A Visit to Italy Author:Frances Milton Trollope Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CONCERT AT THE PALAZZO VECCHIO. 15 to the highest interests of his species. . . . And where is the looker-on, who can deny that such is the case within t... more »he states of the church ? It is, perhaps, the enforced silence of Italy on all, or nearly all, the most important themes that exercise the thoughts of man, which renders the present meeting at Florence so deeply interesting. We feel ourselves in the presence of all the hoarded, closely-closeted, intellect of the land;.... it is like being amidst the unread volumes of a living library, the pages of which, if opened, would show goodly store of very precious thought;.... and it is by no blind-tooling, I promise you, that the contents of these volumes may be guessed at.... not upon the backs indeed, but on the brows, which tell, in characters often bright enough to be read even by those who run, that it is no ordinary crowd with which you mix yourself when waiting upon the Marchese Ridolfi in the Palazzo Bicordi. The citizens of Florence have contributed their share to the entertainment of their illustrious guests, by giving them a concert in the great room of the Palazzo Vecchio. The Creation of Haydn was extremely well performed upon this occasion, and it is said entirely by amateurs.... If this be so, Italy may resume her old place in our musical esteem, as nationally pre-eminent in musical .power .... though the too strong absorption of London and Paris has left her operatic corps sadly out of 1C CONCERT AT THE PALAZZO VECCHIO. proportion to the unprofessional performers to whom we have listened here. The five hundred amateurs who went through the performance I have mentioned certainly left very little to be wished for. The parts of Gabbriello and Eva, were sung by a Signora Balbina Steffanone, who intends, it ...« less