Siena

 

Siena was one of Edward Hutton's favorite cities despite its often tragic history that he spent many pages recounting. But it was the city and its people that most impressed him as well as the spectacular views both within and without. Below find his descriptions of the famous Piazza and Palazzo Pubblico, as well as his impression of the view from the Torre.

What the Piazza Signoria is to Florence, that, and something more, the Piazza del Campo is to Siena: it is at once the most beautiful and the most characteristic thing in the city. However one approaches it—and since it is set at the junction of the three hills on which Siena lies there are many ways to approach—it is always suddenly, with surprise that one looks across that vast and beautiful space shaped like an open fan, enclosed on all sides by palaces, and radiating as it were from what one is often tempted, there at least, to proclaim the most beautiful palace in Tuscany, the Palazzo Pubblico, with its marvellous bell-tower soaring so adventurously, so confidently into the blue sky.

 

This piazza so spacious in form, so strange in its colour and loveliness, is, as it always has been, the heart of Siena. For work or for play, for council or for pleasure, in time of foreign war or civil riot, here the Sienese have always assembled. It was the market-place, the true piazza, the universal meeting-place of the city. But to-day it is almost deserted. One by one it has lost its uses till now but one remains to it; it is still a playground when, in August, on the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the Palio is run there over the smooth bricks round the central space enclosed by its great pavement…. (93)

 

A quietness but seldom broken now fills the Piazza with an exquisite peace. It is the only silent place, I think, in a city full of little noises beyond any other in Tuscany: the clang of metal on metal, the hammers of the coppersmiths that wake you so early, the plaintive cries high up among the old houses of innumerable swallows, the shouts of the hawkers, the shrill voices of children, the songs and laughter and endless loud, free talk of a Latin people not yet dominated by the stupefying thunder of machines…. (95)

 

There is something in the Torre del Mangia that is peculiarly Sienese. Whereas in looking at Giotto’s tower in Florence, like a tall lily beside the Duomo, we do in fact “consider the lilies of the field,” their candid beauty and humility, here we are reminded of something fearless, daring, and adventurous, as though into this one perfectly expressive thing the very soul of Siena had passed—that soul which, mystical as it was beyond any other Tuscan city, was so often boastful too and unstable, a little hysterical in its strange spiritual loveliness, so that it too easily came to naught. Something of all this we find almost everywhere in the city, and especially perhaps in the great unfulfilled boast of the Duomo, but nowhere so subtilely and completely expressed as in this rose-coloured tower soaring over the roofs of Siena…. (96)

 

Hence we climb to the top floor of the Palace, where after all the best of all awaits us… the very world itself, the vast contado of Siena, hill and valley and desert stretching away to where, in the evening mist, maybe, the pure, serene outline of Mont’ Amiata rises into the sky on the verge of the Patrimony, on the confines of Umbria, on the road to Rome. He who has once seen that majesty will never forget it. It seems to seal every one of the days one spends in Siena, or in the little cities of the south that were once her vassals. From here you may count them all: only you will not. You will look only on that mountain whose crest, shaped like the crescent moon, bears as of right the symbol of Mary, and in silence you will await the sunset. And as the bells once more, as of old, ring the Angelus, you will remind yourself, perhaps after many days of forgetfulness, of those things which alone have any reality—

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910.