The 1600s: the Palio in the Piazza




Now in the first decades of the 1600s the Palio concluded its transfer to the Piazza del Campo and its transformation into a popular festival. The proposal of running the Palio in the Piazza was officially made to the Municipality on 11 July 1695 by the Deputies of the Festival for the August Palio,

 Captain Sigismondo Santi and Knight Fortunio Martini. Various reasons supported the proposal: the Palio with horses running through the streets was dangerous and it was impossible to enjoy the entire spectacle. In the Piazza, instead, “everyone could see everything at once in a bigger space for as long as it lasts.” The length of the race in the Piazza had to be equal to the distance from the Santuccio to the Cathedral, equal to what the length had always been. And if the Palio were to be run not by private people but by Contrade (as was already happening in neighborhood festivals), then the banner and the other prizes would remain in Siena. “The Palio staying in the city, donations would be made to the churches and to sacred places, as always used to be made by the Contrade, when they won in similar races.” Beyond the increased spectacle, there would be a tangible increase of cultural goods for the city. 

The idea immediately caused a breach among the Sienese. After other races in the Piazza of uncertain documentation, the 1632 print of Bernardino Capitelli gives a clear date and sure proof of a circular Palio run in the Piazza. In the image, the jockeys ride bareback; they are at the finish of the race and are exchanging furious blows with the sovatto, a kind of cat-o’-nine-tails with a handle in the shape of an animal paw, half-weapon, half-amulet. In the Piazza the Contrada members greet the victory, jumping down from the stands; the Masters of the Field rush on horseback to keep order. The circular Palio was run in the Piazza with ever-greater frequency, yet until the middle of the century it coexisted with  the water-buffalo race popular in Siena and in all of Italy. Then in 1597 the Council of Trent launched its lightning bolts against the bull-hunts and other public games not so much because they were violent as because they were throwbacks to pagan rites (Dionysian and Bacchic) which the Council sought to remove from Italian customs once and for all.

The water-buffalo races had been run in a circle around the Piazza. Presented by the Contrade, the buffaloes were escorted by 12 goaders, armed with a long nail-studded staff. No one can be sure if these were used to prod the Contrade’s own water-buffalo or to poke the animals and goaders of the rivals. The race, which lasted for 3 laps of the Piazza, started at the Vicolo S. Paolo, and the start was marked by a trumpet blast.

Immense and heartfelt was the participation of the Contrade, even in the coarse donkey races which, on occasion, were held in the Piazza with a carnival-like atmosphere and a heated fighting spirit, run between donkeys painted in Contrada colors, pushed around the Piazza by Contrada members, while the donkeys of rival Contrade were subject to being pushed out of the track by every conceivable means.

In the end, in 1656, the Palio around the Piazza took on its definitive form, uniting the passions of the populace with those of the nobility. Add to this the final element that had been missing, in a city with such ignited mysticism: the dedication to the Madonna. Not the Madonna of the Assumption, but to the Miraculous Madonna of the Trench, venerated for the graces received and for miraculous healings in the then infamous and lively Provenzano, the district inhabited by Spanish soldiery and by the prostitutes who gravitated around them.

The cult grew to great proportions when the story circulated of a drunken Spanish soldier who wanted to fire his harquebus at the sacred image; the harquebus exploded, instantly killing the sacrilegous miscreant. The festival pertaining to the grand church, which had been raised with unusual speed to house the sacred image, suddenly became the concern of its neighborhood and of the entire city; from 1656 onward the Miraculous Madonna of Provenzano had its own popular Palio, which was run in the Piazza del Campo by the Contrade, as a conclusion to the annual liturgical feast.



The oldest image of the circular Palio, etched in 1632 by Bernardino Capitelli. Siena, Library of the Intronati


The Palio of Provenzano immediately took on a set form: from 1659 onwards it was organized directly by the Biccherna, the office of the magistrature that had the task of organizing ceremonies pertaining to civic continuity and representativeness. Supervision of the festival was the duty of the three “Lords of the Merriment,” who offered 90 thalers as a prize to the winning Contrada. One might assume they paid also to have their family crests placed on the Great Banner.

In 1657 the chronicler Flaminio Rossi wrote, “It was the first Great Banner with the image of the Holy Virgin of Provenzano, and the three noble coats of arms of the Lords of the Festival.”

The jockeys were mercenaries from the start. They were the well-equiped horsemen who had competed in the tumult of the water-buffalo races and who brought to the circular Palio a virulence that the aristocratic linear Palio had to a much lesser degree. If in the linear race the jockeys had run essentially halfway, in these circular races they did battle, even one against the other. The adolescent who had substituted the nobleman on horseback in the ancient Palios became an ambiguous senex puer of greater age, sometimes deformed and grotesque like the dwarves who in other cities fought in the terrible farsical bullfights of the Baroque period, or, clumsily, rode water-buffaloes. Such masques lived on in memory with crude and cruel nicknames: Stumpy, Lame, Dry Mount, Epileptic, Twisted, and an array of gobbi (hunchbacks) - Gobbo, Gobbo Chiarini, Gobbo Faenzi, Gobbo of Empoli, Gobbo Saragiolo.

Immediately there arose the never-to-be resolved problem of regulating the award relating to winning jockeys. Beyond a set payment, jockeys received the power to request bonuses from the victorious Contrada. The request is recorded for 1657, whereas after the victory of 1666 the Wave brought into its assembly the jockey Domenico of Barberino and invited him to choose between a payment of 10 scudi as final settlement or 40 lira plus tips. The jockey chose the latter, which was voted upon and passed by 20 white balls among 20 voters.

In the first circular Palios inside the Piazza, the Contrade had to find their own horses, but to keep the chances of winning more even, from 2 July 1676 onward the Contrade each presented a horse, and the horses were then assigned by a drawing. In 1657 it was determined that jockeys would ride “alla bisdossa,” bareback, and that the victorious horse would follow its jockey into the Church of Provenzano for the Te Deum of thanksgiving, soon to become a hymn to the Madonna, over the centuries screamed out in unison with only approximative words (Maria Mater Grazie, and so on). In the 1800s the very cultured Abbot Giuliani wrote that he had been scandalized by listening without having understood “a single healthy word.”

In 1666 the College of Balìa deliberated that on the Eve of the Assumption, for the linear Palio, the horsemen should bring the barb horses to have them blessed at the portals of the Cathedral. Those that ran in the circular race came to be blessed within the churches of the individual Contrade in a ceremony which to many seems superstitious and pagan, but which instead perpetuates a very Christian ritual, the beneditio equorum et animalium of the Church since its first centuries.

The same period saw the rise of the“tratta” (from trahere or tirare a sorte, meaning to “to be drawn by chance”). The random drawing for the assignment of horses to the Contrade took place on the green of Camollia, outside the city walls. After a trial race from the Palazzo Diavoli to the Church of San Bernardino at the Antegate, the first horse received an award of a testone, but was discarded, as was the last to arrive.

Thus was born the custom, still very much alive today, of selecting an equally matched horse-race. The Drawing immediately took on great importance because in that period the order of assignment of the horses also determined the order of the entrance in the Piazza of the groups of costumed Contrade representatives in the procession before the race, and indeed the order of the line-up at the race’s starting rope.

From the first codification of its regulations, the Palio embodied its endemic passion for chance.

In 1682 it was established that the Contrade had to pay a “vettura,” literally a “carriage,” to each horse-owner in exchange for use of the horse; in 1698 they had to repay owners for injuries to horses occurring during the Trials (today called the “prove,” called the “comprove” back then) run at various hours throughout the day in the Piazza, which was covered with earth that year several days before the Palio.



Masgalano in chiselled and embossed silver, won by the Tortoise Contrada, showing the rape of Europa (XVI c.) Siena, Tortoise Contrada  


For example, the brothers and sisters of the laymen’s company of St Catherine in Fontebranda, which held devotional and social services within the neighborhood as its aims, were also members of the Contrada of the Goose, the elected head of which, the Governor, assumed the title of Prior of the Companies, and the articles of the Companies were the same as those of the Contrada. In 1600 the Goose suddenly broke away altogether from the Company which remained within the domain of the Domenicans. Disagreements arose over guardianship of the relics of St Catherine (the “Sacred Head”). The disgreements grew into the Goose’s attempt to seize the relics with great furor among the people during a procession for the Feast of St Catherine in May of 1609.

The first circular Palios were not short of drama and discord. Prince Mattias dei Medici, a great lover of horses, was made promoter of the Palio and occasionally judge of the victory, not without several clamorous errors of judgment. In 1664, during a Palio that was considerably “heated,” the She-Wolf set off in first with the jockey Bacchino, who fell in the 3rd lap; the horse continued and won. But, as one chronicler wrote, “the Owl Contrada, for whom Mone was running, having come in second was awarded the Palio because so decided the imbecile Principe Mattias.”

The chronicler explained the insult, “since good sense says that it’s the horse who wins, not the jockey.”

The rule of good sense was soon to become official after 3 centuries of controversy. Ever since, it is the horse who wins, with or without a jockey on its back. And a barb who wins “scosso,” “riderless,” is to the people of Siena the surest, most beautiful sign of fate and of joy.