No one perhaps of the more important cities of Italy retains the visible impress of its old republican medieval life to so remarkable a degree as Siena. Less favoured by fortune than her old enemy, and present ruler, Florence, she has been less benefited or injured by the activity and changes of modern days. And the city retains the fossilised form and shape which belonged to it at the time when its own stormy old life was finally crushed out of it. The once turbulent, energetic, and brave old city, sits there still, on the cold bleak top of a long spent volcano—emblem meet enough of her own nature and fortunes—grim, silent, stern, in death. The dark massy stone fronts, grand and gloomy, of old houses, built to defy all the vicissitudes of civic broils, and partisan town-fighting, still frown over narrow streets, no longer animated by the turbulent tide of life which filled them during the centuries of the city's independence. The strange old "piazza," once the pulsating heart, whence the hot tide of the old civic life flowed through all the body of the little state, still occupies its singular position in the hollow of what was in some remote ante-Etruscan time, the crater of a volcano. Tall houses of five or six stories stand in a semicircle around this peculiar shell-shaped cup, while the chord of the arc they form, is furnished by the picturesque "palazzo pubblico," with its tall slender tower of dark brick, and quaintly painted walls. Like the lava tide, which at some distant period of the world's history flowed hence down the scored sides of the mountain, the little less boiling tide of republican war and republican commerce, which Siena was wont to pour out from the same fount, is now extinct and spent. But such lazy, stagnant, unwholesome life as despotism and priestcraft have left to Siena, is still most alive in and around the old piazza.