Through My Lens - More Siena, Italy

Sunday In Siena, Italy

Our last day in Siena was a Sunday and while we visited several churches, we found no worship services. Bob and I elected to wander to one of the further reaches of Siena that we hadn’t visited yet. 

Our first destination was the piazza where the Basilica San Francesco was. The parking lot in front of the church was full of cars so we very quietly opened the church doors because we were sure there was a group of worshipers inside. It was empty. Beautiful but empty. A stained glass window depicted both women saints, Catherine and Francesco but we didn’t find any information on who Francesco was.

On our map it appeared that there was a park of sorts behind and next to the church. We found private signs (some words are evident in any language) and didn’t go in the gardens but ended up in a rather upscale area of condominiums and wandered past them and back up into the older area of the town.

Another church was empty when we went in to explore. Beautiful marbled floors resembled the Duomo floors. A huge altar with gold trim graced the front of the sanctuary. Beautiful but empty of worshipers. Surely there had been services sometime. This was Sunday.  Was it just too late in the morning?

The night we had taken our late walk, we’d passed a piazza with a statue in the middle that was lit up quite nicely. I recognized it as we passed by again. It didn’t look quite as nice in the daytime. You might even say it was a bit scary with all the heads at the top of the building looking down at you. Piazza Salimbeni actually is formed by a palace built in the 14th century and renovated in the 19th century. 

As we headed for the far end of Siena and the Porta Camollia we found ourselves in a part of town that featured kabob places and shops that displayed Middle Eastern garb for sale. It was almost like walking into another country.

Along the way we were stopped by a group of four Americans in a car who had driven into the city and wondered if they could park there without getting a ticket. We had no idea about the parking but were able to share our map with them and point them in the direction of the Piazza Del Campo in the middle of town. I suggested they take a picture of our map with their iPhone and use it until they could get their own.

At the Porta Camollia, we stepped outside the wall of the old city and looked around. I think Bob was hoping for a McDonald’s nearby. We walked a couple of blocks and then returned to the portal and stopped at the little café there for some coffee and a couple of donuts that were really good. Not McD’s but better, I thought.

That evening we visited a restaurant not too far from our hotel where we had stopped to take in the view from their terrace on a previous walk-by. Clever advertising “Come in and take a look at our view.” It was a bit too chilly for dinner on their terrace but we went inside and were seated at a nice table. Our last Italian dinner was a hit with the best antipasti we’d had the whole trip. It was almost a meal in itself

We always manage to find some sort of entertainment wherever we go—partly because we are so easily entertained. This night we found a large group of young people gathered in the park area behind and below our hotel. There was a race track set up and several stalls with donkeys in them. Eventually each donkey got a rider and we laughed as they tried to set up a start line for a race. A couple of the donkeys would break through the line each time they tried to make an even start. Obviously the donkeys were eager to get the race over with. 

The organizers somehow managed to get them almost even and just let them go. Two of the donkeys lost their riders but finished the race anyway. The young people surrounded the winner singing and chanting and hoisting a banner high. I got the feeling we had watched a parody of the actual Siena horse races.

As I snuggled between the crisp smooth sheets that night my thought was that this was the last night we would be in a bed that wasn’t moving. Hopefully our cruise would be smooth and uneventful weather-wise. 

Exploring Siena and Chianti, Italy

Over the days we spent exploring Siena we ran into small groups of young people dressed nicely and one among them with a laurel wreath on his/her head. The wreathed girls also carried a bouquet of flowers. We finally asked and found out that they were celebrating graduation. I'm guessing from their age and the nearness of the University of Siena, they were college graduates.

This day in Siena, we slept in a bit. There was no particular plan in place—at least not until later when we were due to eat dinner at a winery/farm/hotel. After breakfast we decided to walk again to the Basilica in the Piazza San Dominica where Saint Catherine’s sanctuary was. Somewhere there was supposed to be the house where she grew up and Bob’s brother hadn’t seen the relics (Catherine's head and thumb) yet and was curious.

After the visit to the Basilica and pointing out the relics, we walked past a soccer arena to the Fortezza Medicea (the fortress) that was now a beautiful park with great views and lovely paths to walk. Amazingly we discovered that the majority of the trees lining the walkways were buckeye trees. Huge buckeyes lay beneath the trees just begging to be made into Ohio State necklaces. It was, after all, a football Saturday, one that we would not be able to enjoy since the game was in the middle of the night in Italy.

A stop for coffee and then we decided to try to find the house of Saint Catherine. We ended up at the sanctuary again and Bob went into the gift shop to ask where the house was. It turned out we were in it. The sanctuary was where the kitchen had been and her bed chamber was below it where now there was a chapel.

All that walking and exploring can stir up an appetite and we had not had any real Italian pizza yet. In the Piazza Del Campo we found a nice outdoor restaurant where we could eat and enjoy some people watching. Italian pizza is so different than American pizza. There is less cheese and sauce and much different toppings. Ours had salami and was really quite good.

There were a lot of souvenir shops that featured University of Siena shirts and I didn’t realize how close we were to it until we decided to find the portal into the city we had seen the day before on our excursion to San Gimignano when we returned. It had an unusual old gate in it. As we walked to where we thought it was, we noticed lots of students, many with musical instruments in cases near some buildings that we identified as the music department of the university.

Bob’s brother and his wife took the minibus back to the hotel from the portal that we found. Actually, it turned out not to be the one we’d seen the day before. There are at least seven or eight portals into the walled city if I recall correctly. Bob and I opted to walk back. It was a nice day and we were enjoying the scenery. We found an interesting belfry and listened to some of those music students as we passed by the music department again.

I should know better than to try to recreate the memory of a previous trip. It was just that I loved the excursion we had taken a few years ago to Tuscany when we had a lovely lunch at a farm/bed & breakfast. The MyTours brochure from Siena had no lunches but featured a candlelight dinner in a vineyard. Okay, I said. Not the lunch I wanted but I could go with that. Then they said, well, it’s too cold for dinner outside so it will be in the restaurant at the winery. They assured our guys that it would be very nice and I gave in.

Our ride picked us up a little after six but early enough that the driver could drop us in a small town, Castellina, in the Chianti district for a little stroll before dinner. It was dark but the main street was lit quaintly and there was a nice church along the way. Bob found a leather belt he liked in one of the shops and bought it but most of the shops were closing. 

We met our driver again and continued on to the place for dinner. During our ride we learned of the black rooster, the symbol of the Chianti district and the logo that can only go on bottles of wine made in the Chianti district. Legend has it that back in medieval times Florence and Siena were always fighting over territory. To end the dispute over who would own a large piece of land between the two cities it was decided that they would each send out a horseman at the break of dawn when the rooster crowed and wherever they would meet would determine the border and who owned what. 

The people of Siena chose a white rooster as their alarm clock and fed it well hoping it would crow early. The people of Florence chose a black rooster, kept it hungry and hoped it would crow earlier. It did. The horseman from Florence covered much more territory before meeting up with the one from Siena. The area was known as Chianti and the black rooster became the symbol. 

 I’m sure the hotel and restaurant would have been very picturesque if we could have seen it during the day. The hotel is called Casafrassi and is in the middle of a vineyard. As we passed by part of the vineyard, our driver pointed out where we would have had dinner if the weather was not so cold. And dinner in the restaurant was good but nothing really special. The company was fun though. Two more couples (one who lives ten minutes down the road from us at home) and a delightful young woman from Kent in the UK made it an entertaining evening.

It was a late evening though. We ate too much and were pretty miserable that night. Note to self: keep the memories as memories and don’t try to recreate them.

Basilica Cateriniana, Siena, Italy

The weather for our stay in Siena was amazing. Warm during the day. Cool at night and no sign of the rain so far that had been forecast on our weather app. The afternoon trip to the Basilica of San Domenico was a pleasant walk through narrow up and down streets and, in the vicinity of the Sanctuary of Saint Catherine, very steep streets.

We found the sanctuary first and went there thinking that that was where we would find the post cards and the relics of Saint Catherine but all we found was a beautiful chapel and a gift shop that held no post card of her thumb. Confused, we went up to the church to look in.

The outside is mainly brick but we thought perhaps it had been built around the older structure because inside the church looked much older than it appeared on the outside. It was huge and had the most spectacular stained glass windows. Unfortunately, as we had found in the sanctuary, no pictures were allowed whether flash or not.

There was a small area near the altar that had some pews in it and a small group of worshipers were partaking of a mass. The sound of singing and chanting filled the cavernous church and seemed to resonate from the wooden rafters above us.

Several signs indicated a souvenir shop just past where a small group of tourists were gathered in front of some sort of shrine. As we passed and looked over their heads we could see in a long glass case, the head of Saint Catherine looking very ghostly as it was lit up for viewing.

In the souvenir shop, we found picture postcards of the thumb that was enclosed in a glass urn-like receptacle. Neither of us had seen anything like that in our walk through the church so Bob asked the clerk in the shop. He pointed us to a glassed recess in the wall near where the head was. Sure enough on our way out, we stopped and it was there. No joke. There were postcards of it.

Italy is known for its leather products and there are all sorts of shops selling all kinds of quality leather goods at all sorts of prices. I had left the purse at home that I use for travel. It is leather and I’d bought it for $10 at Pisa when we’d visited the tower several years ago. It was well used but I missed it. On the way back to the hotel, we found another similar purse for $22 but “for you lady, $20.” Sold.

For dinner this night, Bob’s brother had made reservations for us at a restaurant close to the hotel but there were no menus in English. He had been reassured that someone would translate for us. It worked out fairly well and we could brag we ate with the locals. My “pork” turned out to be beef but most of the rest of us got what we thought we would.

With a late night meal, we didn’t want to go straight to bed so we walked down to the center of town. The hotel had assured us upon our arrival that walking at night was quite safe and we truly did not feel any differently. Our walk took us down a new street with lots of upscale stores and lots of young people out and about. Later we realized we were near a university. So we old folks mingled with the young folks until it was way past our bedtime and left them to their late night fun.

Through My Lens - Siena, Italy

Siena, Italy - Piazzas, Horse Races, and the Duomo

 The Athena Hotel was a dream from the start. The views from our room and the terrace of the hotel were spectacular and everything you’d ever imagined about the Tuscan countryside.

Our first night we sank into smooth crisp sheets and basked in the luxury of a bed after our overnight flight on the previous day. Breakfast was a surprise with more than the usual Italian fare that we’d experienced before. There was scrambled eggs as well as the thin sliced meats and cheeses and pastries that we’d had in previous stays in Italy. And most importantly, the coffee was good.

We walked to the Piazza del Campo in the middle of town and found the office of My Tours that we’d seen advertised at our hotel and I’d found while researching TripAdvisor. We signed up for three tours, a walking tour to start at eleven and then a tour the next day to a walled city and after that a dinner at a winery in the country.

Our walking tour guide for Siena was Maria who happened to be from South America with some family connection to Australia but was married to an Italian. She spoke very good English and we were able to understand her quite well.

She began the tour by talking quite extensively about the horse races that take place in the Piazza del Campo twice a year. I had done a post on them here previously so I knew quite a bit of what she was talking about. I had no idea however how small the area was where the races took place. As she talked, I tried to imagine 30,000 people squeezed into the center area of the piazza and the horses trying to make the small curves and inclines as they raced around with or without riders. You see, even if the rider falls off, the horse is still in the race.

Further along in our tour, she took us to one of the stables and explained how each horse had their own place in one of the seventeen sections of the city. They were heavily guarded when chosen to run and the rider and the horse would be led to the race course several times to practice surrounded by “guardians” who would make sure nothing happened to either of them. All of this ceremony and work twice a year just to win the privilege of having the banner in their section’s museum. I’m assuming there is probably a little horse betting on the side although that wasn’t mentioned.

Along the street by the stable we paused to look out over the city to the Basilica of San Domenico, the church where the relics of St. Catherine lie. The head of the saint was on display as well as a thumb. There was some discussion about how the head came to be separated from the body but it seems it was not that she was beheaded but rather it occurred naturally after her death. The thumb was on display because at one point in time it was said her hands bled spontaneously in the same spots where nails would have been put into Christ’s hands.

We continued on to the Duomo which is the overpowering structure of Siena. A huge black and white striped tower can be seen from most every point in the city. When we reached the Duomo, Maria got our tickets for entry as well as tickets for those who wanted to see the crypt. Of course Bob and his brother did.

Maria explained that it was fortunate our visit fell when there were no services in the cathedral because we would be able to see the marbled artwork in the floor. During services it is covered to prevent wear.

The Duomo courtyard had on one end a wall that signified where the original cathedral was to end. We were actually standing in what should have been the sanctuary if the cathedral had been built to the size originally intended. Because of wars and money, the original plan was resized in order to actually finish a building. Once inside though, I could not imagine how it could have been any more spectacular.

There were all sorts of colored marble making up the mosaics and the columns in the Duomo. The green marble Maria said would actually look different at different times of the day as the light played on it. She took us around pointing out other places inside we could explore if we wanted to stay longer and then she left us to go our own way.

We decided it was time for lunch and found a little restaurant on a side street and had some unusual but apparently quite common soup. It was a tomato, basil, garlic soup that was thickened with bread—thick enough that you could have eaten it with a fork rather than a spoon. It had a good taste and was very filling. By the way, most restaurants will affix a cover charge to your bill. We assumed that meant a tip was not necessary.

Fortified, we went back up the steps to find the crypt and the museum of the Duomo. The museum had quite a lot of religious paintings of the time but what I found fascinating was the display of huge books of hand copied music with all the beautiful and delicate painting to accompany the writing. Painstaking work.

 

The crypt was not what the boys expected it to be (no bodies) but it was quite interesting. Ancient frescoes were well preserved on the walls. We wandered around and peered through the glass covered holed in the floor that showed that the excavation of the crypt went down several more levels.

The baptistry of the Duomo was an interesting place as well. You had to be baptized before you could worship in the cathedral so it was a separate building but attached to the Duomo. People were using large mirrors provided on the pews to look at the paintings on the ceiling but a few were standing behind the baptistry and looking at the wall with the mirror. We never did figure out what we were supposed to see there if anything.

Up and down the streets of Siena, we wound our way back to the hotel for a rest. The walking was not easy for those of us who normally walk on level ground. To our dismay, we found that most of the restaurants did not open until seven for dinner so we were quite prompt when we arrived later at the place the guys had chosen to eat. It turned out to be one of the best meals I had during our stay. My gnocchi was potato based and stuffed with a very mild sausage. It was accompanied by a nice sauce and veggies and some deep fried kale that I absolutely love. I need to find out how to make it.

By the time we made our way back to our rooms, we were ready for bed. A little jet lag and a lot of leg work—I only hoped our late dinner wouldn’t keep us up. It didn’t.

Pizza, Pasta, and Portals

Off to Italy for the pizza and pasta and a portal to the past through Siena and its history. Our flight to Rome was through Dulles International where we helped a lady and her three children off the plane. The woman was traveling with two children who looked to be about four and six and one baby strapped to her chest. On her back was a backpack and in her hands a large purse and diaper bag. The older kids were very friendly especially when Bob questioned the big bag of goodies the oldest was carrying. It was for the next BIG flight, he said excitedly. They were cute and I'm glad we didn't have to run for our connecting flight so we could help.

Bob had snagged us two seats against the bulkhead  (the area of the plane where there is a wall) for the flight to Rome. The advantage was a lot of leg room for our eight hour flight. The disadvantage was being near one of the restrooms. Fortunately it was the first class restroom and wasn't terribly busy.

Longer flights with United have meals that come with them but usually the airplane food is, well, airplane food. This flight was a real treat. I had a delicious ravioli entree and if I had stayed awake, it would have been followed by some sorbet. I opted to take my PM medicine and set about trying to fall asleep. I managed several hours in and out of it and was happy to have whatever shuteye I could get.

After a coffee, croissant and a yogurt, we landed at the airport near Rome and began our next leg of travel by bus to Siena, about three hours away. We opted for the bus because of the cost as well as the opportunity to see more of the countryside. A train is sometimes difficult carrying luggage and we had three pieces. Our Siena trip would be followed by a cruise so we weren't traveling as light as we'd like.

Once we established where to pick up the bus, Bob grabbed a panini and coffee and I sipped a glass of orange juice in a cafe as we anticipated over an hour's wait for the bus. As we sat in some seats with a view of the bus stop, we watched three vans and a car of Polizia unload. I wondered what was going on. They didn't seem to be in a hurry so it wasn't an emergency. What were they preparing for?
In this day and age a group of police, some carrying automatic weapons, is a little unnerving.

As we stood waiting for our bus, we suddenly understood. Off to one side down from us a group was singing and clapping some sort of protest I'm guessing. As they moved down an alleyway, the police were right behind them. We boarded the bus. I'm going to assume it all went peacefully.

Our bus ride of three hours was not as interesting as I'd hoped. Perhaps that's why we kept falling asleep or maybe it was the effects of jet lag mixed with PM meds and the wonderful motion of a bus ride. We caught a few more zzzzs before finally arriving in Siena, an old medieval walled city in the Tuscan hills. Our first views were breathtaking.

The bus dropped us at a central bus area and we went about looking for a taxi. I saw one on the other side of the street and raised my hand in the air. The driver nodded and waved back but continued on--I assumed to turn around. We waited ten minutes and decided he wasn't coming back. Crossing to the other side where it seemed there were more taxis passing, we hailed the next one we saw. He pulled over and what followed was a wild toad ride to our hotel. The streets are very narrow, full of tour groups, and of course zig zag through all sorts of old roads and alley ways.

We arrived unharmed and checked into a beautiful hotel, Hotel Athena. We were greeted warmly with, "Oh, it's Mr. Robbins' twin!" and knew my in-laws had arrived. I apologized up front for whatever may lie ahead with the twin-thing and they all laughed. Oh, they just didn't know. . . .

Siena, Italy - The Palio

One of our planned trips for this year is to Tuscany where we will spend a few days in Siena before we cruise the Mediterranean. I've been doing a little exploring on the internet to see what we might want to take a look at while we are there. I discovered that there is a horse race that is run twice a year that is quite historical wrapped in lots of tradition and custom.

The event takes place on August 2 and July 16. The center of the city, the Piazza del Campo, is prepared by spreading a tuff clay on the ring around the main square. The city is divided into 17 contrade, 10 of which participate in any given race. Around the city you can see which section belongs to which contrade because there are signs with the emblems and colors that signify the contrade on various signs: eagle, she-wolf, snail, goose, etc.

The Palio takes place over a four day period with the ultimate race being run on the last day. The prize is called Drappellone or drape. It is a large canvas painted by a local artist each year and is hung in the museum of the contrada that wins.

The course can be treacherous and some horses have crashed into a barrier or each other at particularly difficult point. No matter if the horse has a rider or not (did I mention they ride bareback?),the first to cross the finish line wins.

With all the energy and passion of the Italians, this must be quite an event to experience. Unfortunately our dates do not fall when either race is run but I'm sure we will see all kinds of evidence of the event and hear all sorts of tales.