For two years, Peruggia kept the painting in a false-bottom suitcase, then smuggled the " Mona Lisa" to Italy and arranged to sell it to a Florentine art dealer.
Lucy shuddered a little. " We shall get the silly affair on our nerves if we aren't careful. How could a Florentine cab-driver ever get hold of Cecil" ?
After serving an apprenticeship under one of the best Florentine painters at the time, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli was able to make a name for himself with his painting Allegory of Fortitude.
But the Mona Lisa — said by the Louvre to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant — and additional works by Leonardo still have other secrets to tell.
Bacon's Essays are exquisite, but they have now no practical application; the modern strategist can find but little use in a treatise 'De Re Militari, ' written by a Florentine in the fifteenth century.
In Rome he was simply a very dull Florentine, and it is not remarkable that he should not have cared to pay frequent visits to a place where, to carry it off, his dulness needed more explanation than was convenient.