Palazzo Pubblico

Every great Italian city has a palace it performs for. Siena's Palazzo Pubblico is the original performance: begun in 1297 for the merchant government that made the republic work, it still fronts the Campo with the same gently curved brick facade, and its council chambers became the stage on which Sienese painters invented the picture of good government.

Why it matters

The palazzo is counted among the most significant examples of medieval civic Gothic anywhere, and the city's tourism and museum administration present it as the work of the Governo dei Nove, the government of the Nine that governed from 1287 to 1355. What the building represents is a republic choosing restraint: brick rather than marble, three storeys of disciplined trifore windows, a long low profile shaped to the shell of the piazza. UNESCO's listing of the Historic Centre of Siena, inscribed in 1995, describes the city as the embodiment of a medieval city, built around the Piazza del Campo "as a work of art that blends into the surrounding landscape" — and this facade is that idea's centrepiece.

What to notice

Read the building in stages. The central tower block and the right-hand wing were finished by 1311 for the Nine; after a pause, work resumed between 1325 and 1331 and added the left wing for the Podestà, giving the facade its long, asymmetrical rhythm. In 1687 both flanks received an extra floor of trifore windows in a deliberately faithful Gothic style. On the left rises the Torre del Mangia, whose foundations chroniclers place in autumn 1325 and whose accounts survive from 1338. At the tower's foot stands the Cappella di Piazza, begun in 1352 as a votive offering for the end of the plague of 1348, a Gothic loggia by 1376, later crowned with Antonio Federighi's Renaissance griffins.

Context and history

Inside, the palace made history twice over. Its upper floors became the Museo Civico, where the Sala dei Nove and the Sala del Mappamondo preserve the frescoes of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Simone Martini painted for the governments that met here. The official palace page traces the interior's continuous remodelling from the fifteenth century into the early twentieth: the central block once held a single great hall, later divided into the Sala del Mappamondo, the lords' chapel, the antechapel, the vestibule and the Sala di Balìa, while a monumental staircase by Carlo Fontana reorganized the entrance and the Podestà's wing was altered most heavily of all. Renovations of 1680 to 1687 prepared the way for the added floor; the museum now occupies the piano nobile, the second floor, the ground-level rooms at Campo and market-hall level and even the old prisons between the floors.