I’d become almost Ptolemaic in my careful calculation of solar motion across the Italian sky (the reference here being to the Roman astronomer who, according to my sources, actually spent all of his life in Egypt). It was all about the angles, shade sliding across the race course and into view. The annual European super-heatwave demands this now. It's a weather pattern which may soon be known simply as “summertime”. Life in the Anthropocene™ I suppose, we’re all gonna die!, et cetera, et cetera. It was honestly alright in the shade.
My bus to Siena used the bait-and-switch method of air conditioning — the machine roaring to a frigid climax and then stopping suddenly and unpredictably. It’s often so sudden that you don’t realize it’s happened until your eyes start stinging and you can taste something salty on your upper lip. I didn’t mind though. Two full days of no real-sleep mixed with delirium-inducing stale bus heat creates a kind of all-natural narcotic, eyelids flittering and drooly mouth-breathing. I remember almost nothing.
Thereafter, the air-con situation was: the shopping center behind the bus station in Siena was deliciously cold, the second bus to our campsite (this was a very particular kind of Euro-summer-camp, caravan-park combo that you just kind of have to see to believe) was not, and our tent itself was atomic. The Peronis at the small campsite convenience were cold though, so we sucked it up and hitched another bus down into the city center. Europe doesn’t do air conditioning.
According to my sources…
Six-hundred and ninety (circa 2023) years ago, the modern Palio di Siena began in the smallish-but-important Tuscan city of Siena. It continued a medieval tradition that had (according to my sources) been going on for centuries. According to my sources, ten horses, representing ten of the seventeen contradas (alternatively: city wards, neighborhoods, bairros, boroughs, quartiers or arrondisments) and their bareback-riding jockeys race for three circulations around the sloping course of the Piazza del Campo, the central square of the town. There are few rules, little is off limits. According to my sources, it can get messy.
Entering Siena was, by all accounts, electric. Families with kids, balloons in hand and sticky stuff dribbling from their lips, brushed by other locals and gringos. You can always tell gringos by the cut of their shirts, by the way they unbutton one or two more buttons than they would back home, a suggestion to the audience: “I love Italia!” You can identify the locals because they dressed more sensibly (t-shirts and shorts, it’s hot…), although many had colorful flags tied around their necks which, at this point in the day, seemed to me only a fun, European eccentricity. I was in flowy a white linen shirt myself, buttons down dangerously low.
We joined a tight mass of people gathered outside of the only entrance to the square open to the un-ticketed masses. I’d done almost no research before this point. No spoilers! Another especially galavant nomad friend of mine had done most of the heavy lifting anyway – where to go, which Reddit posts felt authoritative. To me, he had mentioned something about a horse race, Italy, Campari Spritzes — and had found an unusually cheap ticket from Washington D.C. to Florence using creatively transferred credit card miles. Essentially, an offer I could not refuse.
As we entered the piazza, a parade of young Siennese, outfitted in a very-classic getup of poofy, colored shoulders and tight culottes marched along the to-be racecourse, twirling flags and playing trumpets. Individual contradas can be identified by color — i.e. red and white for Girraffa (Giraffe) and green (this will be important later) for Oca (Goose). It seems, though, that those who really, really cared would know which kid was from their contrada, as well as the name his little sister, his mother, his second aunt, and her second husband.
Some racegoers had the foresight to bring crosswords puzzles (cell service wasn’t great) and room-temp 1L water bottles. They staked out spots on the cobbled ground and in the shade of their standing compatriots. Italianos, for sure. Us gringos were just doing our best to play along. According to my sources, the event was to begin at 7PM sharp, although there wasn't much we could do to confirm if this was true. Our 4PM entrance time (a suggestion from one of the especially useful Reddit posts) meant that we could be waiting in the square for another 3 hours.
This air of uncertainty — honestly, bordering on secrecy — permeated the entire event. In-group/out-group, knowers and watchers. There was clearly a particularly industrious caste of Siennese present, proably ticketless too, watching the event from balconies and windows along the tall brick structures surrounding the piazza. There was a more middling-group who might have had the foresight or compulsion to buy tickets seated in the bleachers below them. These were all long-time Toscanos (or close associates), though. You could see it in the way they shuffled anxiously as they waited, unfettered by the heat, neck-flags sopping wet with sweat.
XXX
Back at the floor seats, we’d suddenly gotten quiet. Embarrassingly, I’d been deep in a discussion about American politics when this happened, so an especially-in-the-moment Italiano had to tap me on my shoulder and tell me to STFU — an experience that I still look back on with unease. I hate to be a stereotype. I quickly gathered around the cell phone of my friend, live-action Wikipedia-ing the events as they were unfolding. The crowd was completely silent by this point.
BOOM! A cannon fired. 7:05 PM. Finally. A line of horses, draped in the colors of their contrada, piloted by similarly-shaded jockeys entered through a previously unseen gate. They trotted along the racetrack to the starting point and began moving in an almost ritualistic and Pagan (although undoubtedly very Catholic) circular motion. A man’s voice, the “capitano”, read the names of each horse over a muffled, metallic loud-speaker that made it hard to tell where in the piazza he was reading from.
The order in which the name of each horse was said, determined by an apparent lottery that happened behind-the-scenes-beforehand, produced a confusing variety of responses: Fanculo!, something with same intonation as a “See, I told you!”, a BIG sigh, “Woooo!”. I’m sure a more observant ethnographer could have connected neck-flag colors to horse-responses and come up with a formulation of who was supporting who — but that really felt like the least of my worries at that point. The crowd got quiet again.
According to my sources (and this was confirmed the following evening by a extremely gracious bouncer at a club in the basement of my hostel in Florence — another story entirely), the tenth and final horse in the lottery is a very powerful figure. They determine when the race actually begins. Strategic deals between the contradas in the days, months, and centuries beforehand had given each jockey an ideal starting arrangement of horses, based on allegiances, animosities, bribery and tit-for-tats. The race would not start until the order desired by numero dieci (10) was achieved.
This was all much easier to understand in retrospect. In the moment, I was experiencing the same dissociative feeling I have whenever I'm caught in the middle of a heated Portuguese-language discussion between Brazilians — something serious is clearly going on, but I'm not really in a position to follow along. The jockeys, small batons in hand, would duel each other for starting positions. The horses were growing more and more anxious by the second. The crowd got it though. They’d shout understanding down from the bleachers.
Perhaps most confusingly, after an indeterminate (to me — surely determinate to the Siennese) amount of time, the horses would have to leave the starting line and begin the entire process over again. They’d start galloping in a circle, the muffled, displaced voice would list the names of the contradas, the horses would battle for a spot, the tenth-horse would do nothing, the audience would erupt in disgust, some time would pass, and the process would start again. The happened three or four more times, horses circling, lining up, jockey battles…
The starting rope fell.
I had no idea why. The race started, I got on my tiptoes to look overtop the crowd (now in a euphoric stupor), trying to figure out what the hell is happening. The horses and jockeys rocket across the first stretch of the racecourse, bouncing along in the kind of jumbled hops that are characteristic of bareback riding. As the group exits the first turn, the leading horse (from a red-and-white colored contrada) slams into the wooden barrier that surrounds the course, flinging the jockey off his back in a crumpled mass. Another horse, just behind, trips over this fallen comrade, catapulting the jockey off its back as well.
It was at this moment that I understood the race. My jaw non-metaphorically dropped. You wanted to look away but of course couldn’t. It was car chase in an action move, a lion chasing a gazelle. Are these guys going to be OK? Why would anyone do this? What’s at stake here? It was hyper-real, unfortunately beautiful, beautiful in the way that Old World European violence was beautiful. The gladiator battle and the Roman phalanx. None of that scary post-WW1 stuff. Spectacle for the sake of spectacle. And it was spectacular. The crowd was foaming at the mouth by this point.
And then those two horses, now without jockeys, stood back up. And continued racing. This changed things again, entered the race into uncharted territories. Several more horses fell. Jockeys were now battling for the top spot with wild animals, fighting to stay on their horses at all. It continued like this for two more laps. In the final turn, the leading horse, still with jockey, stumbled over the legs (hooves?) of another horse, this one riderless and from the aforementioned green-colored contrada called Oca , who then rocketed forward in a last-ditch effort and crossed the finish line to the sound of another cannon fire. We had a winner. The winning horse had no rider. My hands were shaking.
Green-flagged Oca supporters pushed their way through the crowd towards the finish line — the beginning of a parade that would continue for the rest of the evening and night. We watched as yellow vans, conspicuously named (in English) “Horse Ambulance” pulled to the front of the piazza. The sounds of trumpets and drums mixed with the “bee-baw” of their sirens. The adrenaline mixed with something else at that moment, something macabre and confusing. To quote the Mayor of Sienna, Nicoletta Fabio, in a local newspaper earlier that day “Il Palio non è attrazione turistica!” — The Palio is NOT a tourist attraction! That was clear by this point.
Il Palio is the opposite of tourism. It isn't worldly. It is something specific to a place, specific to a people. And within modernity, specificity must become spectacle ("so authentic!") and spectacle must grow at scale ("tourism"). And scale demands standardization ("guided") and standardization demands sterilization ("safety"). Il Palio doesn't do this. It rejects the world and makes a 17-contrada universe in which all displays are by and for those who really get it. Jockeys go flying off of unsaddled backs as they always have. Il Palio is nothing more than it claims to be. Nothing more than it wants to be.
The crowd dispersed slowly, drained into the narrow cobblestone streets of the city. The evening had gotten cool by now. We went to a tiny bar a few streets away and bought Campari Spritzes, my first of the day. A recap of the race was playing on a small TV next to the bar. The bartender, an older Italian woman who didn’t speak any English, looked at an instant-replay of the final sequence, jockey launched from his horse and Oca shooting across the finish line and gushed: “una maravìglia!”
