So this city of warm brick, with its churches of marble, its old ways, its palaces of stone, its convents at the gates, comes to hold for us, as it were, the very dream of Italy, the dream that was too good to last, that was so soon to be shattered by the barbarian.  Yet in that little walk through the narrow winding ways from the west to the east of the city, all the eloquence and renown, the strength and beauty of Italy seem to be gathered for you, as in a nosegay you may find all the beauty of a garden.  And of all the broken blossoms that you may find by the way, not one is more fragrant and fair than the sweet bride of Michelangelo, S. Maria Novella.

Standing in a beautiful Piazza, itself the loveliest thing therein, dressed in the old black and white habit, it dreams of the past:  it is full of memories too, for here Boccaccio one Tuesday morning, just after Mass in 1348, amid the desolation of the city, found the seven beloved ladies of the Decamerone talking of death; here Martin V, and Eugenius IV, fugitives from the Eternal City, found a refuge; here Beata Villana confessed her sins; here Vanna Tornabuoni prayed and the Strozzi made their tombs.  Full of memories—­and of what else, then, but the past can she dream?  For her there is no future.  Her convent is suppressed, the great cloister has become a military gymnasium.  What has she, then, in common with the modern world, with the buildings of Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, for instance?—­the past is all that we have left her.

[Illustration:  S. MARIA NOVELLA]

Begun in 1278, as some say, from the design of Fra Ristoro and Fra Sisto, the facade, one of the most beautiful in the world, is really the fifteenth-century work of Leon Alberti working to the order of Giovanni Rucellai—­you may see their blown sail everywhere—­with that profound and unifying genius which involved everything he touched in a sort of reconciliation, thus prophesying to us of Leonardo da Vinci.  For Alberti has here very fortunately made the pointed work of the Middle Age friends with Antiquity, Antiquity seen with the eyes of the Renaissance, full of a new sort of eagerness and of many little refinements.  In the fagade of his masterpiece, the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini, that beautiful unfinished temple where the gods of Greece seem for once to have come to the cradle of Jesus with something of the wonder of the shepherds who left their flocks to worship Him, Leon Alberti has taken as his model the arch of Augustus, that still, though broken, stands on the verge of the city in the Flaminian Way; but as though aware at last of the danger of any mere imitation of antiquity such as that, he has here contrived to express the beauty of Roman things, just what he himself had really felt concerning them, and has combined that very happily with the work of the age that was just then passing away; thus, as it were, creating for us one of the most perfect buildings of the fifteenth century, very characteristic too, in its strange beauty, as of the dead new risen.  And then how subtly he has composed this beautiful facade, so that somehow it really adds to the beauty of the Campanile, with its rosy spire, in the background.