Florence

📕 As one gazes over Florence on some fortunate evening from San Miniato or the Piazzale beneath it, the most beautiful city left to us in the world shines there, belted by the slowly eddying Arno, itself the colour of faded gold, surrounded by its olive-clad villaed hills; and out of it'rise the great Cathedral under Brunelleschi's dome, the flower-like Campanile of Giotto, the dragon neck of the Palazzo Vecchio, the dome of the Medici chapel, the pointed tower of Santa Maria Novella, the tufted spear of Santa Croce. This impression of the city, so nobly picturesque, is not even now lost as one wanders along the outraged Lungarno Acciaioli, between the Ponte Vecchio with its little jewellers' shops and the Ponte Santa Trinita rebuilt from Ammannati's design; yet much has been destroyed by the German rearguard actions of 1944, when all the bridges were blown up except Ponte Vecchio, when the Lungarno Acciaioli was damaged and the houses on the other side of the river destroyed. The city on both banks between the two bridges and the battered immemorial houses rising out of the Arno on the south side formed the traditional view of Florence, which every visitor for centuries had carried away with him, so that on hearing the name of Florence in a far country this was the vision that came into the mind.