Behind the Collegiata, the way leads up to the Rocca di Montestaffoli, the fortress which the Florentines built after 1353, to maintain their hold upon the town. "The Commune of Florence," writes Matteo Villani, "because it wished to live more secure of the town of San Gimignano and to remove every cause of evil thinking from its townsfolk, began to have made and finished, without leaving off the work at their expense, a great and noble Rocca and fort, the which was raised above the Pieve, where was the church of the Friars Preachers. And that church it had rebuilt, larger and more beautiful, on the other side of the town lower down."[196] It was dismantled, two hundred years later, by Cosimo de' Medici. The greater part of it is now a garden, with the old well in the middle of it. Ivy and purple foxgloves clothe the walls; figs and olives and cherries grow where once the _fanti_ of the Florentine captains lolled in their tight parti-coloured dress. The varied noises rising from the town mingle pleasantly with the humming of bees. The highest part commands a superb view over the valley of the Elsa bounded by the distant mountains, the _terra_ itself below with, close at hand, the _belle torri_ rising as it were in the face of their Florentine lords, and away northwards is Boccaccio-haunted Certaldo. One at least of Messer Giovanni's fair heroines came from San Gimignano--the Isabetta whom English poets and English painters have surely made our own. Her father, it will be remembered, was a citizen of San Gimignano who had settled in Messina.