ABSTRACT
The streets of Florence are unlike those of Venice, which reveal at every few yards perfect stage sets for Goldoni comedies readymade. Apart from the wide avenues, open suburban walks, and pavements by fashionable shops, they are narrow: so narrow that the heavily projecting and timbered eaves, which seem like oblong companies or troops in plans of great battles, scissor the sky at street-ends and bends. The shapes of these streets cause thought, for they curve and meet in strange lines inexplicable without a little history. Many a noble palace which went up between mediaeval houses and towers is there in a narrow street between them. In the maze of small streets between Piazza Santa Maria Novella and the Via Tornabuoni there is a tiny space with a fourteenth century cross, called the Croce del Trebbio.
