TUSCAN MOUNTAINS 307 



January 25, 1882. 



. . . My aim was to see some masses of serpentine that lie near Figline, a 

 hamlet a few miles northwest of Prato. These make the mountain-mass cf 

 Monte Ferrato, or the iron mountain. Before noon I found myself shut in 

 the bushy valleys of this set of curious hills that have furnished the decora- 

 tive stone for the incrustation of the Florentine churches. Like all the other 

 mountains of Tuscany these hills were stripped of their woods during the 

 reigns of the grand dukes. When the Austrians came they set to work to 

 restore the forests, but the soil had wasted away so that it was hard to regain 

 what has been lost ; still in the splintered serpentines of these hills hardy spe- 

 cies of pines were growing in the ordered rows of a planted wood. Through 

 them I climbed to the summit, about fifteen hundred feet above the sea. 

 The only human interest I found was a new nunnery tucked away in the 

 shrubby trees. After the general destruction of all cloistered places by 

 the Italian government some years ago, a holocaust that left only a few of 

 the greater historic places and these shorn of their ancient grandeur, there 

 seemed for a time an end of their life in Italy, but now they are here and 

 there creeping back into a little vitality. At the gateway of this new cloister 

 were two figures, one of Christ and the other of the Virgin, which for artistic 

 abominableness exceeded any human images that I ever saw. Nothing is 

 more curious than the incapacity of the Roman Church to hold to its art 

 traditions ; when in this day, in this land, steeped for centuries in art influ- 

 ences, they try to present something artistic, the chance is that their work 

 is much more hair-lifting than what we should find in Arkansas. In the whole 

 field of human psychology I know nothing more puzzling than this utter loss 

 of power to retain the art training which we find here. From the contempla- 

 tion of this brutal Christ and stupid Virgin it was a luxury to escape to the 

 hillsides, though a walk through a pine brushwood is not more fascinating 

 here than elsewhere. 



It is wonderful how hot a Tuscan winter noonday can be ; in the morning 

 I walked on ground frozen almost hard enough to bear up the feet, at noon 

 the south hillsides were as hot as of a summer day, even the earth felt hot 

 on the surface. On the top of the hill was the ruin of some very ancient build- 

 ing, quite tumbled to its foundations. On the old platform where it stood 

 there was a scant grass-grown soil, and here a score of ragged sheep were 

 nibbling while an ancient shepherd watched their hungry scrambles over 

 the mounds of stone. It was an epitome of Italy, an aged man and an aged 

 art, whose ruins gave a pittance to a dwarfed life. The old fellow gave me 

 a long history of the edifice, which amounted to this : it was an old ruin and 

 no one knew anything about it. He told his tale in a slow quaver of voice. 

 His speech was a pure ancient Tuscan, which I thought much more like the 



