Siena

Cavalca el Conte Guido per la Toscana la lanza in man che’l porta e la bandera

Francesco Patavino

Monteriggioni was much closer to heaven than hell. This morning’s weather could not have been more more perfect as Marco and David dropped us off and we walked up to the ancient city gate.

After three nights, two walks and a rest day in the same place with friends, we really felt rested and energised, a result also of the utter pampering we received, including a lovely dinner and lunch out. We had such a brilliant time, both of you and thank you so very much.

We wandered around the silent space, remembering holidays past. Despite our reverie, we managed to remember to get our credentials stamped, before leaving the city through a gate under a tower with the black-and-white pennant of Siena fluttering above us in the sunshine.

In the car park below the city the first coach was disgorging its load of tourists.

As we walked away from the city and climbed the hill views opened up backwards of the perfect circle of the city walls, until at the top of the hill at the entrance to the vast woods we had our final view of the towers rising up above the olive trees. Monteriggioni — a very, very special sight, and very much more like heaven than hell, whatever the Florentine Dante might have felt.

The woods were full of mushrooms, but not the ones we were looking for. We weren’t sure whether the trees were right for the funghi porcini to grow, but in the night the wild boar had certainly had a go at the ghostly pale Amanita: we could see teeth marks in one.

It was hard to look into the understory for mushrooms anyway, because we had to keep our eyes on our feet as we climbed up on a very uneven limestone track,

with rock garden borders of cyclamen, hellebore and any number of seedlings from the trees.

We shared the woods with the birds, and presumably the wild boar, sleeping off a night’s action and nowhere to be seen. Hiding from the Sunday hunters, said Stephen.

The wood spat us out at a stables with the first well-fed horses we have seen for a few days, a reminder of how dear to the Sienese are these animals.

Here were paddocks, stables, stalls, and what looks like a small race track. We are now in Palio territory.

We crossed a valley planted up with wide swathes of alfalfa on either side. From a field track, a beautiful dappled grey horse came towards us. Her rider told us her name was Faghiddia, which means ‘nosey’ in Sardo, the language of Sardinia, where she had been born.

I didn’t ask whether she would be trained up to race in Siena’s famous horse race, the Palio, whether these neat hoofprints would be translated into Siena’s Campo when there is earth packed into the piazza.

Looking back the way we had come it was clear how far into autumn we now were, with wispy low lines of cloud breathed out by the land overnight still hanging in the valleys, even at ten in the morning

We came to a collection of fortified farm houses, the first being ‘Snail Castle’, a 14th century construction named after a spiral staircase within its tower.

We found ourselves passing it without a second glance, yet exclaiming at an oak tree of massive girth which must’ve seen something in the region of four hundred winters. We preferred its pristine 16th century bulk to the castle, two hundred years its senior.

Today had been advertised in the guidebook as one where we would need to carry everything with us because there was no opportunity for getting more food and water. So we were surprised therefore to find a fully functioning little café operating on a donation system set up enterprisingly by a couple in their garden.

That they were idiosyncratic was evident from the twenty bathtubs in their backyard, under the olive trees and filled with vegetables growing.

We walked past the second of the fortified farm houses, Castello di Villa, which we very much preferred to the first. This one had a battered slope to its ancient walls, rising to a modestly-sized but effective-looking crenellated tower.

The interpretation board spoke of a ’ward’ enclosed by the walls, and we could see into it as we passed, through a gateway where the bottom portion had been widened in curious fashion.

We joined a road by means of a couple of country paths along field edges, easy-going earth underfoot and the leaf litter at the side of the path alive with lizards and starred with tiny wild cyclamen.

We were walking through a corridor of woodlarks this morning, a new bird for us, to accompany the ubiquitous longtailed tits which have been the bird of the journey so far, accompanying us from the first days in Italy. And there was a new butterfly, a tiny Lang’s Short-tailed Blue (Leptotes pirithous), a member of the gossamer-winged butterfly family.

We made good time along the pretty country road, now with wide views over open countryside and now in woods where porcupine quills lay scattered over the tarmac.

We have pretty much lost track of the days of the week by now, but had remembered that today was Sunday. There were plenty of people out horseriding, cycling, walking and also running. One very fit gentleman was doing intervals when the road morphed into a quiet strada bianca, passing us again and again going first one way and then the other. There was a decent incline at one end, making for a really effective exercise routine.

We hadn’t passed as many regular pilgrims as we normally do today, but we did come across a large group of Italians doing a four-day stretch of the Francigena from San Miniato to Siena. It’s quite unusual to meet Italians doing the walk, but these made a very jolly crew. I took a group photograph for them at the first sign announcing that we were (apparently) on the outskirts of the city.

Our way now took us through a fantastic path with packed sand underfoot through a coppiced chestnut wood.

It must have been cultivated for decades and decades, since some of the trunks were growing up in really wide rings.

We kept a good eye out because we felt this was much more likely to be porcini mushroom growing territory. Apart from the fact that we didn’t see any, there was also a sign that had been knocked to the ground saying they could only be picked if you had paid for a day license.

The sign was lying on the ground by an electric fence behind which horses were enjoying the cool of the dappled light, if not the flies that accompanied it. We had seen some riders earlier on today; it was turning into something of a day of horses.

It was also a day of sun. We emerged from the woods and made a perpendicular crossing of a couple of valleys — the sun turned the vines a blinding shade of green,

and everything was about six times as colourful as it might otherwise have been.

I think it was the blue of the sky that set it all off, in that way that beautiful autumn days have of not making you regret one bit the passing of summer.

In the distance now, incredibly, the Torre della Mangia and the cathedral tower of Siena came into view,

and from there it didn’t take long to walk through the outskirts. I was looking forward to seeing the city again after so long — I had spent a year there when I was 20 in 1987 (in fact, where I had first met David) and I think perhaps had been briefly back just once since, on a short excursion. We entered through the Porta Camollia.

I found the city simultaneously unchanged, and very different. The architecture of the city was of course the same, with the medieval buildings in their piazzas like the Monte dei Paschi bank, founded in 1247,

and the Palazzo Chigi Saraceni crawling up the hill and round a corner like only a medieval building can.

We went first to the Duomo — that extraordinary masterpiece of Tuscan polychrome — to get our credentials stamped, appropriately enough walking up the Via del Pellegrino to do so.

The existing cathedral was intended as only one transept of a planned building on colossal scale, of which only the west end and one side of the nave was built before Black Death descended upon the city in 1348, and construction work ceased.

The impact of the green/black and white horizontal marble stripes was very powerful — although it’s so huge you can’t get far enough away to see it properly, even by craning your neck in the Piazza del Duomo. And on sunny days like today you are blinded by the sun on the white stone as soon as you look up.

I found myself instead looking down at the pavement, at once-familiar marble roses picked out in lines of tiny drilled holes filled with bitumen, and set against bands of pink marble.

They are a tiny foretaste of the interior floor of the church, entirely covered with a complex glory of inlaid narrative designs. The Duomo is ticketed now and we didn’t go in, but the façade was free to look and marvel at from the piazza in front of the old Santa Maria della Scala hospital building, now a museum.

I liked the way the modern lines of tourists sitting resting in the shade in front of the old hospital echoed the lines of medieval faces high up in the blind windows, details I think from frescoes in the Palazzo Pubblico

I had forgotten just how ornate the façade was, horizontal stripes on the Duomo’s side walls giving way to soaring pink and white marble clusters of narrow pillars, and geometric shapes filed with acanthus leaves or statues.

My favourite were the riot of stacked saints and gargoyles on the corners of the building.

But there were other much-loved details too, doors, and windows.

From there we walked down a half forgotten litany of streets, names familiar to me from forty years ago, Via di Città, Banchi di Sopra, Via Fontebranda, looking in windows that had not changed much either. The Feltrinelli bookshop where as 20-yr-olds we had been so shocked at the price of paperbacks, prohibitively expensive due to the Italian application of a heavy VAT rate,

and the same mouth-watering Sienese specialties in Nannini as ever.

The medieval streets twisted and wound,

and I kept half an eye out for the ornate street furniture, the iron hitching rings,

and the sconces for flags, here decorated with the symbols of the city districts.

until we reached the Piazza del Campo.

It would be harder to imagine a central square could be more memorable. Shell-shaped and paved in brick, it slopes gently down to the Palazzo Pubblico, which houses a superb museum. The Torre della Mangia rises impossibly high over the crenellated building, with Tuscan arches created from concentric double borders of marble, and black and white city shields.

This is the piazza where the Palio is held, an impossibly dangerous, atavistic bareback horserace around the extraordinarily-shaped course, in which the city contrade or districts compete. Seeing it in 1988 was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

The seventeen Contrade have wonderful names: Panther, Eagle, Snail, Tower, Wave, Owl, Shell, Goose — they were all on display in the flags hanging outside the tourist shops, and the postcards.

We sat in the piazza and gradually the pilgrims came in — Silvie and Bruno, on their rest day, and Florian, with whom we sat for a while. Florian was staying for a rest day too, in a ‘nunastery’ — a brilliant word of his own coinage.

We ate our packed lunch and people-watched for a while — a pursuit in which one could indulge all day in the piazza, if one had time.

We wandered over to the Fonte Gaia to say hello to the pigeons, the numbers of which have decreased significantly since the days when they were fed in huge flocks by tourists and were recognised as a public health hazard,

and then down to the internal courtyard of the Palazzo Pubblico, the heart of a city which celebrates its founding mythology in the story of the sons of Remus, who fled Rome with the she-wolf and her cubs after their father was killed.

It was wonderful to be back.

It was such a brief visit to the city — wonderful, but it was time to go. We slowly made our way back up to the top of town to be picked up by our friend Stuart, husband of ex-colleague Michelle who has recently been appointed Principal of the International School of Siena. They are kindly hosting us tonight.

Stats for the Day
Distance: 22.12
Time: 5hrs 4

Uplifting graffiti of the day: La Fragolacigena