A simple pages and pictures
ensemble
to show you some of the unknow resources
of the gorgeous Chianti
Welcome to Siena
North-east of Siena, the southern part of the Chianti Classico wine area, or coming south from the Meleto Castle or the Brolio Castle there are several little villages and castles who can be visited in a half day tour: The Castello di San Sano, Castello di Lucignano, the Certosa di Pontignano and the Castle of Fagnano
PICTURE GALLERY OF SIENA:
San Domenico Church
Santa Caterina da Siena Church
Gothic Palazzo Pubblico
The Dome
SIENA
Siena: Medieval Siena is often
seen as the female counterfoil to Renaissance Florence. At her heart lies the
magnificent shell-like piazza, Il Campo, scene of the famous bareback horse
race, Il Palio, which whips the town into a frenzy twice a year. One day
is not long enough to appreciate all that the tiny walled city has to offer.
Must-sees include the humbug-striped Cathedral decried by Ruskin as 'a piece of
costly confectionery' and the majestic Palazzo Pubblico (town hall)
topped by the soaring Torre del Mangia. Named after the medieval
bell-ringer, the tower should be climbed for magnificent views of the city and
hills beyond. Inside the town hall is the Museo Civico where tourists
flock to see Simone Martini's Guidoriccio - the famous Sienese captain
and standard-bearer of the city, and Lorenzetti's Effects of Good and Bad
Government - a vivid allegory painted against the backdrop of
fourteenth-century Siena. The city's best-loved work, Duccio's Maesta,
lies in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. The devotional picture of the
Madonna, enthroned among saints and angels, once graced the Cathedral altar, her
blue robes setting off the church's starry vaults. No visit is complete without
a wander through Siena's cool, warren-like streets which wind around Il Campo,
like arteries feeding the city's pulsating heart. Visitors can drop into one of
the city's pasticceria for a slice of Sienese panforte or mingle
with the students seeping up the sun in the Campo over a slice of freshly baked
pizza.
From Florence, Siena is best reached by bus. No cars are allowed in the city and
the Siena's train station is on a branch line, making it necessary to change.
Coaches depart from the station on Via Santa Caterina every hour. The journey
takes approximately one hour. The tourist office is located at Piazza del Campo
56 (tel: (0577) 280 551; fax: (0577) 270 676; e-mail: aptsiena@siena.turismo.toscana.it;
web site: www.siena.turismo.toscana.it).
Localization
Siena, the capital city of Siena province in the Tuscany region of north central Italy, is situated about 55 km (35 mi) south of Florence in the heart of a region known for its marble quarries and Chianti wine. Siena has a population of 57,745 (1990 est.). The city produces wine, fertilizer, and chemicals. Siena has largely retained the appearance of a large, prosperous medieval city and for this reason is a popular tourist center. Among the city's most notable landmarks are the 13th- and 14th-century Gothic Palazzo Pubblico, the Gothic-Romanesque cathedral, and the 14th-century Gothic Baptistery of San Giovanni. Many medieval and Renaissance palaces also survive. The University of Siena dates from the 13th century. Founded by Etruscans and later ruled by Rome and the Lombards, Siena became a free commune in the 12th century. In the 13th century it became a flourishing banking center rivaling Florence. The 13th- to 14th-century Sienese school of painting, which produced artists such as DUCCIO DI BUONINSEGNA, ended when the Black Plague began (1348). Emperor Charles V halted Siena's four centuries of republican autonomy in 1555. In 1569 the city came under the Medici dukes of Tuscany, and Siena thereafter shared the history of Tuscany, joining united Italy in 1860.
WERE IT THE BEST of alI
possible worlds and time capable
Iof
being poured and stopped as by a faucet, the approach to Siena should be
threefold, once by car or bus, once by train, once by a magical
ceiling-dissolving balloon, each approach landing in an appealing symptom of the
Siena syndrome. One of the western gates to the city welcomes cars with a Latin
inscription that trans- lates roughly as "Wider than ber gates does SieDa
open ber heart" and Siena is courteous and hospitable--except in
tobacconists' shops, where, understandably, selling ODe envelope and one sheet
of paper, one stamp, one pack of ten cigarettes, oDe box of matches, through
long hours, makes a soured lite.
The
heart narrows in the tristezza of mid-September to spring, when Siena
folds ber arms and broods through the gray, damp days. It broadens when the
hotels rehire last summer's help, the restaurants sharpen their décor and the
Palio costumes afe taken out of the contrada closets far resplendoring.
Though there afe only two Palios run regularly and, occasionally, an extra third
far a foreign dignitary or a pope, the Palio season is stretched to its greatest
possible length, beginning in the spring, when the elabora- tions of the contrada
churches afe regilded, the chords on last
..
year's drums replaced, the house of the borse freshly whitewashed and last year's
pinups covered by a fresh photo of Pope John XXIII, to continue in a spiraI of
frenzy that splutters and dies in the last glass of wine drunk at the last contrada
dinner in October.
If
you come by
train, your seat companion might be a gentle- man reading Orlando Furioso, the
equivalent of The Canterbury Tales, perfectly reasonable however far the
intellectualism of Siena. Out of the train and into a taxi and another
confrontation with the Sienese sense of being unique, apart. The driver almost
sideswipes another car, a norm of Italian driving. He says, "Did you notice
that license? One guess. A Florentine, of course. Dreadful people, pretentious,
verbose, show-ofls. Romans afe almost as bado The Milanese? Not too bad, but
they're vulgar, materialistico The local people, from Grosseto, Piombino and the
Tuscan towns and villages, afe good, fine people, but toward the south, and
worse continuing southward, they afe monsters."
"But,"
one counters, "Florence is not exactly,in the south." "True,"
he says, "they afe the cancet of the north."
Many
centuries ago, Siena rivaled Florence and continues to think so, after old
defeats in battle and consequent losses of terri- tory and lives and in spite of
the Medici shields on many walls. Although Florence is in Tuscany, the cradle of
Italian literary speech, the Florentines bave hideous, grunting accents, say the
Sienese, while theirs is pure, exquisite. This sentiment is often spoken in
something like Arabic-Italian; all "c" sounds afe lacking or slightly
aspirated, so that casa becomes hasa, a coppa of gelato brightens
to hoppa, although cultivated Sienese speech is as musi- cal as they say
it is. You will probably hear that Giotto copied from Duccio, that FIorentine
painting is a decayed imitation of the Sienese, and so on. Don't argue; it is
impolite and useless to fight one of the endearing faults of a delightful
people.
The
third mode of travel, the magic balloon, might take you first into a room of the
university where a class in Italian for foreigners is in session. No one is ever
called upon to recite, only volunteers answer; a rule to preserve the tace of
those unprepared far a public display of linguistic fumbling. Siena sensibilità
at its most sensi- tive. The balloon drops you next through the upper ftoors
of the Palazzo Pubblico before the murals of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, which
depict
early-fourteenth-century Good Government, the dream, the illusion of
Siena, an ideai (it includes a few rough spots, usually overlooked) that exists
firmly as reality in the minds of some of the elderly courtier-inte11ectuals; it
is a significant symbol to them that the Bad Government panels afe practica11y
extinguished while the Good remain clear, lovely and almost entire, a
mystical stamp of verity.
The
light must bave its dark and the honey its blood; Siena inflicted injuries and
the oppression of conquest on surrounding towns. She was a mighty power, as
ruthless as she could afford to be, the home of warriors and bankers to the
papacy, of medieval wheelers and dealers who could turo loyalties on and off
with lightning speed, and yet she was an extraordinarily 10ng-lived free commune.
The essence of the be11igerence, the intense rivalry, the fanfares and battle
colors, the marching, the drums and war chariots, the splendors of Renaissance
costumes, the unseen but never quite secret deals and counterdeals and the
commune spirit remain in the Palios and the passions they trigger.
The
Palio is actua11y a long silk banner, currentty a painting of the Assumption of
the Virgin (for the August 16 Tace) in a timid late-cubist manner. To possess
this, to hang it in a contrada church or museum, a short, brutal and
crooked Tace is run. To be in Siena only on a Palio day is to see it in orgasm
and consequentty at least a bit deceptive. See it belare, see it after, although
between the hithering and thithering mounting like a dancing madness, the
spiraling hysteria of a Children's Crusade (medieval a11usions come easily in
SieDa), it is possible, with enough resolution, to explore the city.
It
may not clarify the frenzy altogether, but it should help to fo11ow the Good
Government muraI with a visit to the house- museum of the contrada
Torre, on the via Salicotto behind the P-alazzo Pubblico. As you
might know, ~~§da is, sociolo~:~IL and emotion~~ expanded
familv with a11 that means- in _a cWmFe'~n1y meaningful unit is the family. The
members of a ciJntrada may not alI be crazy aboute~her, but making
the best of proximity, interdependence, joint traditions and the finan- cial
responsibility and team effort required by the Palio produces an abstract
affection that works better, in the long TUO, than lave.
They
bave no wish to escape each other and often take vacations to:g~ther, and when
ODe Sienese introduces himself to another he will'desigìlate bis contrada as
if it were p~rt ~f bis Dame. ~uring
~the'waxing;
exploding and reluctantly wanmg lime of the PalIo the contrada, traditionally
an almost autonomous townlet within the
;:cjty,
is controlled by a capo, who is in complete charge of all Palio
activities, including judgment of turbulent disputes concerning who is to be
taxed how much to make up the millions of lire spent and far what purpose.
The
Palio race is a development of ancient games harking back to the Romans-some say
to the Etruscans-through changes that echoed courtly games, such as bucolic
imitations of jousting, the goading of buffaloes, which suggests early
bullfighting, and long hazardous races through the city.
Torre,
one of the prosperous contrade, has a varied and largish museum,
attractively arranged to keep great memories vivid: its first win in 1599; the
summer, two hundred years ago, when it won both Palios; the great silver
platters won as awards for the skill, beauty and fine comportment of its group.
In the section set apart far matters of borse and jockey, the silver-studded
trappings and the evolutions of the jockey's costume and equipment: the spiked
iron maces they once used (the knives sometimes used later afe not in evidence)
and the hard helmet since replaced by a less conspicuous protective cap.
Surrounded by the ftourish of banners -about one hundred and fifty of them-the
shine of metal on fifty carefully preserved drums, the coats of armar and the
velvets and furs, two local boys, quite young, afe brought in by the keeper of
the house to demonstrate the use of the drums and ftags. Their work is
profoundly serious, adept, unhurried, priestly. These boys practice every
night-drummers beginning as early as six, the ftag boys at ten or eleven-in
total, obsessed dedication, as Spanish and Mexican boys practice veronicas with
a rag cape.
The
!!!!!!:trada church ~as its
own specialized characteristics. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the
first changes in neigh- borhood churches, which led to the present Palio-adapted
struc- tures. There afe no stairs, or very few, and no side aisJes; the organ is
placed high in the back, the altar is shallow and there afe no choir stalls; in
short, a box with churchly trappings, arranged to
allow
maximum space and no impediments to borse, jockey and ;~ contrada crowd.
The priest is of the church but primarily of the '" contrada, and it
is he who appears in Siena's newspapers at the side of the borse, under the
heading, "Ritorna Vincitor." Except far baptisms, also frequently
performed at the contrada fountain, the church is rarely used at other
times of the year; it belongs to the Palio.
At
10:30 A.M. on August 13 the Piazza del Campo explodes with colors of balloons,
pinwheels, scarves and banners, a daz:?iing flash of sunlight on stained glass,
as one passes the low arches along the via di Città. The dispossessed pigeons
wheel nervously, the boys wear their contrada shirts and cockades, the
girls bave draped their contrada scarves on their hips, Carmen fashion,
babies wave their neighborhood flags, below the windows of the Palazzo Pubblico
hang the banners of all the contrade. Big cameras far television and
newspapers and little cameras that will return to Osaka, Dijon and Paterson afe
trained on the crowd gathered to watch one of the several pre-race tryouts. The
police in ~'. pristine white begin their slow, inexorable march to clear the
track I
of walkers and
arguers. ~i1
Drums
roll, and precisely at Il: 00 a shot is fired and the horses afe led out of the
Palazzo by two white-gloved policemen. As they walk to the starting line, one
notices that numbers afe painted on the horses' rumps, since the jockeys, like
conductors of orchestras, do not wear their silks for rehearsals. They look
rather like waiters of rural trattorie, in their white jackets bound in black
braid and black-buttoned, as they lead their horses around the ring, bowing and
waving in response to the applause, after they bave run the casual-to-listless
race that determines which ten Palio horses will be chosen of a field of
eighteen. It is an easy beginning; only the young bother to shout "Dai,
dai," urging the unheeding jockeys and especially themselves to
excitement and the sore throats and husky voices they will carry about for a
week as a badge of passion and fidelity. A half hour later, these boys wi11
follow the jockey and borse to the contrada stable to walk the borse
under its totem of porcupine or rhinoceros or panther, the boldest ofIering
expert advice. "He's thirsty, give him some water." "No, not yet.
i,i£;;:
-
'4I~~t;"h~:;;èo(jl
off first." Neither hor~e nor handlers pay ~uch ~ft~ttehtiort~lbut the boys
bave stepped roto the awesome terram of ~]";;kfiow-h()w'andinside
information to be unfolded and elaborated
C-e
!i., ."
!+:';;;.,~fth~ JdiÌ1rter table.
.C
".i~i'That
afternoon, sometime between lunch and the late afternoon :ttyout, new signs
appear: a hand-Iettered poster at the side of a
contrada
seat advertises
a dinner on the night belare the Palio, 2,200 lire far adults, 1,000 lire far
children, tickets available at Luigi's bar, Mario's tabacco shop, and Guido's
grocery stare. ODe of the local newspapers advertises its enormous colored Palio
supplement, an exhaustive iconography of jockeys and horses. . Only a Sienese
could wade through alI of il, and always with intense interest and high emotion,
carried along streams of self- deception, although he knows-but this is no lime
to admit it- that the races afe fixed. (He insists that there afe always the
possibilities of accident, bis out in discussions with uninspired, non- Sienese
minds.) On the Piazze Gramsci and Matteotti, other elements of Sienese life try
to make themselves felt, if only as faint reminders. The Communist newspaper, Unità,
chooses this week far its festa: games far children, many eating
stands, a popular entertainer, dancing and a soccer match between Yugoslav and
Italian lady athletes, a busy program that manages not to interfere with Palio
schedules. The church advertises special masses and their meaning in the Palio,
reminding alI that the Palio is a reli- gious banner and it does celebrate
Assumption Day. The city administration feebly hopes that someone will apply far
the jobs it advertises. Nothing but cafés function normally; everyone is out,
wandering, arguing, in a group symbiosis of mutuai excitation.
The
Duomo is as overwhelming1y full of too much to see as otfier greai caihedrals,
and like many of them (except the un- rivaled peak, Saint Peter's in Rome),
dedicated equally to the greater glory of the Virgin Mary and rivalry with some
other cathedral. Pisa has Nicola and Giovanni Pisano? We hire them far SieDa.
Rome has Bernini? Let's bring him to work bere. Dona- tello? Michelangelo? Get
them out of Florence. Nothing but the best and, if possible, better and bigger.
Not the most altruistic way to build and filI a church, this competitive drive
has produced magnificent collections of church art, however.
The
Duomo complex is best seen from the side of the church of San Domenico, where
its compact gray and white presence appears large and calm, a Lorenzetti Virtue
who expresses the non-Palio mood and conduct of the city. This indirect approach
continues through the tortuous streets devoted to Saint Catherine and the Goose
(page 16), into the via di Città, then the via de astoro. AtJove,
rlre-exuavagant height of the double-arched Facciatone (big façade), a
blind giant that was meant to be the façade of a cathedral grand enough to
rival that of Florence. The Black Plague of 1348, financial reverses and the
perilous weakness of the dis- proportionately slender colurnns-among other
reasons-called a halt to the building and left a unique, evocative piazza.
The
prehistory of the church probably followed the usual pat- tern: ~~ple on a
he~t, very likely Etruscan; later, Roman, replaced by a small Christian
church. The gite might thus be considered the care, the oldest part, of SieDa,
the oldest houses those that slope away from the ecclesiastical prominence. The
ecclesiastical center was to bave been linked, as a symbol of accord between
church and civic powers, with the Campo by a long, legai stairway continuing
from the step~ that now drop to the baptistry, another fantasy of grandeur that
faded with other city planning. The on1y present evidence of balanced lay and
church influence is the fact that the Mangia tower of the government and the
campanile of the Cathedral afe carefully of the same height.
Other
than by sheer size and pride framed in winged space, and its accretion of
mosaics and detail in the strie of Orvieto (page 130), the Duomo façade
attracts as a combination of Gothic imposed on Romanesque; a peaceable low, wide
movement pulling against the surging vertical, and since this is Italy, the
spiritual soaring quickly arrested. The lower Romanesque section of rounded
arches, in recessed, carved bands topped by the animaI symbols of the
Evangelists, is reminiscent of churches in Puglia (page 294) and far good reason.
It was the work of Giovanni Pisano, whose father, Nicola, was originally
"di Puglia" and may easily bave been among the numerous artists in the
Pugljese courts of that extraordinary, pre-Renaissance "Renaissance"
prince, Frederick II. From that long distance, via Pisa, come the OrientaI
abstractions and the practice of enlivening monochrome stone with bands of
contrasto The French Gothic was introduced by restless
1{fti~i$:andcraftsmen,
the bees who carried the pollen of innova- "'{ioii:~from one region to
another; bere, particularly, a group of :Cisibrcian monks who directed the
building of the later (four- teenth-century) sections of the Duomo. Although the
façade seems perfectly balanced at first glance, a slower look reveals two pink
blocks, probably tram the first church, on the left side, not re- peated on the
right, and one end pier narxower than the other, testimony of various ideas,
hands and patchings that affected the church in its long time of building,
beginning in the late twelfth century.
The
conflict between Gothic flight and flat, squared space is noticeable again in
the interior as numerous iron bars, probably meant far a ceiling or a broad rail
to contain the foreign-inspired urge toward uncomfortable height. There was a
change of mind or taste, obviously, and the clusters of pillars, talI and
fiercely rigid in their alternations of black and white, stretch up and up, into
distant starry vaults. The famous incised and inlaid marble floor is also a
product of centuries (from the fourteenth into the six- teenth). The choicest
sections afe kept covered except far the period between August 15 and September
15 (roughly) but there is always visible an ampIe stretch to exemplify the early
and straightforward, the later concentrations on virtuosity, the stilI later
whirlwinds of distortion in the excessive lights and darks of mannerism.
Above
the biblical figures and pagan sibyls and the shields of SieDa afe riches of
other masterworks: the incredible pulpit cre- ated by the Pisanos, father and
san, and Arnolfo di Cambio; the handsome Piccolomini altar with a figure, in a
niche, believed to be the work of the young Michelangelo, and several figures by
Bernini; a tomb figure and a wonderfully shaggy John the Baptist by Donatello;
the inlaid woodwork in the choir stalls, finely worked even under the seats, the
ultimate of art far art's sake; the Piccolomini library and its sleek,
infinitely charming frescoes of Pinturicchio bound in bravura perspectives and
bands of Pompeian ornamento
The
splendors of the church reach their climax in the Museo dell'Opera at the side
of the Facciatone, where there is a room devoted to the Duccio Maestà and the
smaller panels that sur-
rounded
it and were attached to its reverse side. It was originally hung in a centraI
area of the Duomo, belare the altar, but the expansion of the Duomo made its
position impractical and it was retired far a period to be rehung as two panels,
back and front. A later expansion caused the paintings to be removed and dis-
carded--cut up, sold, stolen. A few of the panels seem irrevocably galle; a few
remain in England and the United States. After a stubborn, difficult task of
searching out, authenticating, buying back and restoring, the almost complete
set-some forty-odd of sixty-hang in the hushed, mellow illumination of an
air-con- trolled room. If you bave seen the Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni
chapel in Padua (page 268), these will seem a repetition in miniature of the
life of Jesus and Mary, and there afe superfici al resemblances. Siena's pride
as womb of language and art-the pride that causes marble quotations tram Dante
to speak tram many streets in the city, sometimes a bit out of context,
sometimes implying a lave far the city that Dante did not always feel-insists
that Duccio was Giotto's predecessor, an indisputable fact. But the Scrovegni
frescoes were painted a few years belare the Maestà, and furthermore there is
hardly any way of claiming a "prede- cessor" between two men so close
in age who both drew tram a varied, rich world of church art; who both made
brilliant, arresting places in a long line of continuity, Duccio to bring the
traditional Byzantine-Gothic to its richest, warmest culmination, Giotto to
deftect it to paths that ran toward the Renaissance.
In spite of bis conservatism, irresistible waves of art develop- ment and bis own genius urged Duccio away tram the frozen accustomed. Although bis figures afe often in the spellbinding, remote and unfteshly mode of bis time, there is more often a weight and amplitude of body beneath the drapery, a sense of portraiture, a canny, subtle relationship of line, colar and gesture that lie far beyond the borders of that time. The traditional ele- ments, the steady and expected, act as nice foils far the departures. As it does in much early church painting, a development of action may appear in one painting like penny-machine movies, ground out of a series of strips: a figure is shown asleep (a masterly passage), then awakened and then departing, alI in one panel. The customary lines of gold that marked unearthly drapery shining of
heaven
stilI appear, for in~tance, on the robes of tbe Christ figure after the
Resurrection. The Crucifixion maintains the conventional golden background of
the Byzantine, or "Greek," style, but the weight of the hanging bodies,
the distortion in the shoulder of the tbief on tbe left, almost pulled out of
its socket by tbe abnormal stretch from tbe waist, tbe plumb-line drop of the
sagging head, the spiny, angled group of men, tbe long lamenting line of
sorrowing women afe painting outside of periods and strictures of styles.
The
only non-Duccio painting that shares the velvet atmo- sphere is a diflerent sort
of enchantment, a Nativity of Mary by the occasionalIy more interesting older
brother of Ambrogio, Pietro Lorenzetti. It is a work of 1342, tbirty years after
tbe Maestà, and a telling example of the strides taken by Sienese painting in
the first hall of the fourteenth century, the advances in perspective, tbe
readiness for naturalism. In spite of halos on the main personages, and the
majestic size of Sto Anne, the painting is a solid accouche- ment scene blending
and contrasting a wealth of decorative detail in a manner tbat oddly suggests
Vuillard, some five to six centuries later.
Below
the Duccio and Lorenzetti wonders and above, tbere afe a number of objects wortb
a respectful look: in tbe sculpture galIery, a few of tbe monumental and
expressive figures of Gio- vanni Pisano, executed at the end of tbe thirteentb
century to stand on the ledges of the cathedral, then taken out O
~e
weather that was consuming them and replaced by copies. otice tbe tensed
turo
of tbe head and the controlled anxiety in the ace of a figure referred to as
"Maria, daughter of Moses.") Up the stairs, past various church
ornaments and a splendid, alert head, into a room of ceremonial
objects-needlework in gold thread, an example of tbe golden rose that was the
gift of popes to kings, a sinuous polychrome angel, a silver arm designed as a
reliquary for the arm of San Giovanni, and a large gold and crystal casket
adorned with many exquisite crystal and gold pears, apples, leaves, acorns and
flowers coquettishly arranged around a skulI and bones.
On
the floor above the necrophile daintiness, the plainer Ma- donna of the Big Eyes,
she who had the pIace of honor before Duccio's Maestà was hung in the Duomo,
and several rooms beyond tbere is a sign in several languages that leads
out to tbe
Facciatone.
The view gives on the massive churches of Santa Maria dei Servi and San
Francesco and, closer by, the enmeshed pattems of overlapping tiles, little
green lizards crawling aver and under the brown, red, tan and gray ceramic
wavelets. On a neighboring roof a woman loads a clothesline behind the oma-
ments of a fourteenth-century palazzo, and directly below is the car-strewn
piazza bom of miscalculation . lune.
Going
back toward the via di Cit n lei into the via del,
,
-
Poggio
and wind wrt rt, greeting the old lady who always fills ODe Wìii~ and
the brown hound who guards a balcony. This obscure path leads to a magnificent
archway near the Baptistry, a dis- appointment in spite of the fact that its
font is the work of many gifted hands, including Donatello's.
Head
far the via Diacceto, which acts as a high arched bridge aver lower streets that
rush down, along with daredevil motor- cyclists, to the neighborhood of Saint
Catherine and the Fonte Branda under the cliff that is the church of San
Domenico. Con- tinue on toward the Piazza Indipendenza and into the arches,
single, double, photogenically medieval, of the via della Galluzza. At its left
the steep vicolo del Costaccino makes its run far the many-fingered hand
of the Fonte Branda-San Domenico complex. This meshwork of narrow streets
inhabited by carpenters, basket- makers and laundries doesn't seem to be too
poor, although the presence of a busy street fountain indicates very modest
housing. As the street climbs, however, to change its Dame to Costa Sant'
Antonio, it takes on the hostile glower of poverty, spent at its meeting with
via della Sapienza. Here ODe can turo right far the Etruscan Museum at Number 3
or, at Number 5, the Biblioteca Comunale, which occasionally arranges
exhibitions of its treasures -Dante illustrated by Botticelli, some of the
prolix and argu- mentative correspondence of Saint Catherine, ancient books
illus- trated by Sienese painters.
-
With
each successive tryout-two a day-the mobs in the Campo become louder and thicker,
the prices of tight seats more expensive, more luxurious banners of red and old
rose trimmed with gold adoro the piazza. The riders bave changed to their white
clownlike costumes and stiff jockey caps. The screaming is louder
