His father was for a twelvemonth governor of this
place and Chiusi, five miles off (not Lars Porsenna's Clusium, which
is to the south, but Clusium Novum), and brought his wife with him to
inhabit the _palazzo communale_. During his regency the painter of the
"Last Judgment," the sculptor of "Night and Morning," the architect of
St. Peter's cupola, first saw the light. Here the history of the Tiber
begins--here men first mingled blood with its unsullied waves. On
another little tributary is Anghiara, where in 1440 a terrible battle
was fought between the Milanese troops, under command of the gallant
free-lance Piccinino, and the Floren-tines, led by Giovanni Paolo
(commonly called Giampaolo) Orsini; and a little farther, on the main
stream, Citta di Castello recalls the story of a long siege which it
valiantly sustained against Braccio da Montone, surnamed Fortebraccio
(Strongarm), another renowned soldier of fortune of the fifteenth
century.
[Footnote 1: _The Pilgrimage of the Tiber_, by Wm. Davies.]
[Illustration: LAKE THRASIMENE.]
As the widening flood winds on through the beautiful plain, a broad
sheet of water on the right spreads for miles to the foot of the
mountains, whose jutting spurs form many a bay, cove and estuary. It
was in the small hours of a night of misty moonlight that our eyes,
stretched wide with the new wonder of beholding classic ground, first
caught sight of this smooth expanse gleaming pallidly amid the dark,
blurred outlines of the landscape and trees.
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