Of secular buildings of the Romanesque and early Gothic period hardly anything is now left in Milan. The Palazzo della Ragione, however, still stands, though disfigured in later days, on the spot which was once the Broletto Nuovo, the centre and citadel of civic life in the Republican era, a space enclosed in defensive walls and pierced by six gates, corresponding in direction to the principal gates of the city. The walls were built and the seat of the Podestà was transferred thither early in the thirteenth century from the Broletto Vecchio beside the Cathedral, a move significant of the complete liberation of the Commune from the old domination of the Archbishop. The word Broletto appears to be derived from _brolo_, signifying in Milanese a garden, the old Broletto having been once the garden of the Archbishop; but the name followed the civic offices with which it had become inseparably associated—hence Broletto Nuovo. The move was in fact a return of the chief authority in the city to its old abode, since the Broletto Nuovo was apparently the citadel in Roman times, and the seat later on of the military governors, called _Dukes_, under the Lombard rulers. The name of Curia Ducis, the Court of the Duke, still survives in the name Cordusio, by which the big modern piazza close by is called. The Palazzo della Ragione was built in 1228, with a vast open portico below and a great hall above, which was reached, not by a staircase in the building, but over the archway still existing at the north end. It was altered in later times, and an incongruous upper storey was added in the eighteenth century. It is now being restored. The palace stood till 1866 in the centre of a piazza—the original Broletto in fact—which was enclosed on the north side by the great Palazzo dei Giurisconsulti. The modern Via Mercanti now runs between it and the last-named palace, but on the other side it faces into the little Piazza dei Mercanti, which represents all that remains of the Broletto, and is still surrounded by old palaces. It is the one bit of mediæval Milan left, apart from single buildings. On this side of the Palazzo della Ragione there is a little equestrian statue of the Podestà Oldrado da Tresseno, with his name and the date, 1233, beneath, and some Leonine verses in which he is lauded in an elegant rhyme for building the upper storey of the palace and for sedulously performing his duty of burning heretics. _Qui solum struxit Catharos ut debuit uxit._ [Illustration: STATUE OF OLDRADO DA TRESSENO]