Burnt Siena

Just before nightfall. The weekend before the first 2006 Palio, Siena’s 500+ year old horse race around Piazza del Campo, and the stone-paved streets were filled with sound – laughter, singing, drums, horns, and the shouts as friends and enemies called to each other from windows two and three stories above the level of my feet.

Flags of every imaginable color hung from poles jutting from buildings overhead and at first I noticed only that they were beautiful. They waved in breezes unfelt at street level, and they ascended and descended as the street level changed.

It came upon me slowly, as if I had always seen it; along each street, each flagpole held the same flag as the poles before and after. An unending sea of identical patterns – of caterpillars, towers, panthers, elephants, more – receding into distances, in every direction. I was entranced, following the colors haphazardly until I turned a corner, encountering yet another pattern. Through the city, I walked a journey marked by ever-changing color.

I found out later that Siena is made up of seventeen separate contradas, or groups… guilds, maybe. Each has its own flag, and each takes its membership quite seriously. It used to be that one was born into, grew up and worked in, and was married and died within one particular contrada. From the first moment of awareness, one knew where he or she belonged. While the contradas have become less well-delineated through the centuries, it is still true that one has no doubt to which one belongs.

I didn’t know this that night. I knew only that beauty and movement drew me ever onward, and I marveled at each new motif. I walked into streets lit now by hanging lamps and squares of light that spilled from doorways and open windows. Laughter drifted out to me, the scents of garlic, onion, meats… wine. I walked past them, into the next street… and the next.

In the growing darkness I felt suddenly quite the outsider. For the first time in Italy, I was in a place that seemed to keep me at bay, letting me see only glimpses of its soul, and hear only echoes of its heart. For all its color, for all the beauty of its narrow, lovely streets and the hanging-garden of lights and color, Siena was somehow unsettling.

I turned to look in all directions and saw only what I had seen before… flags fluttered in the shifting of winds as day turned into night, the air cooling as the stone city gathered its shadows home.

The city seemed to be waiting… not a wisp of movement, not a breath of air. I stopped in the middle of an almost empty street that led downhill, curving slightly to the right, the flags hanging just above my head. I held my breath.

A whisper past my ear, a motion not quite seen… the laughter of a hundred voices gathered in a hidden garden… a remembered touch… a man speaking in a low voice of lost love… of desire… and an ache in my heart that began a hundred years ago.

Siena, Italy, is 5,768 miles from me, and somehow it will not let me breathe.

© Teresa Cutler, 2006 (This and other essays can be found in my upcoming book, All that Glitters, a collection of essays about Italy.)