Dieci cose ne Siena

So The Seffalice was really impressed with Siena. Here are bullet points of all you need know.

1. There are at least three really really nice restarants in Siena. We can thoroughly recommend La Taverna di San Giuseppe (Via Giovanni Dupre. Try the liver. Seriously. I'd be there all week for it), L'Osteria (Via dei Rossi), and another one whose name I can't remember. But it's on Pian dei Mantellini and has "nonni" (grandmother) in it's name.

2. It's stuck in a medieval time-warp.

3. It's built up a hill, so all the inhabitants have thighs like Lothar Matthäus. It reminds me a little of Bristol in a relaxed-once-important-but-now-content-to-go-at-its-own-pace sort of way, but much more picturesque. It's a very beautiful city with lots of winding alleyways up and down the hill and imposing gothic architecture as it's stuck in a medieval time-warp.

4. Unlike Florence etc it doesn't do so much Renaissance art as it's stuck in a medieval time-warp, instead it has lots of the glittery gold 2-D altarpieces, the type in which everyone has those long tortoise-like faces so all the men look like Mike Atherton wearing a beard and all the women look like Mike Atherton.

5. It's all a sham as the place is bankrolled by the Monte de Paschi di Siena banking group (through disproportionate employment and gifts to the city) allowing Siena to remain in a medieval time-warp, rather than funding itself through holy relics, simony and tribute from the competing Holy Roman Empire and Papal state as it wants you to believe.

6. Hire a car to get there if you're visiting from the UK and flying in to Pisa. It's curiously badly connected to airports and any useful public transport.

7. It's divided into 17 medieval districts (le contrade) who presumably normally co-exist peacefully enough without pillaging each other given Siena really isn't that big, but then burst into crazy longheld rivalries and alliances at various points of the year. Each contrada has its own iconography to mark its district in the form of statues, reliefs, flags, signs, etc. We noted panthers, eagles, dragons, giraffes, hedgehogs.

Here is an elephant. We assumed it's the symbol of one of the contrada.

The biggest time of the year for the contrade is The Palio, a bareback horse race around the main square in the city, run twice during summer. It featured at the beginning of the recent Bond film for your cultural reference point.

8. Donetello again, with another kickass relief. This time to the astonishing font in the baptistry.


9. It has a centuries long rivalry with Florence. It was once a very important trading city but got beat up in the thirteenth century and never really recovered.

10. That's it.

11. Go to 10.