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"Where does he come from?" continued Sanders. "St. Casciano, a small town in Tuscany." "Has he a family?" "Only a sister, whom he loves dearly," good-naturedly answered the girl. "And no one else?" continued the seemingly garrulous old man. "None that I have heard him speak of. No, certainly not," rather impetuously replied Mildred. "How old is he?" continued the old man.
But at S. Casciano I did not stop. And farther still one comes to the village of Impruneta, after climbing higher and higher, with lovely calm valleys on either side coloured by silver olive groves and vivid wheat and maize, and studded with white villas and villages and church towers. On the road every woman in every doorway plaits straw with rapid fingers just as if we were in Bedfordshire.
It was during his retirement upon his little estate at San Casciano that Machiavelli wrote The Prince, the most famous of all his writings, and here also he had begun a much more extensive work, his Discourses on the Decades of Livy, which continued to occupy him for several years.
With these companions I play the fool all day at cards or backgammon: a thousand squabbles, a thousand insults and abusive dialogues take place, while we haggle over a farthing, and shout loud enough to be heard from San Casciano. But when evening falls I go home and enter my writing-room.
The troops, thus withdrawn from the pursuit of their good fortune, were marched to San Casciano, a castle within eight miles of Florence; the leaders thinking they could take up no other position till the relics of the routed army were assembled.
Whereupon Jacopo made a most superb model of wood, all covered with scenes and figures of wax, which were executed for the most part by Tribolo; and these proving to be very beautiful, the young man's fame so increased that Matteo di Lorenzo Strozzi Tribolo having now left Sansovino, thinking that he was by that time able to work by himself commissioned him to make some children of stone, and shortly afterwards, being much pleased with them, two of marble that are holding a dolphin which pours water into a fish-pond, a work that is now to be seen at San Casciano, a place eight miles distant from Florence, in the villa of that M. Matteo.
But Tribolo had scarcely finished the escutcheon, which was very large, and one of those Victories, a figure four braccia high, which was held to be a very beautiful thing, when he was obliged to leave that work incomplete, for the reason that, Maestro Pietro having carried well on the making of the aqueduct and the bringing of the waters, to the full satisfaction of the Duke, his Excellency wished that Tribolo should begin to put into execution, for the adornment of that place, the designs and models that he had already shown to him, ordaining him for the time being a salary of eight crowns a month, the same that was paid to San Casciano.
With this design they removed their camp from Santo Casciano to Santo Geminiano, about five miles from Colle, and with light cavalry and other suitable forces were able every day to annoy the duke's camp.
In 1513 he was suspected of complicity in the conjuration of Pietropaolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, was imprisoned in the Bargello, and tortured to the extent of four turns of the rack. It seems that he was innocent. Leo X. released him by the act of amnesty passed upon the event of his assuming the tiara; and Machiavelli immediately retired to his farm near San Casciano.
For, in addition to the many temples, convents, and sepulchres, which she caused to be scattered over the northern part of Italy, she built the beautiful public baths at Casciano, and the great hospital of Altapascio.
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