260 A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 



streets of Florence recall at every step its mediaeval 

 magnificence. But when from Florence itself one turns 

 to Fiesole, the city by the Arno sinks at once by a 

 sudden revulsion into a mere thing of yesterday by the 

 side of the city on the Etruscan hill-top. Fiesole was a 

 town of immemorial antiquity while Florence was still, 

 what perhaps its poetical name imports, a field of 

 flowers. 



But why this particular height rather than any other 

 of the dozen that jut out into the plain ? Well, there 

 we get at another fundamental point in hill-top town 

 history. Fiesole had water. A spring at such a height 

 is comparatively rare, but it is a necessary accompani- 

 ment, or rather a condition precedent, of all high-place 

 villages. In the Borgo Unto you will still find this 

 spring a natural fountain, the Fonte Sotterra in an 

 underground passage, now approached (so greatly did the 

 Fiesolans appreciate its importance) by a Gothic arch- 

 way. The water supplies the whole neighbourhood ; and 

 that accounts for the position of the town on the low col 

 just below the acropolis. 



Who first chose the site it would be impossible to 

 say ; the earliest stockaded fort at Fiesole (enclosing the 

 town and arx above) must go back to the very dawn of 

 neolithic history, long before the Etruscans had ever 

 issued forth from their Bhsetian fastnesses to occupy the 

 blue and silver-grey hills of modern Tuscany. Nor do 

 we know who built the great Cyclopean walls, whose 

 huge rough blocks still overhang the modern carriage 

 road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladies 

 and Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the 



