Martino, stand the two Guinigi Palaces. They are face to face. One is
ditto of the other. Each is in the florid style of Venetian-Gothic,
dating from the beginning of the fourteenth century. Both were built
by Paolo Guinigi, head of the illustrious house of that name, for
forty years general and tyrant of the Republic of Lucca. Both palaces
bear his arms, graven on marble tablets beside the entrance. Both
are of brick, now dulled and mellowed into a reddish white. Both
have walls of enormous thickness. The windows of the upper
stories--quadruple casements divided, Venetian-like, by twisted
pillarettes richly carved--are faced and mullioned with marble.

The lower windows (mere square apertures) are barred with iron. The
arched portals opening to the streets are low, dark, and narrow. The
inner courts gloomy, damp, and prison-like. Brass ornaments, sockets,
rings, and torch-holders of iron, sculptured emblems, crests, and
cognizances in colored marble, are let into the outer walls. In all
else, ornamentation is made subservient to defense. These are city
fortresses rather than ancestral palaces. They were constructed to
resist either attack or siege.

Rising out of the overhanging roof (supported on wooden rafters) of
the largest and most stately of the two palaces, where twenty-three
groups of clustered casements, linked by slender pillars, extend in a
line along a single story--rises a mediaeval tower of defense of
many stories. Each story is pierced by loop-holes for firing into the
street below. On the machicolated summit is a square platform, where
in the course of many peaceful ages a bay-tree has come to grow of a
goodly size. About this bay-tree tangled weeds and tufted grasses
wave in the wind. Below, here and there, patches of blackened moss
or yellow lichen, a branch of mistletoe or a bunch of fern, break