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FLORENCE.
This city has been longer in possession of music, if the poets and historians may be credited, than any other in Europe. Dante, who was a Florentine, born in 1265, speaks of the organ and lute as instruments well known in his time; and has taken an opportunity to celebrate the talents of his friend Casella, the musician, in the second canto of his Purgatorio.
The historian Villani, cotemporary with Petrarca, says that his canzoni were universally sung in Florence, by the old and the young of both sexes. And his- torians relate that Lorenzo il Magnifico, in Carnival time, used to go out in the even- ing, followed by a numerous company of persons on horseback, masked, and richly dressed, amounting sometimes to upwards of three hundred; and the same number on foot, with wax tapers burn- ing in their hands. In this manner
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