Siena underground

Went to Siena as The Boss was giving a paper to the Law Faculty at the University. The paper went well and I had good fun wandering aroound under stormy skies.

This is one of a set of extraordinary sculptures arrested in their decay from a fountain by Jacopo della Quercia.

They are hidden away in the labyrinthine Santa Maria della Scala museum 'complex' near the Duomo. This museum is a rambling set of floors that goes down into the rock passages three-storeys below street level. It is like something out of Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose'. There are spooky crepuscular chapel to St Catherine of the Night and on the bottom floor strange stone passageways that appear to lead away from the known world.

We later drove to the house by rather a circuitous route to find it even more transformed with all the scaffolding down, the loggetta roof finished and the builders getting ready to leave after a four month stay.