This fountain has also been celebrated by Alfieri, who often came to Siena to visit his friend, Francesco Gori, with whom he remained months at a time. He liked the character of the people, and said, when he went away, that he left a part of his heart behind. And yet Dante, perhaps because a Florentine, accused the Sienese of being light and vain:
“Was ever race
Light as Siena’s? Sure, not France herself
Can show a tribe so frivolous and vain.”
Formerly, if not still, giddy people in Tuscany were often asked if they had been drinking water from the Fonte Branda, as if that would account for any excess.
The Sienese are proud of the fame and antiquity of this fount, which is known to have existed in 1081. It flows at the very bottom of one of the deep ravines which makes Siena so peculiar, between two precipitous hills, one crowned by the Duomo, and the other by the church of St. Dominic, and you look from one to the other in silent wonder. The whole quarter is densely populated. The people are called Fontebrandini—mostly, as five centuries ago, tanners, dyers, and fullers, who are reputed to be proud, and are to Siena what the Trasteverini are to Rome. The streets around diverge from a market-place, on one side of which is the fount under a long, open arcade of stone, of immense thickness, built against the hillside. You go down to a paved court, as to something
sacred, by a flight of steps as wide as the arcade is long. Here are stone seats around, as if to accommodate the gossips of the neighborhood. Three pointed archways, between which lions look out with prey between their outstretched paws, open into the arcade, where flow the waters, gathered from the surrounding hills, by three apertures, into an enormous stone reservoir. The surplus waters pass off into other tanks beyond the arcade, for the use of the workmen of the quarter. Lemon-trees hang over the fount, and grape-vines trail from tree to tree. The steep hillside is covered with bushes and verdure up to the church of San Domenico, which stands stern and majestic, with its crenelated tower amid the olive-trees.
An old Sienese romance is connected with the Fonte Branda. Cino da Pistoja, a poet and celebrated professor of jurisprudence at Siena in the fourteenth century, whose death Petrarch laments in a sonnet, promised his daughter, a young lady of uncommon beauty, to any one of his pupils who should best solve a knotty law-question. It was a young man, misshapen in form, to whom the prize was adjudged, and the poor girl, in her horror, threw herself into the Fonte Branda. Her suitor, sensible of the value of the prize, plunged in after her, and not only saved her life, but fortunately succeeded in winning her affections.
Turning to the right, and ascending the Costa dei Tintori, you come in a few moments to the house of St. Catharine of Siena, once the shop of her father, a dyer, but now a series of oratories and chapels, sanctified by holy memories and adorned by art. It is built of brick, with two arched galleries, one above
the other, of a later period. Sposæ XPI. Katharinæ Domvs is on the front, with a small head of the saint graven in marble, and another tablet styling her the Seraphic Catharine. Below hang tanned skins, probably for sale. The memories of the place are truly seraphic, but the odors would by no means be considered so by those who do not believe in the dignity and sacredness of labor; for the whole quarter—at least, when we were there—was redolent of tan. Skins hung on all the houses. Tan-cakes for fuel were displayed on shelves for sale at every door. Everybody seemed industrious. There was none of the far niente we like to associate with Italy. It was a positive grievance to find great heaps of tan around the Fonte Branda, so poetical to us, because associated with the Divine Poet. But it was still harder to have the same odors follow us to the very house of the seraphic St. Catharine, the mystic Bride of Christ. Very little change can have taken place during the last five centuries in the neighborhood where bloomed this fair lily of the church, and, in one sense, this is a satisfaction. The house itself is of the most touching interest. There are the stairs Catharine, when a child, used to ascend, with an Ave at every step, and over which the legend says she was so often borne by the angels. Everywhere through the passages are the emblematic lily and heart. An oratory has been made of the kitchen which became to Catharine a very sanctuary, instead of a place of low cares, where she served Christ under the form of her father, the Blessed Virgin under that of her mother, and the disciples in the persons of her brothers and sisters. Her father’s Bottega has also been