Book Description

Earthwork out of Tuscany: Being Impressions and Translations of Maurice Hewlett is a travel biography by Hewlett, an English historical novelist, poet and essayist. Excerpt: "Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Florence, form the five elements of our planet according to the testimony of Boniface VIII. of clamant and not very Catholic memory. That is true if you take it this way. You cannot resolve an element; but you cannot resolve Florence; therefore Florence is an element. Ecco! She is like nothing else In Nature, or (which is much the same thing) Art. You can have olives elsewhere, and Gothic elsewhere; you can have both at Aries, for instance. You can have Campanili printed white (but not rose-and white, not rose-and-gold- and-white) on blue anywhere along the Mediterranean from Tripoli to Tangier: you will find Giotto at Padua, and statues growing in the open air at Naples. But for the silvery magic of olives and blue; for a Gothic which has the supernatural and always restless eagerness of the North, held in check, reduced to our level by the blessedly human sanity of Romanesque; for sculpture which sprouts from the crumbling church-sides like some frankly happy stone-crop, or wall-flower, just as wholesomely coloured and tenderly shaped, you must come to Florence. Come for choice in this golden afternoon of the year. Green figs are twelve-a-penny; you can get peaches for the asking, and grapes and melons without it; brown men are treading the wine-fat in every little white hill-town, and in Florence itself you may stumble upon them, as I once did, plying their mystery in a battered old church—sight only to be seen in Italy, where religions have been many, but religionists substantially the same. That is the Italian way; there was the practical evidence."