Burnt Siena
My days in Florence were numbered. After getting a warning from my hostel that I was rubbing up against their maximum nights allowed, I began to look for another town to call home. Venice could be nice. Or what about Verona? Turin, maybe, for a little coffee and chocolate? Then, on my last night at the hostel, I was rummaging through Rick Steves when I noticed something: more pages were dedicated to this little town called Siena than were used to describe Florence. Well, I thought, I if Rick loves it that much, the town can't be that bad. Plus, it'll be nice to get out of big cities for a few days. The next day, I boarded an early train to my mystery town.
After a winding trip on a tiny orange bus (where the young woman standing next to me had some sort of meltdown and collapsed onto my lap; nothing like some excitement!), I reached the ostello, a sweet little place with no character and substantial distance from the city center. Dropping my bag, I popped onto another little orange bus (this time, an old lady tripped and hurt herself) and headed into the old city. When we finally stopped at the main station, I knew I had picked the right town.
Siena is nothing if not two things: a city build for automatic vehicles and a city decorated with Crayola crayons. It's on a hill in Tuscany (so are all the roads), offering everything you could ever expect in classic, postcard-perfect views of Tuscan living. I found myself on an "arts and nature urban trek," suggested by the somewhat useless tourist office (they don't seem to stock much of anything), which brought me into what might be considered the reality version of Under the Tuscan Sun. Builders reconstructing the facades of old, tan brick houses with flowing, lush fields behind them. And then there's Il Campo, the shell-shaped square around which there is an semi-annual bareback horse race (Il Palio). This is where the whole Crayola crayon thing comes in. At midday (what the Cypriots call "mad dogs and Englishmen" time), the tan bricks of the piazza turn that inviting shade of reddened brown that makes up my father's favorite color (see the title, spelled like the town, for a hint!)
For me, the joy of Siena was just strolling. The city is a sight in itself, with beautiful buildings around every corner, laundry flapping in the wind, and the sounds of student life spilling from the university residence halls. And students were to be found everywhere! In the cheap-o pizzeria on Il Campo, where the server chatted me up about his final exams; on a balcony overlooking the burnt square, where Deniss (a Croatian/Italian painter with almost no English) and I used pictograms, bad Italian, Latin and English to talk as we shared a beer; and on the outskirts of the city, where I almost joined a pickup football game in action, choosing instead to allow the experts show me how it's done.
While my hostel curfew did prevent much in the way hanging out at student nightlife (a midnight curfew, when the last bus is at 22:22 doesn't seem terribly fair), I did certainly have some adventures of my own! Over the France-Portugal game (you think I would miss it?), I shared two bottles of local red (whew!) with Tamara and Anna, a South African and a Swede currently living in Ireland. We had a delightful chat, moving from politics to travel to Italy to cell phones to football to wine, and I now have an open invitation to crash at their house in Galway, when I make it to Ireland. We'll see...
After a winding trip on a tiny orange bus (where the young woman standing next to me had some sort of meltdown and collapsed onto my lap; nothing like some excitement!), I reached the ostello, a sweet little place with no character and substantial distance from the city center. Dropping my bag, I popped onto another little orange bus (this time, an old lady tripped and hurt herself) and headed into the old city. When we finally stopped at the main station, I knew I had picked the right town.
Siena is nothing if not two things: a city build for automatic vehicles and a city decorated with Crayola crayons. It's on a hill in Tuscany (so are all the roads), offering everything you could ever expect in classic, postcard-perfect views of Tuscan living. I found myself on an "arts and nature urban trek," suggested by the somewhat useless tourist office (they don't seem to stock much of anything), which brought me into what might be considered the reality version of Under the Tuscan Sun. Builders reconstructing the facades of old, tan brick houses with flowing, lush fields behind them. And then there's Il Campo, the shell-shaped square around which there is an semi-annual bareback horse race (Il Palio). This is where the whole Crayola crayon thing comes in. At midday (what the Cypriots call "mad dogs and Englishmen" time), the tan bricks of the piazza turn that inviting shade of reddened brown that makes up my father's favorite color (see the title, spelled like the town, for a hint!)
For me, the joy of Siena was just strolling. The city is a sight in itself, with beautiful buildings around every corner, laundry flapping in the wind, and the sounds of student life spilling from the university residence halls. And students were to be found everywhere! In the cheap-o pizzeria on Il Campo, where the server chatted me up about his final exams; on a balcony overlooking the burnt square, where Deniss (a Croatian/Italian painter with almost no English) and I used pictograms, bad Italian, Latin and English to talk as we shared a beer; and on the outskirts of the city, where I almost joined a pickup football game in action, choosing instead to allow the experts show me how it's done.
While my hostel curfew did prevent much in the way hanging out at student nightlife (a midnight curfew, when the last bus is at 22:22 doesn't seem terribly fair), I did certainly have some adventures of my own! Over the France-Portugal game (you think I would miss it?), I shared two bottles of local red (whew!) with Tamara and Anna, a South African and a Swede currently living in Ireland. We had a delightful chat, moving from politics to travel to Italy to cell phones to football to wine, and I now have an open invitation to crash at their house in Galway, when I make it to Ireland. We'll see...
posted by Ethan at 10:10 AM
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