Free The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy Page B

God.
    At a later period, the hills were planted over with olive trees, grapes, cypresses, parasol pines; near the cities, handsome villas were built, with gardens, terraces, lemon trees growing in tubs. Yet the peculiar beauty of the Tuscan landscape is in the combination of husbandry with an awesome, elemental majesty and silence; the olives’ silver and the varied greens of the growing crops appear an embroidered veil on a wilderness of bare geology, of cones and cups and solid triangles cut out by a retreating glacier. The knightly era, which turned the landscape of the Veneto into a magic story, with every distant hill topped by a pink castle, was wiped off the map of Tuscany by the wars of the burgher towns. Except for an occasional ruin, the remnants of a grey wall or a tower, rural Tuscany has only convents and abbeys as ricordi of the medieval days, for it was a great place for holy persons; hermits and saints flocked here to live in caves or grottoes, preach, see visions, and found monasteries. The Irish and Scottish saints felt a special call to Tuscany; many were buried here and left their names to churches or villages, like San Frediano in Lucca, and San Pellegrino (which means simply ‘pilgrim’) delle Alpi. Saint Bridget’s brother, Blessed Andrew, founded the monastery of San Martino on the river Mensola, just outside Florence, and she herself was flown by an angel from Ireland to Tuscany to join him, in answer to his dying wish. She then built a church, on her own, and retired to live in a cave in the hills.
    The nobles of the contado, who were unable, in their original savage state, as the documents testify, to write their own names, were also scarcely Christianized, being fond of pillaging convents and monasteries and playing crude jokes on the monks and lay brothers whom they captured in their raids. ‘Pacified’, they brought down into the town of Florence from their feudal mountain lairs the tower-building habit, like animals—moles or beavers—conforming to the instinct of their species. They also brought with them the blood feud and the vendetta. The first towers were built in Florence in the eleventh century; by the twelfth, there were well over a hundred, concentrated in the old quarter around the Mercato Vecchio and what is now the Piazza della Signoria. These rough towers, bearing names like the Lion Tower, the Flea Tower, the Snake Tower, became symbols of insolent prepotency, of that harsh and overbearing character which was forever after attributed to the Florentines by their neighbours: ‘Gent’ è avara, invidiosa, e superba’. That, Dante said, was the reputation of the Florentines from olden time, and, in another place, he said that the Pisans looked on them as a wild pack of mountaineers.
    ‘Stingy, envious, and proud,’ the Florentines were possessed by a ferocious independence and rivalry, a determination to be outdone by no one. This, all the old chroniclers agree, was the cause of their civic turmoils: a boundless ambition and its corollary, an overweening envy. Every man wished to be first, and no man could tolerate that anyone should be ahead of him. The towers grew steadily taller as the burghers copied the nobles, and the city became a sort of multiple Babel, with many towers two hundred feet high and some even higher. In 1250, the year of the first democracy (called the Primo Popolo), the height of the towers was ordered to be reduced by two thirds, and enough material is supposed to have been left from this to build the city walls beyond the Arno. A democratic tendency, among the poorer artisans, appeared very early in Florence, to match the pride of the nobles and the greed of the burghers. The reduction of the towers to an equal height (none was to exceed ninety-six feet) was a symbol of the levelling process. Today, they are nearly all gone; viewed from across the river, at Piazzale Michelangelo, where a copy of ‘David’, the Giant-Killer, stands, Florence appears