Sempre per sempre Siena...
Trip Start
Jun 02, 2007
1
15
Trip End
Jul 05, 2007
Siena, Italy
Monday, August 6, 2007
Take Siena. A tourist attraction now more than anything else, the Piazza del Campo charges for the view (they do live in a picture postcard, after all), and the Duomo charges entry. Men arrange themselves at intervals selling guidebooks, snow globes, postcards, and shot glasses. But even here, it is still possible to find hidden beauty. Walking down the small pedestrian streets, an unassuming building housing law offices and dentists opens to reveal a courtyard that leaves you standing in awe, the Virgin Mary posing gracefully, as she does everywhere in Italy, with open arms to welcome you, whatever your legal or orthodontic needs may be.
I wander the winding streets of Siena with a friend, exclaiming over the improbability that such a small city could be home to such an endless combination of twisting turns and passages that have as much a chance of leading you somewhere new and unexpected as they do for spewing you out, once again, onto the central Piazza del Campo. As we discover yet another Piazzetta, not even large enough to be a Piazza of its own, we hear the now familiar sound of drums, the bands of the Festival Palio that have been marching past our window for days now. The way the city echoes makes it nearly impossible to guess where they are coming from, but we approach a column of steep stone stairs leading away from the city and peer below. What unfolds is an expansive patchwork of yellow houses, bright green grass, dark green vines, blue sky. Closer to where we are, tacked onto the side of the hill, a terra-cotta terrace with a sole boy, not quite a man, marching back and forth, playing his drum for Tuscany.
