A Long Weekend in Siena by Lee Marshall

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Palazzo Ravizza

"To stay at this charming, frescoed hotel is to be transported to another era - without having to give up any of the little modern luxuries."

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Think of a town near you. Make the inhabitants strikingly good-looking, give them proper haircuts, and swap their shellsuits for decent clothes. Then, fill them with a fierce pride in the town and its history, so that, travel as they might, they will never find anywhere that moves them as their birthplace does. Finally, take away, in your mind, the houses and churches and public buildings that have gone up haphazardly over the years and replace them with others, of a noble and unified beauty, which justify the citizens’ loyalty and pride. What you have imagined - give or take a few architectural details - is Siena.

Like any other town, Siena was once nature. It was, in fact, three adjacent hills. Between the hills was a scallop-shaped meadow, where animals would come to graze. Then came a lip, then a drop into a steep-sided valley. When the senesi set about paving the grass, the three hills became the terzieri of Città (where the Duomo stands), San Martino and Camollia - districts which in their turn were divided into a number of contrade (once 59, now a mere seventeen). The scallop-shaped meadow became Piazza del Campo, fronted by the Palazzo Pubblico, which stands proud on the lip. Behind, where the verdant valley dropped away, is a market square, and behind that, a verdant valley. In Siena, you’re only ever a street corner away from what was here before the town went up.

There are other complete and satisfying Italian towns, in which civic pride, religious fervour and private wealth combined and conspired to realise a civitas that was worthy of their ambitions. But, few are as harmonious as Siena, which is, in structure and spirit, an expression of the three centuries between 1260 and 1559. All senesi have those two dates impressed somewhere on the double helix of their DNA. The first marks the Republic’s coming of age, with the Battle of Montaperti, in which a small Sienese force, bolstered by 800 German knights, defeated a far larger Florentine army, leaving ten thousand corpses littering the field. And the second marks the end of the independence that Siena had thus won for itself, with the surrender of the Republic’s last bastion, Montalcino, to the Medici grand-duke Cosimo I.

You might expect a battle that took place more than seven centuries ago to be viewed with a certain detachment by today’s senesi. Far from it. In his book Within Tuscany, sculptor Matthew Spender - who lives in the nearby village of San Sano - writes that Montaperti is one of three subjects that can be guaranteed to generate long, animated discussions in any Sienese bank queue. The other two are the Palio horse-race, and the hunting of wild boar.

The son of poet Stephen Spender, Matthew came out here from London in the late 1960s with his wife Maro, propelled by what he cheerfully refers to as “the dropout syndrome”. Over lunch, I ask him to fix on what makes Siena so special, so apart, even for other Italians; and his sculptor’s mind turns first to their faces. “I’m often transfixed by the exceptional beauty of the Sienese, which is combined with a complete lack of flirtatiousness. I look at the waitress, and I start stammering; but she looks at me as if she couldn’t be less interested, as if I’m a piece of dead camel meat”.

This “supernatural indifference” has nothing to do with his being a foreigner, says Spender: “they behave in the same way with people who live less than ten miles outside the walls”. Siena, Spender believes, is one of the most hermetic societies you will find anywhere: “the Sienese need nothing from the rest of the world: they have each other, and they have the Palio”.

There are several aspects of the world’s most famous bareback horse race, held in the Campo on 2 July and 16 August each year, that puzzle outsiders. Let me pull four out of the hat. One: the apparent chaos at the starting line can drag on for over an hour; but the race itself lasts, on average, seventy-five seconds. Two: the worst thing that can possibly befall a contrada is for its horse to come second; coming last is nothing in comparison. Three: husbands and wives from different contradas often separate for the days leading up to and including the Palio, in the interests of family unity. Four: although no bets are taken, there is a huge sum of money riding on the result. Well over half a million dollars will be paid out by the capitano, or “manager”, of the victorious contrada, not only to his own jockey, but to the capitani of friendly contradas who helped him out in the race. Some money may even go to the other jockeys, who can and do strike deals quite independently of the contradas they are engaged to race for.

I once made the mistake of suggesting to the capitano of the Bruco (caterpillar) contrada that such under-the-table deals were hardly in the Olympic spirit. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and incredulity before asking me what, in God’s name, the Olympics had to do with anything.

It is impossible to understand the Palio without entering into the Sienese mindset; and it is impossible to enter fully into the Sienese mindset unless you have born within the walls and baptised in one of the seventeen fountains that innocent tourists assume have been placed there to refresh and restore the thirsty traveller. But it is worth making the heroic, vain attempt. Matthew Spender believes that “there is something miraculous about being able to take part in a ritual which is so archaic”, and puts the experience of watching the Palio on a level with reading Dante: both hold a key to the Medieval Italian mind. “Except”, he adds, “that reading Dante is easier”.

The first time I ever went to Siena, aged 20, I knew nothing of all this - but I found the place captivating and exhilarating all the same. Florence or Rome or Naples didn’t do this for me, not in the same way; Siena, on the other hand, was electric. Two explanations now occur to me, over and above the beauty of the place and the fact that summer term was over, and I imagined myself to be in love. The first is, that I was somehow energised by the tremendously focused passion of the inhabitants. The second (which I prefer) is that being so totally ignored by people who really had no interest in me was liberating, in such a setting. The Sienese don’t mind tourists at all, unless one happens to be blocking their view of the race. They are so sure of themselves - Dante called them “vainer even than the French” - that they are entirely unconcerned about what others think of them.

For visitors, this freedom can take various forms. At the very top of the Torre del Mangia, which dominates the Campo, I met an elderly man from East Grinstead. He had been determined to make it up here, he told me, to prove to his wife - who was down in the square - that he could do it. And here we stood, 503 steps shorter of breath, next to the great bell, on top of a flimsy wooden platform reached via a precarious ladder with no signs, or guards, to tell anyone they couldn’t. We grinned at the audacity of it all, and I took a photo for him to show his wife.

I feel much the same way about the art of Siena, or rather, the art of the quattrocento golden age of Siena. There is something both innocent and daring about Simone Martini’s richly caparisoned horseman in the Palazzo Pubblico (the visitable part of which goes under the name of the Museo Civico). In a desert landscape that seems more African than Sienese, condottiere Guidoriccio da Fogliano rides proud and erect - though with a faintly grumpy expression on his face, it must be said. Behind stand a castle and a fortified town, painted with a confident, childlike abuse of perspective; to his right is a miltary camp, a-flutter with banners but apparently devoid of soldiers. At the horse’s feet, a pallet fence bristles with lances; their bearers have vanished away. It’s all rather unreal, slipping the carpet from underneath the military pageant in the very act of celebrating it.

You’re in no danger of scraping the barrel of Sienese sights in a single, four-day visit. Especially with the addition of new pulls like the 15th-century Palazzo delle Papesse, which has become a vibrant contemporary art centre, and the huge Medieval hospital complex of Santa Maria della Scala, opposite the Duomo, once a tip-the-caretaker kind of place, now a full-blown museum. Upstairs, Domenico di Bartolo’s frescoes provide some fascinating insights into the daily routine of a charitable hospital in the mid 15th century. Downstairs is the Oratory of Santa Caterina della Notte, a subterranean Baroque chapel, all stucco and beeswaxed pews, one of those vaguely Masonic religious confraternities that channeled the energies of a populace who - deprived of their independence - could no longer glory in allegories of Good Government.

But, even the must-see sights have the element of surprise on their side. The candy-striped Duomo must be the only Christian church anywhere to host - on the intarsia marble floor - a portrait of that old neo-Platonic magus, Hermes Trismegistus. The mid fifteenth century saw the high tide of the Humanist attempt to reconcile pagan philosophy with Christianity - an attempt looked on favourably by local poet Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who became Pope Pius II in 1458. Pinturicchio’s frescoes in the Libereria Piccolomini - entered by a door on the left side of the nave - celebrate the life of the pope-to-be in glorious technicolor. In the first panel, young Enea (Aeneas), seated jauntily on a white steed and dressed up to the nines, looks back over his shoulder at the viewer with a cocky, determined, proud expression that is the very essence of senesità, or Sienese-ness.

Finally, there’s the Campo. However packed it gets, this great civic expanse always retains its symbolic force. There is something going on here beyond the lounging exchange students, the pigeon-chasing toddlers, the Chianti- and sun-fazed tour groups, the crisp packets cartwheeling across the red bricks like tumbleweed. Like Siena itself, the tilting shell of the Campo tantalises the surface-skimming traveller with the promise of something far more deeply rooted.

This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)