We also find the inevitable Lombard cornice beneath the roof. In civil buildings, instead of a complete gallery with colonnettes, this becomes a row of brackets with carvings in the corbel heads. The windows of the lower floor are square orifices barred with iron, for defence in warlike times. The walls are either of the solid brickwork opus romanum, or the great smoothly hewn stones of the opus gallicum. In Lombardy there are more of the former, as clay for bricks is easily attainable. In Tuscany and southward the buildings are more frequently of stone. The Florentine Bargello, though later, offers a very fine specimen of this work, in the older portions of wall, where the smooth-cut stones fit solidly together. If the building required an inner courtyard it was of the same Lombard style as their churches—showing the round arch, and the convex capital, often sculptured.
Tosinghorum Palatium Florentiae celeberrimum in Foro Veteri situm lapide dolato comlumnisque marmoreis extructum cui Turris adjacens ulnar. 130 proceritate erigebatur.
Tracing of an old print of the Tosinghi Palace, a mediæval building once in Florence, with Laubia on the front.
The municipal palace only came in with the Communes after 1100. In Longobardic times, the only buildings that had any pretensions to architecture were the palaces of the dukes or kings. Luitprand's palace in Milan, which fell into disuse after the tenth century, is as graphically described by old chroniclers and in legal documents in the archives of St. Ambrose, as Theodolinda's at Monza had been by Paulus Diaconus.
Before the days of the Communes, when the Brolio or Broletta, and the Palazzo Pubblico were as yet unknown, the palace of the ruling prince was the hall of justice, the nearest Basilica being the public meeting-place. King Luitprand's palace was styled in his time Curtis ducati. In Charlemagne's reign it was Curti domum Imperatoris; in other parchments Curtis Mediolanensis. Across the front ran an open gallery, called Laubia,[49] formed, as were the galleries of the Comacine churches, of a row of arches on colonnettes. Here the placiti were held, and sentences pronounced, as in the regal and imperial public buildings, the populace being assembled in the street below. The ringhiera of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence served the same purpose in Communal times.
The Loggia, which is such a feature in all old Italian houses, is the natural descendant of the Laubia. In its private aspect, as part of a citizen's house, the Loggia was the place where the master of the house received his friends.
An ancient MS. by Landolfo tells us that the space occupied by Luitprand's palace was not very wide. It extended from the monastery of St. Ambrose to the church of St. Protasius ad Monacos (now no more), and the road leading to it was known as Strada de Civite Duce.