And since Prato is a child, there are about her many children; mischievous, shy, joyful little people, who lurk round the coppersmiths, or play in the old churches, or hide about the corridors of Palazzo Comunale.  And so it is not surprising that the greatest treasures of Prato are either the work of children—­the frescoes, for instance, of Lippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti in the Duomo—­or the presentment of them, yes, in their happiest moments; some dancing, while others play on pipes, or with cymbals full of surprising sweetness, in the open-air pulpit of Donatello; a pulpit from which five times every year a delightful and wonderful thing is shown, not without its significance, too, in this child-city of children—­Madonna’s Girdle, the Girdle of the Mother of them all, shown in the open air, so that even the tiniest may see.

The Duomo itself, simple and small, so that you may not lose your way there, however little you may be, was built in 1317, though a church has stood there apparently since about 750, while the facade, all in ivory and green, is a work of the fifteenth century.  Donatello’s pulpit, for which a contract was made in 1425 which named Michelozzo with him as one of those industriosi maestri intent on the work, is built into the south-west corner of the church overlooking the Piazza.  Almost a complete circle in form, it is separated, unfortunately we may think, into seven panels divided by twin pilasters, where on a mosaic ground groups, crowds almost, of children dance and play and sing.  It is the very spirit of childhood you see there, a naive impetuosity that occasionally almost stumbles or forgets which way to turn; and if these panels have not the subtler rhythm of the Cantoria at Florence, they are more frankly just children’s work, so that any day you may see some little maid of Prato gazing at those laughing babies, babies who dance really not without a certain awkwardness and simplicity, as though they were her own brothers, as indeed they are.  Under the pulpit, Michelozzo has forged in bronze a relief of one face of a capital, where other children gaze with all the serious innocence of childhood at the pleasant world of the Piazza.

Passing under the terra-cotta of Madonna with St. Stephen and St. Laurence, made by Andrea della Robbia in 1489, you enter the church itself, a little dim and mysterious, and full of wonderful or precious things, those pillars, for instance, of green serpentine or the Sacra Cintola, the very Girdle of Madonna herself, in its own chapel there on the left behind the beautiful bronze screen of Bruno di Ser Lapo.  There, too, you will always find a group of children, and surely it was for them that Agnolo Gaddi painted those frescoes of the life of Madonna and the gift of her Girdle to St. Thomas.  For it seems that doubting Thomas was doubting to the last; he alone of all the saints was the least a child.  How they wonder at him now, for first he could not believe that Jesus was