This idea for the detour came about by accident. I stumbled across the beautiful Palazzo Colli-Bizzarini online and immediately knew I wanted to surprise Gill by taking her to spend a night there. The history of the Palazzo is outlined later in this post but for now it's enough to say it's the sort of place that you don't get to stay in very often. The word 'unique' is so often overused but, in this case, I think it's an appropriate adjective.

If you thought the story was strange to this point you ain't heard  nothing yet. I will let the Atlas Obscura give you a gist of the strange happenings around Catherine;

"Her miracles were not limited to the stigmata and visions: Catherine was seen levitating during prayer, and a priest once said that he saw the Holy Communion fly from his hand straight into Catherine’s mouth like a miraculous Frisbee."

Well..yes and then there's this

 "She died while in Rome, but her hometown, Siena, wanted to have her body. When they realized they would not be able to smuggle the whole body past the guards in Rome, they took only her head, hidden in a paper bag. Unfortunately, they were stopped by the guards anyway. The thieves prayed to Catherine to protect them, and when the guards looked in the bag, they saw not the small withered head of the saint, but hundreds of rose petals. When they returned to Siena, the head had re-materialized.."

Honestly?

I shall end this amazing story with the useful information that apparently three of Catherne's fingers and a left foot are in Venice. A hand and a shoulder blade are in another church in Rome and Florence had to make do with a rib.

It took an awfully long time to build St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It’s hard to know exactly who to blame for the slow progress but my guess is that the architect has a lot to answer for. I say architect but in fact there was a whole slew of them over the 120 years it took to complete the project.  If only they had made it a bit smaller it might have been finished earlier but no, it had to be gigantic. It’s anyone’s guess as to why a church needed to be so cavernous but it’s probably down to a succession of popes trying to outdo each other in a big swinging dick competition.  Given that celibacy was a key requirement of the job of Pope, it is not surprising that they over compensated by building the tallest nave in Christendom. Well, Beauvais was taller by a metre but that fell down.

St Peter’s Basilica is built in the renaissance style but to be honest, it looks like the sort of building Elon Musk or Vladimir Putin would build to impress their girlfriends.  A feature which I think Elon would especially appreciate in the Baldacchino over the Papal Altar.  This monstrosity was commissioned by the ruthless Pope Urban VII and designed by Bernini. I say ruthless because the four twisted 30 metre pillars needed 50 tons of bronze and there simply wasn’t enough lying around at the time. The obvious solution, to the Pope anyway, was to strip all the bronze from the ribs of St Peter’s dome and when that wasn’t enough the pontiff sent the workers round to  the Pantheon with hammers and chisels to loot another load from there.

Ironically, the winner of the 'who has the biggest Basilica' competition turned out to be a dictator of the 20th century and not a pope although the distinction has been somewhat blurred at times during the long history of the papacy.. President Felix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire chose his home town in the middle of nowhere for the site for the world's biggest church. In a slam dunk move he insisted that the diameter of the dome be twice that of St Peter's. Nobody has a clue how much it cost but estimates put it around 300 million US dollars. Nor is anyone quite sure where all that money came from but the cynical popular name  of the church 'Our Lady of the Exchequer' suggests that the national piggy bank was raided to erect this 30,000 square metre folly which can accommodate 18.000 worshippers. Rumour has it that, these days, the arrival of the local football team to attend mass doubles the congregation. The French manufacturers of the stained glass were obviously aware  the  President's ego and ensured that the only black face in the 8,400 square metres of stained glass was  that of the President. If worshippers get bored they can easily identify their president posing with Jesus in what might just be the most expensive, if improbable, selfie in Christendom.

I hadn’t actually intended to get diverted into church architecture but it has a significant relationship with the actual subject of this chapter, Baldassare Peruzzzi. 

Peruzzi was an architect and artist and had a hand in the design of the Palazzo in which we are staying in Siena. The Palazzo was built between 1520 and 1527. His involvement was limited to some sketches and a model because soon after he started, he was lured to Rome to build the Villa La Farnesina abandoning his hapless client in Siena to cope as best he could.  Peruzzi’s decision to abandon our Palazzo was an astute one as his fortunes prospered in Rome and he was appointed joint architect of St Peter’s Basilica, after the death of Raphael. Few people have heard of him and yet, there he is, scampering over the scaffolds at St Peter’s, gossiping with Michaelangelo, shouting at the masons during their smoking breaks and scarpering off to hide behind a pillar when he spotted the pope arriving to see if the dome could be made just a teeny bit higher.

Peruzzi was commissioned to build our Palazzo by a member of the Sienese nobility called Francesco de Francesconi, Doctor of Law and member of the Government of Nine in Siena. His position allowed him the means to construct a magnificent Palazzo but unfortunately fate intervened before the building could be completed. Siena was annexed to the grand duchy of Tuscany under Cosimo de Medici and subsequently to the Spanish.  Cosimo was a virulently puritanical anti-semite who beheaded sodomites, and taxed the duchy to the point where everyone with money cleared off.  With Cosimo in charge, Francscco was suddenly out of a job and his revenues were reduced to almost nothing. The workers on his Palazzo were laid off and the plans reduced in scope.  Although the exterior was never completed to the initial grand design, the interior is magnificent and befitting a senior member of the Siena government.

Our living room is an example of an early 16^th Century ‘grotesque’ room, with magnificent period frescoes . This artistic term references  the word ‘grotte’ meaning cave, Specifically, the ‘cave’ was that of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s unfinished palace which he started some time after his fiddle performance to accompany the conflagration of Rome. It lay undiscovered for 1000 years until a collapsed arch betrayed the existence of a building that time had covered over. When it was discovered, Peruzzi  and Michaelangelo, who were busy adding flourishes to St Peter’s, were summoned and invited to explore the ‘caves’ which were, of course, just buried rooms. They were decorated in this grotesque style which uses curving patterns of decorative foliage elements and other motifs and elements both human and monstrous.  Peruzzi obviously took inspiration from Nero’s interior decorator and our rooms are an outstanding example of the Grotesque style.