Siena — Innamo

Siena does not try as hard as Florence, and this is its great charm. The city is smaller, darker, built of the particular warm-brown stone called Sienese brick, and arranged around a shell-shaped piazza that is, by most accounts, the most beautiful in Italy. The life here has a different tempo. People eat late, walk slowly, and take the rivalry between the city’s seventeen ancient districts with a seriousness that is entirely genuine.

When to go

September and October. Or, if you are brave, Palio week.

The Palio, run twice a year on July 2nd and August 16th, is one of the oldest and most intense civic rituals in Europe: a bareback horse race around Il Campo, preceded by days of medieval pageantry, street feasts, and deeply felt neighbourhood politics. It is extraordinary to witness, and also extremely crowded. Go knowing this.

For everyone else: September and October are the best Siena has to offer. The harvest is in, the days are warm and golden, and the city is at its most itself. You can stand in Il Campo in the early morning before anyone else arrives and understand what a piazza is actually for.

History

Il Campo, il Palio, and seven centuries of unresolved rivalry.

Siena’s seventeen contrade, the city’s ancient districts, have been competing in the Palio since the medieval era. Each has its own colours, its own patron saint, its own horse, and its own very specific enemies. The rivalry is not theatrical: it is the city’s organising principle. Sienese people identify with their contrada before they identify with Siena, and they will tell you about it, at length, with great pride.

Il Campo, the great central piazza, slopes gently toward the base of the Palazzo Pubblico and its Torre del Mangia. On Palio days, the whole bowl fills with people. On an ordinary October afternoon, it fills with pigeons and light. Both versions are worth your time.

Food & Drink

Pici, ricciarelli, and the wine library in a Medici fortress.

Siena has its own pasta: pici, a fat, hand-rolled spaghetti that takes on a sauce with more grip than its refined Florentine cousins. The city’s pastries are exceptional, particularly ricciarelli, almond biscuits with powdered sugar, sold in every shop and worth every calorie. Panforte, the dense spiced fruit cake, was invented here and is a completely different thing when eaten at source.

The Enoteca Italiana, housed inside the old Medici fortress, is a national wine library: thousands of Italian wines from every region, available by the glass or bottle. It is the right place to spend an afternoon working through the wines of southern Tuscany, and Nesse will guide you through what to order.

The Landscape

South of Siena, the landscape changes into something lunar.

An hour south of Siena, the green Chianti hills give way to the Crete Senesi: pale clay badlands, eroded into soft round hills, with cypress trees in lines and almost nothing else. It is one of the most distinctive landscapes in Italy, and almost nobody goes there. Drive through it slowly, at the golden hour, and you will understand why the painters kept coming back.

Further south still: Montalcino, where Brunello is made, and Pienza, the perfect Renaissance hill town. Nesse knows the estates and the people. She thinks at least one night in Montalcino is non-negotiable, and she is right.