The two styles, Lombard and Gothic, of which I have been speaking, were both in a certain sense exotic.  Within the great cities the pith of the population was Latin; and no style of building that did not continue the tradition of the Romans, in the spirit of the Roman manner, and with strict observance of its details, satisfied them.  It was a main feature of the Renaissance that, when the Italians undertook the task of reuniting themselves by study with the past, they abandoned all other forms of architecture, and did their best to create one in harmony with the relics of Latin monuments.  To trace the history of this revived classic architecture will occupy me later in this chapter; but for the moment it is necessary to turn aside and consider briefly the secular buildings of Italy before the date of the Renaissance proper.

About the same time that the cathedrals were being built, the nobles filled the towns with fortresses.  These at first were gaunt and unsightly; how overcrowded with tall bare towers a mediaeval Italian city could be, is still shown by San Gemignano, the only existing instance where the torroni have been left untouched.[15] In course of time, when the aristocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and public order was maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made way for spacious palaces.  The temper of the citizens in each place and the local character of artistic taste determined the specific features of domestic as of ecclesiastical architecture.  Though it is hard to define what are the social differences expressed by the large quadrangles of Francesco Sforza’s hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube of the Riccardi palace at Florence, we feel that the genius loci has in each case controlled the architect.  The sunny spaces of the one building, with its terra-cotta traceries of birds and grapes and Cupids, contrast with the stern brown mouldings and impenetrable solidity of the other.  That the one was raised by the munificence of a sovereign in his capital, while the other was the dwelling of a burgher in a city proud of its antique sobriety, goes some way to explain the difference.  In like manner the court-life of a dynastic principality produced the castle of Urbino, so diverse in its style and adaptation from the ostentatious mansions of the Genoese merchants.  It is not fanciful to say that the civic life of a free and factious republic is represented by the heavy walls and narrow windows of Florentine dwelling-places.  In their rings of iron, welded between rock and rock about the basement, as though for the beginning of a barricade—­in their torch-rests of wrought metal, gloomy portals and dimly-lighted courts, we trace the habits of caution and reserve that marked the men who led the parties of Uberti and Albizzi.  The Sienese palaces are lighter and more elegant in style, as belonging to a people proverbially pleasure-loving; while a still more sumptuous and secure mode of life