Identifier: historyofarchit02cumm (find matches)
Title: A history of architecture in Italy from the time of Constantine to the dawn of the renaissance
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Cummings, Charles Amos, 1833-1905
Subjects: Architecture
Publisher: Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin and company
Contributing Library: PIMS - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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e between narrow bands of delicate inlay. The extent to which the taste of individual builders in Italy wassometimes attracted by the earlier Sicilian architecture is well illus-trated in the Casa Ruffola at Ravello. It is rather a villa than a palace, built towards the close of thethirteenth century by one or another of the great and public-spirited family who had controlled the affairs of the little Casatown. The house stands in the midst of somewhat exten-sive grounds, with outbuildings of various kinds, detached towers,pergolas, etc. Its plan (Fig. 426) is irregular, and includes a fineinterior court with three stories of arcaded galleries, the lowest withthree great pointed and stilted arches on each side on slender columns,like the arcades of the Capella Palatina and Monreale, the upperwith fifteen small arches with an extravagant and ugly interlacingpattern carried far above them. (Fig. 427.) The entrance toweris remarkable, — a square of about twenty-five feet, covered by an
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Fig-. 424. Siracusa. Windows of Palazzo Montalto. interior dome, and surrounded inside by two blind arcades of inter-lacing pointed arches on coupled columns.^ 1 Mothes,p. 588. 2 Schulz, pi. 87. 270 ARCHITECTURE m ITALY But the most important illustrations of the civic architecture ofThe Public ^^^^ Middle Ages are the town halls or communal palaces,Palaces. jj^ which, as soon as the independent city governments wereestablished, the authority and power of the citizens were centred.Great numbers of these buildings, singularly alike in general charac-ter and style, remain in more or less perfect preservation to this day,and many of them still serve the purposes for which they wereerected five and six centuries ago, and which are expressed withremarkable appropriateness and force by their architecture. The conditions out of which they grew varied, of course, in thedifferent communities; yet such variation was but slight comparedwith the constancy and vigor which characterized the life of

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