when blacksmiths were genuine artists. But, however dismal his birthplace, Alexander III. was enlightened in his views. It was in 1167 he declared, in the name of a council, that all Christians ought to be exempted from servitude.
To go back to the Piazza del Campo. Before the Sansedoni palace is the Fonte Gaja—so called from the joyful acclamations of the people, when water was brought into the square in 1343. It is surrounded by an oblong basin of white marble, elegantly sculptured by Giacomo della Quercia, to whom was henceforth given the name of Del Fonte.
Siena, being on a height, was, from the first, obliged to provide water for its inhabitants at great expense. Aqueducts were constructed in the time of the Romans. But a still grander work was achieved in the middle ages, when water was brought from the neighboring mountains by an aqueduct about twenty miles long, that passed beneath the city, giving rise, perhaps, to the derisive report in Dante’s time that the hill was tunnelled in search of the river Diana:
“The fancied stream
They sought, of Dian called.”
These vast subterranean works so excited the admiration of Charles V. that he said Siena was more wonderful below ground than above. Now there are three hundred and fifty-five wells in the city, and eighteen fountains. The deep well in the cloister of the Carmine is called the Pozzo di Diana.
The most noted of the fountains is Fonte Branda, whose waters were so famous in Dante’s time for their sweetness and purity that he makes Adamo of Brescia, the coiner of counterfeit money, exclaim, amid
the flames of the Inferno, that to behold the instigators of his crime undergoing a like torture would be sweeter to him than the cool waters of Fonte Branda:
“For Branda’s limpid font I would not change
The welcome sight.”