San Domenico should be visited on the day of St Catherine's Feast, which in Siena is kept on April 29th. The nave is hung with the bright banners of the contrade; Mass after Mass is offered up without intermission throughout the morning at the shrine, while crowds of the devout humbly and silently approach the altar, to be fed with that Bread of the Angels, "which," says the collect for that day, "sustained even the temporal life of the blessed Virgin Catherine." The curtain is raised, and behind the gilded bars of the shrine the pale, strange face appears, its features still recognisable. The altar blazes with candles and glares with artificial lilies, while natural flowers, lilies of the valley and white roses--more fitting tribute to her who so loved the simple flowers of the field--are offered up at the chapel rails. And, in this sudden advent of reality, Bazzi's beautiful melodrama palls. In the sacristy, on this day, are shown certain other relics--her discipline; her portable altar-stone; the sacramental cloths which she made for it with her own hands; the bull from Pope Gregory at Avignon granting her the dispensation to have Mass upon it wherever she went; and one of her fingers. The latter relic is--somewhat unfittingly--carried in procession through the church at sunset. The sacristy contains a banner painted with the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin by Bazzi. The chapel on the right of the entrance, the Cappella delle Volte, over which is a large painted Crucifix of the fifteenth century, was not separated from the rest of the church in the days of St Catherine, as it is now. It was the chapel in which she habitually prayed, and by one of its pillars she knelt always, to hear Mass in the church below. Here her visions came to her, here had she those strange mystical revelations of the Divine Word. "Disposing wondrous ascensions in her heart, Catherine went up these steps, to pray in the chapel to Christ her Spouse." Thus runs the writing over the original steps, piously preserved and guarded by bars, on the left, by which Catherine mounted into the cell of mystery; not those modern ones by which we now go up into the little chapel that witnessed this wondrous union of a woman's mind and heart with the suprasensible.