the greater ornament of the city, chiefly because there were many shops on the bridge that impeded the view of the beautiful Lung’ Arno.”  One sees the bridge that was thus built, the foundations having been laid with much ceremony, a procession and a sung mass, in a seventeenth-century print in the Museo Civico.[49] There is a buttress a quarter of the way from each end, on which houses were still standing.  Then in 1635 this bridge was carried away by a flood.  A new bridge was immediately built, only to be destroyed in the same way on 1st January 1644.  In 1660 the present Ponte di Mezzo was finished by Francesco Nave of Rome.

It was on these bridges that the great Pisan game the Giuoco del Ponte was played,[50] a model of which may be found in the Museo.  This new bridge, at any rate, does not shut out the view of the beautiful Lung’ Arno, il bello di Pisa, as one writer calls it.  Standing there you may see the yellow river, curved like a bow, pass through the beautiful city, between the palaces of marble, their wrinkled image reflected in the stream, till it is lost in the green fields on its way to the sea; while on the other side, looking eastward, on either side the river are the palaces of Byron and Shelley, just before the hideous iron bridge, where Arno turns suddenly into the city from the plain and the hills.  To the south of the bridge is the Loggia dei Banchi, and farther to the west, on the Lung’ Arno, the great palace of the Gambacorti rises, now the Palazzo del Comune, and farther still, the Madonna della Spina, a little Gothic church of marble; while if you pass a little way westward, the Torre Guelfa comes into sight at the bend of the river among the ruins of the old arsenal.

It is of course to the wonderful group of buildings to the north of the city, just within the walls, that every traveller will first make his way.  Passing from Ponte di Mezzo down the Lung’ Arno Regio, past the Palazzo Agostini, beautiful in its red brick past Palazzo Lanfreducci with its little chain and enigmatic motto, “Alla Giornata,” past the Grand Ducal Palace, you turn at last into the Via S. Maria, a beautiful and lovely street that winds like a stream full of shadows to the Piazza del Duomo.  On your right is the Church of S. Niccolo, founded about the year 1000 by Ugo, Marquis of Tuscany.  It seems that with Otho III there came into Italy the Marquis Hugh.  “I take it,” says Villani,[51] “this must have been the Marquis of Brandenburg, inasmuch as there is no other marquisate in Germany.”  His sojourn in Italy, and especially in our city of Florence, liked him so well that he caused his wife to come thither, and took up his abode in Florence as Vicar of Otho the Emperor.  It came to pass as it pleased God, that when he was riding to the chase in the country of Bonsollazzo, he lost sight of all his followers in a wood, and came out, as he supposed, at a workshop where iron was wont to be wrought.  Here he found men black and deformed,