Like many places in Italy, Siena comes down to us as a museum, beautifully preserved. Like most fascinating places, it is a museum of contradictions. In the Piazza del Campo, Siena has one of the loveliest open spaces in all of Italy, yet the city is infamous for the closed society it maintains. Bankers and artists, in their always uneasy alliance, have coexisted here for centuries. Siena is as self-involved a city as there exists, constantly keening before the mirror of history, oblivious to tourists, condescendingly tolerant of the modern world, yet the city is so beautiful it is hard to begrudge it this self-obsession. And for all this hoary self-esteem, it is also a place that remains vigorously youthful. This is in part due to its university and musical academy, but also to such events as the Palio, the centuries-old horse race that fires Siena's imagination each summer.
The high point in Siena's history was September 4, 1260, the day the Sienese thoroughly thrashed the Florentines at the battle of Montaperti. The memory is still fresh. Indeed, most of the monuments we associate with Siena, its zebraic cathedral, the stunning Palazzo Pubblico, the many patrician palaces were constructed in the afterglow of Montaperti, when Siena, despite all manner of sieges and internal strife, achieved rare heights of commerce, culture and self-government. Every visit to Siena seems to begin in the Piazza del Campo. A combination of forces draws you there, the flow of pedestrian traffic, the lure of urban beauty, even gravity, the Campo is in the saddle between Siena's three hills. The undulating, rumpled crescent that is the piazza, as beautifully imperfect as a creation of nature, is enclosed by a succession of magnificent palaces. As early as 1307 enlightened zoning restrictions dictated the kind of buildings permitted on the piazza, and only recently has the system broken down, witness the artless "Fast Food" sign above one of the new shops right next to the Palazzo Pubblico, or City Hall. Let your eyes settle instead on the great Gothic City Hall itself, with its slender Mangia tower. Before visiting the Museo Civico inside, it is considered good dolce-far-niente form to soak up the atmosphere with a coffee at one of the outdoor cafes.
The museum is a perfect introduction to Siena. You pass through a series of rooms full of mostly forgettable paintings that nonetheless reveal something about the prevailing Sienese worldview, they are categorized as either Senese or non-Senese. The Sala del Mappamondo, where the city council once met, is, of all the rooms in the city, perhaps the most quintessentially Senese. Bellicose and pious, militant and devout, it captures the two main humors of Sienese history, spirituality and pragmatism. The room, in large part the creation of Simone Martini, displays two of his most famous frescoes. At one end is the devout Siena of his Maestà (1315), the Virgin and child under a canopy surrounded by angels and saints, at the other end is the retributive Siena of the magnificent Guido Riccio da Fogliano (1328), the supremely bedecked warrior on horseback, his steed in the canter of conquest. The sky welling up above the warrior is more serene, more infinite and more heavenly than the Virgin's surroundings. Conquest suited the Sienese, as many of the nearby hill towns learned only too well. Although restoration is under way in the adjoining Sala della Pace, scaffolding cannot seriously mar Ambrogio Lorenzetti's spectacular allegorical frescoes on governments good and bad.
Just as Martini's frescoes represent the opposite thematic poles of the Sala del Mappamondo, so are the Palazzo Pubblico and the Duomo opposite poles of the city. It is a short walk to the cathedral. It took about three centuries to complete and, like many other Gothic buildings, it benefited from the work of countless artisan hands. It surely ranks, inside and out, as one of the most beautiful in Europe. Like the larger cathedral at Orvieto, it has an exterior dressed in distinctive alternating layers of white and dark-green marble. The interior, with its movingly realistic floor pavements and serene blue-vaulted ceiling, is unusually soft, welcoming, even comforting, adjectives that don't normally leap to mind in Gothic cathedrals.
It is hard to miss the banker's heart of Siena, for the evening passeggiata, or promenade, along the curving Banchi di Sopra cuts through the financial district. The Monti dei Paschi di Siena bank, housed in the 14th-century Palazzo Salimbeni, was founded in 1472, 20 years before Columbus discovered the New World. If the Sienese were good at commerce and banking, they were no less gifted in the arts, as is abundantly clear in the Pinacoteca. This article is not the place to itemize masterpieces from the Sienese school, the outstanding quality of the museum is that, walking from room to room, you sense the momentum of art as it wells toward the Renaissance. From the flat, gilt planes of Byzantine painting, with its earnest and awkward religious portraiture, subtle emotional inflections begin to rise, like hills on a relief map, in the Madonnas painted by Duccio di Buoninsegna. Soon Duccio's successor, Simone Martini, and others expand into deeper perspective and broader subject matter. Religous figures shrink judiciously into perspective within landscapes.
Siena Has One of the Loveliest Open Spaces in All of Italy