A beautiful Sunday in Siena starts with a carillon chorus from all surrounding churches. At seven in the morning; wake up sinners! A charge of crashing bottles from last night's bacchanalia follows. Does the recycling bin happen to be right outside our windows? And then more bells at the half hour.
Siena is loud. In every way imaginable.
After breakfast, we walk the two short blocks from our rooms to the "back door" of the cathedral of Santa Maria della Scala - Siena's Duomo. The facade is adorned with faces, edges, creatures, stripes, twisty things. pointy things - everything. This is the plain side. It is not possible to stand back far enough to really take it in.
We go around the door to the Baptistry, and then up a couple flights of steeps stairs, and through a gothic portal to reach the Piazza.
We can finally see the Campinile and the Duomo itself. The piazza is open and airy; they are doing some big reconstruction of the surrounding high walls. But the cathedral: more stripes, more pointy things, and just more.
Still, this does not prepare us for the inside and the implosion of stuff. There is not a surface, edge, structural or non-structural element, floor area, or ceiling that hasn't been lovingly dressed with every imaginable color, face, or critter. No one out-does Siena.
The chapels that seemed over-the-top in Florence, are sedate here, and become (relatively) quiet spaces of contemplation. Except that every ten minutes an Italo-English voice barks over the address system: no flash photography.
Downstairs, in the Baptistry, the space takes on a dark and sedate quality, as well as a smaller scale; really wonderful art pieces and frescoes help your visual cortex recover.
After the Duomo, we head over to Il Campo, the public square. It's just down the narrow street, through a narrow ramp, and down to the sloped square itself. By contrast to the streets, of course, Il Campo is open and wide - and remarkably steep once we get to the bottom. We do notice that all the sides of all the cars parked nearby are scuffed and dented.
On the other side of the Palazzo Publica, and down some more ramps, is the market area, where we have a tasty and very filling lunch at Antica Trattoria Papei. Their ribollita is a revelation.
After lunch, we have to take care of some business errands, exchanging cash and so forth, which takes us across town. We walk towards San Domenico, trying to avoid the valley along Fontebranda. Reaching the other side gives us some great views back, but there is a big soccer match today, and the police, in riot gear (shields and everything), line the Viale Dei Mille, which we must traverse to reach the bank. Siena scores a goal and the crowd just erupts with cheers and roars. We look at each other, eyebrows raised.
A light dinner of pizza at Il Campo, and some gelato from Grom finishes our day. Our walk home is interrupted by some ambulances, pressing the crowds to the sides of the streets as they go rushing by, sirens echoing through the narrow, twisty corridors.
Stand back far enough, and Siena seems like a quiet, quaint hill town. But no, Siena is loud.
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