Word: gimignano
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...sure that nothing disturbed the precise relationships he put them in, Morandi drew chalk circles around the bases of his "models" on the surface of the table.) Sometimes the things have the look of architecture; the slender bottle necks, leaning together, vaguely recall the towers of Bologna and San Gimignano. Occasionally their groups, bound together by some mutual gravitation of shape, might remind one of people insecurely huddled on the edge of Morandi's small flat earth, the tabletop...
Behavior is not a liquid that sets like Jell-O into the mold of a building. Yet all building implies some ordering of life. Fine spaces do not "happen"; they are designed, either by consensus over a span of years (like the town plan of San Gimignano in Tuscany) or else by the authoritative work of one man. There is no consensus of the first kind in America: witness the slurping tide of chaotic architectural mutants that passes for an urban experience in any U.S. city. So we are left with the individual architect as form giver: the responsibilities remain...
Drawing from his recollections of the Italian hill town of San Gimignano, Saarinen plotted a multilevel alleyway between the two new colleges. Lying between Mory's famed saloon and the gym, this walkway separates the colleges in a cavernous passage while louvered windows peep through sandy slabs. The atmosphere is similar to Yale's Gothic buildings of the 1920s-though one modern-for-modern's-sake critic likens it to a set for Ivanhoe. Determined to avoid the typical cookie-cut module, Saarinen decided that as far as possible no two rooms should be alike. Result: though...
Near Poggibonsi the French also captured, virtually unharmed, one of the delights of medievalists - the town of San Gimignano "of the beautiful towers." The allied Control Commission had proclaimed the town a protected monument "of the first artistic and historical importance"; it was carefully outflanked and spared direct assault...
Once a rival of Florence, San Gimignano had already dropped to commercial obscurity by the 15th Century, had drifted on to modern times almost unchanged, a perfect relic of Dante's Italy. Thirteen of its original 72 square towers still survived...