Marguerite went to "Chanticler" at the Pergola on Thursday night. Crammed, fashionable. Students making a great noise the whole time - it's what they do in the absence of a formed identity. Second performance last night and, according to the papers, scarcely anybody there. And of those who were present, many left after the second act. Curious! However there is no doubt that the first performance stirred the hotels to their depths. Eight or ten people went from this hotel alone. None of them stayed after the third acty I think. On that night I just strolled about, in search of anything I could see, and saw nothing. Often the case I find.
Yesterday, Marguerite and I went to the Bargello in the morning. On the previous morning I went into the Pitti and the Boboli Gardens. I was unaware that a ticket was required for the one, and that the other was not open 'til the afternoon. In each case I was corrected after I had got a long way, with the utmost politeness. My opinion of the Pitti is going up. The courtyard is magnificent. I have been into S. Spirito again. It is the exterior of this ('purest baroque', as an expert told me whom I met there) that I ought to paint, in sunshine, from the South East corner. It would be a wonderful composition.Yesterday I tried a mixture of ink on aquarelle, and a mixture of a symbolical figure with Florentine architecture.
I wrote 1,800 good words of "Clayhanger" today.
The most curious new visitors we have are a brother and sister, very fair, she about 27, he about 30. Very much alike, timid, graceful, twisting themselves etc. when addressed. Always together. They go out together, getting up fairly early, with two stools, and sit close together side by side and paint the same view; he in oils, she in watercolour. Ponte Vecchio and hackneyed things like that. She wears linen dresses with white collars. Both virgins I should think. And likely to remain so.
I read G. Biagi's "Private Life of the Renaissance Florentines". Not a bad magazine article.
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