Florence: Fiesole

After his tour of Florence, Edward Hutton took to the countryside and the small towns in the vicinity. His first stop was the hilltop town of Fiesole with its awesome views. One of the most memorable things to do on any trip to Florence is to have lunch at an open-air restaurant on the walkway to the summit of the city with its spectacular view of Florence below even if it is usually covered in haze.

How weary one grows of the ways of the city, --yes, even in Florence, where every street runs into the country, and one may always see the hills and the sky! … so to-day, leaving the dead beauty littered in the churches, the palaces, the museums, the streets of Florence, very often I seek the living beauty of the country, the whisper of the poplars beside Arno, the little lovely songs of streams….

 

Many and fair are the ways to Fiesole… but for me I will go like a young man by the bye ways, like a poor man on my feet, and the dew will be yet on the roses when I set out, and in the vineyards they will be singing among the corn… And then, who knows what awaits one on the way? …

 

The Fiesolani are not Florentines, people of the valley. But Etruscans, people of the hills, and that you may see in half an hour any day in their windy piazzas and narrow climbing ways. Rough, outspoken, stark men, little women keen and full of salt, they have not the assured urbanity of the Florentine, who, while he scorns you in his soul as a barbarian, will trade with you, eat with you, and humour you, certainly without betraying his contempt. But the Fiesolano is otherwise; quarrelsome he is, and a little aloof, he will not concern himself overmuch about you, and will do his business whether you come or go. And I think, indeed, he still hates the Florentino, as the Pisan does, as the Sienese does, with an immortal, cold, everlasting hatred, that maybe nothing will altogether wipe out or cause him to forget. All these people have suffered too much from Florence, who understood the art of victory as little as she understood the art of empire….

 

To-day Fiesole consists of a windy Piazza, in which a campanile towers between two hills  covered with houses and churches and a host of narrow lanes. …

 

But it is not to see a church that we have wandered up to Fiesole, for in the country certainly the churches are less than an olive garden, and the pictures are shamed by the flowers that run over the hills. Lounging about this old fortress of a city, one is caught rather by the aspect of natural things—Val d’Arno, far and far away, and at last a glimpse of the Apennines; Val di Mugnone towards Monte Senario, the night of cypresses about Vincigliana, the olives of Maiano—than by the churches scattered among the trees or hidden in the narrow ways that everywhere climb the hills… Or if it be up to San Francesco you climb, the old acropolis of Fiesole, above the palace of the bishop and the Seminary, it will surely be rather to look over the valley to the farthest hills, where Val di Greve winds toward Siena, than to enter a place which, Franciscan though it be, has nothing to show half so fair as this laughing country, or that Tuscan cypress on the edge of that grove of olives.

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