United States or Northern Mariana Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Sometimes it is a troop of stout Franciscan friars, in sandals and brown robes, each carrying his staff and wearing a brown broad-brimmed hat with a hemispherical crown. Sometimes it is a band of young theological students, in purple cassocks with red collars and cuffs, let out on a holiday, attended by their clerical instructors, to ramble in the Cascine.
The situation is one of the most delightful in Florence: across the narrow quay the windows look almost sheer down into the river, sparkling with a hundred facets in the spring and summer sunlight, cut by the deep shadows of the old bridges, to where it is lost to sight between the tall poplars by the Greve mouth and the ilexes and elms of the Cascine, closed in by the pale blue peaks of the Carrara Alps; or else, in autumn and winter, scarcely moving, a mass of dark-greens and browns, wonderfully veined, like some strange oriental jasper, with transparent violet streakings, and above which arise, veiled, half washed out by mist, the old corbelled houses, the church-steeples and roofs, the tiers and tiers of pine and ilex plumes on the hill opposite.
It is greatly to be feared that all those nervous and impatient efforts which have been made and are still being made by the Italian people to better their condition, will be of little avail, until they set up a better standard of principle and make their private actions more conformable with their ideas of political independence. Oct. 22. I attended to-day the fall races at the Cascine.
I have been out once, only once, and only for an inglorious glorious drive round the Piazza Gran Duca, past the Duomo, outside the walls, and in again at the Cascine. It was like the trail of a vision in the evening sun. I saw the Perseus in a sort of flash. The Duomo is more after the likeness of a Duomo than Pisa can show; I like those masses in ecclesiastical architecture.
You, who know the quaint old mediæval city in the winter "season," when the smart balls are given at the Corsini or the Strozzi, when the Cascine is filled with pretty women at four o'clock, and the jewellers on the Ponte Vecchio put forth their imitation cinquecento wares, would not know it in August, when beneath that fiery Tuscan sun it is as a city of the dead by day, while at night the lower classes come forth from their slums to idle, to gossip, and to enjoy the bel fresco after the heat and burden of the day.
All was of no avail, and in the evening, whilst we were as usual at the Cascine, the whole Imperial family, accompanied by the Austrian minister, and escorted by several of the Corps Diplomatique, drove round the walls from Palazzo Pitti to Porta San Gallo unmolested amid a silent crowd, and crossing the frontier on the Bologna road, bade farewell for ever to Tuscany.
Away in the Cascine Woods a gay party of people are seated on the velvety moss; they have mandolins, and they sing for pure gaiety of heart. One of them, a woman with fair hair, arrayed in white, with a red rose at her bosom, is gathering the wild flowers that bloom around her, and weaving them into posies for her companions.
They can lead a graceful, dissolute, far niente life, loll in carriages, and be whirled round for hours, say the Florence Cascine, the Roman Pincio, and the park at Milan smoking the while, and raising their hats to the ladies. They can trot a well-broken horse not too fresh, on a hard road, and are wonderful in ruining his legs. But they can neither hunt, nor fish, nor row.
Lever, who lives irreproachably with his wife and family, rides out with his children in a troop of horses to the Cascine, and yet is as social a person as his joyous temperament leads him to be. But we live in a cave, and peradventure he is afraid of the damp of us who knows?
After they had driven in the Cascine and around the Viali for the sunshine and air, Aurora asked suddenly: "Haven't we had enough of this?" and ordered the coachman to go home. "Why!" exclaimed Estelle, astonished, "I thought we were going to Gerald Fane's to see how he's getting along!" "No, I guess we won't.
Word Of The Day