The Express.
London, England, 1866-01-23 00:00:00

(mom OUR owe

Day by day the press

Florence seems to increase.

it will be absolutely fink
part of the city to anothi
alarmingly near. And
of all street police, or m
who should do that duty,
a former letter, becomes
important every day.
tale of accidents or of
considered as much bet
motions of the heavenl

hear of a slab of plat
worth five•hundred franca,

"from an unseen hand,

&nit to imagine that el
petaled in the broad
thoroughfare, and yet
should be seen by ■o
say that the offender

break as many more li‘
as it may please him to

body there to interfere
could it be expected that,
gentlemen, with his
heels, and his huge lm
on the spot, would hai

of a nimble-heeled Beam)

The same morning pal
over the Ponte alle GI

=shed between a carriage

bridge, avoiding that
leaping on the lop of

ball for the "Asilo Infa
at the Palazzo Burial

" Oltrarno" quarter of
alle Gracie ; and the throng of carriages therefore
was greater than usual, so the crushing of a few
foot passengers, especially in so excellent a cause,

cannot be grudged.
This ball (an annual affair) was a very successful
one—such a ball as Florence seems to have the
special privilege of producing. For somehow or
other, it would be difficult to say for what reason,
these festivities here have a spirit, a "brio," an
air of veritable enjoyment and light-hearted mirth,
that similar assemblies in your great Babylon, or
even in Paris the Gay, do not possess. Much perhaps
is due to the locality. Let the crowds which as-
semble be as numerous as they may—let " all the
world" agree to meet at one of these Florentine
" feste "—there is yet always abundance of room.
We are not suffocated or squeezed out on to a stair-
case. Let the street outside be as much too small
as it may for the throng of corners and goers, the
noble halls and magnificent .staircases, which may
be counted in Florence by the hundred, are ready
to accommodate the pleasure-seekers with all com-
fort directly they are inside. I could not help
thinking, as I admired the superb proportions of
the immense ball-room at the Serristori Palace,
richly ornamented, with all its cinque-cento decora-
tions in perfect preservation, how many dwellings
in London or Paris could have exhibited a room
at all comparable to it. Of, properly speaking,
private residences in London I imagine that no
single one possesses a hall of such proportions.
And this ball-room, it must be understood, is but
the centre of a suite of numerous drawing-rooms,
any one of which would be deemed an exceptionally
fine ball-room by the dwellers in Belgravia. And
the magnificence of the Serristori Palace, benevo-
lently lent by its noble owners for the purposes of
the charity, is by no means unique in Florence.
Truly the merchant princes of the old republic
built like princes, and lived amid a splendour of
architectural forms and proportions, not without
an influence in the formation of character—and
that influence a different one from such as may be
supposed to be exercised by a few miles of Harley-
streets and Grosvenor-streets.
All visitors to Florence during the last three or
four years must have been struck by an ugly gap of
waste land, with a few old walls upon it, ragged
and squalid looking, which interrupted the hand-
some line of the buildings of the new Lung' Arno.
There, in the very central spot of the most beautiful
part of the city, where the fashionable world of
Florence most does love to congregate, by the side
of the favourite mall which, leading to the Cascine,
is thronged every afternoon by hundreds of car-
riages and promenaders, this hideous and un-
accountable eyesore has remained, while all
around it has been decking itself out in continually
increasing magnificence. Utterly unaccountable to
all except the few who knew the history of that
very ugly but yet most valuable bit of ground. It
was known (to Florentines) as the " terreuo della
Vaga Loggia" The Vaga Loggia was a lodge or
balcony from which the Grand Duke, in antedilu-
vian grand ducal days, used to witness the starting
of the "barberi," or riderless horses, which
ran a yearly race on the eve of St. John's day.
Now the land in question was attached to this
loggia. But the Grand Duke has gone, and the
barberi have gone, and the loggia has gone, or is
no longer needed for its original purpose. And
the miserable bit of ground, which looks as if it
bad been in Chancery for a hundred years, fails
altogether to "look like the time " it has lived to
see.
Indeed, the cause of its abandonment has been
analogous to that of being in Chancery. There
were disputed claims to the ownership between the
crown and the Florentine corporation. When,
however, it was decided to pull down the old walls
and encircle Florence with a new boulevard, and
it became necessary that the municipality should
have possession of the walls and the site of
them, it was agreed between the crown, which
had rights over them, and the corporation, that
the city should, as part compensation for those
rights, give up to the crown all claim it might
have to the lands of the Vaga Loggia. The
new owner—or rather the newly recognised owner—
proceeded at once to sell the much-coveted bit of
ugly ground, and it has been bought for the very
reasonable sum of five hundred and fifty thousand
francs= £22,000, by a society of capitalists, who
purpose building on it a superb club-house, reading
room, winter garden, and so forth. The idea is
an admirable one. Florence possesses as yet
nothing of the sort ; and placed, as this new attrac-
tion will be, in the very tideway of all the gay
world of Florence, both in its daily outward bound
pilgrimage to and homeward bound journey from
the Cascine, it will be sure to be a notable success.
I told you in my last letter that I feared that
before you could receive it the telegraph would
bring the news of the death of Massimo d Azeglio.
The prevision has been but too quickly fulfilled.
Yesterday our municipal council voted, of course
nevi- con., that an oiler should be made to the
representatives of the artist, poet, patriot, to assign
Westminster
resting place Santa Croce—our Florentine

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FLORENCE, JAN. 17.
rem of traffic in the streets of i
lomat, and the moment when . 14
y impossible to get from one i ' '1
another appears to be coming
ad of course the utter absence 1
r utter imbecility of all those
luty, which I complained of in I
mans more manifest and more
f. Every morning brings its •
' offences, which appear to be '
beyond human control as the :
mly bodies. This morning we
date glass in a shop window, I.
franca, smashed by a atone
cad," say the papers. It is dif-
I d
1 such an outrage could be per- 1
ad daylight, and in a crowded
yet that the perpetrator of it
1
so eye. But it is needless to
Br in left perfectly at liberty to
1 ; l•
hundred francs' worth of glass I
ito do. Of course there was no- i '
. , O
fere with his amusement. Nor !. l' 1
that one of the beadle-undertaker i i
s long black coat down to his i (
long staff of office, had he been '
have availed to stop the flight . 1 1
scamp.
rg paper narrates how a passenger I,) 1
I i •
e Grano narrowly escaped being
carriage and the parapet of the , • •
bat fate only by his agility in 1
of the latter. There was a great i • .
1
) Infantili," an excellent charity
Serristori," which is in the !
rof the city, just over the Ponte I i
he throng of carriages therefore if '
" " •

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