270 PRÆTERITA-II

the other.¹ Both were then in the outer passage from the entrance to the Tribune.

These conclusions being comfortably arrived at, I sate myself down in the middle of the Ponte Vechio, and made a very true and valuable sketch of the general perspective of its shops and the buildings beyond, looking towards the Duomo.² I seem to have had time or will for no more in Florence; the Mercato Vecchio was too crowded to work in, and the carving of the Duomo could not be disengaged from its colour. Hopeful, but now somewhat doubtful, of finding things more to our mind in the south, we drove through the Porta Romana.

30. Siena, Radicofani, Viterbo, and the fourth day, Rome;-a gloomy journey, with gloomier rests. I had a bad weary headache at Siena; and the cathedral seemed to me every way absurd-over-cut, over-striped, over-crocketed, over-gabled, a piece of costly confectionery, and faithless vanity. In the main it is so; the power of Siena was in her old cathedral,³ her Edward the Confessor’s Westminster. Is the ruin of it yet spared?

The volcanic desert of Radicofani, with gathering storm, and an ominously Æolian keyhole in a vile inn, remained long to all of us a terrific memory.⁴ At Viterbo I was better, and made a sketch of the convent on one side of the square, rightly felt and done. On the fourth day papa and mamma observed with triumph, though much worried by the jolting, that every mile nearer Rome the road got worse!

31. My stock of Latin learning, with which to begin my studies of the city, consisted of the two first books of Livy,⁵ never well known, and the names of places

¹ [The “great” Angelico in the Uffizi is presumably the “Coronation of the Virgin,” No. 1290 (now in the “Hall of Lorenzo Monaco”). For another reference to Botticelli’s “Venus Rising from the Sea” (now in the “Hall of Botticelli”), see Vol. XXII. p. 430.]

² [The drawing is here reproduced: Plate XII.]

³ [Ruskin apparently refers to the unfinished nave (for the present cathedral is only a transept of a much vaster edifice as originally planned). The Opera del Duomo is now housed in it.]

⁴ [And as such was noticed in Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V. p. 106).]

⁵ [See above, p. 144.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]