Seven Seasons in Siena (2 page)

And, oh yeah, there'd have to be only two ball games every summer. And the Cubs would've just won one of them, against all other Chicago teams.

That's a bit like what Dario is going through right at this moment, I imagine. The
brucaioli
—the people of the Bruco—have just pulled off the one thing that really matters in Sienese society: a victory in the Palio. Even now they're parading
through the streets, hoisting aloft the hard-won drappellone. People are reaching out to touch it, fondle it, kiss it. There's a new banner commissioned for every Palio, designed by a new artist and always incorporating the Virgin Mary, who is the patron saint of this event.
“Bru-bru-bruco!”
Jeffrey shouts, native style, as it passes, without a trace of irony. I'd join him, but my throat is constricted by an unexpected swelling of emotion. This is, I realize,
seriously cool
.

In the Middle Ages, nearly every city in Italy had some kind of annual civic competition, ranging from the highly skilled (archery) to the refreshingly Neanderthal (hurling large rocks at one another's heads)—but those traditions eventually withered away, worn down by a relentlessly encroaching modernity. Not in Siena. In fact, the Palio has if anything grown in importance and stature over the ensuing centuries. Part of the reason is historical; when Florence, Siena's perpetual antagonist, finally and decisively defeated the city in 1555, it instituted an oppressive rule that all but cut off the Sienese from outside influence. The city was not allowed to grow or flourish. The entire Renaissance just glanced right off it, as though it were under a bell jar. Effectively ghettoized in their own hometown, the Sienese responded as good Italians always do: defiantly. They placed increasing emphasis on their native customs, rituals, and protocols. Chief among these was the Palio. In this sense, it was for many years not merely an expression of civic unity and strength but a tool of civic survival. The Palio reminded—
still
reminds—the Sienese of who they are.

And who exactly are they? In a way, there are seventeen different answers. The old walled city is divided into as many districts, each of which is named after a mascot, usually an animal.
Each has its own colors, flag, church, fountain, and theme songs; they're like a clutch of pint-size sovereign states all parked within the municipal polity. The Sienese call them
contrade
, and they are, in no particular order, the Eagle, the Snail, the Owl, the Dragon, the Giraffe, the Porcupine, the She-Wolf, the Seashell, the Goose, the Caterpillar, the Wave, the Panther, the Forest, the Tortoise, the Unicorn, the Tower, and the Ram.

Some contrade are wealthy, some not. Some have ancient, bitter feuds with their neighbors; others have no enemies at all. What they all have in common—apart from an independent governing body and a constitution—is that their adherents view themselves primarily as
contradaioli
, that is, as members of their contrade. Stop anyone on any street in Siena and ask him to identify himself. He won't say, “I am a Sienese” or “I am a Tuscan” or even “I am an Italian.” What he'll say, head held high and eyes spitting pride, is “I am of the Dragon.”

Today, wearing our
fazzoletti
, we feel that we are of the Caterpillar. And in this spirit of borrowed glory we set out for the Duomo—Siena's magnificent, if bizarrely unfinished, thirteenth-century cathedral.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure how to get there. We might follow the crowd, of course, but it keeps breaking up and spinning off in all directions (even straight up; I spot someone actually scaling a wall to climb in a window). Still, I can see the tip of the Duomo from where we're standing, and I figure all I have to do is head toward it.

Siena's medieval thoroughfares lack the gridlike regularity we associate with modern metropolises; they twist and turn, they snake and skirt, they fork and double back. (Siena was
the first city in the world to ban all vehicles—even bicycles—from its city center, very likely for this reason; the bottlenecks would otherwise be hideous. Two Vespas abreast could clog the average alley as quickly as a lump of gorgonzola can an artery.) And so it proves that the worst way to get anywhere is to head straight for it; we find ourselves, in the manner of Looking-glass Land, right back where we started.

I'm forced to fall back on that most unmasculine of last resorts: asking directions. In my halting Italian, I interpose myself between smiling natives and ask plizz excuse but can you say how is to find Duomo, and am graciously bestowed a full complement of fulsome instructions and extravagant gestures, almost as though I asked not for guidance but for an abbreviated performance of Puccini's
Suor Angelica
. But it does the trick.

The Duomo is so packed with people, we don't even have room to sweat. And if the noise on the street was cacophonous, in here, under the vaulted roof, it's like having your brains clawed out of your head. You can't see anything either, except the very top of the altar, and the ceaselessly waving contrada flags that threaten at any moment to descend lethally, like a guillotine.

For all the discomfort and incipient peril, the principal sensation is one of joy: reeling, riotous, airborne—yet strangely regulated. I'm being crushed on all sides, but I feel safe; I'm in the arms of something so much larger than I am. Calm descends over me. I'm experiencing a kind of bliss, the quiet transport of being buoyed by a roiling yet eternal sea.

And then I'm buoyed by something else. The service—which, over the deficient sound system, has sounded to me like endless incantations of someone's monosyllabic mantra—
has now apparently concluded, and the vast mass of people has rotated clockwise and is heading back toward the doors. For a few moments, I'm pressed against an ample-breasted woman in the most ungracious way imaginable.
“Perdonimi, signora!”
I holler at her, begging her forgiveness for our accidental intimacy, but she can't hear me, barely even notices me. Instead, she's smiling.

I've completely lost track of Jeffrey, but I feel certain he'll know to look for me outside. Unfortunately, when I'm finally squeezed out the door (I imagine this is what it was like to exit the birth canal), I find the portico thick with churning humanity. I crane my neck skyward, where the first stars are just now blinking awake, and gulp down a few soothing swallows of cool night air.

It's the only respite I get, though, before being literally swept up—yes, I said literally; for a few terrifying moments I am actually
lifted off my feet and carried away
—by a mob of people in the throes of something like a benevolent frenzy. I gird my loins, slip into Terminator mode, and try to power my way out of their midst, but it's useless; I'm like a pebble in a landslide. It's then that I notice their fazzoletti: blue, green, and gold, just like mine. These are the brucaioli; they've simply absorbed me, like attracting like. I give in and go with the flow.

It isn't hard to figure out where this is headed; I'm hoping Jeffrey will deduce it as well. Possibly he's even in the same situation, somewhere behind or even ahead of me. In any case, I can't seem to summon up any consternation; the mood around me is too triumphal, too ebullient. I'm riding a wave of sheer happiness.

As I suspected, we end up back in the Caterpillar district. We were just here last night for the
cena della prova generale
, the
big dinner before the day of the race, held in the expansive garden of the Caterpillar headquarters. We were seated at a long table reserved for visitors, while the rest of the garden was brimming with exuberant natives. “This is
our
Palio,” Dario had told me confidentially. “We are certainly going to win. We have the best horse, the best jockey. And we have paid off all the right parties so that we expect no interference.” He made no secret of the fact that greasing palms was part of the process. Victory in the Palio isn't just won; it's purchased. “Of course,” he added, “there's always the unexpected, the freak occurrence that no one can foresee, that throws everything out of alignment. That's part of the excitement of the race. But this year I feel such confidence. The wind is at our back.” And that's when he told me he would, despite his kind attentiveness to Jeffrey and me, be off like a shot should the Caterpillar triumph.

Dario didn't sit with us at the big dinner; he'd been recruited to do table service. But occasionally he swung by to see how we were doing and to refill our wineglasses. (Wine cups, actually. It's pretty downscale, this dinner; but then it's an open-air affair, practically a picnic. And there are something like two thousand diners. Which would be a lot of stemware to wash.)

We were the only foreigners at the visitors' table. Everyone else was from elsewhere in Italy—Rome, Venice, Bologna—and seemed to regard the full-bore carousing of their Sienese hosts with the kind of upraised eyebrows a maiden aunt might display at a frat party. We sat next to a couple from the nearby town of Poggibonsi, which is within the province of Siena but since it's outside the city walls is as foreign to the urban Sienese as any hamlet in Asia or Africa,
and thus consigned to this corner for aliens. We'd actually passed Poggibonsi a day or so earlier in Dario's van, and the name instantly became a kind of in-joke. Afterward, whenever there was a lull in the day's activities, one of us would exclaim,
“Poggibonsi!”
to the general hilarity of the other. We'd done so a few times during the dinner, too, before we learned of our neighbors' actual habitation there, so I had to invent some awkward lie to explain why we'd been continually blurting out the name of their hometown. “We plan to visit tomorrow,” I said, “and we are so excited.”

The couple's eyes widened. “You come to Poggibonsi?” They exchanged a furtive glance. “Why?”

“We are told it is so beautiful.” I was sure this would pacify them, but they just looked at me all the more strangely. Later I would learn that Poggibonsi is a drab little industrial town. The only tourists they ever see there are the ones who are hopelessly lost.

Eventually the Poggibonsesi and I grew tired of reaching quite so far across the language divide, and we politely drew back from each other. I turned my attention instead to the assembled Caterpillars.

What I saw was a kind of revelation. There'd been a burst of activity when the dinner began, with the medieval-clad drummer boys making a stirringly martial entrance and a rousing rendition of the contrada's anthem, which begins as follows:

I enjoyed that; it's what's drawn me to Italians in general—their theatricality, their love of tradition, their
spirit
. Ever since my first trip to Rome, some ten years ago, I've found the robustness of the Italians' appetites (for food, for music, for fashion) to be a welcome antidote to the dismaying anemia of modern American culture, which seems anchored by the Internet on one end and the shopping mall on the other. Being of Italian blood myself (my grandfather was born in Asiago), I imagined that there was something in my DNA that responded to the Roman way of life—and the Venetian, and the Milanese, and the Bolognese, and all the others I've experienced in the years since. But it wasn't till last night, taking in what was actually going on in the ancient society surrounding me, that I found what I didn't even know I'd been looking for: the ideal Italian society. And hence the ideal society, period.

A first glance seemed to argue for a deeply segregated community: there were tables at which only middle-aged men were seated; others where their distaff counterparts held court. Couples with young children were relegated to a certain set of tables, while teenagers had their own dedicated seating, from which they seemed forever to be darting away and then back again.

Yet they weren't in any real sense separate. Because there was one overriding mood in the place: that of exuberant fellowship, of camaraderie, of the sheer joy of being among others
who are exactly like you. Throughout the night, small groupings of a half-dozen or more persons would rise from their seats and robustly sing one of the Caterpillar's many anthems—even teenage girls did so, without a trace of irony; teenage girls, perhaps the most jaded and world-weary citizens in any Western democracy. They stood as one, tossed back their impeccably coiffed hair, put their arms around each other's waists, and swayed back and forth while chirping the same patriotic tunes their fathers and grandfathers had been bellowing all night long. The effect was disorienting, as though a group of American mall rats had leapt up and crooned “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” barbershop quartet style. There were many different songs, some of them popular tunes rewritten to incorporate the name of the contrada's horse, Berio (most recognizable, the Disney tune “Hi-ho, hi-ho” becoming “Ber-io, Ber-io”), and plenty of choruses of the contrada's marching anthem, which I'd heard many times in the preceding days:

And then the speeches began; long addresses by the contrada's executives. I've been to any number of fund-raising
events in my life, and at each of them the perfunctory, monotonous, tinged-in-sanctimony speeches have served as the chief buzz kill. Initially people will sit up straight and pretend to listen attentively. But about fifteen minutes in, they'll become restless and start to whisper, then to murmur, and then pity the poor closer, who has to pitch his or her voice above a steady hum of chatter by people who are now only biding their time until the band starts.