United States or Finland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
And this forms its main interest at the present time. We see in Pienza how the most active-minded and intelligent man of his epoch, the representative genius of Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, commanding vast wealth and the Pontifical prestige, worked out his whim of city-building.
Those who have a day to spare at Montepulciano can scarcely spend it better than in an excursion to Pienza and San Quirico. Leaving the city by the road which takes a westerly direction, the first object of interest is the Church of San Biagio, placed on a fertile plateau immediately beneath the ancient acropolis.
Those charming episodes and accidents of fancy, in which the Gothic style and the style of the earlier Lombard Renaissance abounded, are wholly wanting to the rigid, mathematical, hard-headed genius of the Florentine quattrocento. Pienza, therefore, disappoints us. Its heavy palace frontispieces shut the spirit up in a tight box.
"There are treasures here," said he. "See these two Chinese vases with convex lids, with the orange ground decorated with gilding. Those are pieces no longer made in China. It is a lost art. And this tete-a-tete decorated with flowers; and this pluvial cope in this case. What a marvel! It is as good as the one of Pius Second, which was at Pienza and which has been stolen.
With the exception of the very small portion reserved for the Signori, when they visit Pienza, the palace has become a granary for country produce in a starveling land. There was one redeeming point about it to my mind.
The good-natured young man hurried away, and Philip, taking his place, flooded her with a final stream of advice and injunctions where to stop, how to learn Italian, when to use mosquito-nets, what pictures to look at. "Remember," he concluded, "that it is only by going off the track that you get to know the country. See the little towns Gubbio, Pienza, Cortona, San Gemignano, Monteriano.
Comparing Monte Oliveto with similar districts of cretaceous soil with the country, for example, between Pienza and San Quirico we perceive how much is owed to the monks whom Bernardo Tolomei planted here. So far as it is clothed at all with crop and wood, this is their service.
Then, no doubt, they will stand behind the door and see what he does when he wakes. At Pienza Signora Carletti was copying parts of it in needlework, nor can I think that the original was ever better than the parts which she had already done. The work would take weeks or even months to examine with any fullness, and volumes to describe.
It is difficult to believe that this creta of Southern Tuscany, which has all the appearance of barrenness, and is a positive deformity in the landscape, can be really fruitful. Yet we are frequently being told that it only needs assiduous labour to render it enormously productive. When we reached Pienza we were already in the middle of a country without cultivation, abandoned to the marl.
Word Of The Day