CHAPTER X
Some Famous Convents and Monasteries
BEYOND 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 strict observance of the rule of St Francis, who have recently been united with the Riformati and others of their spiritual kindred to form one body, under what Mr Montgomery Carmichael, our chief lay authority on matters Franciscan, appropriately calls “the glorious and primitive style and title of the Friars Minor.” From the earliest Middle Ages, there stood upon this spot a little chapel dedicated to the hermit St Onuphrius. Bernardino passed this way in June 1406, and found that a crowd of people had come out from the city, to celebrate the hermit’s feast. Before the young Franciscan’s eyes lay stretched that noble panorama of Siena that we see from the convent to-day. Suddenly fired, he climbed up into a tree and addressed them in words so inflamed with divine love that, while many wept, there were some that deemed him mad. A few years later the Spedale of Sta. Maria della Scala, to which the place belonged, made it over to him, and he founded the present convent upon the site of the chapel.