Strada Romana is the present Via Cavour, still the busiest in the city. Passing up it towards Camollia, from the Croce del Travaglio, we come to the Piazza Tolomei, in which the people assembled on the eve of Montaperti. The great grey stone Palazzo Tolomei, its portals guarded by two lions and surmounted by the armorial bearings, the three crescent moons, of that great Guelf House, was begun in 1208; it is the oldest, perhaps the most imposing of all the private palaces in Siena. The councils of the State occasionally met here in the first days of Guelf preponderance after the battle of Colle, and it was here that King Robert of Naples was entertained in 1310. In earlier times--those eventful days that preceded Montaperti--the General Council met in San Cristofano opposite. The column with the Lupa--though the present wolf only dates from the seventeenth century--was originally erected in 1260, after Montaperti, in token of this. The church itself was modernised in the eighteenth century. It contains some tombs of the Tolomei and a good picture by Girolamo del Pacchia, representing the Madonna and Child between St Luke and the Blessed Bernardo. It was in this church in 1376 that St Catherine effected a reconciliation between the Maconi, headed by Stefano and his father Corrado, and the Tolomei and Rinaldini. Behind it, round and about the Via del Re, there are a number of picturesque old houses of that epoch standing and several towers that once belonged to the Tolomei.[155] On the left, next to the Gothic Palazzo Tolomei, is a graceful little palace in the style of the fifteenth century, decorated above with the Lily of Florence. Further on, on the right, is the Palazzo Bichi, rebuilt in 1520 for the unfortunate Alessandro. At the corner of the Piazza Salimbeni is the Palazzo Spannocchi, begun in 1473 for Messer Ambrogio Spannocchi, the treasurer of Pius II. It is a perfect type of the massive, yet graceful domestic architecture of the Florentine Quattrocento. Formerly ascribed to Bernardino Rossellino, Signor Lisini has recently discovered reason for believing that it (as well as the palace in the Via Romana of the Abbot of San Galgano) was built under the direction of Giuliano da Maiano.[156]