Sharing Siena

I was picked up today by my driver, Leonardo, to drive to San Gimignano. Friendly, personable and a good driver, he was an excellent find. On the way we collected a guide, Claudia (sourced by Leonardo) who was also just wonderful. San Gimignano is a medieval walled city, high on a hill. The town is full of towers, built by wealthy families to showcase their power and wealth. There is nothing inside, just a tower. There were originally about seventy towers, but only fourteen remain. All that work to look powerful… Shelley (who lived in Tuscany for a while) has an apt poem (Ozymandius)  - “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains”. 

The views of the countryside with cypress, olives and vineyards were stunning and the town was gorgeous. It was a bit too early for most of the shops to be open - probably lucky for me as it was all artisan goods and looked pretty good through the windows. Claudia had great stories with just the right mix of historical facts and social reflection. 

We then drove to Siena, Claudia’s hometown. The Duomo was magnificent and Claudia had so many stories to bring it alive. This is her hometown and so much of her information was woven into stories about people in and experiences of her life. She was so generous in sharing her personal thoughts and opinions as well as the facts. Here’s the floor of the church and the ceiling in the library. 

The thing I found most fascinating about Sienna was the contrade - seventeen neighbourhood divisions, each represented by an animal. The most well known public feature of the contrade is the twice yearly horse race around the piazza, but Claudia (who is a Unicorn) told me and showed me so much more. Each contrade has its own church, patron saint, community hall and special customs and feast days. You are generally baptised into the contrade of your parents (they choose if both from different contrade) and then participate in that community. I was originally thinking of it as a football team type connection, but it’s actually a way of life, the social fabric of the community. Symbols and signs of the contrade are everywhere- a plaque on a building showing it’s the caterpillar area, a flag of the wolves, flown for four months after their win at the last race, the baptismal area of the dragons. 

Lunch was delicious, a new meal for me, Malfatte- a kind of spinach and ricotta meatball (no meat) in a sauce with butter and sage.

We finished our wandering with a quick look inside the Dominican church, a vast contrast to the elaborately decorated duomo, but equally beautiful in its simplicity, and enhanced (?) by the head and thumb of St Catherine.