Italy · Old Town
Siena
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Siena is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta 1,500 points
Black and white in bands, all the way up and all the way in: this building is wearing the city's shield. It sits on the flat crown of the oldest hill, so you climb to it from wherever you start. Then walk round the right flank and find an arcade that begins and ends in mid air. The city meant to set a far bigger nave at right angles to this one and got as far as a single wall. That wall has the best view in town.
Piazza Giacomo Matteotti 500 points
The north end of the level, and the exact spot where Siena stops being medieval and starts being a place with buses. Broad, straight, flat, and the last easy walking you get before the lanes take you back. I cross it quickly. Everything I actually want to eat is downhill from here.
Piazza Santo Spirito 500 points
The eastern edge of the level, up on the Valdimontone ridge, where the lanes stop being a crush and open just enough for a bench. There is a dome here you cannot see at all until you are standing next to it. Behind the square, the level runs out.
Porta Romana 500 points
The south-eastern foot of the level, and the lowest ground you will stand on all day. Everything above you is the way home. Step through, turn round, and look at what you are about to climb: from out here it is all city and all uphill.
Torre del Mangia 500 points
Four hundred steps and no lift, in a shaft barely wider than the stair inside it. No one has ever made this easier, and I approve of that. From the terrace the three hills of the Old Town read as three hills again, and the shell of brick at the foot of it is the flattest ground for miles.
Mercato delle Merci 250 points
The one point on this level that is an event rather than a building. Come on market morning and the whole width of the road is food, laid out under plane trees on the western rim, next to the open ground of La Lizza. Come on any other morning and it is a very good road with plane trees on it. I take what I get.
Mura di Siena 250 points
Brick, and not a circle. Follow it from outside and the trick shows itself: it is a contour line. Where the ground fell away they let the ground do the work, and where it did not they built. You meet it on the south and west rim of the level, and there the house fronts end and open country starts in one step.
Piazza San Francesco 250 points
The north-east shoulder of the level. Big, plain, brick, open on one side, and it looks like a place that mislaid a few of its own walls. Walk to the low edge and the country east of the city drops away in front of you. The stairs down from here are worth the detour on their own.
Porta San Marco 250 points
The far south-west corner, downhill from everything, which means the reward here is the walk back. From outside, the arch frames the city like a picture nobody hung. The lane running up to it is one of the steepest bits of the whole level.
Porta Tufi 250 points
The southern tip of the level and its emptiest corner. The lanes thin out, the garden walls get longer, and then there is an arch with fields on the far side of it. The two hundred metres before a gate please me more than the gate.
Name origin
Why it is called Siena.
The Romans wrote it Saena, and when that got confusing they gave it a surname: Sena Etruriae to tell it from Sena Gallica over on the other coast, Sena Iulia on the road maps. Then from 1071 the scribes started writing the name as a plural, Saenae, because the place was three separate boroughs on three separate hills and one word would not stretch over them. No other stop on my map comes in the plural.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Nobody chose a valley here. Siena sits on the high ground of the Tuscan upland, on the ridge that parts one river basin from the next, and the numbers say the rest: 320 metres at the town hall, 361 up at one end of the level and 288 down at the other. It grew over three hills, one at a time, and each hill got its own castle before anybody tied the three together with a single wall that follows the ground instead of a plan. That is why nothing in this level is flat and why its edge wanders. A city laid out along a watershed is a city where everything is either up or down. I have no legs and even I noticed.
Sources: www.treccani.it
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Siena has no founding date. It has a stack of receipts. First a modest Etruscan settlement, sitting on the boundary between what Volterra ran and what Chiusi ran, which is a thing that happens to a ridge. Then Rome made it a colony, probably under Augustus, and put it on a list. Then the paperwork thins to almost nothing until a Lombard official called Willerad turns up alive in 678, and in 712 the bishops of Siena and Arezzo have an argument about whose parish is whose. That is the founding story: a border, a list, and a filing dispute. I find it very restful.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 678–1147
Officials, then counts, then bishops. Under the Lombards Siena was run by a gastaldo, and the oldest one anybody can name is Willerad, on record as alive in 678. The Franks arrived and the job turned into a county. Then from the tenth century the bishops began to matter more than the counts, who were pushed out into the countryside, and it was under the bishops' wing that the town first started running itself. Four hundred and seventy years, and not one of them was about anybody who lived here.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1147–1287
The commune. In 1147 a document names consuls for the first time, and the bishops are no longer in charge. By 1180 the emperor's chancellor had confirmed that Siena could mint its own coin, which settles the question of who runs a town more firmly than any speech. Then a podestà brought in from outside, the first of them a man from Lucca in 1199, and from 1202 a council summoned by a bell that did the work of a parliament. Called to government by ringing a bell. I would attend every session.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1287–1355
The Nine. Nine men, all of them from merchant and ordinary families rather than noble ones, held the government for sixty-eight years. Treccani calls it flatly the best government Siena ever had, and says what it spent the money on: the territory, and the buildings. Most of what you will walk past today was ordered by a committee of nine shopkeepers. And they signed the ground itself, which you will see when you get to the bottom of the hill.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1355–1557
Two hundred more years of the republic, spent almost entirely on rearranging its own committees. The pattern is the same each time: an emergency council is appointed, the emergency does not end, and the council stays. In 1454 they appointed one called the Balia and made it permanent and answerable to nobody, and it quietly ended up holding the actual power. The state's own archive draws the line at 1557: everything before that is filed as republican Siena. Two centuries of reshuffling and the filing clerks got the last word.
Sources: archiviodistatosiena.cultura.gov.it, www.treccani.it
- 1557–1860
Florence, from a distance. Prince Philip of Spain held the lordship of Siena and handed it on to Cosimo I in Florence, because he owed Cosimo a great deal of money. A city can change owner to settle an account. After that Siena kept its own councils and its own paperwork, but the man at the top was a governor standing in for somebody else's sovereign, first a Medici and later a Lorraine. Two hundred years in, in 1778, Pietro Leopoldo's laws finally got the fields and the trade moving again. The bill got paid eventually. It usually does.
Sources: www.treccani.it
- 1860–
Italy. In 1860 Tuscany was annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia by a vote, Siena went along with the grand duchy it was part of, and shortly afterwards the whole arrangement was called Italy. That was the first time in eleven hundred years the question of who runs this place was answered by anybody who could see the hills from where they were sitting.
Sources: www.treccani.it, www.treccani.it
The emblem
What the shield means.
This icon is not a shield. Siena's arms are the balzana: silver above, black below, one line across, nothing else. Magnificent on a flag and completely unreadable at the size of an app icon, so the icon is the tower over the town hall instead. Almost 87 metres above the Campo, 102 to the lightning rod, and the crown on top is a double row of battlements in travertine and dark stone, put there to repeat the white and the black of the city. So the arms are on the icon after all, just carried up 87 metres by a building. Its name comes from a bell-ringer who was famous for spending everything he was paid, which makes it the only landmark in Europe named after an appetite.
Sources: it.wikipedia.org, www.comune.siena.it
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The oldest secular building in Siena is not a sight. It is hiding. Its arches, spanning about 13 metres, were built into the church of S. Quirico on the crest of Castelvecchio and are still in there. What did survive out in the open is its name: the place was the stallum regis, the royal seat, where the Lombard official sat and the money came in, and the street it stood on is called Via di Stalloreggi to this day. Buildings get eaten. Street names are the last thing to go, and I say that with respect.
Sources: www.treccani.it
There is a second set of lanes under the ones you are walking. Siena has more than 25 kilometres of tunnels cut into the rock beneath it, called the bottini after the barrel vault over them, a word first written down in 1226. They run 1.8 metres high and under a metre wide, which is a very good width, and until the pipes arrived in the early twentieth century they were the whole city's water. Nothing up here tells you they are down there. That is the sort of thing I would keep quiet about too.
Sources: www.visitsiena.it
Siena is cut into seventeen contrade, and the city's own glossary calls them cities within the city. They are not districts on a map somewhere. They are lines on the ground, and the reason they are settled is that people argued about them for so long that in 1729 the governor, Beatrice Violante of Bavaria, published an order fixing every boundary, the number of them and how many people each one held. You will cross a dozen of those lines today, mostly without noticing, and the street signs will tell you which beast you are standing on. A city that spent centuries arguing about lines on the ground has my full attention. Lines on the ground are my entire diet.
Sources: palio.comune.siena.it, palio.comune.siena.it
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- vicolo
- An alley. There are more than fifty of them in this level and the names are better than the streets: Vicolo di Malizia is mischief, Vicolo di Finimondo is the end of the world, Vicolo del Sasso is the stone, Vicolo delle Pietre is the stones. Two of those are about me.
- chiasso
- Narrower than a vicolo. Chiasso del Bargello is one, and then there is Chiassino del Pignattello, where the word has been made smaller a second time. A diminutive of a diminutive of a narrow thing.
- costa
- A slope, and the honest word for what most of this level is. Costa Larga, Costa dei Paparoni, Costa dell'Incrociata, Costa di Sant'Antonio, and Costarella dei Barbieri, the little slope of the barbers. Note how few names here promise you anything flat.
- di sopra
- Upper, with di sotto for lower. Banchi di Sopra and Banchi di Sotto are the two halves of the main street, one above the crossing and one below it, and Casato di Sopra and Casato di Sotto do the same on the other ridge. Not the direction, the altitude.
- fonte
- A spring. Via della Fonte, Vicolo della Fonte, Piazza di Fonte Nuova, Via di Fontebranda, Via di Fontegiusta, Via di Fontanella. A hilltop city counts its water carefully and then names the lanes after it.
- -eria
- The trade that used to be on it. Via di Beccheria was the butchers, Via di Calzoleria the shoemakers, Via di Pescheria the fishmongers, and around them sit Vicolo degli Orefici, Vicolo dei Borsellai and Vicolo del Coltellinaio. Two of those six are about lunch.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 228streets
- 2,113dots
- 31.8km of street
- 40.9km on foot
- 11.7hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.