Further on in the Via Cavour, to the left, is the exquisite little early Renaissance church of Sta. Maria delle Nevi, built shortly after 1470 for Giovanni de’ Cinughi, Bishop of Pienza, probably from the designs of Francesco di Giorgio. The altar-piece, representing Our Lady as Queen of the Snows, with a predella illustrating the legend of the building of Sta. Maria Maggiore at Rome, was painted by Matteo di Giovanni in 1477; a most poetically conceived work and one of the most beautiful pictures of the Sienese Quattrocento. This part of the Terzo di Camollia was originally the famous Poggio Malavolti, where that great family had their towers and houses in a regular fortress as far as the recently demolished convent of the Cappuccine; it was surrounded with walls and had a gate near where Sta. Maria delle Nevi now stands.
On the right the steep and picturesque Via Vallerozzi leads down the Costa d’Ovile, the scene of the massacre of 1371, to the Porta Ovile. Half way down is the oratory of San Rocco, the church of the Contrada of the Lupa, with frescoes by Manetti and Rustichino. The Fonte Nuova, a little off the street to the left, was built by Tino di Camaino in the fourteenth century. In the Via Garibaldi, on the way to the railway station, is the Casa della Consuma, the palace in which the brigata spendereccia, the extravagant young club of Sienese nobles recorded by Dante in canto xxix. of the Inferno, ran through their fortunes. There has been much throwing about of brains upon the question whether this notorious brigata spendereccia is, or is not, to be identified with the brigata nobile e cortese of which Folgore da San Gimignano sung, and whether Dante’s “Niccolò who first discovered the rich usage of the clove”—who is usually said to have been either a Salimbeni or a Buonsignori—is the Niccolò di Nisi to whom Folgore dedicated his corona. However that may be, the present aspect of the Casa della Consuma is prosaic and modern. In the same street is the oratory of the Brotherhood of St Sebastian, for which Bazzi painted that most wonderful of banners now in the Uffizi. It has early seventeenth century frescoes, illustrating the life of the martyr.
Following up the Via Camollia towards the gate, we have on the right the Campansi, a former convent of Franciscan nuns, now a poor-house. Most of its artistic treasures have been removed to the picture gallery, but a certain number of frescoes have been preserved. In the cloisters is a large Assumption, mingling Sienese and Umbrian influences, the work of Matteo Balducci and (according to Mr Berenson) in part of Pietro di Domenico. On the first floor are: an Annunciation by Sano di Pietro; a Madonna and Child with St Anne, attended by the Magdalene and St Ursula (poetical in conception, but rather poorly executed) by Beccafumi; a Resurrection by Benvenuto di Giovanni. From a window in the women’s department a beautiful view is obtained of San Francesco.
The Madonna of Fontegiusta was built in 1479, as a thanks-offering for the victory of Poggio Imperiale, by Francesco Fedeli and Giacomo di Giovanni of Como. Over the outer portal is a beautiful Madonna and Child with Angels, of 1489, by Neroccio Landi. In the sixteenth century the fashionable thing was to hear vespers in this church on Sunday afternoons. In Pietro Fortini’s Novelle de’ Novizi, his five “right honest but most facetious ladies” attend vespers here, and at the holy water basin (the work still of Pacchia’s father, Giovanni delle Bombarde) they join company with their “two winsome youths, most disposed to the service of love,” and walk out with them in the cool as far as the Palazzo de’ Diavoli.[158] The marble high altar, with the Pietà and exquisitely worked setting, is the masterpiece of Lorenzo di Mariano, executed in 1517 and, according to the legend, sent to Rome on mules for the edification of Leo X. The frescoed Assumption, in the lunette above the altar, is by Girolamo di Benvenuto. On the right wall is a Coronation of the Madonna by Fungai. On the left wall is the fresco of the Sibyl revealing the mystery of the Incarnation to Augustus, by Baldassare Peruzzi. It has been damaged and badly restored, and is one of the painter’s latest and less satisfactory works, showing a mannered and unsuccessful attempt to imitate the style of Michelangelo. The Madonna commending Siena to her Divine Son is by Bazzi’s pupil and son-in-law, Il Riccio. The shield and whalebones over the door are said by tradition to have been sent here as a votive offering by Christopher Columbus.
The Porta Camollia bears the famous and characteristic Sienese greeting to all that enter: Cor magis tibi Sena pandit, “Siena opens to thee her heart more than her gate.” When Pius II., on January 31st, 1460, returned to Siena from the fruitless congress at Mantua, he passed through this gate and found all the streets as far as the Duomo gorgeously decorated. Inside the gate there was a structure to look like a Paradise with a choir of boys dressed as angels; when the Pope drew near, one of them descended from his place and sung so sweetly, commending the city to him, that Pius burst into tears. When Charles VIII. of France entered here in May 1495, accompanied by the Signoria who had met him at the Antiporto, he had a similar reception, a boy dressed to represent the Madonna as Queen of the city singing a Latin welcome to the sound of music. The present gate was built in 1604, in honour of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I., from the design of Alessandro Casolani.
Outside the gate is the Piazza d’Armi or Prato di Camollia, where the Spanish soldiers mustered in 1552 on the surrender of the citadel. Here is the column that marks the place where Enea Silvio Piccolomini introduced the Emperor to his bride, Leonora of Portugal. The Antiporto or Portone was many times destroyed and rebuilt, the present structure dating from the seventeenth century. A short way further on, on the road towards Florence, is the Palatium Turcorum, the palace of the Turchi (a family of the Noveschi who were connected with the Piccolomini), a red brick structure with a fine tower. It has been popularly called, from the fifteenth century downwards, the Palazzo de’ Diavoli. The chapel is a fine piece of Renaissance architecture by Antonio Federighi, with a frieze somewhat recalling that of the chapel of the Campo; in the interior are tasteful terra-cotta mouldings and an Assumption with a multitude of Angels, St Jerome and St Thomas—like a Sienese picture of the Quattrocento in terra-cotta—also by Federighi. It was little beyond this palace that the Sienese pursued the routed Florentines and papalini in 1526—but they fled for ten miles without stopping.
We retrace our steps through the Porta Camollia to the Lizza, that favourite promenade of the Sienese which now covers the site of Don Diego’s citadel, where the nightingales are loud at evening among the trees at the entrance to Santa Barbara, the Medicean fortress of Duke Cosimo thrown open to the citizens by an Austrian Grand Duke. The church of San Stefano, on the Lizza, contains over the high altar the masterpiece of St Catherine’s painter disciple, the reformer Andrea di Vanni, painted about 1400. It is a typical Sienese picture, but of no surpassing merit; the Madonna and Child are enthroned in the central panel, with the Annunciation above; at the sides are the Baptist and St Bartholomew, St Stephen and St James, with the four Evangelists above them and other saints in the cuspidi and pinnacles. The faces of the virgin martyrs have something of the characteristic Sienese gentle sweetness. The predella is obviously later, being probably the work of Giovanni di Paolo.
