The little townlet of Buonconvento itself, where Henry VII. died in 1313 and Alfonso of Calabria had his headquarters in 1480, is inclosed in well-preserved walls of the fourteenth century, with the balzana and lion of Siena’s Commune and People over the gate. In the one street, which is practically all the place, is an old tower with armorial bearings of generations of Podestàs. The church of San Pietro and San Paolo, near the gate, deserves a visit for a most beautiful little Madonna and Child by Matteo di Giovanni, over the high altar. To the left of the altar are pictures by Sano di Pietro (the Madonna with St Catherine and San Bernardino) and Pacchiarotti (an early work according to Mr Berenson). There are also a frescoed Coronation of the Madonna ascribed to Sano, on the right wall, an Annunciation with the Magdalene and St Antony by Girolamo di Benvenuto, on the left, and a Madonna in glory with Saints in the manner of Pacchia.
From Buonconvento we gradually mount upwards, partly through oak woods, to Monte Oliveto. Long before we reach it, the great red-brick convent becomes visible, with the curious little townlet of Chiusure, once
a place of some slight importance, high up on the hill above it, looking like a part of the bleak mountain side. This whole region, the desert of Accona, is wild and barren in the extreme, save where the strenuous labour of these Olivetan monks has effected some cultivation; the convent itself appears as an oasis in a wilderness of cretaceous precipices, or balze. As we mount, it gets wilder and more bare in front, while round and behind us an ever grander and more spacious outlook opens; Siena is dimly seen in the distance, Monte Amiata rising higher and higher to the south, and, more westward, that loftily placed last home and refuge of the battered Republic, heroic Montalcino with its towers. At last we reach the monastery portal, guarded with a machicolated tower like a fortress; a long avenue of cypresses leads down to the church with its massive square tower and the convent buildings, built into the ravines. They are built of a rich red brick which, as Addington Symonds notes, “contrasts not unpleasantly with the lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives.”
It was, as we have seen, in the very year of the Emperor’s death in Buonconvento below, 1313, that Bernardo fled to this solitude. The son of Messer Mino Tolomei (the head of the Ghibelline section of that normally Guelf house) and Fulvia Tancredi, he was born in 1272, and christened Giovanni. After a boyhood of piety and study, he was made doctor by the Studio of Siena and knight of the Holy Roman Empire by Albert of Hapsburg—which latter event was seized by the Tolomei as an occasion for displaying all the wealth and splendour of their clan. He had a dazzling career as leader of the social and intellectual life of the city, though the stories told by his ecclesiastical biographers, of his becoming practically ruler of the Republic, are obviously nonsense; such things did not happen to noblemen while the Monte de’ Nove held sway. Then came his conversion. He had been going to deliver a philosophical discourse in the Studio, so runs the legend, when he was suddenly stricken with blindness. In the darkness he saw visions, prayed to the Blessed Virgin and recovered his sight at her intercession. Instead of his promised lecture, he poured out an impassioned homily upon the contempt of the world.[169] He distributed all that he had to the poor, retaining only a little land in this desert of Accona, to which he now went forth with two noble companions, Patrizio Patrizi and Ambrogio Piccolomini. The three began by raising with their own hands a little chapel to St Scholastica. Giovanni now dressed in the roughest hermit attire, and took the name of Bernardo. Men began to flock to him, and certain Guelfs, suspecting a Ghibelline plot, are said to have attempted to take his life by poison. Praying at the spot where now is the great portal of the church, Bernardo beheld a silver ladder stretching up to Paradise, with Angels leading white-robed men upwards to Christ and the Madonna. Accused of heresy, Bernardo and Ambrogio were summoned to Avignon, where Pope John XXII. received them kindly and recommended them to Guido Tarlati, the warrior bishop of Arezzo, who (in accordance with a special communication from the Madonna, says the legend) gave them a rule of life, armorial bearings and the white habit.
Thus the Order was founded and Bernardo began to build the church and convent, over which the Archangel Michael and the fiends renewed the war that they had waged in Heaven before the creation of the world. After having been frequently sent by the Pope to heal the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines in many towns of Italy, at last in 1348, when the terrible Black Death was ravaging the peninsula, Bernardo assembled his monks, bade them leave the convent, going two and two to every town and city to tend the plague-stricken, and all to assemble once more in Siena, two days before the Feast of the Assumption, in the convent that he had founded outside the Porta Tufi. All arrived safely, as he had promised them. On the vigil of the Assumption, he addressed them for the last time. Then, a few days later, he died; the rest took the pestilence, and the greater part of them passed away with the people they had come to tend.
At present the Olivetani have been almost everywhere suppressed. Here a few monks remain, their superior being regarded as merely the custode for the government, and there are a certain number of students. The Abbate Generale of the Order resides at Settignano.