The 1700s: the Proclamation of Violante and the Rules of the Modern PAlio




The century of the Enlightenment opened with the introduction of a second Palio of the Contrade besides the Palio alla lunga, or linear Palio, continuing to take place on15 August. Already the linear Palio had been unseated in the hearts of the Sienese by the circular race, with its intimate theatricality..

The idea came from the Goose Contrada, winner of the Palio of July, 1701. The Goose asked to “rerun the Palio won,” to put the victory up for grabs, calling for another race to be run on 16 August for the Feast of the Assumption.

The ancient charm of the Feasts during which the Sienese summer reached its zenith, the wish to give the Festivials new vital blood, the Contrade’s desire to be more central in the holiday and in its organization, the proud ambition of a great people to declare itself primus inter pares by means of a gesture, a gift, an idea, all set the scene for the August Palio to begin its history. The Goose made available the 60 thalers it had won in money, 20 for expenses and 40 as a prize for the winning Contrada.

At the beginning the process was spontaneous, and if July’s winner did not wish to rerun the Palio, there was always another Contrada eager to step in as substitute with generosity and perhaps a hint of contentious emulation. When in 1747 the Goose declined, the Tower offered itself as substitute; in 1750, the entire citizenry   opted to pay the expenses by general collection.

In 1774 the Municipality ratified the organization of the two Palios.

The Palio also took on its definitive regulations. On 16 May 1721 the College of Balìa declared a proclamation, laying down the first modern regulation of the Palio.

In 16 commandments, with an enlightened sense of fairness, the ordinances, and articles of the previous centuries were condensed and set down, creating an orderly and unequivocable system. “The Sienese proclamation won’t last a month,” says a nasty Tuscan proverb: Yet it has endured to our own time, even with the continual updates of a festival ever a vital part and accurate mirror of the city.

n   1. The times of the Trials on the Eve of the Palio are set: 1 hour in the morning and 1 hour in the afternoon.

n   2. Stands may be erected only on the side of the Piazza where the shops are.

n   3. For the procession before the Palio, the Contrade must parade at least 24  representatives in costume.

n   4. In the procession, the jockey must parade, bearing the due insignia.

n   5. The jockeys must use only “an ordinary riding crop” and go to the starting rope after the mortaretto cannon is fired.

n   6. The pay awaiting the jockeys will be “only 10 lira, and 10 scudi if they should win the Palio and not in any other way.”

n   7. After the procession around the track, the   representatives in costume must go to their assigned places. 

n   8. No one from the ground may hit or incite the horses at the starting rope.

n   9. No one may help a fallen jockey to remount a horse. 

n   10.      The first horse to complete three circuits and to reach the Judges’ Stand wins.

n   11.      The Palio will be claimed by official representatives of the winning Contrada. 

n 12. The jockeys must stop when the mortaretto cannon is fired and also stop the horses in case of a false start, this too to be signalled by the mortar. 

n   13.      The Contrade must sign up for the drawing. 10 and only 10 will be drawn by chance to run in the Palio. 

n 14. The Contrade must deposit a sum which will go to the owners of the horses. 

n 15. The Contrade will follow the same predetermined sequence both in the procession and at the starting rope. 

n 16. No one may bother the horses once the race has started. 


An idealized portrait of Violante od Baviera.
Bust in alabaster (XIX c.) Sina, private collection.


Another proclamation was to be a milestone in the history of the Palio: the proclamation on the new boundaries of the Contrade issued in 1729 by Beatrice Violante of Bavaria, Governess of Siena, to put an end to the continual controversies between Contrade over boundaries and over their number and demographic entity.
In the second half of the preceding century, 6 Contrade disappeared, those with an ephemeral and irregular existence almost as “party societies”occasionally taking part in spectacles and public games.
The legend that they were abolished for having insulted the judges – widely spread in oral tradition and also among some scholars – is highly improbable. Incorporated by their more active and better organized rival-neighbors, the Lion, the Viper, the Rooster, the Oak, the Bear, and Strong-Sword left the scene, dying of natural causes. 


 Their knights parade even today in the Historic Procession, visor lowered on their helmets, bringing a carneval-like yet sinister tone to the commemoration of the Siena that once was, a “memento mori” like the reminders whispered in the ears of heroes in the triumphal processions of ancient Rome.

The Eagle narrowly escaped the same fate after it had won the water-buffalo race in 1610 and then, from 1622 onwards, was a long time absent from public spectacles in Siena.

When in 1718 the Eagle wanted once again to participate in the August festival, it was met by the opposition of its neighboring Contrade, the Wave, the Tortoise, the Panther, and the Forest, who had made claims to the territory and population of a Contrada dorment for so long. The controversy went before the Biccherna, dragging on so long as to attract the attention of the decisive Governess of Siena. Her proclamation, which took into account also the need for demographic equilibrium, set the number and the boundaries of the 17 Contrade , “taking away the power to bring back old ones or to create new ones.” More than 250 years have passed, yet the Proclamation of Violante is still law in Siena, at least for the territory that it covers, the city within the walls. Made strong by this definitive division, the Contrade of the 1700s continued their growth. Each wrote up its own articles, or constitutions, to regulate the lives of these associations. They acquired, in perpetual rented use or in ownership, their headquarters and their churches, taking advantage of the elimination under Leopold of the laymen’s companies decreed between 1770 and 1780.

Commenting on Siena, Peter Leopold wrote a series of sober, enlightened and sharp observations: “The city of Siena is divided into many Contrade, each of which has its own Captain, insignias, and chapel, which is rarely officiated, but these serve to say the evening’s rosary and to deliberate on the race of the Palio. Long ago these were the places where people met and under their insignia they went to war, and though no such reason exists any longer, the Sienese remain very attached to their little private churches, which are rather more meeting halls for deliberations on the Palio race.”

As the Grand Duke noted, the sacred and profane came together in a sort of “surrogate for the cult of patriotic independence” (as defined by Roberto Barzanti, noteworthy Palio historian). But  the meetings in such sacred places were not marked by any passive devotion. One of many proofs of this is the document with which the ecclesiastical authority conceded the use of the Church of the Giraffe, advising that “…above all, in the case of meetings, there shall not be in the abovementioned chapel any tumults and so forth as often happens in such occasions.” Almost in response, many Contrade formed the habit of covering sacred images during meetings in the church, “so they wouldn’t see and they wouldn’t hear” what went on in the tumultuous meetings called together by the sound of the bell. In the meetings, then as today, the common good was sought and propositions were voted on using black and white balls, as in ancient times.

This form of popular, lay government, in which everyone participates and for which the Contrade have long prided themselves, did not stop the city from paying   solemn honor to visiting high prelates or crowned heads with an impromptu day-off, with pageantry, torchlit processions, and with an extraordinary Palio.

For the entrance of Violante of Bavaria splendid festivities were held in 1717. The Veridico Ragguaglio, a “True Clarification,” illustrated and annotated recently by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, remains a primary source to learn about the history of the Palio.

In 1739, when Francesco II passed through Siena, an extraordinary Palio was run, and another was dedicated to him in 1745 when he rose to the imperial throne. On that occasion the prize reached the exceptional amount of 60 thalers. For Peter Leopold, a race was run on the 13th of May 1767 with especially supervised and well-prepared choreography. Together “the Contrade [entered] the Piazza in military fashion with pikes in hand, trimmed hats, and garments of various colors according to the colors of the insignia of each Contrada.” The allegories represented on the floats were unprecented. “Along came a very beautiful wagon with Munificence, Happiness, Misery, festive Siena, and two rivers...”

An ever more attentive theatricality  sent into the Piazza, along with historic and classical floats, new allegories dear to the Enlightenment and to its branches known to be dear to the sovereign and to his vision of the world: the floats became signs of their time. In the Palio of 1786 after the Temple of Happiness (by an unfortunate choice, the Contrade not running in the race took part) the Piazza witnessed the appearance of the personifications of Religion, Science, Agriculture, and Justice. Allusive written messages refered to the Granduchy and its cities: Ancient Siena, Beautiful Florence, Powerful Livorna, Florid Pisa.



Niccolò Nasoni. The Palio of August,
1713. Siena private collection.


n 1791 Public Happiness paraded in the Piazza among shepherds and shepherdesses and above all Commerce improved by Peter Leopold.

In contrast to the rarefied climate of the Procession and the abstractions of its allegorical floats, the circular race occurred according to the dictates of the roughest, most immediate expressionistic realism.

The horses were often recruited forcibly by the Municipality which sometimes, to find the required number, obliged all the Post Offices of the surrounding environs to send at least one to each drawing, which from 1761 onwards took place at the Palazzo, at the Biccherna door. Horses and horsemen in this century were rarely of noble origin. There was the horse of Savino the innkeeper, the bay horse of Signor Bagnacci, the white horse of Signor Mascagni and the brown horse of Signor Giannetti, the hatmaker in the Piazza nicknamed “the Bomb.”

The inclusion of the jockeys in the new Enlightened choreograpy and the new semiotic context of the Palio proved impossible, whatever steps were taken to shape them to the tastes of the time. An effort was made to oblige them to parade in full costume on the big parade horses.

Giovan Battista Stratico, from the Accademia dei Rozzi, wrote in 1775 an Olympian ode to the victorious jockey. A few years later Vittorio Alfieri brought his horses to the Piazza and versified about Bastiancino and Carnaccia. In 1793 he wrote to Siena, asking “who is hero among the jockeys,” and the next year complained about his friend Bianchi, “not even after 15 August were two verses written to tell me how the festivities went? to tell me of the glories of Bastiancini, Batticuli, and the others?”

The jockeys of that era, in truth, were not the stuff of poems and Pindaresque odes. The Contrade were already suspicious about the secret clans of jockeys that fixed race results and divvied up the earnings, official or otherwise.

Among these clans, competition was anything but Olympian, and it appeared in riots and assaults, threats and furious fights such as those which, between 1787 and 1788 set the “clan of the Sienese” against “the clan of the Maremmans” the head of which was the Maremman Isidoro “Dorino” Bianchini who won 13 Palios for 9 Contrade. After clamorous reinings and furious whiplashes, with vendettas on the subsequent race, Dorino, Ciocio, and the jockey for the Panther met each other at the starting rope on2 July 1778 with such forceful whiplashes that they ended up on the ground where “they fought as if to kill each other if the civil troops hadn’t separated them, throwing the jockeys of the She-Wolf and of the Panther in jail.” The jockeys were released the next day, with an injunction to leave the city immediately.

But these wars were like the fights of the proverbial thieves of Pisa. In order to stay, Dorino, perhaps the greatest of the century, taken by the reins by the She-Wolf in 1787, ran for them the next year; whipped until he bled by the Owl, won a Palio for them two years later; having won the Palio for the Tortoise in 1786 he ran the following year for the archrival, the Snail, and though assaulted by the Tortoise, two years later he returned to run and win for them; solemnly whipped by the Wave in 1787, he wore their colors in 1787 and brought them a victory.

The Palio of the jockeys has always been the anti-Olympics par excellence: winning, not participating, is what counts.

Yet the end of the century the Piazza del Campo witnessed events of greater drama and violence. After the French Occupation, the reactionary squadron-mobs from Arezzo reached Siena in 1799, to cries of “Viva Maria!” In the Piazza, upon the pieces of the destroyed tree of liberty, 10 cadavers were burned.

In July of 1799 the Palio was suspended for reasons of public order; soon it was understood that to protect public order it was riskier to ban the Palio than to let it be run.

The Banner with its Madonna of Provenzano was assigned to the August race. Yet again the Palio proved that the life of the city went on.