Brighouse & Rastrick Gazette. — 1893-03-18 (Brighouse, West Yorkshire, England)

MEMORIES OF FLORENCE.  There is an interesting article, with sketches, in the Qveen, on Florence and the Villa Palmieri, where her Majesty proposes to spend a holiday. The celebrated singer Catalani (says the writer) spent her last days in Villa Lavag,2,i, while not very far 3ff, in the stately Villa Salviati, Giulia Grisi and Mario resided for some years before the death of the former. The walls thus associated with two great names on the stage of mimic love and hate once witnessed a terrible domestic tragedy of alousy and revenge. For it was hither that the haughty Veronica Cybo brought the head of Catarina Canacci, whom she had caused to be murdered, and, first twisting round and round the severed throat the strands of beautiful golden hair, she concealed the ghastly objet in a jar of flowers, or, as some more unpoetically relate, in a basket of clean linen, then presented it to her husband, Jacopo Salviati, Catarina's supposed lover. Following the Bolognese road over wind-swept hill and plain, we reach the steep ascent of Monte Senario, a convent whose foundation goes back to the early days of Floretine history. Where Giotto's bell-tower, radiant with the gleam of its marbles, now rises beside the Cathedral of Florence, once stood the oratory of a confraternity of seven gentlemen who met together to sing the praises of the Virgin, and were hence called "Laudesi." They were assembled in their oratory on August 15th—the Feast of the Assumption—in the year 1233, when on their blessed eyes broke a vision of a luminous globe with seven rays, which rested on their heads, and was followed by an apparition of the Virgin, surrounded by angels, who exhorted her servants to abandon the world, its wealth and joys, and become religious. They hastened to obey the behest of their heavenly patroness, and at first went to dwell in a meadow then situate just outside Florence, but which later became the site of Santa Croce. The fame of their great piety, however, attracted too many curious crowds; so they prayed to the Holy Mother for guidance in the choice of another retreat, and she, in a new vision, indicated to them the solitudes of Monte Senario, then a forest inhabited by wild animals. There is no forest there now, and the landscape has some of the gloomier features of the higher Apennines. Certainly the brethren should have found contemplative leisure in their new abode if anywhere; but, whether this were so or not, tie ir convent grew so in celebrity to attract at last the doubtful attentions of the envious. 'I he Servants of Mary, as they called themselves, were at last accused of heresy, and Piero Martire, the Grand Inquisitor, was sent in 1244 by Pope Innocent IV. to inquire into the matter. But the question was soon set at rest, and the brethren triumphantly vindicated, by an apparition to Piero, of the Virgin array d in a black mantle, the habit of the accused order, and accompanied by angels, who presented the inquisitor with seven pure white lilies, which they had gathered, they told him, on the mountain. Such are some of the scenes which may be visited by Her Majesty and Princess Beatrice in their drives.