Irma in Italy Part 24

"An autograph wouldn't weigh very much," suggested Irma.

But Richard took no notice of the interruption.

"Well, I made a particular note about Nicholas Pisano. So I am sure I am right. But come, if you wish to do the cathedral in the shortest known time, we must go at once to the library."

"I am not in so tremendous a hurry."

"Ah, that's because you have no idea how much there is in Siena. See, there's the librarian letting one group of victims go. We can easily slip in."

The room they now entered, though small, was beautifully decorated.

Above the rich woodwork were ten frescoes on the walls, each a complete scene from the life of some hero.

"He is Enio Sylvio Piccolomini," explained their self-appointed guide, "who became Pope Pius II, and isn't that a funny scene where he is trying to persuade the king of Scotland to harry the border so that Henry VI of England may have so much to do at home that he won't interfere with the affairs on the continent?"

"Oh, but the colors are so rich, and Enio Sylvio, if he looked like that, must have been a very interesting person."

Richard laughed at Irma's seriousness.

"Pinturicchio knew how to please Pope Pius III, the nephew of Enio Sylvio, who engaged him to paint these pictures. But still, on the whole, I imagine that the Piccolomini were rather interesting. For generations they held the chief offices in the church here in Siena, and in the years they were fighting with the Tolmei, they kept things pretty lively. But in Enio Sylvio's time the worst of the Civil Wars were over.

But now come," and Richard looked at his watch. "You can have only five minutes for all these illuminated books."

"Oh, more than that," cried Ellen.

"No, my dear, that is enough for a general impression, which is all you would retain if you were to spend an hour here."

The five minutes, however, lengthened into ten before Ellen and Irma were ready to leave the fascinating folios in their leather bindings.

They were all books of devotion, some of them music books, with the chants of the church, and all of them ill.u.s.trated with tiny paintings rich in color.

"It is all very well to hurry us," said Ellen, as they walked toward the door of the Duomo, "but you spent a whole morning here, and this is my first visit, as well as Miss Derrington's."

"You have a good enough general impression," replied Richard, with a laugh; "and what more can any one expect, on a first visit?"

"Evidently," thought Irma, "Richard Sanford looks on sightseeing much as Uncle Jim does."

A little later, at the great door, Irma and her friends almost ran into Uncle Jim, behind whom walked Katie Grimston and Marion.

"Well, you must have taken the longest way round; where in the world have you been, Katie?" asked Ellen.

"Oh, we came through the town, and there were so many nice little shops there that I had to stop, as I always do," replied Katie, whose hands were full of little bundles. "Besides, none of us were in a great hurry for the cathedral. You know I have been all through it," and she glanced coquettishly at Richard. "If you wish us to go on with you now, we can as well as not," she added.

"You must suit yourself, but as Marion and his uncle have not been here, I should think you'd like to give them the advantage of your superior knowledge."

Then Uncle Jim spoke for himself. "I really think Marion and I ought to take a turn around inside, if nothing more. But Miss Grimston----"

"Oh, of course I'd rather do what you do," said Katie, turning her back to Richard, who thereupon went outside. Then after Irma had had a word or two with Uncle Jim, she and Ellen found Richard near a carriage.

"It is too warm to walk, and I am going to take you down to the Campo.

It is the most interesting spot here in Siena and I wish to be the first to show it to you."

"Oh, not more interesting than St. Catherine's house," said Ellen.

"More interesting to me, and I believe it will be to Miss Derrington,"

said Richard.

As they drove along, Irma realized that it was indeed strange that she should be so contented in the company of Ellen and Richard, two persons of whom she had not even heard until this very morning. As if he read her thoughts, Richard said rather abruptly, "I suppose Marion hasn't had a chance to tell you that he and I used to go to school together in New York. That was years ago, when we were first out of the kindergarten.

Lately he has studied at home, and I've been off at boarding school, so I have seen him only occasionally in my holidays. You must have seen more of him, Ellen."

"Oh, no," responded his sister. "Until to-day, I had hardly even seen him since he was a small boy. Of course I felt very sorry for him this winter."

"Ah, here we are!" and Richard signalled the driver to pull up, as they reached the end of a narrow street.

"Oh, it is picturesque!" cried Irma, looking at the square before her.

The great open s.p.a.ce was hardly a square, but a piazza tending toward a semicircle, and slightly lower than the street. On the side farthest from them were several fine buildings, from one of which rose a high, square tower, of which Irma remembered to have seen many pictures. Then she recalled something she had just read. Surely Richard would know.

"Yes," responded Richard. "This is the very tower they are copying for the Provincetown monument. What a genuine Yankee you are to remember.

There," continued Richard, "this is the famous Campo. It is in a hollow, where the three hills of Siena meet. How I should like to have seen it five or six hundred years ago, on one of those days when a fisticuff game was going on, or one of the more exciting donkey races. Oh, it makes our sports to-day seem tame, when we read what these old Sienese used to do. You see," he continued, without waiting for the girls to ask questions, "at one of these fisticuff fights one Sunday before Carnival, the fighters on one side grew so excited when driven off the ground that they fell upon their opponents with sticks and stones, and then with lances and darts, and all of Siena crowded to the neighborhood. The soldiers, the greatest men of the city, too, tried in vain to stop them, and some of the soldiers were killed. Then people who lived in the very palaces we're looking at threw stones out of their windows, but the mob only threatened to set fire to the houses."

"Well, how did it end?" asked Ellen impatiently.

"Oh, the fight would probably have continued to this day, if some one, after several soldiers had been killed, had not thought of getting the Bishop of Siena, and all the Friars here to come down to the Campo, and when they began to march in a solemn procession right through the thick of the fight, carrying the cross and other religious emblems, of course the fighting stopped. But naturally their games were not often as exciting as this."

"What were the donkey races like?"

"Oh, quite different. The city was divided into _contrade_, or districts, and on the days of the races each district appeared with its captain and other officers, with its special banner, and a donkey painted in its colors. The game was to get the donkeys to go twice around the Campo. No one on the field was permitted to have a weapon of any kind, not even a finger ring, but they could fight and push and do all in their power to prevent any donkey's winning, except that of their own district. After the donkey races died out they used to have buffalo races; you know," in a tone of contempt, "the kind of buffaloes they have in Italy, and later horse races, which they still have."

"Here on the Campo? How I should like to see them."

"Then you must come here the second of July or the middle of August. The _Palio_ is the name given to the race, and as the city is still divided into _contrade_, these horses are mounted by representatives of the different ones. But I have a friend who came here one summer, and he says that in spite of the crowds and the display of rich banners and colors these races are now rather tame affairs."

"Nothing is what it used to be," said Ellen, half mockingly. "My brother," she explained, turning to Irma, "is romantic, and always longing for the past, in spite of which I don't believe he would have cared to live in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries."

"Well, they did some things better than we can, the men of those days.

Just come for a moment to the Palazzo Municipio, and I'll show you some pictures that will make you envy the Sienese."

As the girls followed he marched them rapidly from room to room, decorated with enormous frescoes, in which were shown the victories of the Sienese over their neighbors, especially over their chief rival, Florence. From the great Council Hall they pa.s.sed to the Hall of the Nine, who at one time were supreme in the Government of Siena. After one or two efforts Irma ceased trying to understand the allegorical figures that had almost as large a place in the pictures as the historical. But the color was so beautiful, and generally the paintings were so pleasing that she restrained the laugh that was often on her lips, when something appeared to her particularly absurd. But Richard, who had been here before, had the meanings of the allegories, as well as the historical incidents, at his tongue's end.

In one room, he told them, a treacherous leader of the Sienese forces had been entrapped and stabbed to death by The Fifteen, who then were the rulers of Siena, and he would have described fully these blood-curdling events, if Ellen had permitted.

Finally, as they drove towards home, Richard pointed out several old palaces in which leading families had lived, and in almost every case he had a tale of Salimbeni or Tolomei or Saraceni in the days when the followers of one great house would kill hundreds of the followers of the other. "When," said Richard, "these narrow streets literally ran blood in those old days of Guelph and Ghibelline."

"Thank you," said Irma faintly, as they reached their hotel, "I feel as if I had swallowed a whole history."

"Well," responded Richard, "I thought it was well for you to accomplish all you could this morning, for I don't see why you shouldn't make quick work with Siena, and go on with us to-morrow or the next day to San Gimignano."

"I don't know, I am sure, what Aunt Caroline's plans are," said Irma, "but I can ask her."

Yet she realized that she could not repeat Richard's strange name.

"San--what?"