The Palio at Siena
Our
rooms were in a tower. From the windows one looked across the brown tiled roofs
to where, on its hill, stood the cathedral. A hundred feet below was the
street, a narrow canyon between high walls, perennially sunless; the voices of
the passers-by came up, reverberating, as out of a chasm. Down there they
walked always in shadow; but in our tower we were the last to lose the
sunlight. On the hot days it was cooler, no doubt, down in the street; but we
at least had the winds. The waves of the air broke against our tower and flowed
past it on either side. And at evening, when only the belfries and the domes
and the highest roofs were still flushed by the declining sun, our windows were
level with the flight of the swifts and swallows. Sunset after sunset all
through the long summer, they wheeled and darted round our tower. There was
always a swarm of them intricately maneuvering just outside the window. They
swerved this way and that, they dipped and rose, they checked their headlong
flight with a flutter of their long pointed wings and turned about within their
own length. Compact, smooth and tapering, they seemed the incarnation of airy
speed. And their thin, sharp, arrowy cry was speed made audible. I have sat at
my window watching them tracing their intricate arabesques until I grew dizzy;
till their shrill crying sounded as though from within my ears and their flying
seemed a motion, incessant, swift and bewilderingly multitudinous, behind my
eyes. And all the while the sun declined, the shadows climbed higher up the
houses and towers, and the light with which they were tipped became more rosy.
And at last the shadow had climbed to the very top and the city lay in a grey
and violet twilight beneath the pale sky.
One
evening, toward the end of June, as I was sitting at the window looking at the
wheeling birds, I heard through the crying of the swifts the sound of a drum. I
looked down into the shadowy street, but could see nothing. Rub-a-dub, dub,
dub, dub - the sound grew louder and louder, and suddenly there appeared round
the corner where our street bent out of sight, three personages out of a
Pinturicchio fresco. They were dressed in liveries of green and yellow - yellow
doublets slashed and tagged with green, parti-colored hose and shoes, with
feathered caps of the same colors. Their leader played the drum. The two who
followed carried green and yellow banners. Immediately below our tower the
street opens out a little into a tiny piazza. In this clear space the three
Pinturicchio figures came to a halt and the crowd of little boys and loafers
who followed at their heels grouped themselves round to watch. The drummer
quickened his beat and the two banner-bearers stepped forward into the middle
of the little square. They stood there for a moment quite still, the right foot
a little in advance of the other, the left fist on the hip and the lowered
banners drooping from the right. Then, together, they lifted the banners and
began to wave them round their heads. In the wind of their motion the flags
opened out. They were the same size and both of them green and yellow, but the
colors were arranged in a different pattern on each. And what patterns! Nothing
more "modern" was ever seen. They might have been designed by Picasso
for the Russian Ballet. Had they been by Picasso, the graver critics would have
called them futuristic, the sprightlier (I must apologize for both these
expressions) jazz. But the flags were not Picasso's; they were designed some
four hundred years ago by the nameless genius who dressed the Sienese for their
yearly pageant. This being the case, the critics can only take off their hats.
The flags are classical, they are High Art; there is nothing more to be said.
The
drum beat on. The bannermen waved their flags, so artfully that the whole
expanse of patterned stuff was always unfurled and tremulously stretched along
the air. They passed the flags from one hand to the other, behind their backs,
under a lifted leg. Then, at last, drawing themselves together to make a
supreme effort, they tossed their banners into the air. High they rose, turning
slowly, over and over, hung for an instant at the height of their trajectory,
then dropped back, the weighted stave foremost, toward their throwers, who
caught them as they fell. A final wave, then the drum returned to its march
rhythm, the bannermen shouldered their flags, and followed by the anachronistic
children and idlers from the twentieth century, Pinturicchio's three young
bravos swaggered off up the dark street out of sight and at length, the drum
taps coming faintlier and ever faintlier, out of hearing.
Every
evening after that, while the swallows were in full cry and flight about the
tower, we heard the beating of the drum. Every evening, in the little piazza
below us, a fragment of Pinturicchio came to life. Sometimes it was our friends
in green and yellow who returned to wave their flags beneath our windows.
Sometimes it was men from the other contrade or districts of the town,
in blue and white, red and white, black, white and orange, white, green and
red, yellow and scarlet. Their bright pied doublets and parti-colored hose
shone out from among the drabs and funereal blacks of the twentieth-century
crowd that surrounded them. Their spread flags waved in the street below, like
the painted wings of enormous butterflies. The drummer quickened his beat, and
to the accompaniment of a long-drawn rattle, the banners leapt up, furled and
fluttering, into the air.
To
the stranger who has never seen a Palio these little dress rehearsals are
richly promising and exciting. Charmed by these present hints, he looks forward
eagerly to what the day itself holds in store. Even the Sienese are excited.
The pageant, however familiar, does not pall on them. And all the gambler in
them, all the local patriot looks forward to the result of the race. Those last
days of June before the first Palio, that middle week of August before the
second, are days of growing excitement and tension in Siena. One enjoys the
Palio the more for having lived through them.
Even
the mayor and corporation are infected by the pervading excitement. They are so
far carried away that, in the last days of June, they send a small army of men
down in the great square before the Palazzo Comunale to eradicate every blade
of grass or tuft of moss that can be found growing in the crannies between the
flagstones. It amounts almost to a national characteristic, this hatred of
growing things among the works of men. I have often, in old Italian towns, seen
workmen laboriously weeding the less frequented streets and squares. The
Colosseum, mantled till thirty or forty years ago with a romantic, Piranesian
growth of shrubs, grasses and flowers, was officially weeded with such
extraordinary energy that its ruinousness was sensibly increased. More stones
were brought down in those few months of weeding than had fallen of their own
accord in the previous thousand years. But the Italians were pleased; which is,
after all, the chief thing that matters. Their hatred of weeds is fostered by
their national pride; a great country, and one which specially piques itself on
being modern, cannot allow weeds to grow even among its ruins. I entirely
understand and sympathize with the Italian point of view. If Mr. Ruskin and his
disciples had talked about my house and me as they talked about Italy and the
Italians, I too should pique myself on being up-to-date; I should put in
bathrooms, central heating and a lift, I should have all the moss scratched off
the walls, I should lay cork lino on the marble floors. Indeed, I think that I
should probably, in my irritation, pull down the whole house and build a new
one. Considering the provocation they have received, it seems to me that the
Italians have been remarkably moderate in the matter of weeding, destroying and
rebuilding. Their moderation is due in part, no doubt, to their comparative
poverty. Their ancestors built with such prodigious solidity that it would cost
as much to pull down one of their old houses as to build a new one. Imagine,
for example, demolishing the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. It would be about as
easy to demolish the Matterhorn. In Rome, which is predominantly a baroque,
seventeenth-century city, the houses are made of flimsier stuff. Consequently,
modernization progresses there much more rapidly than in most other Italian
towns. In wealthier England very little antiquity has been permitted to stand.
Thus, most of the great country houses of England were rebuilt during the
eighteenth century. If Italy had preserved her independence and her prosperity
during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there would
probably be very much less medieval or renaissance work now surviving than is
actually the case. Money, then, is lacking to modernize completely. Weeding has
the merit of being cheap and, at the same time, richly symbolic. When you say of
a town that the grass grows in its streets, you mean that it is utterly dead.
Conversely, if there is no grass in its streets, it must be alive. No doubt the
mayor and corporation of Siena did not put the argument quite so explicitly.
But that the argument was put, somehow, obscurely and below the surface of the
mind, I do not doubt. The weeding was symbolic of modernity.
With
the weeders came other workmen who built up round the curving flanks of the
great piazza a series of wooden stands, six tiers high, for the spectators. The
piazza which is shaped, whether by accident or design I do not know, like an
ancient theater, became for the time being indeed a theater. Between the seats
and the central area of the place, a track was railed off and the slippery
flags covered parsimoniously with sand. Expectation rose higher than ever.
And
at last the day came. The swallows and swifts wove their arabesques as usual in
the bright golden light above the town. But their shrill crying was utterly
inaudible, through the deep, continuous, formless murmur of the crowd that
thronged the streets and the great piazza. Under its canopy of stone the great
bell of the Mangia tower swung incessantly backwards and forwards; it too
seemed dumb. The talking, the laughter, the shouting of forty thousand people
rose up from the piazza, in a column of solid sound, impenetrable to any
ordinary noise.
It
was after six. We took our places in one of the stands opposite the Palazzo
Comunale. Our side of the piazza was already in the shade; but the sun still
shone on the palace and its tall slender tower, making their rosy brickwork
glow as though by inward fire. An immense concourse of people filled the square
and all the tiers of seats round it. There were people in every window, even on
the roofs. At the Derby, on boat-race days, at Wembley I have seen larger
crowds; but never, I think, so many people confined within so small a space.
The
sound of a gunshot broke through the noise of voices; and at the signal a
company of mounted carabiniers rode into the piazza, driving the loungers who
still thronged the track before them. They were in full dress uniform, black
and red, with silver trimmings; cocked hats on their heads and swords in their
hands. On their handsome little horses, they looked like a squadron of smart
Napoleonic cavalry. The idlers retreated before them, squeezing their way
through every convenient opening in the rails into the central area, which was
soon densely packed. The track was cleared at a walk and, cleared, was rounded
again at the trot, dashingly, in the best Carle Vernet style. The carabiniers
got their applause and retired. The crowd waited expectantly. For a moment
there was almost a silence. The bell on the tower ceased to be dumb. Some one
in the crowd let loose a couple of balloons. They mounted perpendicularly into
the still air, a red sphere and a purple. They passed out of the shadow into
the sunlight; and the red became a ruby, the purple a glowing amethyst. When
they had risen above the level of the roofs, a little breeze caught them and
carried them away, still mounting all the time, over our heads, out of sight.
There
was another gunshot and Vernet was exchanged for Pinturicchio. The noise of the
crowd grew louder as they appeared, the bell swung, but gave no sound, and
across the square the trumpets of the procession were all but inaudible. Slowly
they marched round, the representatives of all the seventeen comrade of
the city. Besides its drummer and its two bannermen, each contrada had a
man-at-arms on horseback, three or four halbardiers and young pages and, if it
happened to be one of the ten competing in the race, a jockey, all of them
wearing the Pinturicchian livery in its own particular colors. Their progress
was slow; for at every fifty paces they stopped, to allow the bannermen to give
an exhibition of their skill with the flags. They must have taken the best part
of an hour to get round. But the time seemed only too short. The Palio is a
spectacle of which one does not grow tired. I have seen it three times now and
was as much delighted on the last occasion as on the first.
English
tourists are often skeptical about the Palio. They remember those terrible
"pageants" which were all the rage some fifteen years ago in their
own country, and they imagine that the Palio will turn out to be something of
the same sort. But let me reassure them; it is not. There is no poetry by Louis
Napoleon Parker at Siena. There are no choruses of young ladies voicing high
moral sentiments in low voices. There are no flabby actor-managers imperfectly
disguised as Hengist and Horsa, no crowd of gesticulating supernumeraries
dressed in the worst of taste and the cheapest of bunting. Nor finally does one
often meet at Siena with that almost invariable accompaniment of the English
pageant - rain. No, the Palio is just a show; having no "meaning" in
particular, but by the mere fact of being traditional and still alive,
signifying infinitely more than the dead-born English affairs for all their
Parkerian blank verse and their dramatic re-evocations. For these pages and
men-at-arms and bannermen come straight out of the Pinturicchian past. Their
clothes are those designed for their ancestors, copied faithfully, once in a
generation, in the same colors and the same rich materials. They walk, not in
cotton or flannelette, but in silks and furs and velvets. And the colors were
matched, the clothes originally cut by men whose taste was the faultless taste
of the early renaissance. To be sure there are costumiers with as good a taste
in these days. But it was not Paquin, not Lanvin or Poiret who dressed the
actors of the English pageants; it was professional wig-makers and lady
amateurs. I have already spoken of the beauty of the flags - the bold,
fantastic, "modern" design of them. Everything else at the Palio is
in keeping with the flags, daring, brilliant and yet always right, always
irreproachably refined. The one false note is always the Palio itself -
the painted banner which is given to the contrada whose horse wins the
race. This banner is specially painted every year for the occasion. Look at it,
where it comes along, proudly exposed on the great medieval war chariot which
closes the procession - look at it, or preferably don't look at it. It is a
typical property from the wardrobe of an English pageant committee. It is a
lady amateur's masterpiece. Shuddering, one averts the eyes.
Preceded
by a line of quattrocento pages carrying festoons and laurel leaves and
escorted by a company of mounted knights, the war chariot rolled slowly and
ponderously past, bearing aloft the unworthy trophy. And by now the trumpets at
the head of the procession sounded, almost inaudibly for us, from the further
side of the piazza. And at last the whole procession had made its round and was
lined up in close order in front of the Palazzo Comunale. Over the heads of the
spectators standing in the central area, we could see all the thirty-four
banners waving and waving in a last concerted display and at last, together,
all leaping high into the air, hesitating at the top of their leap, falling
back, out of sight. There was a burst of applause. The pageant was over.
Another gunshot. And in the midst of more applause, the racehorses were ridden
to the starting place.
The
course is three times round the piazza, whose shape, as I have said, is
something like that of an ancient theater. Consequently, there are two sharp
turns, where the ends of the semicircle meet the straight diameter. One of
these, owing to the irregularity of the plan, is sharper than the other. The
outside wall of the track is padded with mattresses at this point, to prevent
impetuous jockeys who take the corner too fast from dashing themselves to
pieces. The jockeys ride bareback; the horses run on a thin layer of sand
spread over the flagstones of the piazza. The Palio is probably the most
dangerous flat-race in the world. And it is made the more dangerous by the
excessive patriotism of the rival contrade. For the winner of the race
as he reins in his horse after passing the post, is set upon by the supporters
of the other contrade (who all think that their horse should have
won), with so real and earnest a fury that the carabiniers must always
intervene to protect man and beast from lynching. Our places were at a point
some two or three hundred yards beyond the post, so that we had an excellent
view of the battle waged round the winning horse, as he slackened speed.
Scarcely was the post passed when the crowd broke its ranks and rushed out into
the course. Still cantering, the horse came up the track. A gang of young men
ran in pursuit, waving sticks and shouting. And with them, their Napoleonic
coat tails streaming in the wind of their own speed, their cocked hats bobbing,
and brandishing swords in their white-gloved hands, ran the rescuing
carabiniers. There was a brief struggle round the now stationary horse, the
young men were repulsed, and surrounded by cocked hats, followed by a crowd of
supporters from its native contrada, the beast was led off in triumph.
We climbed down from our places. The piazza was now entirely shaded. It was
only on the upper part of the tower and the battlements of the great Palazzo
that the sun still shone. Rosily against the pale blue sky, they glowed. The
swifts still turned and turned overhead in the light. It is said that at
evening and at dawn these light-loving birds mount on their strong wings into
the sky to bid a last farewell or earliest good-morrow to the sinking or the
rising sun. While we lie sleeping or have resigned ourselves to darkness the swifts
are looking down from their watch-tower in the height of heaven over the edge
of the turning planet toward the light. Was it a fable, I wondered, looking up
at the wheeling birds? Or was it true? Meanwhile, some one was swearing at me
for not looking where I was going. I postponed the speculation.
(From Along the Road)
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