One day in the hot summer of 1542, tempers flared and two of Michelangelo's assistants came to blows. The stonecarver Giovanni de' Marchesi had just delivered a cartload of “old marble” pulled from the ruins of an ancient building on the Capitoline Hill. Since May, Giovanni had been delivering marble to San Pietro in Vincoli where he and Urbino, Michelangelo's live-in assistant, were carving the architectural elements for the tomb of Julius II. But the two assistants were constantly at odds, one “too grasping and the other no less unreasonable.” Michelangelo, who claimed to have already “lost a month of my time because of their ignorance and beastliness,” now worried that their continued differences were about “to lead to a serious quarrel resulting in blows or death.” At his wits' end and desperate to restore order, Michelangelo appealed to his friend Luigi del Riccio: “I think they should both be dismissed and that the work should revert unconditionally to me, so that their stupidity may not be my ruin, and I can get on with it. Although I have been advised to divide the said work, and to allot one part to the one and one to the other, I cannot do this. … I beg you to get them to agree as best you can, because this would be an act of charity.” Del Riccio talked to both men, settled the accounts, and efficiently took care of the problem, thereby leaving Michelangelo free to work on the tomb without the petty distractions of his warring accomplices.