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Indeed Dante consumes all our thoughts in mediaeval Ravenna. There is a tale told by Franco Sacchetti that I will set down here, for it expresses what in part we must all feel, and what in the confusion of philosophy at the end of the Middle Age was felt far more keenly by men who visited this strange city.
Sacchetti, Nov. 86. To seduce their neighbour to a favourable opinion, and afterwards to believe implicitly in this opinion of their neighbour who can do this conjuring trick so well as women? That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good the atavism of an old ideal.
The Galli, the Sacchetti, were great; so was the old trunk of the Calfucci; so was that of the peculators who now blush to hear of a measure of wheat; and the Sizii and the Arrigucci were drawn in pomp to their civic chairs. Oh, how mighty I saw them then, and how low has their pride brought them! Florence in those days deserved her name.
Close by was Signorina Maria Sacchetti, the beauty of San Felice, already more than plump, but with a good complexion, and hair so thick that it stood out from her satisfied face as if it were trained over a trellis. She wore white, and long, thread gloves which went above her elbows. Maddalena regarded her with awe when Amedeo mentioned a rumor that she was going to be "promised" to Dr.
And as we have gone so far as to confer the honour upon dead men, why not upon figures of wood and stone, and why not upon an ox? The stories which Sacchetti tells by way of illustration speak plainly enough.
"But Sacchetti makes his point clear," I babbled on, most blandly; "almost as clear, as comprehensive and as penetrating as should be to you the point of this." And with a swift movement I swung half-round in my saddle, and sank my dagger to the hilt in his side even as he was in the act of raising his.
Every honest citizen came to consider his tournament now, no doubt, less dangerous than formerly as a fashionable sport. Franco Sacchetti has left us a ludicrous picture of one of these holiday cavaliers a notary seventy years old. He rides out on horseback to Peretola, where the tournament was cheap, on a jade hired from a dyer.
Sacchetti does not answer the question asked by the astonished people of Ravenna, but goes on to tell us of the lord "who delighted in such things as do all lords." He could not have answered it for he did not know himself what it meant.
Like its neighbours the Farnese and Sacchetti palaces, it had been built by Antonio da Sangallo in the early part of the sixteenth century, and, as with the former of those residences, the tradition ran that in raising the pile the architect had made use of stones pilfered from the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus.
While yet young, he painted two pictures for the Cardinal Sacchetti, representing the Rape of the Sabines, and a Battle of Alexander, which gained him so much celebrity that Pope Urban VIII. commissioned him to paint a chapel in the church of S. Bibiena, where Ciampelli was employed.
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