The Idler in Italy (1839)
by Marguerite Gardiner (9780217628617)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and, I will venture to assert, could not have been better finished or designed at Paris, or London. Florence, 8th?The approach is imposing, and prepares one for the grandeur and beauty of a town that surpasses my expectations; much as they had been raised by the various descriptions I had heard and read of it. A thousand associations of the olden time recur to memory on viewing this noble city. The Medici, those merchant princes to some few of whom Florence owed so much, from Cosimo, the Padre della Patria, to the licentious, depraved, and banished Alexander, seem to be brought before us with an identity that they never were invested with while we perused their histories in cold and distant lands. Through the streets which we now pass, paced many a brave and many a dark spirit, " fit for treason, stratagem, and spoil;" and many a branch of that family, the catalogue of whose crimes, as given by the old historians, forms one of the darkest that ever made a reader shudder. Here was born Catherine and Mary de Medici, whose ambition, and reckless mode of satisfying it, have furnished so many atrocities to the page of history;and here figured Bianca Capella, more fair than chaste, whose tragic death formed a dramatic sequel to her romantic story. Here shone the lovely Eleonor of Toledo, niece to the grand duchess of that name, and wife to her profligate son, Don Pietro de Medici; who, suspecting her virtue, removed her to Caffaggioli, a country residence of his family, and there plunged a dagger in the heart he had alienated from him by a series of actions of the most open depravity. This crime was acknowledged by Francisco, his brother, then reigning duke, to Philip of Spain, who took no steps to punish it; notwithstanding that the family of the murdered victim, and in particu...

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