Siena has long been recognized as one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe, and it is for this reason that in 1995 its entire historic center was added to the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Between the advent of the commune in the twelfth century and the fall of the Guelph regime of the Nine Governors in 1355, the Sienese authorities erected architectural monuments of great significance, including the Palazzo Pubblico, new ramparts and gates, and several large-scale fountains, while the aristocratic and merchant elite constructed towers, tower-houses (casetorri), and, by the early duecento, the city’s first palaces. Much of this prodigious corpus of medieval urban fabric survives intact.

It is thus surprising that while monographs on individual edifices abound, there are few synthetic studies of Siena’s rich secular architecture. The city’s non-religious buildings certainly have not received the same level of scrutiny as its churches. (One thinks of Italo Moretti and Renato Stopani, Romanico senese, Florence: Salimbeni, 1981; and the ongoing encyclopedic series by Peter Anselm Reidl, Max Seidel, et al., Die Kirchen von Siena, Munich: Bruckmann, 1985–). Antonio Canestrelli devoted only twenty pages to non-ecclesiastical buildings in his pioneering book, L’architettura medievale a Siena e nel suo contado antico (Siena: Lazzeri, 1904), and Gino Chierici’s essay “La casa senese al tempo di Dante” (Bullettino senese di storia patria 28 (1921): 343–80), though focused specifically on Sienese civil architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, is extremely limited in scope. Vittoria de Vecchi was the first to establish a typological and chronological framework for the city’s secular monuments, which she organized into five sequential periods, but she was chiefly concerned with documenting the emergence and development of the Sienese “Gothic” style (“L’architettura gotica civile senese,” Bullettino senese di storia patria 56 (1949): 3–52).

Fabio Gabbrielli’s handsome volume, Siena medievale: L’architettura civile, the first comprehensive publication on Sienese secular architecture in more than six decades, is thus in many respects an unprecedented undertaking. Of course, it has all the polish one would expect of a book promoted by the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi, whose president contributes a brief forward. Its generous scale (23.5 × 30 cm) is especially welcome, as are Andrea Sbardellati’s extraordinary photographs and digital reconstructions. One is immediately struck by the ambitious breadth of the work, which is the product of many years of research on Gabbrielli’s part, and draws upon the latest publications by his colleagues at the Università degli Studi di Siena. Moreover, it has the virtue of making accessible the results of numerous esoteric but fundamentally important archeological essays, many of which appeared in local periodicals, such as Archeologia dell’architettura and La Diana, which are difficult to acquire outside Tuscany. Gabbrielli writes in a lucid, precise prose and employs a highly sophisticated technical vocabulary that may require non-specialists, even native Italian speakers, to consult a dictionary of architectural terms.

Gabbrielli’s book is essentially an expansion and elaboration of his 1995 essay, “Stilemi senesi e linguaggi architettonici nella Toscana del Due-Trecento” (in Architettura civile in Toscana: il Medioevo, Amerigo Restucci, ed., Milan: Silvana, 1995, 305–67), in which he interprets the evolution of Sienese secular architecture in terms of a teleological progression from the towers and tower-houses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the fully developed civic and private palaces of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As in his earlier study, he defines the formal elements (stilemi) of the Sienese civic style, which he traces from its origins in the late duecento to its “codification” in the Palazzo Pubblico facade, the first phase of which was completed in 1311. Gabbrielli claims that the emergent style constitutes a “specific Sienese language” (188) (all translations from the Italian are mine), distinct from that of the city’s ecclesiastical buildings, as well as from that of the civic architectural styles of other major Tuscan centers. To a large extent, the Guelph commune promoted the new gotico civile and facilitated its expansion, not only in public monuments such as gates and fountains but also in the private sphere—hence, the much-cited statutory rubric of 1297 ordering that all new facades around the Piazza del Campo be devoid of jetties (ballatoi) and that they have windows with colonnettes, and the directive stipulating that all new earthen homes in Siena and its environs be faced with brick (Il Costituto di Siena volgarizzato nel 1309–1310, III, 37; V, 409), in apparent imitation of the Palazzo Pubblico and other government edifices.

The first of the five chapters treats the many surviving limestone Sienese towers and tower-houses built by seignorial families in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Gabbrielli’s distinction between the vertical towers, with their sheer unarticulated surfaces, and the mainly residential tower-houses, which were perforated by windows and doorways at every level and girded with wooden jetties and awnings (tettoie), clarifies inconsistencies in the earlier literature on the subject.

Chapter 2 discusses domestic architecture and public works of the period between 1200 and 1270. Here, Gabbrielli focuses on the evolutionary development of the palace type and presents several early examples, most notably the Palazzo Bisdomini and Palazzo Rinuccini. He defines their salient characteristics and skillfully reconstructs the primordial appearance of their street facades, which are beautifully illustrated in the large-scale foldout plates at the end of the volume. Particularly interesting is his account of the introduction of decorative brickwork into the city’s domestic architecture, long before it became the material of choice for palace exteriors in the trecento.

The third chapter, “The City of Mercatores and the Birth of Sienese Gothic (1270–1300),” begins with a monographic treatment of the Palazzo Tolomei (completed ca. 1275), the first monumental structure of the Guelph era and, for a time, the headquarters of the General Council. For Gabbrielli, the quarter-century following the completion of this massive residence was a time of stylistic and typological experimentation that saw the further development of the Sienese facade, the progressive reduction of external wooden protrusions, and an increased interest in the decorative possibilities of brick. Gabbrielli also analyzes the exterior articulation and ornamentation of the Palazzo Lombardi, the most representative building of the late duecento, and the Palazzo del Rettore of Santa Maria della Scala, as well as some edifices that have been almost completely ignored in previous studies, such as the Palazzo Malavolti, one of the largest domestic structures of its time.

The fourth chapter is Gabbrielli’s most substantial contribution, as it encompasses a large body of recent archeological research that until now had been relatively unavailable to scholars outside of Siena. The construction of the Palazzo Pubblico (1297–1348) and the paving of the adjacent Piazza del Campo (1327–46) were undertaken during the merchant regime of the Nine Governors, whose long reign is traditionally associated with the golden age of Sienese culture, and Gabbrielli interprets the project as the culminating architectural feat of the medieval period. Although Gabbrielli’s chronology closely follows that previously established by Michele Cordaro (in Palazzo Pubblico di Siena: vicende costruttive e decorazione, Cesare Brandi, ed., Milan: Silvana, 1983, 29–143), his extensive documentation of the original aspect of the palace’s elevations is unparalleled for its meticulousness and exactitude, going so far as to discuss the herringbone incisions on the bricks of the second story and the trecento color scheme of the various surfaces of the exterior.

What is missing, however, is a nuanced account of the complex fifty-one-year building campaign, such as that created by Marvin Trachtenberg for Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio and Piazza della Signoria (Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 87–147), as well as a thorough analysis of the symbolic features of the Sienese palace’s design and decoration. Why, for instance, did construction come to a halt between 1311 and 1325? Is there a mathematical basis or visual logic underlying the symbiotic relationship between the civic palace and the Campo? The remainder of the chapter, the longest and most scrupulously documented of the book, consists of an exhaustive catalogue of the principal gates, fountains, and residences of the first half of the trecento, many of which seem to have been inspired by the architecture of the Palazzo Pubblico.

The fifth and final chapter, “Palaces and Gothic Fortifications in Quattrocento Siena,” is essentially a postscript. Following the succinct treatment of late trecento and early quattrocento architecture at the end of the previous chapter, Gabbrielli traces the resurgence of the Sienese civic style in the middle- to late fifteenth century. The rear and side elevations of the Palazzo delle Papesse and the facades of the Palazzo Bichi (later Buonsignori) and Palazzo Binducci are among the structures explored here. All were erected between the 1450s and 1490; and although their designs are faithful to trecento prototypes, they were nevertheless “updated” with certain fashionable motifs. However, Gabbrielli does not offer a convincing explanation for the persistent popularity of the old communal style, which seems to have stood in opposition to the Florentine-influenced “Renaissance” buildings of the Piccolomini and several of their contemporaries.

In his rigorously archeological approach to the material, Gabbrielli follows the lead of his colleague Roberto Parenti, who is a pioneer of stratigraphic analysis and other techniques for analyzing medieval masonry and intonacoes. Thus, he is primarily concerned with the lives of individual forms (mullioned lancet windows, crenelated battlements, semi-pyramidal corbels, etc.) and with the development of key architectural types. Unlike Fabrizio Nevola’s recent tome on Renaissance Sienese architecture (Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), Siena medievale lacks a broad contextual apparatus for deciphering the signification of architectural forms. Although promising to “attempt to gather the salient [architectural] characteristics of an epoch and reconstruct their evolution in relation to the economic and political changes of society” (11), historical background is mostly confined to introductory remarks within each of the five chapters, and the book does not advance new theoretical formulations with regard to Siena’s secular architectural traditions as, for example, Manfredo Tafuri did for Venice. Thus, the reception of the civic style, which Gabbrielli loosely associates with civic identity, is not fully addressed or problematized, nor is the arrival and spread of “Gothic” in both the city and its contado.

Despite the very high quality of this book, there are still a few surprising omissions. Most conspicuously, Sbardellati’s excellent photographs and reconstructions are not accompanied by architectural plans. Although interior configurations are beyond Gabbrielli’s purview, including the plans of at least some of the structures, particularly the Palazzo Pubblico, would have been helpful. Moreover, there are no maps of the locations of buildings, and it is consequently difficult to visualize their distribution within the urban matrix. Aside from a subchapter on the Piazza del Campo, there is little discussion of urbanistic context or the strategic siting of facades on squares and streets. Finally, there is no systematic treatment of the building practices of the medieval Sienese, such as the extraction and transportation of limestone and marble from the Montagnola and other regions, the government-subsidized production of brick, the importation of wood for centering and scaffolding, and the organization and operation of worksites.

None of this, however, detracts from the significance of Gabbrielli’s masterful synthesis, which for its comprehensiveness and thoroughness ranks with Fabio Bargagli Petrucci’s Le Fonti di Siena e i loro acquedotti (Siena: Olschki, 1906) and the seminal work by Duccio Balestracci and Gabriella Piccinni, Siena nel Trecento: assetto urbano e strutture edilizie (Florence: Clusf, 1977). His richly illustrated book will without a doubt remain the standard study of medieval Sienese secular architecture for many years, and should spawn further investigations of the city’s extraordinary architectural patrimony.