The upper portion of the house of which I give a sketch remains very fairly perfect, though its lower story has been entirely modernized. It will be seen that it is very uniform in its design, the large and small windows alternating regularly; and that semi-circular arches are used in the windows in connection with ogee trefoils. This is one of the apparent inconsistencies which occur in almost all Italian Gothic work; and might seem to give us ancient authority for any amount of licence in our combination of the elements of what we ordinarily consider to be thoroughly different styles. The windows are marked by the same elaboration of their sills which we noticed in the Broletto at Bergamo, and the detail of these, as also of the corbelling out from the wall of several chimney-breasts, is exceedingly good.
In a back street in the village I found a house the balconies around which were corbelled forward on finely moulded beams, which, judging by the moulding, could hardly be of later date than the commencement of the fourteenth century.
Wooden mouldings of this kind are much rarer in Italy than they are in the North, and I particularly notice this little relic, therefore, which still remains to show how well the science of moulding was sometimes understood even there.
Such a village as Coccaglio is, as I found afterwards, a place to be made much of; for generally, except in public or important buildings in large towns, one sees very little trace of any mediæval domestic work beyond the perpetually recurring arcading under the houses which is so general a feature in all the towns in the North of Italy.