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Down the steep mountains, over bridged torrents, past the hill-towns and valley-lands, they came to the City of the Lily, fair Florence of the Arno. "As early as 1829," Cooper thought, "the unification of Italy was irresistible." In Florence a home was soon found in the Palazzo Ricasoli, Via del Cocomero.
No sooner did you say the word cocomero, than here comes a boy carrying one upon his head. Tasso. Listen! listen! I have read in some book or other those verses long ago. They are not unlike my Aminta. The very words! Cornelia. Purifier of love, and humanizer of ferocity! how many, my Torquato, will your gentle thoughts make happy! Tasso. At this moment I almost think I am one among them.
Before the master of the house a wrinkled old man, with long grey hair was a smoking tureen of bread soup, over which he was in the act of sprinkling some grated Parmesan cheese. A plate of green figs, and a large water melon the cocomero made up the repast. "Giuseppe! you are late for supper," said the old patriarch, as the boy approached to whisper his introduction of the stranger.
When he had reached the age of eighty-three, however, he was so palsied that he could no longer work in any fashion, and took to spending all his time in bed in a poor little house that he had in the Via del Cocomero, near the Nunnery of S. Niccolò; where, growing worse from day to day and wasting away little by little, he died on December 13, 1466.
Honest Fra Domenico, then, who was preaching Lenten sermons to the women in the Via del Cocomero, no sooner heard of this new challenge, than he took up the gauntlet for his master, and declared himself ready to walk through the fire with Fra Francesco. The Franciscan declared himself content: he had not directed his challenge to any subaltern, but to Fra Girolamo himself.
When you caught the swallow in my curtains, and trod upon my knees in catching it, luckily with naked feet. The little girl of thirteen laughed at the outcry of her brother Torquatino, and sang without a blush her earliest lay. Cornelia. I do not recollect it. Tasso. I do. Cornelia. Here is the cocomero; it cannot be more insipid. Try it. Tasso.
Does the old twisted sage-tree grow still against the window? Cornelia. It harboured too many insects at last, and there was always a nest of scorpions in the crevice. Tasso. O! what a prince of a sage-tree! And the well too, with its bucket of shining metal, large enough for the largest cocomero to cool in it for dinner! Water-melon. Cornelia. The well, I assure you, is as cool as ever. Tasso.
Among these was one Jacopo di Casentino, who, being born, as it is read, of the family of Messer Cristoforo Landino of Pratovecchio, was apprenticed by a friar of the Casentino, then Prior at the Sasso della Vernia, to Taddeo Gaddi, while Taddeo was working in that convent, to the end that he might learn drawing and colouring in the art, wherein in a few years he succeeded so well that, betaking himself to Florence and executing many works in company with Giovanni da Milano in the service of Taddeo their master, he was made to paint the shrine of the Madonna of the Mercato Vecchio, with the panel in distemper, and likewise the one at the corner of the Piazza di S. Niccolò and the Via del Cocomero, which were restored a few years ago, both one and the other, by a worse master than was Jacopo; and for the Dyers he painted that which is in S. Nofri, at the corner of the wall of their garden, opposite to S. Giuseppe.
And when, the next day, after he was free from his professorial work, he turned up the Via del Cocomero towards the convent of San Marco, his purpose was fully shaped. He was going to ascertain from Fra Luca precisely how much he conjectured of the truth, and on what grounds he conjectured it; and, further, how long he was to remain at San Marco.
Among the rest a certain Master Simone da Villa, richer in inherited goods than in learning, returned hither, no great while since, a doctor of medicine, according to his own account, clad all in scarlet and with a great miniver hood, and took a house in the street which we call nowadays the Via del Cocomero.
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