Fortezza Medicea di Siena

The Medici Fortress was raised in three years by the dynasty that had just erased the republic, as a garrison stronghold over the conquered city. Its later civic uses show how the meaning of the structure changed over time.

Why it matters

The fortress is the architectural full stop at the end of Siena's independence. After the republic fell to the combined Spanish and Florentine forces in the 1550s, Cosimo I de' Medici ordered a garrison stronghold built beside the walls, on the spot where the Sienese had already razed an earlier Spanish citadel they hated. The city's tourism portal notes that the Sienese had blown up that first Citadel in 1552 precisely because it embodied enemy rule; the Medici answered with a second, larger fort, and the itinerary of the Museo Galileo in Florence credits the Urbino military engineer Baldassarre Lanci, then in the duke's service, with giving it the four-sided plan still visible today.

What to notice

The grass-covered walls form a quadrangle of about fifteen hundred metres, with four pentagonal bastions dedicated to La Madonna, San Domenico, San Filippo and San Francesco. Medici coats of arms survive on them. A drawbridge once connected it with the gardens of the Lizza, now a public park. The ramparts' elevated position reflects the fortress's original defensive purpose.

Context and history

Works began in 1561 and were completed in 1563, and the Forte di Santa Barbara, as it is officially called, was kept in shape for centuries while the city walls around it decayed — a fact the Museo Galileo's history of science itinerary reads as evidence of how seriously the Medici took their hold on Siena. In the late eighteenth century the fortress was demilitarised and a public garden was laid out inside, designed by Antonio Matteucci with the gardener Leopoldo Prucher. Later civic uses included cultural and wine institutions.