The Stones of Florence Read Online Free PDF Page A

people used to come every week to market. Fiorino was killed during a surprise night sortie from Fiesole. Caesar arrived with reinforcements and started to build a city. Fiesole was taken and destroyed. Catiline and his partisans escaped into the Pistoiese hills, where they were hunted down by the legions and slain in the great battle of Pistoria.
    This account of the founding of the city, given by the old chroniclers, is a curious mixture of myths and actual history. Caesar never fought in Tuscany, but Catiline was in Fiesole, and there was a famous battle of Pistoria in which he perished. Fiorino, the eponymous hero, was a literary invention, on the pattern of Romulus, but there w as an Etruscan ford and market on the Arno, near Ponte Vecchio, at the narrowest point of the river, and Caesar, in a sense, was the founder of the city, which was resettled by his veterans, on the site of an Italic town, under the agrarian laws he sponsored. Even the date is not far off; the battle of Pistoria, which gives the time of the legendary foundation, took place in 62 B.C.; the agrarian laws were put into effect in 59 B.C.
    Roman Florence had baths, temples, a forum, where the Piazza della Repubblica is now, a Capitol or a great temple to Jupiter with a marble staircase leading up to it, an aqueduct, and a theatre, all of which have vanished, leaving a few street names as markers: Via delle Terme or Street of the Baths, Via del Campidoglio or Street of the Capitol. Outside the city walls, there was an amphitheatre, seating fifteen thousand people; its outlines can still be seen on curving Via Torta, Via dei Bentaccordi, and Piazza dei Perruzzi, which transcribe half an oval near the church of Santa Croce. The back of Palazzo Vecchio occupies the site of the theatre, and the Baptistery, that of the praetorium or residence of the Roman governor. In the Baptistery, in the crypt of San Miniato (the first local Christian martyr; decapitated in the arena, he carried his head across the river and up the hill to what is now his church), there are Roman columns and frilled capitals which were put to use by Romanesque builders. The tradition of Rome is palpable in Florence to those who know that it is there, just as, to those who know of it, the plan of the Roman colony, laid out like a camp or castrum, becomes visible in the city’s old streets.
    Florence was the ‘daughter’, Rome, the ‘mother’—this was the medieval notion. The Florentines of the Middle Ages boasted of the tradition, claiming descent from noble Roman families. The Uberti, for example, purported to descend from a supposed son of Catiline, pardoned by Caesar and adopted by him under the name of Uberto Cesare. In Dante’s day, it was believed that two races had settled Florence: the nobles or Blacks, who were descended from the soldiers of the Roman army; and the common people or Whites, who were descended from the primitive inhabitants of Fiesole. The incompatibility of these two stocks was held to be the explanation of the perpetual strife in the city. Another story told how Florence, destroyed by Totila, was rebuilt by Charlemagne, who restored it ‘come era, with its antique form of government—Roman law, consuls, and senators.
    These legends and genealogical fantasies struck a core of truth. The sobriety and decorum of Florence is the gravitas of Rome—a pioneer, frontier Rome, set in the wild mountains, on a rushing river. This sense of an outpost, of a camp pitched in a military rectangle hard by the mountain of Fiesole, is still perceptible in the streets around the Duomo—Via Ricasoli, Via dei Servi, which run straight out towards the mountain barrier like streets in the raw towns of the old American Far West.
    Beneath the surface of Florence lies a sunken Rome. In the dim light, the crypt of San Miniato, with its pillars of odd sizes and shapes, resembles a petrified forest. Tradition used to say that the Baptistery was the old temple of Mars, the war god of