park girt with walls, for fowling, near
Gravina, and another for sport in winter at Melfi; besides many other
things that are not related, for the sake of brevity. Niccola,
meanwhile, busying himself in Florence, was going on exercising himself
not only in sculpture but in architecture as well, by means of the
buildings that were going on being made with some little goodness of
design throughout all Italy, and in particular in Tuscany; wherefore he
occupied himself not a little with the building of the Abbey of Settimo,
which had not been finished by the executors of Count Ugo of
Brandenburg, like the other six, as was said above. And although it is
read in a marble epitaph on the campanile of the said abbey, GUGLIELM.
ME FECIT, it is known, nevertheless, by the manner, that it was directed
with the counsel of Niccola. About the same time he made the Palazzo
Vecchio of the Anziani in Pisa, pulled down in our day by Duke Cosimo,
in order to make the magnificent Palace and Convent of the Knights of S.
Stephen on the same spot, using some part of the old, from the design
and model of Giorgio Vasari, painter and architect of Arezzo, who has
accommodated himself to those old walls as well as he has been able in
fitting them into the new. Niccola made, likewise in Pisa, many other
palaces and churches, and he was the first, since the loss of the good
method of building, who made it the custom to found edifices in Pisa on
piers, and on these to raise arches, piles having first been sunk under
the said piers; because, with any other method, the solid base of the
foundation cracked and the walls always collapsed, whereas the sinking
of piles renders the edifice absolutely safe, even as experience shows.
With his design, also, was made the Church of S. Michele in Borgo for
the Monks of Camaldoli. But the most beautiful, the most ingenious, and
the most whimsical work of architecture that Niccola ever made was the
Campanile of S. Niccola in Pisa, where is the seat of the Friars of S.
Augustine, for the reason that it is octagonal on the outer side and
round within, with stairs that wind in a spiral and lead to the summit,
leaving the hollow space in the middle free, in the shape of a well, and
on every fourth step are columns that have the arches above them on a
slant and wind round and round; wherefore, the spring of the vaulting
resting on the said arches, one goes climbing to the summit in a manner
that he who is on the ground al