.  What could be more like a child’s dream of a church than La Madonna delle Carceri?  And the Palazzo Pretorio—­it is a toy palace wonderfully carved and contrived, a toy that has been thrown aside.  In the Palazzo Comunale the little daughter of Florence has gathered all her broken treasures:  here a discarded Madonna, there a Bambino long since forgotten; flowers, too, flowers of the wayside, faded now, such as a little country girl will gather and toss into your vettura at any village corner in Tuscany; a terra-cotta of Luca della Robbia, and that would be a lily; a Madonna by Nero di Bicci, and that might have been a rose; a few panels by Lippo Lippi, and they were from the convent garden.  In Via S. Margherita you come still upon a nosegay of such country blossoms, growing still by the wayside—­Madonna with St. Anthony, S. Margherita, S. Costanza, and S. Stefano about her, painted by Filippino Lippo, a very lovely shrine, such as you cannot find in Florence, but which Prato seems glad to possess, on the way to the country itself.