Palazzo Sansedoni

The long brick facade of Palazzo Sansedoni bends with the curve of Piazza del Campo, the private answer to the civic palace across the square. Begun as a fortified tower house in the thirteenth century and remodelled in the eighteenth, it now houses the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi and retains its historic civic character.

Why it matters

Siena's most celebrated square is usually read through its public buildings, yet the Campo took its shape from private towers as much as from the commune's palace. Palazzo Sansedoni is the most complete survivor of that aristocratic half. The Fondazione that owns the palace calls it the most representative building of private fourteenth-century architecture in the city, and the claim is easy to argue from the building itself: a Gothic facade of unified brickwork sweeping around the piazza's shell, with the stub of a medieval tower still rising at the corner. As headquarters of the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the palace has remained in continuous institutional use.

What to notice

The facade follows the curve of the square: the wall does not resist the Campo's curve, it traces it, over three storeys of windows that shrink as they rise. The tower base is rhomboid in plan, a detail the municipal tourism portal singles out. The top of the tower body reflects a later compromise: the medieval tower was cut down by court order in 1760, and a covered terrace was built on its stump. The decorated interior includes the chapel of the Beato Ambrogio Sansedoni with a ceiling by Anton Domenico Gabbiani, frescoed chambers by the Pisan painters Giuseppe and Francesco Melani, and, from 1743, works by the Florentines Giandomenico Ferretti and Pietro Anderlini in the main salon and Galleria — one of the fullest Baroque ensembles in a city better known for Gothic austerity.

Context and history

The site's oldest stone is a tower raised around 1243, when the Sansedoni, a Ghibelline family tied to banking, were establishing themselves between the Campo and the Via Francigena. A tower-house on the same block was completed in 1339 by a building team led by Agostino di Giovanni, the date and name recorded by the Fondazione's own history of the palace. The family's most famous son, Ambrogio Sansedoni (1220–1286), became one of Siena's revered religious figures; the municipal tourism portal notes his portrait bust on the cathedral facade and a Palio run in his honour into the mid-sixteenth century.

The palace grew by acquisition. In 1739 the family bought the neighbouring Casa Campioni, adding the Rocca Bruna tower and nearly doubling the volume; in 1757 came Casa Tolomei, later refitted with neoclassical stuccoes. The present facade is largely an eighteenth-century creation: a neogothic redesign by the Florentine architect Ferdinando Ruggieri, documented in a 1759 letter in which Francesco Sansedoni reported the facade works drawing to a close. A year later the story turned brutal — expert reports, a neighbour's dispute, and on 17 March 1760 the tribunal of the Biccherna ordered the family's tower demolished. The demolition ran from spring to autumn; the terrace on its base survives in use today. In 1995-era institutional arrangements the palace passed to the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena, whose headquarters it remains.