[48] I speak of the time when Signor Difendente Sacchi visited the church in 1828, before writing his work. CHAPTER III CIVIL ARCHITECTURE UNDER THE LONGOBARDS Ecclesiastical as was the work of the guild, the Comacine of Lombard times was nevertheless a fine civil architect. He worked as willingly for the prince in palace-building and for the country in fortification, as for the Church in building monasteries and cathedrals. Indeed war of all sorts bore such a large proportion in the life of the Middle Ages that the fortress was of more importance than the home. In civil architecture the _Magistri Comacini_ of the seventh and eighth centuries followed much the same style as in their ecclesiastical buildings, of course adapting it to its different uses. In the Lombard palace we find on the upper floor the usual double-light windows, with the two round arches and dividing column enclosed in a larger arch of masonry. We also find the inevitable Lombard cornice beneath the roof. In civil buildings, instead of a complete gallery with colonnettes, this becomes a row of brackets with carvings in the corbel heads. The windows of the lower floor are square orifices barred with iron, for defence in warlike times. The walls are either of the solid brickwork _opus romanum_, or the great smoothly hewn stones of the _opus gallicum_. In Lombardy there are more of the former, as clay for bricks is easily attainable. In Tuscany and southward the buildings are more frequently of stone. The Florentine Bargello, though later, offers a very fine specimen of this work, in the older portions of wall, where the smooth-cut stones fit solidly together. If the building required an inner courtyard it was of the same Lombard style as their churches--showing the round arch, and the convex capital, often sculptured. [Illustration: TOSINGHORUM PALATIUM FLORENTIAE CELEBERRIMUM IN FORO VETERI SITUM LAPIDE DOLATO COMLUMNISQUE MARMOREIS EXTRUCTUM CUI TURRIS ADJACENS ULNAR. 130 PROCERITATE ERIGEBATUR. TRACING OF AN OLD PRINT OF THE TOSINGHI PALACE, A MEDIÆVAL BUILDING ONCE IN FLORENCE, WITH _Laubia_ ON THE FRONT. _See page 61._] The municipal palace only came in with the Communes after 1100. In Longobardic times, the only buildings that had any pretensions to architecture were the palaces of the dukes or kings. Luitprand's palace in Milan, which fell into disuse after the tenth century, is as graphically described by old chroniclers and in legal documents in the archives of St. Ambrose, as Theodolinda's at Monza had been by Paulus Diaconus.