Siena Culture

The contrade are the subject, not the Palio

Siena is divided into seventeen contrade, and understanding them is the difference between seeing the city and seeing a square. A contrada is a neighbourhood community with its own name, colours, emblem animal, church, fountain, museum, officials and inherited rivalries. A Sienese is baptised into one at its fountain, eats at its dinners through the year, and inherits its alliances and grudges. It is the primary civic identity in the city, and it operates continuously rather than twice a year.

This recasts what a visitor is looking at. Flags along a street mark territory. A fountain with an animal on it is a baptismal font. And the Palio is the contrade's own event — which is precisely why it would run, identically, if no visitor ever came. Ten of the seventeen contrade race on 2 July, for the Madonna of Provenzano, and on 16 August, for the Assumption; three laps of the Campo, under ninety seconds, after four days of trial races and dinners.

The city that stopped, and knows it

Siena held around 50,000 people before 1348 and holds about 53,000 now. The plague, then the war, then the abolition of the republic in 1555, removed its capacity to grow — and a city that does not grow does not demolish. The Sienese are entirely conscious that their greatest asset is the product of their greatest defeat, and the Facciatone, the standing wall of the cathedral nave the plague stopped, is the monument to it.

Sienese painting

Siena produced a school of painting that developed away from Florence's: flatter, more golden, closer to its Byzantine inheritance, more interested in pattern and devotion than in perspective and anatomy. Florence won the argument about what Italian art was for, and the consequence is that Sienese painting is systematically under-weighted outside Italy. The Pinacoteca Nazionale and the cathedral's own museum are where to correct that, and both are quiet.

The cathedral as a claim

The Duomo is a statement about ambition. Banded black and white marble inside and out, an inlaid marble floor of fifty-six panels, and sculpture by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo and Bernini in a single building — what the Opera della Metropolitana fairly calls a complex holding work by some of the most important masters in the history of European art.

Food, and the hills on either side

The cooking is inland Tuscan and frugal by design: pici, the thick hand-rolled pasta, ribollita, pecorino from Pienza, wild boar from the Chianti woods. Panforte and ricciarelli are the city's own medieval confections and still made everywhere. The wine is the surrounding landscape's most famous export — Chianti from the hills north-east, Brunello from Montalcino to the south.