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A landscape lay before him, which has often been compared to that of the Val d'Arno seen from Fiesole, and has indeed some common points with that incomparable mingling of man's best with the best of mountain and river. It was the last week of October, and the autumn was still warm and windless, as though there were no shrieking November to come.
Father Carnesecchi, of the Society of Jesus, who had charge of the penitents in the college of his Order, and to whom I was formally handed over by my indurate captor, was a member of an old family of Fiesole long settled in Florence, a thin, threadbare, humble old man, who kept his eyes fixed to the earth sharply piercing, intelligent eyes as they could be and did his best to keep his lips from speaking.
Florence was a Fiesole descended to the plain. And it descended for just the selfsame reason that made Bishop Poore thirteen centuries later bring down Sarum from its lofty hill-top to the new white minster by the ford of Avon.
This has wholly arisen and proceeded from the negligence of princes, who have lost all appetite for true glory, and of republics which no longer possess institutions that deserve praise. In ancient times, by means of colonies, new cities frequently arose, and those already begun were enlarged, as was the case with Florence, which had its beginning from Fiesole, and its increase from colonies.
Sometimes as I take tea in their beautiful grounds I hear, over the wall, the electric tram squealing up the new road with its loads of hot, dusty, unintelligent tourists who are going to 'do' Fiesole in an hour in order that they may say they have been there, and I think think I think how little they think what lies so near them."
In order to arrive at the raison d'être of Fiesole you must blot out mentally Arnolfo's vast pile, and Brunelleschi's dome, and Giotto's campanile, and Savonarola's monastery, and the tall and slender tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, rising like a shaft sheer into the air far, far below you must blot out, in short, all that makes the world now congregate at Florence, and all Florence itself into the bargain.
A relief of the Madonna and Child is a finer achievement in his earlier manner, and in the Duomo of Fiesole there remains a bust of the Bishop, Leonardo Salutati, while in the same chapel, an altar and relief, from his hand, seem to prove that it was only a fatal facility that prevented him from becoming as fine an artist as Benedetto da Maiano.
To-day it is nothing, having suffered restoration, beside the other violations. Within, Verrocchio was buried, and in the Cappella del Miracolo, where in the thirteenth century a priest found the chalice stained with Christ's blood, is the beautiful altar by Mino da Fiesole.
And could anyone blame her if she did? Up the right-hand slopes of the Val d'Arno, between Florence and Fiesole, the carriage-road runs for some distance comparatively broad and direct between stone walls and cypress-hedges, behind which the passer-by gets glimpses of lovely terraced gardens, of the winding river far below his feet, of the purple peaks of the Carrara mountains far away.
And in all the time that he worked at Castello, he did not execute with his own hand anything save the two fountains, with the two rivers, the Arno and the Mugnone, and the statue of Fiesole; this arising from no other cause, so far as one can see, but his being too much occupied, as has been related, with the many affairs of the Duke.
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