Ercole d’Este, stayed here for four days in June 1473. On Sunday, writes Allegretto, “the Commune of Siena, or rather the Signoria, arranged a most beauteous dance before the house of Tommaso Pecci in the street, and all the fair ladies and girls of Siena were invited. And my wife either lost there or had stolen from her a goodly knife, ornamented in silver, which cost me eighteen lire the pair. And in the street there was arranged a great vat of forty measures, divided in half, and a column in the middle upon which were a lion and a wolf, so that the lion threw white wine on one side of the vat and the wolf threw red wine on the other side, and a fountain in the midst between the lion and the wolf threw water. And in the vat stood always silver cups, in order that every one could drink. At the Loggia of the Officers of the Mercanzia, ninety-eight couples of ladies assembled and went to the dance in order, accompanied by as many youths, and in front of the house they danced until nightfall, when there was made a rich and fine collation of all kinds of confectionery.”[136]
Opposite the Palazzo del Capitano, at the corner of the street and the Piazza del Duomo, is the Palazzo Reale, which Bernardo Buontalenti built at the end of the sixteenth century for the Medicean Grand Dukes of Tuscany. In part, it occupies the site of the palace of Giacoppo Petrucci in which his cruel and tyrannical son, the Cardinal Raffaello, resided. Raffaello left it to his nephew, Anton Maria Petrucci. It was here that the Emperor was lodged in 1536; from here Granvelle and Sfondrato made their “buonissima riforma” of the State, and afterwards the Cardinal Ippolito d’Este with his guard of Switzers.
In the Via di San Pietro is the great red brick Palazzo Buonsignori, with a richly ornamented façade, one of the finest private palaces in Siena in the Gothic style. It was originally built in the fourteenth century, but has a fine court and stairway of the Quattrocento. Between it and the steps to the church is a small Gothic palace of the thirteenth century (completely restored), known as the Casa della Pia. This was the house of Count Nello de’ Pannocchieschi, whose fair fame (in spite of painters and novelists) recent research has cleared from the imputation of his having been the husband—and therefore the murderer—of La Pia, that hapless lady whom Siena made and Maremma unmade, whom the divine poet met among the dim shades of those who died a violent death.[137] San Pietro alle Scale, the parish church of San Pietro in Castelvecchio, is a structure of the thirteenth century, with a modernised façade and interior. There are two small tondi by Sano di Pietro, representing the Archangel Gabriel and Santa Lucia, in the sacristy. The picture over the high altar, the Repose on the Flight into Egypt with a handsome swarthy Madonna, is a decidedly meritorious work by Rutilio Manetti. At the end of the Via di San Pietro the Porta dell’Arco leads out beyond the older circuit of walls which represented the limits of the city proper, until the Nine inclosed the suburb in the still standing walls of the fourteenth century.
The Via Stalloreggi is the continuation of the Via di Città as the Via di San Pietro is of the Via del Capitano. Inclosed by the two, bounded outside by the Via delle Cerchia and the Via Baldassare Peruzzi, is the oldest part of the city. At the corner of the Via di Castelvecchio in the Via Stalloreggi, at a house once belonging to one of the Marescotti, is a fresco by Bazzi, “where a dead Christ, who is in the lap of His Mother, hath a marvellous grace and divinity.”[138] The Via di Castelvecchio intersects this oldest part of Siena. It is a tall, narrow winding street, in parts squalid, but with here and