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I didn't

But within a very short tier journey than any we'd made before It was only a matter of hours, but to my utter astonish to the far city of Florence itself

There, set down in a wholly different world than that of the Veneto, walking quietly ast an entirely different breed of Italian, into churches and palaces of a different style, I understood for the first time what he meant

Understand, I'd seen Florence before, traveling as Marius's li to what I saw as a vaod

But it was night The city lay under the usual curfew And the stones of Florence seeestive of a fortress, the streets narrow and gloohtened by luminescent ribbons of water as were our own The palaces of Florence lacked the extravagant Moorish ornaloss fantastical stone facades They enclosed their splendor, as is more common to Italian cities Yet the city was rich, dense and full of delights for the eye

It was after all Florence-the capital of the ure who doreat ht of my dark rebirth, a man who had died only a few years before

We found the city unlawfully busy, though it was quite dark, with groups ofabout in the hard paved streets, and a sinister quality of restlessness hung about the Piazza della Signoria, which was one of the most important of all the many squares of the town

An execution had taken place that day, hardly an uncommon occurrence in Florence, or Venice for thatI sh all the evidence had been cleared before night

I had a natural distaste for such things, which not everyone has, by the way, and I edged towards the scene cautiously, not wishing with these heightened senses to be jarred by some horrible remnant of cruelty

Marius had always cautioned us as boys not to "enjoy" these spectacles, but to place ourselves mentally in the position of the victim if ere to learn the maximum from

As you know from history, the crowds at executions were oftenthe victim sometimes, I think, out of fear We, the boys of Marius, had always found it terribly difficult to cast our ed or burnt In sum, he'd taken all the fun out of it for us

Of course, as these rituals happened almost always by day, Marius himself had never been present

Now, as we noria, I could see that he was displeased by the thin ash that still hung in the air, and the vile smells

I also noticed that we slipped past others easily, two dark-draped swiftly ures Our feet scarce ift that we couldquickly out of sudden and occasional race

"It's as though we're invisible," I said to Marius, "as if nothing can hurt us, because we don't really belong here and will soon take our leave " I looked up at the grim battlements that fronted on the Square