Italy, in common with the rest of Europe, passed by a natural process of evolution from the Romanesque to the Pointed manner, and treated the latter with an originality that proves a certain natural assimilation.

Yet the first Gothic church, that of S.Francis at Assisi, was designed by a German; the most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is emphatically German.[13] During the comparatively brief period of Gothic ascendency the Italians never forgot their Latin and Lombard sympathies.

The mood of mind in which they Gothicised was partial and transient.

The evolution of this style was, therefore, neither so spontaneous and simple, nor yet so uninterrupted and complete, in Italy as in the North.

While it produced the church of S.Francesco at Assisi and the cathedrals of Siena, Orvieto, Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, together with the town-halls of Perugia, Siena, and Florence, it failed to take firm hold upon the national taste, and died away before the growing passion for antiquity that restored the Italians to a sense of their own intellectual greatness.
It is clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their vocation to revive the culture of the classic age, they at once and for ever abandoned the style appropriate to northern feudalism.