If you don’t want to spend hundreds of euros on a good seat, the best place to watch the Palio di Siena is by the start. For my first time — decades ago — I arrived early in the apron-shaped Piazza del Campo and sweated out the long afternoon as a tide of tension rose. By early evening, when the horses and jockeys finally entered from the courtyard of the towering Palazzo Pubblico, 50,000 spectators ached for release.
I clambered on to a temporary fence for a better view. A Sienese woman who was maybe 19 hauled herself up and, for balance, grabbed me from behind. As the jockeys embarked on the long, casuistical process of lining up at the start rope, she began to moan, then weep. Eventually her nerves could stand it no more and, hugging me ever tighter, she screamed, ‘Cazzo! Cazzo! Entra! Entra!’ Loosely translated: ‘Get your cock in!’
Siena’s Palio (other smaller versions happen all over Tuscany) is not like other horse races. Its hors d’oeuvre is a two-hour pageant marked by splendid displays of flag-throwing. The jockeys, dressed in liveried PJs, ride without saddles. They trade bribes as they line up and, if they’ve accepted a bung, deliberately obstruct other horses or fall off their mounts. They batter one another with whips fashioned from distended calves’ penises, and thrash one another’s horses on the nose. Many centuries after races were first run in the city between its various districts, or contradas, it might easily have dwindled into folklore, like Florence’s faux-violent medieval football tourney. Yet it still matters to the people of Siena more than anything.
The race is run twice a summer, on specific religious festivals, between a rota of ten of the city’s 17 contradas. It’s utterly lawless and yet deeply bound up in religion.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in