quintessential
These two photos (immediately above and below) are from a ceremony in which the horses were assigned to the various contrade (a contrada is a team of sorts, each one of which is made up by a different quarter of the city). You could tell from the reactions of the contrada which groups received the coveted horses. Tartuca was the last chosen, and thus stuck with a horse that bucked off its jockey twice in a trial-run yesterday.
quintessentially Senese:
• a mother indulged her young son's protests when she said it was time to go and let him play a few minutes longer in the Piazza del Campo, but when it was actually time to go, she got up and slowly walked away, telling him, "Io vado, ciao!" (I'm going, bye!)
• two moms donning their respective contrada flags of istrice (the porcupine) and drago (the dragon), chatting and pushing their strollers down the Via Banchi di Sopra
• this most fabulous toy store window with a row of dressage-ribbon-adorned horses in all of the colors of Siena's 17 contrade and a matchbox-car-racetrack-turned-Palio-course, which had a tiny row of horses with their fantini (jockeys) and a track the same color as the dirt brought into the piazza. There was a little boy looking admiringly through the window at this toy, but his mom answered that it was "troppo grande" (too big).
That first photo--where did you find that? Thank you for posting this! I'm sooooo jealous!
ReplyDeleteIt was part of the Bruco fountain! I discovered it today walking a little farther down Via dei Rossi all the way to San Francesco.
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