on than by sustained quality
of style, I know none to surpass Fortini's sketches. The prospect from
Belcaro is one of the finest to be seen in Tuscany. The villa stands at
a considerable elevation, and commands an immense extent of hill and
dale. Nowhere, except Maremma-wards, a level plain. The Tuscan
mountains, from Monte Amiata westward to Volterra, round Valdelsa, down
to Montepulciano and Radicofani, with their innumerable windings and
intricacies of descending valleys, are dappled with light and shade from
flying storm-clouds, sunshine here and there cloud-shadows. Girdling the
villa stands a grove of ilex-trees, cut so as to embrace its high-built
walls with dark continuous green. In the courtyard are lemon-trees and
pomegranates laden with fruit. From a terrace on the roof the whole wide
view is seen; and here upon a parapet, from which we leaned one autumn
afternoon, my friend discovered this _graffito_: "_E vidi e piansi il
fato amaro!_"--"I gazed, and gazing, wept the bitterness of fate."

II.

The prevailing note of Siena and the Sienese seems, as I have said, to
be a soft and tranquil grace; yet this people had one of the stormiest
and maddest of Italian histories. They were passionate in love and hate,
vehement in their popular amusements, almost frantic in their political
conduct of affairs. The luxury, for which Dante blamed them, the levity
De Comines noticed in their government found counter-poise in more than
usual piety and fervour. S. Bernardino, the great preacher and
peace-maker of the Middle Ages; S. Catherine, the worthiest of all women
to be canonised; the blessed Colombini, who founded the Order of the
Gesuati or Brothers of the Poor in Christ; the blessed Bernardo, who
founded that of Monte Oliveto; were all Sienese. Few cities have given
four such saints to modern Christendom. The biography of one of these
may serve as prelude to an account of the Sienese monastery of Oliveto
Maggiore.

The family of Tolomei was among the noblest of the Sienese aristocracy.
On May 10, 1272, Mino Tolomei and his wife Fulvia, of the Tancredi, had
a son whom they christened Giovanni, but who, when he entered the
religious life, assumed the name of Bernard, in memory of the great
Abbot of Clairvaux. Of this child, Fulvia is said to have dreamed, long
before his birth, that he assumed the form of a white swan, and sang
melodiously, and settled in the boughs of an olive-tree, whence
afterwards he winged his w