Not to Scale

On a cloudy, cool day I drove 40 minutes or so to visit the spirited medieval city of Siena, where twice every summer the residents conduct a bareback horse race, the Palio, in their main piazza. Also banks were invented here and the concept of ‘collateral,’ according to Rick Steves’ audio tour that I downloaded and followed upon arrival.

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The day before, I’d stayed put in the garden of my AirBnB in the little hamlet of Roccastrada with my new best friend, a gray cat named Mimi, and just stared off into the distance. Truly, my mind needed a day to recover from all the input these past weeks. It’s been complete sensory overload with the sights, the language, the problem solving, the food and the emotions. As much as my spa days in Bagno Vignoni were relaxing, I was still needing to figure things out — ordering at restaurants, assessing the social codes of the spa and sauna, driving and parking. So I needed and got a day to recharge. I did not speak to any human, in any language, and I looked at grass and trees and listened to birds.

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Siena had a very easy to manage parking garage and an escalator that took you up the sheer cliff to the historic center. They are not kidding about these Tuscan hill towns. Thankfully my glutes are well developed. My buddy Rick’s tour started in the Campo, the main square where the Palio is held.

Piazza del Campo: Rick said this is where we get the color ‘burnt sienna’ and I’m not fact checking.

Other side of Piazza del Campo It is not a square square, but rather an elliptical square. Kind of disorientating and surrealist.

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Palazzo Pubblico still houses Siena’s city administration since the 14th century when they broke the mold saying we’re rich secular humanists! We don’t need no church as the center of OUR town.

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*Ovviamente* the She-Wolf is the one who suckled Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, and then Remus’ son was Senius, so the She-Wolf’s grandson, and he founded Siena. And now she sates pigeons who respectfully line up for a quaff.

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But you know there HAD to be a Duomo somewhere; it is Italy. I didn’t bother to pay to go in because… I don’t care about altarpieces or flat-ass medieval art anymore. Who does? Is it inspiring? Am I simply oversaturated from ND’s campus? Like I know they were figuring out how to represent three-dimensionality on a single plane but snore.

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When they were super rich and powerful, the Senese had tried to expand the Duomo to assert themselves but then the plague came and that’s showbiz, baby! Now in a very Italian way, there’s a parking lot in a half-finished medieval church nave.

Rick said that St. Catherine’s thumb AND teeth were in the Basilica di San Francesco and that was freaky as hell so I hoofed it out there and I couldn’t even find them! Instead there were some supposedly ‘miraculous’ hosts that didn’t spoil for like 100 years or something which I thought was kind of the point of all Styrofoam?

The flags along the walls in San Francesco represent each of Siena’s 17 still territorial neighborhoods, *contrade*; the whole Palio race is about which one’s horse wins and gets the Virgin Mary *palio* or banner for the year. So it’s college.

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Found the University of Siena Botanical garden!

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A Day in Siena