Siena

Siena: no medium-sized town in the entire world is more spectacularly beautiful. But can you imagine what it is like to live in such a place and experience its beauty every day? Siena di ogni cosa piena--"Siena is full of everything", as the saying goes.
The origins, and therefore the underground parts, of Siena are Etruscan and thus predate the Romans. The superstructure dates from 1200-1700, perhaps with its apogee in the 1400s, before the Sienese Republic was subjugated by Florence.
Siena is divided into 17 contrade--neighbourhoods, or parishes. There were once 23, but some were amalgamated. They have names like il Leocorno 'The Unicorn', l'Onda 'The Wave', la Tartuca 'The Tortoise', la torre 'The Tower', la Selva 'The Wilderness'. Each one has a parish church, a social centre, a fountain for civil, non-religious baptisms (i.e. for being received into the community), a bar, a Captain, a Prior, and a small army of people dressed in colourful mediaeval costume who are extremely good at playing the snare-drum and throwing flags up into the air--because they do it every day of the year. It is a matter of pride. I worked in the contrada of the Tartuca and the contradaoli practised every afternoon under the portico of the cavernous church Sant'Agostino, where that they could be satisfied by the drums' reverberating echo.
Young men will carry a baby's bottle at their belts, full of fizzy Vernaccia, to show that as infants they were weaned on the white wine of San Gimignano, in Sienese territory.
There is an extremely elaborate heraldry, as each contrada has its own colours and ornate flag. All the flags are on sale at stalls around the centre of Siena. Tourists buy those that they think are most attractive and wear them as scarves when they walk around the city. This is a big mistake, for wearing the colours of an 'enemy' contrada is a serious misdemeanour in Siena. A person may be jostled, insulted or liquid may be poured onto his head. Barmen will refuse to serve a person in the 'wrong' colours.
All of this rivalry stems from the Mediaeval need to mobilise the parishes in order to provide a Sienese army against the Florentines, Perugini, Viterbesi and any other potential invaders. It still functions in much the same way. On the façade of the city hall in Perugia (a historical ally of Florence) there are the hinges of one of the gates to the city of Siena. Things have not been right between the two cities ever since. At present the Strada dei due mari, a road that runs straight between Siena and Perugia, does not have signs saying 'Perugia' in Sienese territory, nor does it have signs saying 'Siena' in Perugino territory.
The Sienese were finally conquered by the Florentines in 1556. There is a painting in Palazzo Pubblico, which dominates the Piazza del Campo, of prominent Senesi expiring under the Florentine onslaught. It is redolent with shame. In an effort to compensate, the Senesi will take visitors to Montaperti, an unassuming hillock with a shrub on top of it, visible from the Strada dei due mari, and they will point to the River Arbia and say that Dante recorded in the Inferno that it ran red with the blood of the Florentines, but that was in 1297. Once, I parked briefly in one of the squares of Siena. The inhabitants came out and kicked my car--because it had a Florence numberplate.
A visit to the Rector of the University of Siena is an experience. In his room there are the shields and portraits of previous rectors dating back to about 1310. When I visited, the incumbent was Luigi Berlinguer, who was later Minister of Education, a member of one of the most famous contemporary Italian political families, though Sardinian in origin, to be exact from the windy peninsula of Stintino in the far northwest of the island. It was a Sienese who got me my current job, Piero Tosi, Rector and President of the Italian Council of Rectors, who was sufficiently friendly with the Florentines that they could prevail upon him for a favour. I was lucky: shortly afterwards he was impeached and removed from office, the victim of a political manouevre.
Senese life hinges on the Palio, a horse race that purports to be Mediaeval, but in reality dates from the 1600s. In any event, no doubt there were such races before the seventeenth century. Thousands of people cram into the Piazza del Campo and, after four hours of mediaeval pagentry, there are three laps of the square. There are eleven horses, all highly-strung Arab stallions ridden by Sardinian jockeys dressed in the heraldic costumes of the contrade (which of the 17 run is determined some days before by drawing lots). The Palio is run on 2nd July and 16th August each year. It is one of the most symbolic events of any kind anywhere in the world. The politics of it occupy the entire year, daytime and night-time, every day. There are usually false starts and it is not always shown olive on television if it is not run to time before the 8 o'clock news. In the piazza it is followed by mass hysteria and fighting between victorious and losing contrade. The winning contrada holds a dinner for 1600 people, and those who eat at high table are the Prior, the Captain, the Jockey and the horse. Before the race each horse is taken into the parish church and blessed. A guard is mounted on it overnight to avoid doping by enemy contrade. Much betting and bribing do nevertheless go on. Jockeys have been badly mauled by contradaioli who accuse them of conniving with the enemy in order to lose the race (for a big but secret payment, of course).
Anthropologists who have studied Siena have never found anything remotely similar anywhere else in the world. The city is divided rigidly into people who belong and those who don't. Even people from two kilometres outside the city limits will specify non sono contradaiolo--"I am not one of them"....or conversely "I am...". To those who don't belong, the attitude of the true Senesi is incomprehensible, frustrating, weird. Some who have had to deal with it in terms of personal offence find it enraging.
Food and drink have a primacy in Siena that verges on religious fervour. Every day at ten minutes to one in the afternoon the traffic goes mad as people struggle to get home in time, or to a restaurant, and install their legs under a table with a damask tablecloth on which there is a plate of pici alla lepre, thick Sienese spaghetti with hare meat sauce. From the Province of Siena come the Nobile da Montepulciano, a strong, noble red wine, and Brunello da Montalcino, probably the most seductive wine in the world, and riotously expensive (especially the hundred-year-old bottles that are opened each year to celebrate the new vintage).
Siena has many secret places, and there are even more in the surrounding countryside. For example, few tourists are aware that in the grand marble stairway up to the baptistry of the cathedral there is a point where a small basalt cross is inlayed into the white marble, about 4 cm square. This is where Saint Catherine of Siena fell over and hurt her leg. Her house is on the other side of the hill, and it is a shrine. Piazza del Campo has the form of a cape: it is reckoned to be the form of her mantle, laid down to protect the city.
Siena invented capitalism. The world's oldest bank is the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472 (it was followed three years later by the RoLo, the Savings Bank of Romagna and Lombardia). The Monte dei Paschi has a mediaeval headquarters that resembles the council chamber of a castle. It is partly owned by the city of Siena and it owns half of the property in the city. The relationship is a very odd one. It leads to immense riches and an unbearable smugness. The Senesi genuinely believe that the world revolves around Siena. The southern Italian journalist Orlando Ruggero told Michael Foot, who was then the leader of the British Labour Party, that "my people are vain, but they are not proud". Well perhaps the Senesi are both vain and proud. They have a superiority complex which comes directly from pure, undiluted provincialism, the refusal to consider anything beyond the bounds of the Province of Siena in anything other than Sienese terms. Such is the wealth in Siena that of a winter's morning the shop assistants can be seen sweeping the front steps of their shops, dressed in expensive furs, their fingers encrusted in gold.
The Monte dei Paschi finances the concerts at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. This baroque concert hall is a place where some of the world's finest classical musicians play; the harpsichordist Kenneth Gilbert, for example, is a frequent visitor. But it is almost impossible to get tickets. They are given away by the bank on a 'grace and favour' basis. All that is available to the music lover is a place in the 'gods' where, from the third terrace one can stand and look down from an oval hole in the wall at a sea of fur coats far below. The Sienese are obdurate philistines and those who go to concerts do so in order to flaunt their wealth and be seen.
I was married (though not for the first time) in Palazzo Pubblico, in the Hall of the Tapestries. It was hard to keep the tourists out during the ceremony. Afterwards, we went to Ristorante Marsili. This is located in Palazzo Marsili, which is a 14th century building with an ancient Etruscan cellar full of rare wines in dusty, cobwebby bottles. The meal was without exception the best I have ever eaten. It was a tour de force of the highest gastronomic calibre and the choice of wines was inspired by genius. If nothing else, I shall remember that meal with satisfaction.
In Siena a hospital was founded in the 1300s in front of the cathedral. It was frescoed by the Sienese masters of the 15th century. It is now a museum of breathtaking beauty, but until a very few years ago the only way to see the frescoes was to fall ill, or be a doctor or nurse.
The hue of the bricks of Siena has given its name to a russet brown colour used by artists throughout the world. It is particularly elegant. But what is it like to live in such a city? For the non-contradaiolo it is extremely difficult. The beauty is oppressive, and so is the provincial routine of daily life. Siena will never admit it, but it lives under the cloud of the oppression of Florence, which is a much less provincial place. So the Sienese have turned southwards. Everywhere there are the signs of Romulus, Remus and the suckling she-wolf, and 'SPQR', all of which are visual references to Rome, which Siena has adopted as an ally against Florence. It is a curiously one-sided alliance, as Rome does not need Siena, a provincial city--too far away to be part of Rome's orbit, which does not really extend into Tuscany and peters out at Viterbo, still in Lazio.
Yet there are so many enchanted places around Siena. Down the Cassian Way, there is Buonconvento, four-square walls and a tiny but exquisite art museum with splendid mediaeval paintings; branching off to the west there is the Monastery of Monteoliveto Maggiore, serene and beautiful amid the cypress trees. Further south still there is the vast panoramic extinct volcano of the Amiata, with its thousand-year-old villages, such as Arcidosso. Then there are the outliers, such as Radic fani, neck of an eroded volcano, which sticks out of the clay plains like a thumb, and has a ruined castle perched on top. Montepulciano, with its four-square palazzi and streets that follow the contours around the hill on which the town is built (for many years it was my favourite town in the whole world). There are so many such places, and all of them have superb food--and good food leads to conviviality, a Senese virtue.