48 BROWN : 



about the old time Florentine palace. Its lower story not 

 infrequently consisted on front and part of two sides of open 

 arches. These were not free entrances by any means, but 

 were barred by powerful, iron gratings. Through these could 

 be seen, sitting in state in his court yard and surrounded by 

 his family and retainers, the head of the house. For these 

 dwellings were devised to harbor the many members, married 

 and unmarried, of a huge kinship. What I saw, therefore, in 

 the Via de' Bardi, was a goodly number of these palaces, vir- 

 tually unchanged, but with the arches blocked up and the 

 rooms allotted to suit the needs of later and wholly different 

 indwellers. Wholly different, I may well say, for their pre- 

 sent occupants, so far from being knights and nobles, are not 

 now even always human. 



To give you an idea, however, of how the buildings were 

 put up : — A ham and beef shop, which had got into one of 

 them, took fire, and blazed and sizzled and sputtered and 

 frizzled away as hard as it could ; but so entirely confident 

 was everybody in the arched floors and stone stairways of old 

 time, that those above looked down, and those over the way 

 looked out at what was going on with no other feeling than 

 that of amused interest. Sorry to say, I did not see the fire, 

 but I saw the place shortly afterwards, and all the disturbance 

 had to show for itself was thoroughly' smoke blackened walls 

 and the cinders of meat. 



What I desire is that some person of great wealth and an 

 original turn of mind should take one of these old structures 

 in hand and "restore" it in the full sense of the word — 

 knock away all the added mortar and brick, make the court 

 yards and stairways look as they did six hundred years ago — 

 and then, if he still have money to burn, not to burn it, but 

 use it to buy a good deal of authentic, old time furniture 

 and fit up his resurrected rooms with it. This has been done 

 by government in the case of certain public edifices, as I shall 

 have occasion to remark later on, also by private individuals 

 in one or two instances. But I want more. 



