Category: Travel Writing
Siena remains the most perfectly mediaeval of all the larger cities of Tuscany. Its narrow streets, its spacious Gothic palaces and churches, the three hills upon which it rises enthroned, with the curiously picturesque valleys between them, are still inclosed in frowning wall...
San Gimignano is still surrounded by its second circuit of walls, built to inclose the Castello Nuovo at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. The five...
11. CHAPTER IXAt the famous Croce del Travaglio, where the Bohemian Caesar learned to respect the might of a free people and Giovanni Martinozzi routed the hireling soldiery of the last of th...
2. CHAPTER ISiena remains the most perfectly mediaeval of all the larger cities of Tuscany. Its narrow streets, its spacious Gothic palaces and churches, the three hills upon which it rises...
8. CHAPTER VIRising majestically above Siena, crowned with the mosaic of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin in Paradise, as though to make her seem still floating in air over the city that...
10. CHAPTER VIIIFabio di Pandolfo Petrucci had been expelled from Siena in September 1524, by a temporary alliance of all factions in the State. Of the three chief leaders in the revolution, Gi...
5. CHAPTER IIIAfter the expulsion of the Riformatori in March 1385, a new supreme magistracy was instituted to rule the Republic. It was composed of ten citizens--the "Signori Priori, Governa...
13. CHAPTER XBeyond the Porta Ovile, on the hill known as the _Capriola_, rises the convent of the Osservanza, one of the chief houses of the _Osservanti_--San Bernardino's followers of the...
6. CHAPTER IVWe may conveniently begin the story of Sienese art with the coming of Niccolò Pisano to Siena in 1266, the year after Dante's birth, for the work of the great marble pulpit of t...
9. CHAPTER VII"In the name of God, Amen. To the honour and praise and reverence of God, and of His Mother, Madonna Holy Mary Virgin, and of all the Saints of God, and to the honour and exalta...
7. CHAPTER VAt the heart of Siena, where its three hills meet, is the famous Piazza upon which so many of the stormiest scenes in the history of the city have been enacted: the Campo, now k...
14. CHAPTER XISan Gimignano of the Beautiful Towers is a place of frowning grey and brown walls and towers, of mysterious alleys, of shimmering olive-trees and fields of flowers that lie beyo...
3. CHAPTER IIThe closing years of this great republican epoch are lit up by the genius and the inspiration of one of the most wonderful women in the history of Italy: Caterina Benincasa, now...
4. letter did St Catherine write to him in her own familiar style, pleadingfor peace and the reformation of the Church. Then he turned against her. "Most holy Father," she wrote to him through Raimondo, "to whom shall I have recourse, if you abandon me...
1. CHAPTER XII12. m. Vittoria Forteguerri,d. 1454. | +----------------------------------------------------+---------------------------------------------------+ | | | ENEA SILVIO LAODAMIA, CATERINA, (POPE PIUS II.), m. F...