"Per Ornato Della Citt[grave{a}]": Siena's Strada Romana and Fifteenth-Century Urban Renewal

On January 19, 1468, a cloth merchant named Paolo di Antonio di Vitello petitioned the Sienese government for financial incentives to help him restore his house in Siena [1] Paolo referred to the "great beauty of the whole city and satisfaction of all citizens" which would, he claimed, be the benefit if he rebuilt the facade of the house, which stood on Siena's main street, the Strada Romana. [2] He was able to appeal for public funding for the renovation of his private property simply on account of the aesthetic benefits to the public realm, "ornato della Citt[grave{a}]" (beautification of the city), that accrued from his investment in building. [3] As such, Paolo's petition and hundreds of others like it reveal the prominent role assigned by Siena's government to the architectural renewal of the city. [4] This policy considered individual renovations as participating in a gradual and collective process of urban renewal, which resulted in the projection of civic self-fashioning onto the city fabric itself. [ 5]

Such concerns can be traced to the late thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth, when Siena experienced its greatest moment of demographic and architectural expansion. [6] At this time, the republican government, known as the Nine (1287-1355), showed special consideration for the appearance of the city and oversaw the construction and maintenance of Siena's main public and religious buildings. [7] The city's development was carefully controlled by a consistent corpus of new laws directed at the regulation of private and public architecture and at the protection of public space. [8] As Wolfgang Braunfels first noted, concern for urban aesthetics was originally focused on the civic hub, the Piazza del Gampo, a shell-like open space facing the administrative and legislative center of the city, the Palazzo Pubblico, and surrounded by private palaces and shop fronts. [9] Coinciding with the beginning of the construction of the Palazzo Pubblico, sophisticated planning regulations of 1297 required t hat any new facade built onto the Gampo be based on that of the palazzo itself. [10] Subsequently, in order to improve the appearance of the area, the piazza was paved in 1300. [11]

The Nine's patronage of architecture was not confined to the Campo but extended from the provision of facilities such as fountains, walls, and drainage systems to participation in construction costs of monumental architecture such as the cathedral and Mendicant churches.[12] Such civic investment in architecture clearly inspired the content of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's fresco cycle The Allegory of Peace on the walls of the Sala dei Nove inside Siena's city hall, the Palazzo Pubblico (Fig. 1). [13] The cycle is composed of two parts: allegorical figures of virtues and vices related to the arts of government, and naturalistic scenes representing urban and rural life under the influence of those allegorical figures. While the philosophical program behind the images is not at issue here, it seems clear that the allegory of the Effects of Good and Bad Government itself rests on the basic metaphor that the physical fabric of the city forms the setting for an idealized vision of urban life, defined in terms of varied human activities and interaction. [14] The direct referencing between urban form and government institutions that was expressed in Lorenzettl's frescoes was a key element in Siena's visual self-representation into the fifteenth century; moreover, it also informed, and was informed by, the development of the city itself. [15]

That this should have been the case is not surprising, for in Siena, as in so many other Italian medieval city-states, urban form, and especially the appearance of central public spaces, was a matter of great civic concern and was supervised both through permanent legislative measures and direct government action. [16] Indeed, Lorenzetti's images established an allegorical elision whereby good government was to be understood as being expressed by the city's physical appearance and its maintenance. Thus, in 1398, city officials stated that "every well-governed city provides for the appearance and maintenance of its fabric," while a zoning restriction of 1459 against blacksmiths was explained by the fact that "in every well-governed city it is forbidden that they work on the main streets." [17] In these and countless other instances, the physical appearance of the city fabric, as expressed through architecture, street maintenance, and shop usage, reflected on the commune itself.

Growing public concern for the city's appearance must partly be understood in light of the relative domestic stability enjoyed by Siena between 1403 and about 1480. Following the brief spell of Giangaleazzo Visconti's control of the city between 1399 and 1403, Siena was governed by what Mario Ascheri and Petra Pertici have described as a "governo trinario," a three-party coalition that united the interests of three of the city's five sociopolitical parties (the so-called Monti) [18] This revitalized republican government provided the patronage conditions for a series of commissions that embellished the prime sites of civic government and worship, such as the Palazzo Pubblico and the Duomo. [19] With the notable exceptions of an attempted coup led by Antonio di Cecco Rosso Petrucci in 1456 and Pope Pius II Piccolomini's demands for the readmittance of the excluded noble families to government between 1458 and 1464, Siena's internal situation remained unaltered until the 1480s, when major institutional changes followed factional disputes and the breakup of Monti coalitions. [20] The relative governmental continuity through the first eighty years of the fifteenth century forms a vital key for understanding the long-term implementation of the urban renewal policies that are the focus of this article.