[45] Bonazzi says that the present Via Vecchia was one of the very earliest of the streets, and that people have tramped up and down it for at least twenty-five hundred years.
[46] One historian says that there were as many as a hundred towers, but the more prudent Mariotti will only allow of forty-two. Only one or two remain, yet in old days they, like the city walls, were most carefully preserved, and it appears that Sextus IV. "fulminated excommunications and fined by a fine of fifty ducats any person who dared to pull down a tower." Of those which remain the Torre degli Scirri at Porta Susanna is the most conspicuous. The bell tower of the Palazzo Pubblico is another; and in many of the streets one can trace their mutilated trunks between the house walls.
[47] These graceful arches have been almost everywhere bricked up and replaced by square window posts, perhaps because it was easier to fit glass into a square than into an arch. In Gubbio and some of the smaller Umbrian towns the arched window has in many houses been left untouched.
[48] In old days the Perugians actually kept a caged lion in their public palace, so Ciatti was probably quite correct as far as this first statement is concerned.
[49] Ciatti was neither fair nor true to the women of the town. The Madonnas of Bonfigli and Perugino disprove his testimony in the sixteenth century even as our own eyes contradict it in the nineteenth. We have only to go to mass in S. Lorenzo to realise the simple grace of the young Umbrian peasant girls, and in some of her palaces we may have the happiness of seeing some of the fairest women, and certainly the most elegant, of modern Italy.
[50] This square is one of the most charming points in the city. In old days it was a very disreputable and untidy suburban square or thoroughfare. The last witch burned in Perugia was burned in this place. All the refuse of the city was cast out upon it. In this way, and upheld by the first Etruscan wall, an artificial space of flat land was procured which the houses to the east of the piazza now occupy, but these were always threatened by destruction as the soil below them was constantly giving way, and one of Fortebraccio's great works was the bolstering up of these houses with strong arches and walls from below. The reason of the name of the square is that its pavement actually covers the Etruscan wall. It is a beautiful and picturesque place, full of fine detail. The buildings of the old University (1483) have almost an echo of Oxford in their square window frames; the palace of the _Capitano del Popolo_ has a grand door in pietra serena with the figure of Justice carved above it.