The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

“Superficially,” writes John Addington Symonds, “much of the present charm of Siena consists in the soft opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the city into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not peculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness which stirs melancholy.”160

We leave Siena by the Porta Fontebranda, along the way by which the returning Noveschi crept up to the city walls on that fateful night between July 21st and 22nd, 1487, turning back at intervals for the varied glimpses of San Domenico with its huge red bulk and tower, or the gleaming marbles of the Duomo. At the antimony works, where the road divides, we take the way to the right, westwards. Presently we mount up again, through lanes on either side that might almost be English – only, when these break away, the silvery olives, the convents on the hills, Siena’s towers and the distant mountains remind us that we are in Tuscany. “The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena,” to quote Symonds once more, “lies westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is a region of deep lanes and golden-green oak woods, with cypresses and stone-pines, and little streams in all directions flowing over the brown sandstone. The country is like some parts of rural England – Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleenwort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut.” The view of Siena behind us gradually expands, as we mount up. When the little chapel is passed, we keep to the right; presently an avenue of oaks and ilex-trees leads to the villa, or castello, of Belcaro.

Belcaro, superbly situated and thickly clothed round with a magnificent grove of rich, dark-green ilex-trees, was a strongly fortified place in the early days of the Republic, and in the fourteenth century it belonged to the Savini. At the beginning of 1377 it was much decayed, and Nanni di Ser Vanni Savini gave it to St Catherine, with the consent of the government, to be made into a convent of “religious women who shall continually pray for the city and inhabitants of Siena.” She called it Santa Maria degli Angeli, and several of her letters are addressed from it. Later on, the convent became a fortress once more, and at one time belonged to the Bellanti; in 1525 it came into the hands of the Turamini, a rich family of bankers. Crescenzio Turamini had the present palace, loggia and chapel built from the designs of Baldassare Peruzzi, and employed the master himself to decorate them with frescoes. On the ceiling of a hall on the ground floor is the Judgment of Paris, which has caught not a little of the Raphaelesque grace and charm of the decorations of the Farnesina. It has been repainted. A loggia is likewise covered with decorative work, mythological scenes and arabesques, which have been so modernised by restoration that nothing really remains of Peruzzi’s original work save the invention and design. In the chapel there are a Madonna and Saints behind the altar from his hand, with Evangelists and Saints on the walls, and the arms of the Turamini above. These are practically Peruzzi’s last works, and were finished at the beginning of 1535, but have all been more or less ruined by the restorers. In a room in the villa there is a Madonna and Child with St Catherine and San Bernardino – a lovely little picture by Matteo di Giovanni.

There is a typical inclosed Italian garden of romance, with its lemon-trees and pomegranates; but the chief charm of Belcaro is its noble view. Upon all sides, as we wander along its terraces and parapets, the mountains and the valleys of the Sienese dominion lie outstretched before us, Siena herself l’amorosa madre di dolcezza away to the east, the grove of ilex-trees at our feet. A trophy of canon balls records the great siege of the city. At the beginning of the war, Belcaro was held by the forces of the Republic. On April 4th, 1554, it was attacked by the imperialists in force, 2000 infantry and 50 horsemen, with two pieces of artillery. A mere handful of French soldiers, eight in number, under a Beaufort, held out till noon, when their officer was killed and the rest surrendered. Afterwards, the Marchese di Marignano had his headquarters here. Beneath Peruzzi’s fresco or among the trees of the garden, he may have drunk wine with his captains while the hapless victims, the “useless mouths,” lay perishing between the walls of the city and the trenches of his soldiery. Here, in April 1555, he received the two Sienese ambassadors, Girolamo Malavolti and Alessandro Guglielmi, who came to make the necessary arrangements for the surrender of the city, after the terms of the capitulation had been decided in Florence.

Instead of turning up at the chapel to go to Belcaro, we turn down to the right and then again down through the flowery lanes to the left, where huge white or grey oxen drawing wains block the way at intervals, and a dark-eyed boy, leading two beautiful white goats, greets us in his pleasant musical Tuscan. Suddenly the landscape changes. The lanes end and woods appear – we are approaching the great Selva del Comune. Above the forest ground, over the scantier trees to the left, rises, solitary and austere, the convent of the Augustinian hermits, San Salvatore di Lecceto: “a blessed place,” writes Ambrogio Landucci, “in which the Most High chose to work so many wonders.” According to tradition, the disciples of St Ansanus fled to these woods when the Roman persecutors discovered their hiding-places in the city; St Augustine found hermits here in the fourth century, and gave them a rule of life. St Monica and St Jerome are said to have visited the place, and William of Aquitaine (this, at least, seems a historical fact), whom Dante afterwards saw among the warriors of the Cross in the rosy sphere of Mars. “Our ancient hermitage,” says Landucci, “was ever a sweet attraction for sanctity.” Francis, the Seraphic Father of Assisi, came here too, and plucked from one of its ilexes the stick which he afterwards stuck into the ground at Capraia, and which grew up into a goodly tree. The place was originally known as the Convento di Selva, the Convent of the Wood, which was also called the Selva di Lago, because of the lake or swamp (afterwards drained) that lay at the foot of the hill. The name Lecceto is derived from the abundant ilex-trees which, though much reduced in numbers, are still one of the glories of the district. The golden age of the convent begins after 1256, when Pope Alexander IV. united all the Augustinian hermits into one order, and Lecceto became the head house of Tuscany. It produced an enormous number of beati, of whom Fra Filippo Agazzari, the pious novelist, and William Flete, St Catherine’s correspondent, an Englishman who had settled here, are the only ones whose fame has penetrated beyond the boundaries of Tuscany.

Wonderful legends linger round the convent and the forest, told with much vividness and simplicity by Fra Filippo, with much unction by Landucci. Angels are said to have descended in human form, to eat with the hermits in their refectory or to succour them in their needs; the flowers of this forest, when sent to other places, healed the sick and worked miracles, “all evident signs that here flourished a continual spring of Paradise.” The Dominican Ambrogio Sansedoni, then a young knight, coming from Siena up through the wood to the convent (the very way in which we are treading now), was assailed by the fiend in the guise of a beautiful girl whom two ruffians had bound to a tree. The pious historian assures us that the knots had been tied by the Gordius of Hell to entangle Ambrogio’s soul, but that, while he laboured to untie them, he discovered the snare and repulsed the foe by the sign of the Cross.161

Very sweet and pleasant are the pictures that Fra Filippo gives us of the priors of Lecceto in his day; for “the friars who had to choose them, always put in that convent for prior the best friar and the one of most holy life that there was in the province.” He tells us of Frate Bandino de’ Balzetti, who was so strict in the rules that when he saw a thief taking away the convent donkey at the time of silence, rather than break the silence or cause the friars to break it, he let him lead it off, while he himself went into the church to pray for the redemption of that thief’s soul. Of course the thief was miraculously moved to repentance, and the prior sent him away in peace with a plenteous alms.162 He tells in full the life of Frate Niccolò Tini, a friar of the convent of Sant’ Agostino in Siena, young in years but old in wisdom and sanctity, who was made Prior of Lecceto in 1332 and ruled it until his death in 1388. It was under him that Filippo himself entered as a novice in 1353, and he records with enthusiastic love and admiration the man’s boundless humility and meekness, patience and charity. Suffering agonies from two horrible complaints, the Prior was always bright and kind, though his face would show sometimes the agony he endured. He loved to tend the sick with his own hands, to distribute all that the convent had of bread and wine to the poor – himself going to the gate to do it, because he knew that they would not fare so well at the hands of the other brethren. “His joyous face seemed that of Moses, so burned his heart with love and charity, and with such gladness did he receive strangers, especially the servants of God.” Many times during his priorate the friars had to fly from the place, when the wandering companies of mercenaries were ravaging the contado. “One morning,” says Fra Filippo, “I arrived there with a companion at the dinner hour, in the days when a company was expected, and already all the place was cleared, and we found the Prior alone, for the other friars had fled with the goods from the place. And as soon as he saw us, that blessed Prior received us with so much love and charity and with such gladness, that it was a wondrous thing. And in all the place there remained nothing to eat, save only two rolls which he had kept for himself, very small, and some wine and some leeks. And with a holy charity he constrained us to eat with him, and he set those two rolls on a table without a cloth, and the wine and the leeks. God knoweth that I do not lie, but I never found myself at feasts nor at weddings nor at any banquet, where I seemed to myself to fare so well and so abundantly or where the food did me so much good; and the like befell my companion. For the sweetness of the words of God that were on his lips was meat above all the meats of the world.”

Once whilst Frate Niccolò was prior – it must have been a few years after Filippo entered the convent – Lecceto was threatened by the Sienese themselves. Shortly after the fall of the Nine in 1355, when Massa and Casole and other places were in arms against the new regime of the Twelve, a son of Messer Ranieri da Casole was seen to come into the wood with certain foot soldiers. The rumour spread that the Prior of Lecceto was sheltering outlaws, who came to do evil to the city of Siena. More than four hundred armed contadini threatened the convent, captured three of the men in the wood and sent them to the Podesta, while in Siena there uprose an uproar in the Campo, and the people shouted to go to Lecceto and burn the place down. The friars of Sant’ Agostino sent a warning to the Prior, that the people were already on their way to waste the place. While the armed crowd of peasants broke into the convent and rang the bells a martello, the Prior shut himself into the chapel and prayed earnestly before the image of the Saviour. At once a sudden rain fell; the three prisoners, whom the mob had been going to hang, were led back to the Podesta and proved innocent; the armed forces of the people turned back, the contadini went quietly home, “so that in a short while all the Place was cleared of folk, and that blessed Prior remained in peace with his friars.”163

Perhaps, St Catherine preferred saints of a more robust temper. It is somewhat curious that she appears to have had no intercourse with Frate Niccolò, though we have several letters of hers addressed to other friars of Lecceto, especially Antonio da Nizza and William Flete. They were among the men of holy life whom Pope Urban summoned to Rome, to assist in the reformation of the Church, and neither wished to leave their beloved solitude. “I shall see,” she wrote to them, “if we really have conceived love for the Reformation of holy Church. For if it is really so, you will follow the will of God and of His Vicar, you will leave the wood and come to enter upon the field of battle. But if you do not do it, you will be disregarding the will of God. And, therefore, I pray you, by the love of Christ crucified, that you come soon, without delay, at the demand that the Holy Father makes of you. And do not fear that you will not have a wood; for here there are woods and forests.”164

We pass up through the oaks and ilex-trees – the latter, scanty in parts and freshly planted round the convent buildings, are grand and dense enough further on to make a real forest still – until we reach the Eremo, with its small church and castle-like square tower of the monastery. The present buildings, though restored, date from the fourteenth century, and the tower was built in 1404, when Filippo himself was Prior. The place is silent and deserted now, left in the charge of a family of contadini, save for a month or so in the year, when the students of the Archbishop’s seminary of Siena come here for their villeggiatura.

Outside the church, in the portico, are frescoes painted about 1343 by a certain Paolo di Maestro Neri, a follower of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, somewhat recalling the style and spirit of those of the master himself in the Sala de’ Nove, or those by that other unknown pupil of his in the Campo Santo of Pisa. The whole portico in front of the church is covered with them, mainly in monochrome; partly obliterated, they originally formed one of those vast allegories of human life in which the painters of the Trecento – above all the Sienese – delighted. The artist here is as severely ascetical and monastic in spirit as the unknown master of the “Triumph of Death.” On the one side is Paradise; on the other side is Hell. The long wall between them sets forth the life of the cloister and the life of the world, the one leading to Heaven, the other to Hell. In the one, we have peace and war; love-making and dancing; feasting and dicing, the loser seizing the winner by the throat; the car of pleasure, over which Cupid flies, while youths and ladies are with musicians within; a great boar-hunt; money-changing; a court of law; travellers waylaid by robbers. The devils are in it all; they wait by the gaming-table, they sit on the horse that draws the car of pleasure, they watch the hunting and all man’s ordinary business, they pounce upon the soul of the murdered, they preside over the death-bed of the impenitent. War is raging in earnest; a grim sea-fight is in progress, the devils are blowing on the ships and urging them against each other; there is the storming of a castle – the demons sound the trumpets for the onslaught, and carry off through the air the souls of those that fall. But above, behind the city from whose gates the pleasure-seeking crowd of worldlings has passed out, is Christ with the banner of the Resurrection – ready to save, if only they will turn to Him.165 And in the other fresco to our left, a number of men of all ages and conditions have taken their crosses upon their shoulders, to carry them after Christ. We are shown the Works of Mercy and the life of the Evangelical Counsels. The devil is here too – but only to be vanquished and put to flight. Then we have the death of the just – in the corner, to match the death of the impenitent sinner at the end of the other fresco. And after that, comes only the Paradise.

The frescoed Christ over the door of the church is probably by the same painter. In the second cloister there are a number of frescoes originally painted at the beginning of the Quattrocento. They are greatly damaged, obliterated in parts, completely restored in others; we get a vague general impression of hermits doing works of mercy and seeing visions, of St Augustine giving his rule, of holy deaths in convents and hermitages. Further on are five better preserved. The first is the story of Giovanni di Guccio, told by Fra Filippo.166 Giovanni di Guccio, who belonged to a wealthy family of the Monte de’ Nove, entered Lecceto as a boy, but in the noviciate found the coarse food so trying that he thought that he would have to leave the Order. In the wood he met “an ancient man of right venerable aspect,” who confirmed him in his vocation. “And suddenly He showed him the wounds of His side and of His hands and feet, from which there issued such great splendour that that of the Sun is nothing in comparison with it, and they all seemed bleeding. Then, straightway, He vanished.” This Giovanni was prior in 1323 and often told this story as an example, as of another person, and not until his death did the brethren know that he spoke of himself. In the other frescoes, we see an abbot preaching in front of the convent, a painted ideal of penitential life and pious death, the monks journeying with a sainted prior in their midst, and the return of the lost sheep to the fold. The whole cloister, with the well in the middle, is picturesque. There is little to see in the church, where a few frescoed saints seem striving to emerge from the whitewash.

Down among the vines (on the left of the entrance as you face the convent) is the famous holy well, the “Poggio Santo,” now dilapidated. According to the legend, piously recorded by Landucci, there was at first no water to be had, but one of the hermits, novella Moisè “novello” Moisè, struck the arid soil with a rod, and at once a spring of limpid water gushed out, with miraculous powers of curing those stricken with fever. One of the original hermits is said to have been buried in this field, and our pious historian even discovers some hidden mystery of divine things in the colours of the stones that lie around.

In a clearing in the wood on the eminence opposite the convent is the little chapel, now restored, of San Pio. In November 1460, the friars of the chapter and convent of San Salvatore, otherwise Lecceto, presented a petition to the Signoria of Siena, to the effect that they wanted to build an oratory under the name of San Pio and could find no place more suited to their purpose than the hill opposite the Place of Lecceto, “the which hill belongs to the magnificent city of Siena, and is a woody and stony place, from which no fruit can be got.” They therefore beg the Magnificent Signoria to give them enough land on the said hill to build their chapel: “which thing will be acceptable to our Lord God, and also will greatly please the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius the Second, who has many times been to the said place. And your petitioners undertake ever to pray to God for your Magnificent Signoria, that it may prosper and increase in a good and pacific state.” The name of “the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius” was at that time one with which to conjure, and their petition was approved successively by the Concistoro, the Council of the People, and the General Council.167

At the bridge below Belcaro, we keep to the right and then turn off to the left, skirting the wood, to San Leonardo al Lago, the remains of a hermitage in the forest which was connected with Lecceto. Here Agostino Novello, who had been Manfred’s minister, lived in his austere old age and died. A few picturesque ruins of the hermitage remain, with the woods rising up behind them, but the rest are farm buildings. The church contains, in the choir, a beautiful series of frescoes: the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Sposalizio; with, on the four segments of the vault, four choirs of Angels, singing and making music, gazing down on the sacred scenes on the walls or assisting at the Mass on the altar below. They appear to be works of some later follower of the Lorenzetti, but are ascribed to a certain Pietro di Lorenzo, a mediocre painter of the early Quattrocento. Four small miracles of St Leonard, on the left, almost obliterated, are of no artistic importance, but one of them gives a most vivid representation of the torture of the corda or strappado, with the scribe taking down the confession; in this case, the Saint is upholding the victim. In the crypt is the original burial-place of Agostino Novello.

The Abbazia di San Galgano, a long drive from the Porta San Marco, was a Cistercian house whose monks at one epoch regularly served the Republic as Camarlinghi di Biccherna. According to the legend, Galgano Guidotti came hither in 1180, and on Monte Siepi, above the Merse, struck his sword into the rock. Here he died in 1181. A few years later the Bishop of Volterra, Ugo dei Saladini, built a round chapel over the hermitage and founded a small house of Cistercians. This chapel still remains. The great Cistercian monastery and abbey-church of San Galgano, in the plain of the Merse, were built in the thirteenth century, being probably begun in 1220 and 1224 respectively. Of the monastery, only a few ruins remain. The abbey-church, magnificent still in its ruin, is one of the purest and noblest pieces of Gothic architecture in Italy; it is a typical building of the Cistercians, whose churches and convents, purer in style and earlier in date than those of the Friars Minor and Friars Preachers, have caught more of the true spirit of northern Gothic than have theirs.168

The most famous, and perhaps still the most interesting, of all the monastic houses in the State of Siena is that of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. It can be reached either from Asciano, a picturesque little town with a number of paintings of the Sienese school in its churches, or by driving all the way from Siena by Buonconvento. Pedestrians, if they do not intend to spend the night at the convent, should take the morning diligence to Buonconvento, and walk down to Asciano from Monte Oliveto in the afternoon to catch the evening train back to Siena. We drive out of the Porta Romana, Siena gradually growing more distant behind us, Monte Amiata rising nearer and more distinctly in front. About two miles from Buonconvento we cross the Arbia, and then again by an old bridge outside the gate.

The little townlet of Buonconvento itself, where Henry VII. died in 1313 and Alfonso of Calabria had his headquarters in 1480, is inclosed in well-preserved walls of the fourteenth century, with the balzana and lion of Siena’s Commune and People over the gate. In the one street, which is practically all the place, is an old tower with armorial bearings of generations of Podestàs. The church of San Pietro and San Paolo, near the gate, deserves a visit for a most beautiful little Madonna and Child by Matteo di Giovanni, over the high altar. To the left of the altar are pictures by Sano di Pietro (the Madonna with St Catherine and San Bernardino) and Pacchiarotti (an early work according to Mr Berenson). There are also a frescoed Coronation of the Madonna ascribed to Sano, on the right wall, an Annunciation with the Magdalene and St Antony by Girolamo di Benvenuto, on the left, and a Madonna in glory with Saints in the manner of Pacchia.

From Buonconvento we gradually mount upwards, partly through oak woods, to Monte Oliveto. Long before we reach it, the great red-brick convent becomes visible, with the curious little townlet of Chiusure, once a place of some slight importance, high up on the hill above it, looking like a part of the bleak mountain side. This whole region, the desert of Accona, is wild and barren in the extreme, save where the strenuous labour of these Olivetan monks has effected some cultivation; the convent itself appears as an oasis in a wilderness of cretaceous precipices, or balze. As we mount, it gets wilder and more bare in front, while round and behind us an ever grander and more spacious outlook opens; Siena is dimly seen in the distance, Monte Amiata rising higher and higher to the south, and, more westward, that loftily placed last home and refuge of the battered Republic, heroic Montalcino with its towers. At last we reach the monastery portal, guarded with a machicolated tower like a fortress; a long avenue of cypresses leads down to the church with its massive square tower and the convent buildings, built into the ravines. They are built of a rich red brick which, as Addington Symonds notes, “contrasts not unpleasantly with the lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives.”