Monteriggioni

Between 1213 and 1219 the Sienese built this castle from nothing, by order of their podestà, on land bought from a noble family: it was the site of an old Lombard farm, and its name, Montis Regis, probably meant an estate of the crown or one exempt from its taxes. To raise a castle ex novo was a new thing for Siena, which until then had bought its castles ready-made. The circular line of the walls came out simply by following the shape of the hill: about five hundred and seventy metres, fourteen towers on square bases and two gates, one facing north towards Florence and one south towards Rome. Around them ran the carbonaie, ditches filled with charcoal that was set alight to drive back an assault; when, between the fourteen and the fifteen hundreds, the walls were banked up with earth to stand artillery, the ditches of fire became useless.

In 1254 the Florentines laid siege to the castle and the castle held, until the German garrison inside — badly paid, and reached by the news that their king Conrad IV had died at Naples — let itself be bribed and opened the gates. Three centuries later, on 27 April 1554, the castle was handed over without a fight by its own captain, Bernardino Zeti, a Florentine exile, to the marquis of Marignano; the year after, Siena fell for good. Historians take that day as the end of the communal age in Italy. Cosimo I then imposed his lordship, and the people of Monteriggioni were carried off to Florence as slaves. Dante had used these towers to show the ring of giants at the bottom of hell — the circle, he writes, «di torri si corona», is crowned with towers — and today the village is a stage of the Via Francigena, some twenty kilometres from Siena.