Solo in Siena

I was inspired by my sister-in-law to do a little solo travel this winter during the weekends My Girl is traveling with her sports teams.  I have plenty of time to be at home by myself, so I might as well go have a little adventure.  For awhile I had a kid at home or I was waiting for a travel buddy.  No more waiting.  I used to do a lot on my own and I can do it again.  So, this weekend I went to Siena.  I wanted to see the frescoes of good and bad government in the city hall.  They are famously one of the first examples of secular art.  Prior to this most art was religious or mythological.  It's unique and sounded interesting and a good enough reason to go somewhere.

 

Piazza del Campo and the Palazzo Pubblico

Siena is one of the better know Tuscan Medieval hill towns between Rome and Florence.  It's famous for the Palio, the horse races between the neighborhoods.  Twice a year, in summer, the central shell shaped piazza is turned into a race track and every spare bit is packed with people.  It is a Party with the whole town celebrating and hordes of tourists there to see the spectacle.  I was happy to be there on a quiet day in January where only a handful of people scurried across the piazza on a gray day.

Inner courtyard of Palazzo Pubblico

15th century Painting of S. Bernadino preaching in front of the Palazzo Pubblico

The Palazzo Pubblico is the city hall built at the end of the 13th century.  During this time Italy was divided into Duchies or city states.  From the 12th century until the mid 16th century the city of Siena was the center of the republic of Siena and one of the most important cities in Europe.  It rivaled Medici Florence in wealth and power.  The Palazzo Pubblico was the seat of the Signorina, the governing body of Siena, and the Podestà, a nonpartisan mayor of sorts.

Frescoes depicting the Risorgemento of 1870s

The interior is decorated with frescoes old and new, including depictions of the unification of Italy in the 19th century.  With it's long history, people forget that Italy as we know it today is a relatively new country.  Most of the interior decorations are Medieval.  The room with the frescoes I had come to see was closed for restoration.  I should have checked before choosing to come.  I missed it by a few days.  I'll just have to come back.

Maestà by Simone Martini

View into a main hall of the Palazzo Pubblico

I spent a lot of time wandering the streets of the old town.  It isn't large, but it is packed with a warren of old buildings and narrow streets, perfect for exploring.  The town has Etruscan roots and legends say that it was founded by the sons of Remus, the nephews of Romulus, the founder of Rome.  They stole the statue of the Capitoline wolf and fled Rome on a pair of horses, one white and one black, after Romulus murdered their father.  The coat of arms for the city has a white band on top and black band on the bottom representing the horses of the founding brothers. (You can see the coat of arms in the 15th century painting of the Palazzo Pubblico.)

Cathedral Facade with unfinished exterior walls extending to the side

The Cathedral of Siena, the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunata, is certainly spectacular.  The story of the building tells the story of the rise and fall of Sienna.  Before the cathedral there was a 9th century church and episcopal palace on the site.  At the end of the 12th century the mason's guild, the Opera di Santa Maria, was commissioned with the cathedral's construction and reconstruction continuing for over 200 years.  It took so long to build that the lower parts of the facade are Romanesque (round arches, simpler style) and the upper parts are Gothic (stained glass, tall pointed arches, very ornate).

In 1339, at the height of Sienese power and wealth, a massive addition to the cathedral was planned that would have made their cathedral larger than the Duomo of Florence, their rival city.  This reconstruction would have turned the current nave into the transept of the new larger cathedral.  Construction started, but was never completed.  An expensive war and the plagues of the mid 14th century robbed the city of its wealth and decimated the population.  And they lost the war with Florence.  Two outer walls are still in place.  The wall and columns of what would have been an aisle were incorporated into the current museum of the Duomo.  You can climb inside what would have become the new facade for spectacular views.  White stones in the piazza mark where columns would have been.

Palazzo Pubblico

Inside the Duomo is even more spectacular with the dramatic striped walls and columns and works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Bernini, and Pisano.  The black and white stripes are reminiscent of the white and black colors of the city crest.  Around the nave are busts of the popes.  Since no one knows exactly what they looked like in the early years, there seem to be only a few faces that then repeat over and over.  The interior is elaborately decorated including the marble mosaic floors which were added over the 14th - 16th centuries.  I was fortunate to be there on a day the floors were uncovered.  The mosaics are often covered to protect them when the church is in use.

Marble pulpit and angel candelabra on the column

An early panel, Wheel of Fortune floor mosaic - Symbols of Sienna and nearby cities

One of my favorite parts was the Piccolomini library, a smaller room off to the side.  It houses the collection of illuminated choir books.  The library is decorated with brightly colored Renaissance frescoes.  Decorations include a Roman copy of the Greek statue of the Three Graces.  It is quite the room.  I really enjoyed intricate decoration of the choir books.  A friend just told me about a church where you can go hear Gregorian chants on Sunday evenings.  I'll have to check it out.

I took a few minutes for a little drawing inside. I finished later because the church was closing and the light was fading.  The perspective is tricky and the stripes are a bit chaotic, but it is a fun thing to draw.  I have a little notebook with brightly colored pages that makes for more lively sketches.  The orange changes the feel of the place.  Yellow would be too bright, blue too cold, green too lush.  Maybe red would have been better, warm, but darker.

I also visited the baptistry, crypt, and museum of the Duomo complex.  The crypt was rediscovered during some renovation work in 1999 has only recently been excavated.  This so called crypt was never used for burials and may have been an entry point for pilgrims in a slightly earlier version of the cathedral, but it wasn't used for long.  It was soon filled in to support the expansion of the building above and the baptistry in front and below.  So there are pieces added, missing, and covered due to remodeling and additions in the surrounding buildings.  In the excavations they found the remains of a Lombard building that you can now see in the floor of the crypt.  The Lombards were a Germanic people who arrived in the area in the 6th century, after the fall of the Romans.  The room is small but worth seeing for the wall frescoes.  They are incredibly rich and bright and it seem that every bit of wall and ceiling is decorated.  I loved this little space.  

When buying paints, raw sienna and burnt sienna are common pigment colors.  These earth colors have been in use since humans painted in caves.  Here you can see the colors on the steps from the baptistry up to the Duomo.  In the steps you can see the natural golden yellow of the local stone.  You can see the deep red orange brown of the the burnt iron rich clay in the bricks of the walls all over town.

The museum houses some of the original pieces of the exterior for preservation including statuary from the facade and the original stained glass window.  Copies are outside.  Lots of alter pieces, reliquaries, and bejeweled religious items, but my favorites were the statues.  These are late enough that you can see a bit of the "Gothic sway", so different from the stiff straight posture seen in earlier works.

I really enjoyed my short stay in Siena.  It's picturesque and filled with history.  It's also quite a small town, small enough that while I loved my visit, I wouldn't really want to live here.  There are, however, still a few things I didn't get to see.  I'll come back for another little visit when the frescoes I came to see are finished.

In the middle of history and the news

 One of the interesting things about living in Italy is that I feel much less insulated from the events I learn about in history and read about in the news.  I love learning about the history and the stories of the places we visit.  My Girl is taking European history this year in school.  I love to think about Lisbon while we talk about the age of exploration and Florence when we talk about the Renaissance.  We can discuss the impacts of the Council of Trent on the art and buildings we see around us.  I'm learning so much.

When we first arrived there was a lot of news about immigrants coming into Europe from Africa and other parts of the world, including news about the infiltration of Nigerian gangs into territory formerly controlled by the mafiosi of Southern Italy and Sicily along with the influx of wave after wave of refugees crossing the Med.  At church one of my friends is a woman who is and was one of these refugees from Nigeria.  She left her country, arrived in Europe through Greece, and now lives in Italy.  She is a wonderful woman with an incredible story of survival.  

Last year My Girl played basketball on the school team.  While the school is nominally American, only about 1/3 of the students are from the US.  Another third are Italian and the last third from all over the world, including a strong contingent from Israel.  One of the seniors on the team was from Israel and famous on the team for her jujitsu rolls after getting knocked down or falling during practices and games.  This year she is part of the Israeli air force.  I don't know what her role will be in the current conflict, but it is different to know someone there.  We have friends living in Tel Aviv.  Their son graduated from high school last spring and will join the military early next year.  Because of a health issue he will not be a front line soldier, but it is still a different thing.

At scout camp the council sponsored a group of Ukrainian scout to join us for the week.  They are currently living in northern Poland.  The scout troop has been a great opportunity for them to get together and support and help each other.  My girl got to know a few of them quite well going on the high adventure outings each day.  Our provisional troop invited them to join us for Dutch oven cobbler and ice cream one evening.  A few spoke a little English.  They enjoyed trading patches and other little things.  And it turns out that Uno is a universal card came that everyone knew.

Earlier this fall the kids on the military bases here in Italy worried about the possibility of a government shut down due to funding issues.  My Girl's school competes against these schools in High School sports.  A shut down would mean that on-base school would continue, but all extra curricular activities, including the Homecoming dance and school sports, would be cut.

I am in the Facebook group for the scout troop in Naples.  They recently announced a change in a camping trip because of a lack of adult leaders.  Due to recent events more than the usual number of adults are away doing their jobs.  This is an expected part of military life, but it has an impact on the families.

In the US I would read the headlines about what was happening in the world, but it was always something that was happening over "there".  Now "there" is here.

It's a fire swamp

 

Packing up to head home from scout camp 2022

Let me start at the beginning...  We lived here comfortably for two years without a car thanks to a pretty good public transport system and friends who helped us with rides to scouty places that were less accessible.  We finally got a car and I'm so glad to have it now that My Girl is doing sports at school with early and late practices and weekend games and races.  I must say that it's a love/hate thing with this car.  We found one that met our basic requirements: not a standard transmission, big enough for My Boy to sit in the back seat and take us to scout camp and back, close enough to pick it up, and priced so that if we needed to push the remains off a cliff we'd be OK with it.

We found a 2005 Toyota Corolla just outside of town at a rather sketchy looking car lot. (One day I'll have a car younger than my kids, but not yet.)  This was late fall of 2021.  I don't remember the exact date, maybe around the November 1 holiday.  It needed a new battery and a little touch up paint on the bumper.  So we left it there expecting to pick it up the next week.  Well, the weeks came and went and we couldn't get ahold of the sales person.  We thought we might have been scammed.  At the end of December we finally got through.  It turned out that the sales person and then the whole office staff had COVID which closed the shop.  We were finally able to pick it up in January about 10 weeks after agreeing to buy the thing.  But that was just the beginning.

Thanks to The Princess Bride I call this the fire swamp car.

We'll never survive.  

You only say that because no one ever has.

Westley: I mean, what are the three terrors of the Fire Swamp? One, the flame spurt - no problem. There's a popping sound preceding each; we can avoid that. Two, the lightning sand, which you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too.

Buttercup: Westley, what about the R.O.U.S.'s?

Westley: Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.

Our first problem was the battery and electrical system.  I quickly learned the hard way that the battery and electrical system have a leak that drains the battery if it sits for more that a couple days.  I also learned that if you jump it in the normal ways it blows a fuse or two.  Yada yada, tow truck because it is stuck in drive and will only start in neutral and won't shift to neutral without power.  Yada yada.  New battery.  New friend, Alfredo, at the garage a few doors down from the parking garage.

So now we know and either take the car out every few days to recharge the battery or disconnect it with an ingeniously simple little device that sits between the battery and the cable.  Pop the hood, twist twist problem solved.

When we bought the car we didn't realize that it has a SEMI-automatic transmission.  Mostly because we didn't know that such a thing existed.  We don't really have them in the US.  This means (I think) that it has a standard transmission with a computer that shifts for you.  You can also manually shift.  The problem with this is that if you drive it like an automatic it wears and overheats the clutch.  So it will get to the point that in heavy traffic the clutch will overheat and just drop into neutral until it cools down.  You just have to sit and wait.  Long story short I got to learn Italian words that I never thought I'd need like marcia, attuatore, and frizione.  Alfredo had tried to save us money by using rebuilt pieces.  It didn't last.  

We put in our second transmission last spring literally the day before we were scheduled to leave for scout camp.  The second time we went to the official Toyota shop further away.  He asked us several times if we really wanted to make such a big repair on such an old broken down car. (Crazy Americans)  He finally agreed when I said that it was cheaper than a new car.  (True, but not by much)  He ordered the parts and they arrived just in time to do the repair so that we could get to scout camp on time.  We headed to Switzerland.

By this time I was feeling better about the car.  I was getting used to the quirks and to driving in Rome.  The secret is to imagine you are swimming in a school of sardines.  Just go with the flow and mostly ignore the lines on the roads.  Everyone else does.

This fall I was just about done in by the R.O.U.S.s.  Rains Of Unusual Size.  I drove to Naples for My Girl's cross country meet on the Navy base.  There is only one home meet and this is really the only away meet that is reasonable to travel to.  The others are a full day of driving or more each way.  Rain was predicted so I came prepared with a jacket and umbrella.  I just didn't anticipate how much it would rain.  I parked at the gate and went in with a friend who could get guests on base.  (The gate guards say Welcome aboard" since it's a Navy base.)  The parents waited in the food court while it rained harder than I have ever seen it rain for a few hours with hail and plenty of lightning.  It was so dark, except for the lightning.  We joke about storms being "nautical".  This went beyond nautical to biblical.  They finally ran at 2 pm under dark skies after a 4 hour delay..  There were teams from Sicily, Spain, and Bahrain so they didn't want to cancel it altogether.  That's a long way to travel for a race.  A few minutes into the race it dumped again, soaking all the runners in no time.  My Girl said that it was raining so hard it was hard to see.  For a minute I thought the rain had turned back into hail.  Maybe it was just really big loud drops.  I thought it would slow them down, but maybe running in the rain is the secret sauce.  She and her friend got new personal best times and she finished 5th overall out a field that included eight schools.

This wasn't the worst of it and doesn't really do it justice.

Just after the start of the race.

By the time we were ready to leave there was blue sky but you could see the effects of the rain.  The parking lot at the gate had flooded over the curb and into the gate house and left a thick layer of mud.  I don't know how deep it got.  I got in my car and the seats were wet.  I thought that the seals on the doors must have leaked.  I drove away and got about 50 yards before the car died.  It wouldn't go again.  I called on a scout friend who helped me get the car towed to a shop.  She was a life saver.  Another friend gave me a ride to Rome and My Girl a ride home from the school.  As they unloaded my poor soggy car at the shop I could see water draining from the insides including the half full hazard lights, the effects of the R.O.U.S.

We spent the week thinking about how to salvage our nearly new transmission.  That and the tank of diesel were the only things of value in the whole heap.

It turned out that the water in the lot got deep enough that it flooded the engine, complete with water in the tank.  The interior had flooded from below and through the doors.  Fortunately, they were able to drain and dry the engine and the electrical dried out enough so that it returned to its previous dilapidated state.  It took a bit of time, but it worked.  We lost the tank of watery diesel, but the transmission still works.

Exactly one week later I took the train down to pick it up.  My friend messaged me while I was on the train.  The car wouldn't start...

Sigh...

I thought at first that it would be the battery, but no.  It was the starter motor.  It seems that with all the water something in there got a little rusty.  After a few tries it started and seems OK now.  Maybe my fire swamp has four terrors instead of three.

The car and I are home and now I need to go pick up My Girl. 

P.S.

After about a week of intermittent warnings, the starter motor (motorino di avviomento) gave out for good.  It took another tow truck (carro attrezzi) and a trip to Alfredo's to get it replaced.  It was a quick overnight job.  So not too bad.  I hope it holds out for awhile.  This isn't the Italian I want to learn.

Quick trip to Florence

There are so many options when it comes to travel.  So, where to go in February during white week?  Settimana Bianca is an unofficial Italian holiday, a week off to go skiing.  This was quite familiar to us since our schools in California take off the week of President's day for ski week.  My Girl's school here has the same idea.  Many of the American parents work for the embassy and get the Monday off so the school takes that week for ski week.

My Boy's school doesn't pay attention to American holidays so he was at home and in school.  Instead of ski week, they have spring trips.  This year he is going to Morocco.  I think this is the perfect time of year for that trip.  He had a fantastic time and loved the food and the slow pace of the trip.

My Girl and I decided on a short trip to Florence.  She wanted some days to just rest and relax.  School is busy with long bus rides, sports before or after school and on the weekends, all on top of homework.  We got lucky with good February weather, clouds, but no rain.  We visited churches and ate good food that was not Roman food.  Italian food is so incredibly regional!  You might be able to find carbonara in Florence, but it is a sure sign of a touristy place.  I've never even seen them try pesto in Rome.  It is strictly Genovese.

We visited the Duomo, the magnificent cathedral in the Medieval center of town.  The exterior is spectacular and ornate while the interior is pretty plain, partly because the ornamentation has been moved to the museum of the Duomo just behind the church.  Also because of years of reworking the interior based on the styles of the time and the influence of people such as Girolamo Savonarola.  

Savonarola was an ascetic Dominican monk who was very influential politically and culturally in Florence during the later part of the 15th century.   He opposed ornamentation in churches and called for reform in the Catholic church.  Some have called him a proto-protestant.  He opposed the ruling Medici family and was partly responsible for their fall from power in 1494.  This time of the Florentine republic was temporary.  The Medici family returned to power less than 20 years later.  Savonarola preached against any type of luxury, culminating in the bonfire of the vanities on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) of 1497 where supporters burned their luxury goods including clothing, cosmetics, playing cards, musical instruments, art, and books.  He was eventually excommunicated and hanged for heresy and sedition.

Facade detail

Interior fresco

Equestrian Monument di Niccolo da Torentino by Andrea del Castagno

(Cool hat and horse)

Dome interior

The Last Judgement by Giorgio Vasari

The first stones for the new cathedral were laid in 1294.  This covered an earlier 5th century church on the same site.  You can visit what is left of the old church below the Duomo.  There are beautiful mosaic floors that undulate in a way that is a bit disorienting if you were to walk on them.  Thankfully there are raised walkways.  By 1418 only the dome was left to build.  But this was a bit of a problem.  The original architect and several others including the last one had died leaving some plans that no one knew how to complete and a church with a massive hole in the ceiling.  The dome was famously finished by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1436.  The multicolored marble exterior was started with the original architect, but remained unfinished for centuries.  The facade we see today was finally completed in 1887.  There was a facade in the 15th and 16th centuries that was never completed.  This has been reimagined in the Duomo museum.  You can find the original facade statues there.

Wobbly mosaic floors of old church

Perseus with the head of Medusa (1554) at the Loggia del Lanzi

The Piazza del Signorina is one of the main squares in Florence.  There is a large statue of Neptune, a replica of Michelangelo's David in front of Palazzo Vecchio, and the Loggia del Lanzi.  The Loggia is now the backyard of the Uffizi gallery and home to an incredible sculpture collection from the 1st to the 19th centuries.

We sat and sipped at Gilli.  Here you can imagine you are a person of wealth and leisure on the Grand Tour or an artistic intellectual in the Art Nouveau era since the tea and pastry shop has been in Florence since 1733.

I left My Girl in the soft seats to climb the campanile next to the Duomo.  It is quite a hike to the top, 414 steps.  There are spectacular views of the city, the cathedral and its iconic dome.  You can also climb the dome, but if you are standing on it, you can't appreciate it in the same way, but you do get an up close view of the frescoes.

 

That evening I visited the museum of the Duomo.  It is pretty spectacular.  There are all sorts of models and architectural drawings of the cathedral and its dome.  Various bits of the Duomo complex have been moved inside the museum for safekeeping, including the statuary from the facade and the doors of the baptistry.  What we see outside are replicas.  The gilt bronze doors by Ghiberti are amazing.  There was a competition for the commission and Ghiberti won over Brunelleschi.  Brunelleschi never got over it.  He later won the commission for the dome which I think makes up for it.

There are so many amazing pieces in the museum, but I think my favorite is Michelangelo's Pieta, one of three he worked on in his life.  This is the second and an unfinished work from late in his life.  Unusually, this was not a commission, but a sculpture he may have intended for his own funerary monument.  It is believed Michelangelo used his own face for that of the older man holding Jesus.  Michelangelo's Pieta in the Vatican is more famous, but there is something about this one that I really like.

One of the must see stops in Florence is the Accademia, the home of Michelangelo's original David.  Florentines saw themselves in the story of the young David overcoming the much stronger Goliath with cleverness, not brute strength.  David and this sculpture became symbols of liberty and freedom.

Michelangelo's David is quite literally the poster boy of Renaissance sculpture.  This depiction of David was unique for the time, since most prior works showed David in victory often with the head of Goliath.  Here David is thinking about what he is ahead of him. He is relaxed, but not, all at the same time.  The block used to make the masterpiece was rejected by two other sculptures because of its imperfections.  Because of its size it was too expensive to waste.  This piece was initially intended to be part of a series of figures for the cathedral facade, but never made it there.  The ruling body decided it was too perfect and needed to be in a place where it could be better appreciated.  Instead it lived in front of Palazzo Vecchio until it was replaced by a replica in 1873 and brought inside for safe keeping.  While it is considered Renaissance perfection by some, the proportions are a bit off, most likely intentionally so, with the head and hand being a bit too large for the body.  Perhaps this was because it was designed to be viewed from below at a distance or it may have had a more symbolic meaning.  Da Vinci never said and we will never know for sure.

David

The hall leading up to David is called the Hall of the Prisoners for the unfinished works by Michelangelo.  They were meant to be part of a grand papal tomb in St Peter's in Rome, but the project was never finished.  Instead, a much scaled down tomb featuring Moses was created for Julius II in San Pietro in Vincoli.  Michelangelo is believed to have said that he worked to liberate the forms that were in the marble.  You certainly get that feeling in these unfinished works.  At his death they were donated to the Medici family and displayed in the Boboli gardens until 1909.  In many ways I like these unfinished pieces more that the polished perfection of the finished ones.

The bearded slave, the most finished of the four

One of the halls, the Gipsoteca, was quite unusual.  This former hospital ward and art academy teaching studio houses a large collection of 19th century plaster models from the the sculptor, Lorenzo Bartolini.  Bartolini was a noted sculptor during his life, and also a teacher at the Accademia delle Belle Arte.  He was sought after by the rich and famous across Europe for his expressive bust portraits.  Marble portrait busts in draping Roman robes, so neoclassical!  The models are displayed much like they were in Bartolini's workshop.  Most of the figures have nails regularly placed in the plaster as reference points for the sculptor working on the finished marble piece.  It gives them a slightly diseased look but is an interesting insight to the artist's process.

from the Gipsoteca

Workshop of Lorenzo Bartolini 1856-7

Steak was on our official must eat list while in Florence.  Roman food feels very light on meat.  While we didn't get an official traditional Bistecca Fliorentina, we did have a delicious lunch.

Florentine steak

Ponte Vecchio over the Arno river

It was a quick trip, but really fun to see a city new to us.  I'll definitely be back.

 If you want to read more about Renaissance Florence I suggest Brunelleschi's Dome and the Bookseller of Florence, both by Ross King.