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She was just reaching for the crown, when the padre came into the cloister and stopped with amazement as his eye fell on the group. "Fra Lorenzo," said he, after a moment, "you are sent for to go to Casale Montalcino: Giuseppe is dying; and you will stay there until the last offices are finished." The young monk seemed under a spell which he shook off with difficulty.
Stretched upon the smooth turf of the Castello, we bade adieu to the divine landscape bathed in light and mountain air to Thrasymene and Chiusi and Cetona; to Amiata, Pienza, and S. Quirico; to Montalcino and the mountains of Volterra; to Siena and Cortona; and, closer to Monte Fallonica, Madonna di Biagio, the house-roofs and the Palazzo tower of Montepulciano.
As for the box," he took it in its turn to study it, "these are really the half-moons of the Piccolominis. But what does that prove? That after the siege, and just as it was necessary to retire to Montalcino, Montluc gave his prayer-book, as a souvenir, to some of that family. The volume was either lost or stolen, and finally reduced to the state in which it now is.
And then there are the cities, placed each upon a point of vantage: Siena; olive-mantled Chiusi; Cortona, white upon her spreading throne; poetic Montalcino, lifted aloft against the vaporous sky; San Quirico, nestling in pastoral tranquillity; Pienza, where Æneas Sylvius built palaces and called his birthplace after his own Papal name.
Accordingly, in the next year, the pacific Florentines began by ravaging the territory of Pistoja; then attacked the Pisans at Pontadera, and took 3000 prisoners; and finished by traversing, and eating up all that could be ate in, the country of Siena; besides beating the Sienese under the castle of Montalcino.
He may be as ignorant as a Bersagliere from Montalcino with whom I once conversed at Rimini, who gravely said that he could walk in three months to North America, and thought of doing it when his term of service was accomplished.
In the middle of the vast sad landscape, the place is still, with a silence that can be almost heard. The deserted state of those innumerable cells, those echoing corridors and shadowy cloisters, exercises overpowering tyranny over the imagination. Siena is so far away, and Montalcino is so faintly outlined on its airy parapet, that these cities only deepen our sense of desolation.
It is still circled with the wall and gates built by the Sienese in 1366, and is a fair specimen of an intact mediæval stronghold. Here we leave the main road, and break into a country-track across a bed of sandstone, with the delicate volcanic lines of Monte Amiata in front, and the aërial pile of Montalcino to our right.
This village lies on the edge of a great oasis in the Sienese desert an oasis, formed by the waters of the Orcia and Asso sweeping down to join Ombrone, and stretching on to Montalcino.
As for the box," he took it in its turn to study it, "these are really the half-moons of the Piccolominis. But what does that prove? That after the siege, and just as it was necessary to retire to Montalcino, Montluc gave his prayer-book, as a souvenir, to some of that family. The volume was either lost or stolen, and finally reduced to the state in which it now is.
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