But it is the other relief which is so simply and
so deeply affecting--the interior of a narrow cell, with one chair and a
rude table, at which the patriot novelist wrote his greatest work, _The
Siege of Florence,_ and with him standing a little way from it. In spite
of the small space and the almost vacant stage, the scene is full of
most moving drama, and records a whole Italian epoch, now happily past
forever.
These are modern sculptures, and they scarcely contest the palm with the
monument of the four galley-slaves and the Medicean grand-duke. In
another piazza two princes of the Lorrainese family, if I remember
rightly, face each other over its oblong--classic motives, with the
figures much undraped, and one of them singularly impressive from the
mutton-chop whiskers which modernized him. There are several theatres,
and among them a Goldoni theatre, as there should be in a city where the
sweet old playwright sojourned for a time and has placed the action of
his famous comedy, "La Locandiera.
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