These journeys to Italy had a considerable influence on Chaucer's mind. Already in that privileged land the Renaissance was beginning. Italy had, in that century, three of her greatest poets: the one whom Virgil had conducted to the abode of "the doomed race" was dead; but the other two, Petrarch and Boccaccio, still lived, secluded, in the abode which was to be their last on earth, one at Arqua, near Padua, the other in the little fortified village of Certaldo, near Florence. In art, it is the century of Giotto, Orcagna, and Andrew of Pisa. Chaucer saw, all fresh still in their glowing colours, frescoes that time has long faded. Those old things were then young, and what seems to us the first steps of an art, uncertain yet in its tread, seemed to contemporaries the supreme effort of the audacious, who represented the new times. Chaucer's own testimony is proof to us that he saw, heard, and learnt as much as possible; that he went as far as he could, letting himself be guided by "adventure, that is the moder of tydinges." He arrived without any preconceived ideas, curious to know what occupied men's minds, as attentive as on the threshold of his "Hous of Fame": For certeynly, he that me made To comen hider, seyde me, I shulde bothe here et see, In this place wonder thinges ... For yit peraventure, I may lere Some good ther-on, or sumwhat here, That leef me were, or that I wente.[474] He was thus able to see with his own eyes the admirable activity, owing to which rose throughout Italy monuments wherein all kinds of contradictory aspirations mingled, and which are nevertheless so harmonious in their _ensemble_, monuments of which Giotto's campanile is the type, wherein we still recognise the Middle Ages, even while we foresee the Renaissance--with Gothic windows and a general aspect which is classic, where the sentiment of realism and everyday life is combined with veneration for antique art, where Apelles is represented painting a triptych of Gothic shape. Pisa had already, at that day, its leaning tower, its cathedral, its baptistery, the exterior ornamentation of which had just been changed, its Campo Santo, the paintings of which were not finished, and were not yet attributed to Orcagna. Along the walls of the cemetery he could examine that first collection of antiques which inspired the Tuscan artists, the sarcophagus, with the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which Nicholas of Pisa took for his model. He could see at Pistoja the pulpit carved by William of Pisa, with the magnificent nude torso of a woman, imitated from the antique. At Florence the Palazzo Vecchio, which was not yet called thus, was finished; so were the Bargello, Santa-Croce, Santa-Maria-Novella. Or-San-Michele was being built; the Loggia of the Lansquenets was scarcely begun; the baptistery had as yet only one of its famous doors of bronze; the cathedral disappeared under scaffoldings; the workmen were busy with the nave and the apse.