h presents a frigid aspect to eyes
familiarised with warmth of tone in other buildings of that period. The
details of the columns and friezes are classical; and the facade,
strictly corresponding to the structure, and very honest in its
decorative elements, is also of the earlier Renaissance style. But the
vaulting and some of the windows are pointed.

The Palazzo Piccolomini, standing at the right hand of the Duomo, is a
vast square edifice. The walls are flat and even, pierced at regular
intervals with windows, except upon the south-west side, where the
rectangular design is broken by a noble double Loggiata, gallery rising
above gallery--serene curves of arches, grandly proportioned columns,
massive balustrades, a spacious corridor, a roomy vaulting--opening out
upon the palace garden, and offering fair prospect over the wooded
heights of Castiglione and Rocca d'Orcia, up to Radicofani and shadowy
Amiata. It was in these double tiers of galleries, in the garden beneath
and in the open inner square of the palazzo, that the great life of
Italian aristocracy displayed itself. Four centuries ago these spaces,
now so desolate in their immensity, echoed to the tread of serving-men,
the songs of pages; horse-hooves struck upon the pavement of the court;
spurs jingled on the staircases; the brocaded trains of ladies sweeping
from their chambers rustled on the marbles of the loggia; knights let
their hawks fly from the garden-parapets; cardinals and abbreviators
gathered round the doors from which the Pope would issue, when he rose
from his siesta to take the cool of evening in those airy colonnades.
How impossible it is to realise that scene amid this solitude! The
palazzo still belongs to the Piccolomini family. But it has fallen into
something worse than ruin--the squalor of half-starved existence, shorn
of all that justified its grand proportions. Partition-walls have been
run up across its halls to meet the requirements of our contracted
modern customs. Nothing remains of the original decorations except one
carved chimney-piece, an emblazoned shield, and a frescoed portrait of
the founder. All movable treasures have been made away with. And yet the
carved heraldics of the exterior, the coat of Piccolomini, "argent, on a
cross azure five crescents or," the Papal ensigns, keys, and tiara, and
the monogram of Pius, prove that this country dwelling of a Pope must
once have been rich in details befitting its magnificence. With