386

1014 HISTORICAL ANNOTATION

Below the Acropolis, Douglass could also see the free-standing temple of Theseus,
who according to Greek legend unified the region of Attica under Athens. The Theater
of Dionysus, a large open-air theater at the base of the Acropolis, is also visible from
Lycabettus. Ernest Arthur Gardner, Ancient Athens (London, 1902), 9-12, 24-25,
80-81, 123- 25, 217-18; Stamati M. Polemis, A Short Description of the Ancient
Monuments and Museums of Athens (Athens, 1927), 23.

434.9 Florence] Located on the Amo River, the city of Florence is in the Italian
province of Tuscany. Initially the site of Etruscan settlement, it later became an impor-tant Roman town. The city became known for the production of fine silks, tapestries,
and jewelry. Baedeker, Northern Italy, 380-85; Cohen, Columbia Gazetteer,
1:1010-11.

434.12 Theodore Parker] Theodore Parker was among the "Secret Six" who sup-
ported John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.
Suffering from declining health, Parker traveled to the Caribbean and then Europe,
where he hoped to improve his condition. Instead he died of tuberculosis in Florence,
Italy, on 10 May 1860. Renehan, Secret Six, 37-46; ANB, 17:43-l4.

434.13 Elizabeth Barrett Browning] English author Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-61) published her first poetry collection in 1826. Additional works included a
translation of the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound Among her admirers was the poet
Robert Browning, with whom she began corresponding in 1845 . They married the
following year, despite the objections of Barrett's family, and moved to Florence,
Italy. Suffering from frequent bouts of ill health. Browning nevertheless gave birth to
a son in 1849 and then published her most famous work, Sonnets from the Portuguese,
in 1850. She died in Florence in 1861 and is buried there in a tomb shaped as a sar-cophagus resting on six pedestals. Scott Wilson, Resting Places, The Burial Sites of
Over 7,000 Famous Persons (Jefferson, N.C., 2001), 44: Beverly Taylor, "Elizabeth
Barrett Browning," in Victorian women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing (Detroit,
1999), 80-98; Magill, Critical Survey of Poetry, 1:393-404; Emerson, "Scholarly
Edition of the Grand Tour Diaries," 119n.

434.27-28 It was in ... speech in Roxbury] Once home to Brook Farm utopian
community, Roxbury in the 1840s was a suburban community south of the city of
Boston, Massachusetts. Theodore Parker preached mainly in his West Roxbury
Unitarian Church from his April 1837 ordination until December 1845, when he
accepted the pulpit of the newly organized Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of
Boston. Although Douglass spoke throughout Massachusetts as an itinerant abolition-
ist agent in the 1840s, no notices have survived of his addressing an audience in
Parker's Roxbury congregation. ANB, 17:43-44.

435.4 Duomo] Famous for its 300-foot-high dome. Florence's cathedral, known
as Il Duomo, was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi and built from 1294 to 1462. In
1588 the unfinished facade created by Giotto di Bondone was removed and replaced
with marble. Baedeker, Northern ltaly, 406, 436, 474; Emerson, "Scholarly Edition of
the Grand Tour Diaries," 123n.