Ciclo CXXXIII

Illustrissimo Signor mio,

I write from Amboise, where the Loire is wide and slow and the king’s court does not ask me to count paces. But I count them still — in the mind, along the walls of Imola, along the rampart at Cesena where the slope was wrong and I told you so and you did not answer, which is its own answer.

The Romagna frontier will not hold as it stands. I say this not to reproach — the works were done in haste, and haste is the enemy of stone. But I have turned the matter over these many months, and what I see is this:

The curtain wall between Forlì and Faenza is too thin at the salient. A battery of six culverins placed on the ridge to the southeast — I have drawn the angle, it is in the map I sent by the courier in March, if it reached you — would enfilade the approach for two hundred paces before the ditch. No infantry can cross that ground under fire from above and from the flank. The cost of thickening the wall is greater than the cost of the battery. I would choose the battery.

The ditch at Cesena holds water. This is good. But the counterscarp is not revetted — the earth slides after rain, and the glacis loses its angle. A wall of cut stone, three piedi thick, set on a bed of pounded lime and gravel, would hold. I estimate forty days’ labor for sixty men. The stone is there; the quarry at Bertinoro has not been exhausted.

I think of the canal at Cesena often. You asked whether it could be made to serve the fortress in siege. It can, but not as it runs now. A dam at the bend above the town — here, where the bank is firm clay — would raise the water level by four piedi and feed a moat that encircles the eastern wall without new excavation. The mill owners will protest. Let them. A mill can be rebuilt. A wall that falls cannot be argued with.

I do not know if you still hold these towns. I do not know if the maps I drew are in a cabinet in Rome or burned. I write because the hand remembers what the mind would set aside, and because I contracted to deliver what I know of these works, and I have not yet delivered it all.

The candle is low. The hand trembles. But the line on the page is straight, and that is enough.

Di Vostra Illustrissima Signoria, servitore che vi ricorda il fosso di Cesena, Lionardo