[Illustration: REMAINS OF THE FIRST PALAZZO DEI PRIORI IN THE VIA DEL VERZARO]
people's law--that force which alone kept head above the breakers of foreign wars and civil discord in the past--slumbers, but is not dead, in the halls where it once reigned. A hum of modern life, a host of modern busts and portraits now clash with, now mellow, the sombre walls and passages. At the other end of the Corso there is a grand new Prefettura, where the Prefect of all Umbria manages Umbrian matters, but the pulse of the old city beats on in its old veins. The _Priori_, with their golden chains and crimson gowns, have vanished, but the men and women of the land are pretty much the same. They wear big collars of foxes' fur on their long winter cloaks, just as they did in mediæval times, and they bring their claims of business into their first house of business, they swarm and hum within the corridors, and trample up and down the wide stone staircase with dignified determination stamped upon their features. In the rooms to which they go the clerks sit writing steadily amidst their piles of archives and of blue-books. Few probably of all these people know, and fewer care, about the Peruginos and Bonfiglis in the rooms above; for the natural man or woman desires to pray before his saints and not to pay to stare at them.
We hear that the present palace was finished in the middle of the fourteenth century. Long before that date there had been a public hall where the rulers of the city met to discuss and settle its affairs.[51] But this building was comparatively small and cramped, and the new meeting-house was undertaken with superb disregard to expense. A rough calculation from the many bills shows us that upwards of 14,041 _libre_ was spent on the building of it, but it took nearly one hundred and thirty years to build, and the fact that it was finished at different periods--a bit being added at intervals down the Corso--may account for the waving and irregular line of the east front, which is one of its most marked features.
The first architects employed were natives of Perugia: Fra Bevignate and Messers Giacomo di Servadio and Giovanello di Benvenuto. The original plan of the building was probably a perfect square, reaching from its present north front down to where the great door now stands. One should examine the building from the back in order to understand it fully. At one time we hear that Lombard workmen were called in to assist in the "very heavy labour," which, perhaps, gives a certain Lombard look to parts of the brickwork round the windows.