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Siena, Italian capital of the Middle Ages, lies amongst ancient hills moulded out of age-old tufa and cradled between the Val d’Elsa and the Valdarbia. Legend has it that Senio and Aschio, the sons of Remus, founded Siena although the town really has Etruscan and Roman origins. The town’s structure was laid down during the late medieval period when the three hill districts of Città, Camollia and San Martino came together.
After the Lombards, bishops and consoles had come and gone, Siena became a place of merchants and craftsmen and grew powerful on a colourful trade in textiles, spices, perfumes saffron, wines and waxes. Its flourishing past is evident in the magnificence of the walled town centre. Siena’s fine homes still stand as monuments to its wealthy former denizens. The town’s fabulous squares of heady proportion and the intensely religious nature of its Romanesque-Gothic churches bear witness to a scale of artistic endeavour unique in the world. But misfortune struck in the 14th-c.: famine and the black death decimated the people of Siena and brought their town to its knees. Siena was a broken city and lost its independence. Giangaleazzo Visconti, Pandolfo Petrucci, the Spaniards under the rule of Charles V and lastly Cosimo I de’ Medici prevailed and mastered the city. This brought about a terrible economic crisis that ended only in the 18th c. with the arrival of the Lorrainese. Nowadays Siena is a paradise for tourists. A spell seems to have been cast over the town and its inhabitants, because they are the only people in Italy who still observe an ancient and traditional feast day purely for their own pleasure: all their own proud feelings of citizenship are invested in the Palio.
A visit to Siena is like journeying backwards through time: walking through the picturesque alleyways surrounding the famous Piazza del Campo, everything seems to have remained much as it would have been in medieval times, when the city enjoyed its greatest artistic and civil splendour. The medieval atmosphere lives again particularly during the Palio, the traditional horse race, which is held in the Piazza del Campo on 2 July and 16 August every year. Preceded by a historic cortege and procession in costume, the race itself lasts little more than a minute, but all the symbolism and spectacle of ancient tournaments is concentrated within it, and it is closely followed by the Sienese and the thousands of tourists who come to watch it every year. The magnificent Piazza del Campo in which it is held is one of the finest city spaces in Europe, with its unusual shell-like shape uniting the different levels formed by the conjunction of the three hills on which the city was founded.