MYTHS, LEGENDS AND THE LINEAR PALIO (1000-1300)

Siena was an Etruscan city, modest but well-connected to the major centers of Etruria:  Fiesole and Chiusi, Cortona and Volterra.  Many  have pointed out fascinating analogies between the first Palios and the equestrian games of the Etruscans and earlier still of the Greeks.  In Poggio Civitate, not far from Siena, there is a fragment of pediment, from the 6th century b.c., showing a series of horsemen lined up, riding bareback like today’s jockeys and, like their modern counterparts, they are equiped with riding crops and  hats, all set to run their Etruscan Palio.  

Another myth of the race’s origins – favoring Siena as born from the rib of Rome and founded by the fugitive sons of Remus – depicts those men reaching the fateful place after a great race, chased by the horsemen of Romulus.   Senio and Aschio thus founded Siena at the end of a mythic “linear Palio.”   The insignia of the new city was to be white and black after their horses and   the clouds of smoke that rose from the two sites where they offered their sacrifices to the gods. 

The Balzana (the old Roman insignia in black and white) remained the Coat of Arms of Siena, perhaps because, as Geno Pampaloni wrote, it is the perfect symbol of the extreme character of the city. It seems the irreducible opposition of white and black, yet the Balzana in fact presents the fusion of all colors in the white and their absolute absence in the black.  

The same is true of the Palio: the Balzana is omnipresent as the insignia of the Municipality and as a sign of everything, reductio ad unum of the agreeable disagreement, of the seeming harmony between between Contrade which, with their individual colors and flags, are divided and oppose each other, set themselves apart and clash.   But they refind each other and unite  in the Balzana, like the Sienese people when they are happy to run into each other away from home or when they pit themselves against the rest of the world.  The obsessively black and white marbles of the Cathedral, symbol to some of the glory and pain of the Madonna, render the building a kind of “sacred Balzana,” and thus the appropriate setting for the offering of candles, the benediction of the Palio banner, the Te Deum of victory, for the most intense and tumultuous moments of popular religiousness, which may be archaic in form, but fully heartfelt as an indispensable and ever-current part of the Palio rites.   

  For the Festival of the Assumption Siena became an “open city.”   Arrests were suspended; exiles could return and freely walk the town; goods and livestock poured into the marketplace; streets came alive with musicians and minstrels, mimes and jesters who entertained the crowds; acrobats and strongmen, teeth-pullers and healers, trinket-sellers and harlots, wine-merchants and vendors offered their wares and their services. The city displayed tapestries and flags, decorations, festoons and garlands: in 1329 the City-State ordered 600 of these to be made. In 1378 monies were spent on fireworks, then considered a marvel. 

The culmination was the offering of candles and tributes in the Cathedral, a religious and political rite, an act of Sienese devotion to the Madonna and of subordination to the vicars, the leaders of the City-State. The collective oath of allegiance was its own precise ritual: a scroll from 1200 describes it, referring to an article in an older statute, since lost.  The quantity of fine waxen tributes to be offered varied according the importance of whoever made the offering, but all citizens (from 18 to 70 years old) were dutibound to make  offerings, as were all institutions of Siena and its State, most notably the Municipality which offered a gold-leafed and painted candle, as it does today. In the years of the greatest splendor, the Sienese who packed the Cathedral watched as, before their Madonna to whom vows were offered, there kneeled former enemies, now become fellow citizens: the Counts of Scialenga and the Counts Gherardesca, the wise Aldobrandeschi and the Guidi, legendary warriors. The wax that the workers of the Catherdral amassed beneath the dome reached a weight of 30,000 lbs.,then redistributed to the small churches and parishes of the diocese, representing the ancient paradigm of the ritual donation, with the symbolic obligations of giving, receiving, and reciprocating. In the words of a saying much cherished by Boccaccio, “The Church is like the sea, from everyone it takes and to everyone it gives.”

The Municipality played an analogous role in the secular aspects of the festival.  Prisoners to be freed from the dungeons were drawn by lot, as were the names of virtuous and needy maidens whose dowries were provided for “at the public expense.” Public reconciliations between factions and families gave relief to feuds among the citizenry. Food and drink was provided for all. In the act of submission of Montelaterone (1205), the Municipality committed itself to giving victuals to anyone who brought a tribute of fine wax to Siena. This was the first documentation of the custom that was to continue in the banquet offered by the Signoria and today in the dinners on the eve of the Palio sumptuously laid out on the streets for thousands of celebrants. In the period of the “culture of hunger” – experienced by even the most splendid cities such as Siena – the festival was a moment of liberation from the strict daily rations of bread and wine. The city found, gave, and abounded in food and drink for everyone, wines and meats, cookies and blancmanges, the precursors of cavallucci and riccarelli, copate and panforti, the Sienese delicacies of today.

To organize the Palio the Municipality annually nominated the Deputees of the Festival, mentioned in records from the 1300s with tasks and status greater than those of today. Running in the Palio were the nobles and notables on their battle-horses: the medieval games were mimed battles, training for war. The linear track  ran from outside the walls all the way to the Cathedral, from the outlying fields to the   streets, over muddy roads like Pantaneto to the marble of the Cathedral, from the country to the city.  The prize was the Pallium, a long piece of precious cloth, sometimes stitched in vertical bands, stuffed with hundreds of vaio fur pelts.  The Pallium later gave its name to the race and then to the festival.  This linguistic fact underlines a tie between sign and context, symbol and ceremony, meaning and the meaningful.

From the start the race was  sensational and dramatic, full of accidents and events.  

The oldest document recording the Palio, from 1238, deals with Palio justice. A fine of 40 farthings was to be paid to Ristoro di Bruno Ciguarde  because “running in the Palio and having arrived last, he did not take the pig, the derisory prize assigned by the regulation to the most losing of all the losers” (at that time, last place; today, 2nd place). Such a “purge” helped define victory and defeat, establishing hierarchies ofwinners and losers, dictating the symbolic order of homo ludens.  

Another sign of the times lies in the Constitution of 1262, in which it is decreed that the qui current eques, the participants of the Palio, the noble jockeys of that era, could not be prosecuted for homocide or injury occurring during the race, because “predicta maleficia non committerint studiose” – “they didn’t do it on purpose.” What was asked of jockeys was above all a theatrical show of honesty.

These first Palios were an affair of the noblemen. The Contrade participated, instead, in the crude games in which masses of contestants opposed each other on the basis of territory (eg.,La Città against Camollia and S. Martino).  Siena was born plural, on three hills. The three primeval castles expanded into Thirds (Città, Camollia, S. Martino) growing until they met and almost dictated the site of the Campus Fori, the Piazza del Campo. The Contrade grew up within this 3-way partitioning, an Indoeuropean matrix there since the Etruscans and which in Siena stubbornly refused the 4-way partitioning laid out everywhere by the Romans.  

The oldest documentation of the Contrade lies in the regulations of 1200, prescribing that all citizens were to bring a candle to the Catherdral cum hominibus sue contrate.  

Historian Andrea Dei affirms that the Sienese “began to create companies in the city of the Contrade” in 1209.  Contrada originally meant “a main inhabited street,” then “neighborhood,” and finally the association of a district’s inhabitants.  

Giovanni Cecchini, authoritative writer on Palio historiography, notes, “the Contrada, as a territorial and administrative district, is as old as the city itself.” E. William Heywood, an important Palio historian, adds, “For the past 400 years the Contrade have been the distinguishing characteristic of life in Siena, the equivalent of which can be found in no other Italian city.”

The Contrade used to be far more numerous.  After the Plague of 1347, their number was reduced to 42.  They took their names from streets, gates, fountains, churches or illustrious families within their territories.  They fulfilled religious, administrative, military, and recreational functions.  The head of the Contrada was the Sindaco, the Mayor, who was directly answerable to the Podestà, aided by popularly elected counsellors. The Contrada was subject to taxes, it ran its own police force, saw to the upkeep of streets, and carried out other services for the public good.