III.iv. A Dragon Preserved

"There’s nothing in the world quite like Siena, it is a medieval city that might be likened to a rare beast, with heart, arteries, tail, paws and teeth. Only the skeleton is left intact, and it is enough to astound us."
- Bernard Berenson

Six and a half years ago I was in Siena for one day and ever since then I have had an ever growing, ever aching desire to return. This past weekend, I did. I returned to a city no bigger today than it was seven hundred years ago, still alive, still slightly melancholic, still beautiful as ever.
    There is something about the Sienese aesthetic, the hopeless addiction to beauty, to ritual, to symbolism, that appeals to me in my deepest nerve. It is the same sway I feel towards the earliest French art, and, to a lesser extent, the Venetian art of Mantegna and Bellini. The Sienese were concerned with beauty in all aspects of life; in a beautifully desperate act they vowed their entire city, its hopes and desperations, triumphs and failures, to the Virgin Mary in the same way that Louis XIV dedicated his kingdom to her also and the Venetians wedded their republic to the sea. But in Siena they went further; they had their greatest painters decorate the covers of municipal ledger books, they frescoed the walls of their city hall with the truth and fiction of their own history, and they even embarked on an outrageous plan, defying at once physics and logic, to expand their Cathedral in a time of economic decline and catastrophe.
    But in its confidence and exuberance, Siena suffered and made enemies. Two thirds of its people died in the plague of 1348, and the Florentines, the perpetually irked rivals, eventually took it over. Now it is quiet, a backwater of steep streets, old palaces, and beauty standing still. As a city it had no reason to prosper much beyond the middle ages, and the pilgrims coming to Rome along the Via Francigena, the artery that was the lifeblood of the place, eventually slowed to a trickle, then stopped. A city like Pisa, near the sea, has its river silt up. Siena just dies because people stop coming.
    But today all these things coalesce into unimaginable beauty, newly thronged with tourists during the summer months though quite quiet upon my visit. I decided to come here for several days, my first overnight trip since my arrival in Italy. It is in fact a point of contention amongst European travelers as to what distance is too far for a day drip. There seem to be several schools of thought on the subject, ranging from ratio of hours of travel over hours of visiting time to the hour when the last train leaves for home. My reasoning was simply an economic one, a night in the youth hostel costing less than a round trip train fare to the place, never mind that this hostel was far outside the centre and nearly unreachable by bus in the after dinner hours.
    On my third and final day in Siena, strolling through one of the pleasant, narrow streets lined with shops, a display of silk ties caught my eye and I peered into one of the display windows. Having decided after a minute or so that a nice tie was not worth a monograph on Duccio or Simone Martini, I moved on. A few seconds later, a girl came running out of that very shop yelling "Nick!"
    I looked at her, astonished.
    "Nick! Don't you remember me, from SPECQUE?" The Simulation du Parlement Européen Canada Québec Europe was an international conference I had attended in Toronto before I left, the same conference where I had met my friend Marko who had visited me in Bologna several weeks prior.
    Of course I remembered, this was Ditmira, from the Sienese delegation. I was embarrassed as I recalled that, barely two moths ago, she had been at my house in Toronto for an end of conference party, and has given me her number in case I were ever to visit Siena. Here we were now, conversing in French once again on a shopping street in Siena in November. It turned out that she worked at the tie store, and unfortunately wasn't able to leave her post. When I told her I was staying at the youth hostel she seemed genuinely horrified.
    Next time you're here, Nick, there is a room in the University residence you can rent for only eleven Euros," she said. Eleven Euros! This made the youth hostel seem an unaffordable luxury. If only I had known.


A view of the famous Campo of Siena and the tower of the Palazzo Pubblico


The Duomo of Siena, clad in brilliant white and verdigris marble


The façade of the Duomo


Me in front of the Duomo


The unfinished expansion project, now a parking lot…


… that is used for things such as Fiat conventions…


…while Giovanni Pisano's timeless gargoyles look on


Inside the baptistry


The man and his frescoes


Me and my Duomo


Culinary delights are not lacking in the city, which has a shop selling only gourmet coffee beans