26 1 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 



with its southern exit by the Porta Eomana. The real 

 1 makers of Florence ' were the humble workmen who 

 thus extended the firm hold of the growing republic to 

 the southern bank. By so doing, they gave their city 

 undoubted command of the imperial route from Germany 

 Eomeward, and brought in their train Dante and Giotto, 

 Brunelleschi andDonatello, Fra Angelico and Savonarola, 

 the Medici and the Pitti, Michael Angelo and Eaffaele, 

 and all the glories of the Eenaissance epoch. For as at 

 Athens, so in Florence, art and literature followed plainly 

 in the wake of commerce. 



But the rise of Florence was the fall of Fiesole. 

 Already in the eleventh century the undutiful daughter 

 had conquered and annexed her venerable mother ; and 

 in proportion as the mercantile importance of the city 

 in the plain waxed greater and greater, that of the city 

 on the hill-top must slowly have waned to less and less. 

 At the present day Fiesole has degenerated into a mere 

 suburb of Florence, which, indeed, it had almost become 

 when Lorenzo the Magnificent held his country court at 

 the Villa Mozzi, or even earlier, when Boccaccio's lively 

 narrators fled from the plague to the gardens of the 

 Palmieri, though it still retains the dignity of its ancient 

 cathedral, its municipal palace, its gigantic seminary, 

 and its great overgrown Franciscan monastery, that 

 replaces the citadel on the height above the town. Nay, 

 more, with its local museum, its bishop's palace, and its 

 quaint churches, it keeps up, to some extent, all the airs 

 and graces of a real living town. But in reality these 

 few big buildings, and the graceful campanile which 

 makes so fair a show in all the neighbouring views, are 



