The whole design of the Broletto is so very simple as to be almost chargeable with rudeness of character. The ground on which it stands is divided by columns and piers, the spaces between them being all arched and groined. Towards the Piazza three of these arches, springing from rather wide piers, support the main building, and another supports an additional building to the west of it. Above the three main arches are three windows, of which that in the centre, though very much altered, still retains a partially old balcony in front, and was evidently the Ringhiera, from which the people standing in the Piazza were wont to be addressed by their magistrates. The windows on either side are very similar in their design and detail; their tracery is of fair middle-pointed character; and the main points in which they strike one as being different from English work are the marble shafts with square capitals in place of monials, a certain degree of squareness and flatness in the mouldings, and the very pronounced effect of the sills, which have a course of foliage and moulding, and below this of trefoiled arcaded ornament, which in one shape or another is to meet the traveller everywhere in Northern Italy; either, as here, hanging on under the sills of windows, or else running up the sides of gables, forming string-courses and cornices, but always unsatisfactory, because unmeaning and unconstructional. The origin of this sort of detail is to be found in the numerous brick buildings not far distant, where the facility of repeating the patterns of moulded bricks led (as it did in other countries also) to this rather unsatisfactory kind of enrichment. The detail of the arcades supporting the upper part of the building is throughout bold and simple, and I should say of the thirteenth century; the bases are quite northern in their section, the caps rather less deep in their cutting, but still in their general design, and in the grouping of tufts of drooping foliage regularly one above the other, reminding one much of Early French work, though they are certainly not nearly so good as that generally is. There is a flatness about the carving, too, which gives the impression of a [Illustration: 5.--BROLETTO, BERGAMO. Page 54.] struggle, in the hand of the carver, between the Classic and Gothic principles, in which the latter never quite asserted the mastery. The lesson to be learnt from such a building as this Broletto appears to me to be the excessive value of simplicity and regularity of parts carefully and constructionally treated; for there are no breaks or buttresses in the design, and all its elements are most simple, yet nevertheless the result is beautiful.