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Updated: May 7, 2025
Presently, as the glow moves higher, the battlements and machicolations take a golden clearness that marks every detail against the blue depth of sky whose fire is fading and preparing to change into the calm splendour that mingles with the dusk.
An unusual and very effective ornamentation crowns both stages of the tower, consisting of a series of gradines at top with square machicolations below. The other monument of the pair, distant about twenty feet from the one already described, is architecturally far less happy.
In a piercing voice he cried aloud to the Trojans: "Rise, ye horse-taming Trojans, break the wall of the Argives, and cast among the ships fierce blazing fire." So spake he, spurring them on, and they all heard him with their ears, and in one mass rushed straight against the wall, and with sharp spears in their hands climbed upon the machicolations of the towers.
Though called a castle, the building was little fortified, and had been erected with greater eye to internal convenience than those crannied places of defence to which the name strictly appertains. It was a castellated mansion as regular as a chessboard on its ground-plan, ornamented with make-believe bastions and machicolations, behind which were stacks of battlemented chimneys.
Birds flew from the tops of the towers and the edge of the machicolations to some other spot, described circles in the air, chirped, and soon passed out of sight. About a hundred feet below us were the pointed roofs of the city, the empty courtyards of the old mansions, and the black holes of the smoky chimneys.
One round tower of the walls remains, built of stone, with machicolations and Ghibelline battlements added in brick and plastered; a modern slab over the door gives the date 1455.
The form of this lofty keep is rectangular, and the machicolations and embattlements which were added in the fifteenth century are in a perfect state of preservation. Upon the platform, which I was able to reach by means of ladders and the half-ruinous spiral staircase, viper's bugloss spread its brilliant blue flowers over the dark stones, and enticed the high-soaring bees.
Behind him loomed up the massive Palazzo Vecchio, with its high tower, sharply cut, and set with deep machicolations; to the left, the splendid Loggia of Orgagna, filled with rare marbles, and the long picture-gallery of the Uffizi, heaped with the rarest art-treasures of the world; to his right, the Giant Fountain of Ammanato, throwing jets of pure water one drop of which outvalues all the nostrums in the world; and in front, the Post Office, built centuries before, by Pisan captives.
They have shooting holes from every room and machicolations over the outer doors and along the battlements, and what makes the houses seem to contain even more stories than they do, is that each floor has two ranges of windows, one on the ground so that you can only see out if you sit on the floor, and another too high to see out of at all; below every lower window projects a long wooden spout.
The many-windowed English mansion sleeping among turfy lawns to the plash of a fountain, and the cawing of rooks in the beechwood, tell of a tranquil past life-record broken only by transient unrest; whereas the towers on the Continent with their meurtrieres and frowning machicolations, bristling on every hill, frequent as church spires, now gutted and ruinous, proclaim a protracted reign of oppression and then a sudden upheaval in resentment and a firebrand applied to them all.
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