A difficult simplification!—­simplicity being really the most difficult achievement in any art, so that though it seem so easy it is really hard to win.  Guidetto seems to have built here at S. Michele as a sort of trial for the Duomo, which is already less like an apparition.  And if the facade of S. Michele has not the strength or the naturalness of that, leading as it does to nothing but poverty in the midst of which still abides a mutilated work by a great Florentine, Fra Lippo Lippi, it is because Guidetto has gradually won to that difficult simplicity from such a strange and fantastic dream as this.

[Illustration:  THE TOMB OF THE MARTYR S. ROMANO IN S. ROMANO, LUCCA

Matteo Civitali

Alinari]

It is quite another sort of beauty we see when, passing through the deserted, quiet streets, we come to S. Frediano, just within the Porta S. Maria, on the north side of the city.  Begun by Perharlt, the Lombard, in 671, with the stones of the amphitheatre, whose ruins are still to be seen hard by, it stood without the city till the great wall was built in the twelfth century, the apse being set where formerly the great door had stood, and the marvellously impressive fagade taking the place of the old apse.  Ruined though it be by time and restoration, that mosaic of Our Lord amid the Apostles and Angels still surprises us with a sudden glory, while the Campanile that rises still where of old the door stood is one of the most beautiful in Italy.  Within, the church has suffered too from change and restoration.  Once of basilical form, it is now spoiled by the chapels that thrust themselves into the nave, but cannot altogether hide the nobility of those ancient pillars or the simplicity of the roof.  A few beautiful ancient things may still be found there.  The font, for instance, with its rude sculptures, that has been forsaken for a later work by Niccolo Civitali, the nephew of Matteo; the Assumption, carved in wood by that master behind the pulpit; the lovely reliefs of Madonna and Child with Saints, by Jacopo della Quercia, in the Cappella del Sacramento; or the great stone which, as it is said, S. Frediano, that Irishman, lifted into a cart.

But it is not of S. Frediano we think in this dark and splendid place, though the stone of his miracle lies before us, but of little S. Zita, patron of housemaids, little S. Zita of Lucca, born in 1211.  “Anziani di Santa Zita,” the devil calls the elders of Lucca in the eighth circle of Hell; but in her day, indeed, she had no such fame as that.  She was born at Montesegradi, a village of the Lucchese, and was put to service at twelve years of age, in the family of the Fantinelli, whose house was close to this church, where now she has a chapel to herself at the west end of the south aisle, with a fine Annunciation of the della Robbia.  To think of it!—­but in those days it was different; it would puzzle Our Lord to find a S. Zita among our housemaids of to-day.