Nor, for his sake, refused through every vein to tremble.”
Dante, who meets him in Purgatory, alludes to the grandeur of this act as atoning for his ambition, which
“Reached with grasp presumptuous at the sway
Of all Siena.”
So stanch a friend would seem to have deserved a less terrible fate. On the disastrous day of Colle he was taken by the Florentines, who cut off his head, and carried it around the battle-field, fastened on a lance.
On one side of the piazza is the massive Palazzo Pubblico, bristling with battlements. On its front blazes the holy name of Jesus, held up by St. Bernardin of Siena for the reverence of the whole world. The busy throng beneath looks up in its toilsome round, and goes on, the better for a fleeting thought. Below is a pillar with the wolf of pagan Rome that bore Siena. From this palace rises the beautiful tower del Mangia, seen far and wide over the whole country, so called from the automaton which used to come forth at mid-day, like the Moor at Venice, to strike the hours. This figure was to the Sienese what Pasquino was to Rome. To it were confided all the epigrams of the city wits; but, alas for them! one day, when it came forth to do its duty, a spring gave way, and it fell to the ground and was dashed in pieces. This tower commands an admirable view. North, the country looks barren, but the slopes of Chianti are celebrated for their wines, and Monte Maggio is covered with forests. South and west, it is fresher and more smiling, but leads to the fatal marshes of Maremma. Santa Fiora, the most productive mountain, annually yields vast quantities of umber. The happy valleys are full of olives and wheat-fields. Farther
off, to the south, the volcanic summits of Radicofani, associated with Boccaccio’s tales, blacken the horizon. To the east everything is bleak and dreary, the whole landscape of a pale, sickly green.
At the foot of the tower is a beautiful votive chapel of the Virgin, built in the fourteenth century after a pestilence which carried off eighty thousand people from Siena and its environs. It is like an open porch resting on sculptured pillars. Over the altar within are statues and a fresco of the Madonna, before which are flowers and lamps burning in the bright sunlight—all open to the air, as if to catch a passing invocation from the lips of those who might otherwise spare no thought, amid their toils, for heaven.
Siena is peculiarly the city of Mary. Before the great battle with the Florentines,
“That colored Arbia’s flood with crimson stain,”