The large prison that rises up at the walls, to the left of us, occupies the site of the Rocca that defended the town until the Florentine occupation in 1353. After that, a Dominican convent was built upon the spot—the convent in which Savonarola stayed while preaching the Lent in the Pieve. It was suppressed in the eighteenth century by the Austrian Grand Duke of Tuscany. Opposite to it, in the Via del Castello, is the little church of San Lorenzo in Ponte, with a few unimportant frescoes of the Trecento.
Passing under the Arco de’ Talei into the Via San Giovanni, we see a large piece of the first circuit of walls on the right, adjoining the Portone, blackened apparently by fire, and the tall Torre Talei. Opposite the tower is a shrine, with a ruined fresco by Mainardi. In the refectory of a former convent of Benedictine nuns (now the Palazzo Pratellesi) is a very Peruginesque fresco by Vincenzo Tamagni, representing the mystical marriage of St Catherine of Alexandria; it is dated 1528. On the left is the dismantled façade of San Giovanni, a building of the eleventh century. Over the inside of the gate is a chapel built in 1601 to cover a venerated picture, but the outside of the Porta San Giovanni is still unspoiled thirteenth century architecture.
A short way beyond the Porta San Giovanni is the former monastery of Monte Oliveto, founded in 1340 by Giovanni di Gualtiero Salvucci. In the lunette over the door of the church is a fresco of the Madonna between two white-robed monks, possibly by Tamagni. There is a Madonna of 1502 in the church by Mainardi, and two Sienese pictures of the school of Lippo Memmi are in the sacristy. In the cloister is a frescoed Crucifixion by Benozzo Gozzoli, with St Jerome beating his breast and saying the Rosary at the foot of the Cross. Beyond Monte Oliveto, a road of olives and barley fields leads to the small hamlet of Santa Lucia. In its church are a fresco of the Crucifixion, with a little Dominican kneeling at the foot, by Pier Francesco, and a picture by Fra Paolino—one of those compositions of Madonnas and Saints that he inherited from Fra Bartolommeo.
Outside the Porta San Matteo is the convent of the Cappuccini. In its church is a Deposition from the Cross of 1591, ascribed to Jacopo Ligozzi of Verona. About two miles further on, with a splendid view over the valley, is Cellole, a Romanesque church of the first years of the thirteenth century. Attached to it was the Leper Hospital, where San Bartolo devoted his life to the stricken and where at last, himself overtaken by the fell disease, he became one with the rest and died.
Behind the Collegiata, the way leads up to the Rocca di Montestaffoli, the fortress which the Florentines built after 1353, to maintain their hold upon the town. “The Commune of Florence,” writes Matteo Villani, “because it wished to live more secure of the town of San Gimignano and to remove every cause of evil thinking from its townsfolk, began to have made and finished, without leaving off the work at their expense, a great and noble Rocca and fort, the which was raised above the Pieve, where was the church of the Friars Preachers. And that church it had rebuilt, larger and more beautiful, on the other side of the town lower down.”[196] It was dismantled, two hundred years later, by Cosimo de’ Medici. The greater part of it is now a garden, with the old well in the middle of it. Ivy and purple foxgloves clothe the walls; figs and olives and cherries grow where once the fanti of the Florentine captains lolled in their tight parti-coloured dress. The varied noises rising from the town mingle pleasantly with the humming of bees. The highest part commands a superb view over the valley of the Elsa bounded by the distant mountains, the terra itself below with, close at hand, the belle torri rising as it were in the face of their Florentine lords, and away northwards is Boccaccio-haunted Certaldo. One at least of Messer Giovanni’s fair heroines came from San Gimignano—the Isabetta whom English poets and English painters have surely made our own. Her father, it will be remembered, was a citizen of San Gimignano who had settled in Messina.
San Gimignano must be seen on some day of festa and procession, such as that solemnity of Santa Fina which is kept once in every five years on the first Sunday in August, or, more easily perhaps, on the annual celebration of the Corpus Domini. On the afternoon of the vigil of the latter day, the children wander out over the fields of all the country round for miles, returning at nightfall with baskets full of red and yellow flowers (the colours of the Commune), to be scattered in the way on the morrow. Then on the morning of the Festa, after High Mass at the Duomo, the procession passes under the Tower of the Commune, through the streets, between those grim towers, beneath the massive dark portoni, round and round the piazze. First come the various companies and confraternities of the contado with their priests and banners, then the Cappuccini with the gigantic black crucifix, followed by the canons of the Collegiata and, under the baldacchino, the Proposto bearing the Blessed Sacrament. The procession is almost exclusively composed of men and boys, the women and girls contenting themselves with scattering the red and yellow flowers before it as it advances. The crowd follows from place to place, falling down in adoration as the Sacred Host comes past. The bandsmen, the one obtrusive note of municipal modernity, with their uniforms, their white plumes and tricoloured favours, only make themselves evident at intervals, and whatever there may be of tawdriness in the decorations and the finery is lost and transfigured in the glory of the Tuscan early summer. Old Latin hymns, the Church’s heritage from the remotest Middle Ages, mingle and harmonise with the clamour of the bells that clashed out a stormo while Guelfs and Ghibellines struggled madly together in these very streets through which the waving banners move to-day, that rang a gloria for the coming of Bishop Ranieri the peacemaker, or were swung to and fro by the hands of invisible Angels when the maiden Fina died. What more would the seeker for fresh sensations in Italy desire?
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX
THE following short note on Books and Authorities is not intended as a complete bibliography, but simply as a guide to further information upon the subjects dealt with in the present volume, and upon others which the limited space at my disposal has compelled me to treat somewhat cursorily and summarily.
A.—HISTORY.
Orlando Malavolti, Historia de’ Fatti e Guerre dei Senesi, così esterne come civili, seguite dall’ origine della lor Città, fino all’ anno M.D. LV. Venice, 1599.