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Updated: June 27, 2025
As examples of his lighter vein, we might allude to the sonnet on the Sistine and the capitolo in answer to Francesco Berni, written in the name of Fra Sebastiano. Sometimes his satire becomes malignant, as in the sonnet against the people of Pistoja, which breathes the spirit of Dantesque invective.
Whether she meant by that more than a sympathetic affection, a common cause, an adventure shared, a comradeship, I know not or at least I did not know then. All I have to add is, that she never betrayed it. I lived in Pistoja for a month or more, very happily, without money in my pocket or a house to my name, to the benefit of my health and spirits and with no injury to my heart's treasure.
"Do you know, Don Francesco, how small a part of the person the laws of morality compel you to cover? There is not a dust-box in Pistoja but will give you a new suit to that measure every day." Food? "Have you ever asked yourself," she would exclaim, "how many pounds of bread we throw to the dogs in the week? Enough to feed fifty packs of hounds." Drink? "It streams at every street corner."
Pistoja, with its pleasant worship of the wholesome in common life; Lucca, girdled with the grey and green of her immemorial planes, and adorned with the silvery gloss of old marble and stone-cutter's work exquisitely curious; then Prato, dusty little handful of old brick palaces and black and white towers, where I heard a mass before the high altar but two Sundays ago.
This and this alone is the cause of the hate of the great Florentine: he hated Florence with an intolerable love because she thrust him out; he hated Pisa, Arezzo, Siena, and Pistoja because they feared or rivalled Florence, and would not be reconciled. His dream of an Italy united under a foreign Emperor, the ghost of the Roman Empire, remained a dream, noble and yet ignoble too.
And indeed we may trace very happily the rise of Tuscan sculpture in Pistoja. Though she possesses no work of Niccolò himself, his influence is supreme in the pulpit of S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, and it is the beautiful work of his son Giovanni we see in the great pulpit of S. Andrea, where you enter by a door carved in 1166 by Gruamonte with the Adoration of the Magi.
His chief work was a long Canzone sopra l'Amore, which was so deep and philosophic that seven weighty commentaries in both Latin and Italian have as yet failed to sound all its depths. In the story of the early love of Cino da Pistoja for Ricciarda dei Selvaggi there is a genuine and homely charm which makes us feel that here indeed true love had found a place.
Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the pietra serena of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce or of conquest.
Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a very great dust.
We also learn from these letters that the Battle of Pisa then remained in the Sala del Papa. I will conclude this chapter by translating a sonnet addressed to Giovanni da Pistoja, in which Michelangelo humorously describes the discomforts he endured while engaged upon the Sistine.
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