Medieval – Jconcetta's Journeys

Getting Around to

Feste

Harvest festivals are common the world over and autumn in Tuscany sees many celebrations of Italy’s most popular foods: truffles, porcini mushrooms, chestnuts, pumpkins, olives and, of course, grapes. Some feste last for days and include vendors selling dishes that show off the newly harvested food. Others are evening affairs, often dinners where the food is cooked by locals and the proceeds support some local project or charity.

When we told Marzia and Renzo that we like going to food fairs and community celebrations they immediately swept us off to an evening harvest festival at the hamlet of Ponte a Tressa, about 30 minutes away. There, as we stood in line perusing the menu (which was in Italian, of course), a local was heard to say (also in Italian, of course), laughing, “Well, it’s looks like we’ve made it: the Americans are here!” This was reported by Allegra who with Renzo ordered for all of us, as the only thing we recognized on the menu was pizza. We sat at long tables and ate family style. The main ingredient was goose cooked several ways: goose stew, sliced goose, stuffed goose neck, With each dish came potatoes, also cooked in different ways. We had a variety of bruschetta as well as the ubiquitous pizza and, of course, vino. There was a live band and dancing, pens with farm animals, games of chance and a stand where Renzo treated us all to limoncello, an essential and delicious finishing touch to a meal.

The second festa, some weeks later, was different. For the Buonconvento event, we bought tickets to a sit down meal at a table the size of our party (4 in this case). There was a choice of two complete meals which were delivered to our table.The food was good but not unusual and I don’t remember what we ate. Live music and other activities happened around the historical center, including a well attended fashion show. Buonconvento is Marzia’s home town and her father, who was in his 80’s, joined us for dinner. Most memorable from this experience was our leave taking with Marzia’s father. Again I quote Joan’s journal: “When we parted for the night he held each of our hands and, as translated by Marzia, thanked us for coming and wished the best for us always. Even though I could not understand a word that he said to me, I could feel the warmth and sincerity of his words. Sometimes feelings transcend verbal communication.”

Abbeys: Active, Inactive and Ruined

In any part of Italy one cannot help but observe the ubiquitous ecclesiastical structures: parish churches, monasteries, abbeys, hermitages, basilicas, many, perhaps most, still active after hundreds of years. In Tuscany even the smallest hamlet has a church and the region abounds with Romanesque, Medieval and Gothic religious buildings.

So what is an abbey? An abbey (abbazia in Italian) is essentially a monastery that is autonomous and governed by an abbot. It often includes a number of buildings – church, living quarters, refectory, cloister, library, agricultural structures – as well as landholdings. The abbot is likely to have more involvement in the surrounding community than, say, a parish priest or a prior. Abbeys were built across Europe in the Middle Ages according to a plan written by he founder of the Benedictine religious community. Tuscany, particularly Siena province, is rich in abbeys. Because they were often built in relatively secluded places and because they were meant to reflect the simplicity of monastic life, their architectural beauty set in a spectacular environment is immensely attractive, even if one is not religious.

We visited two of the most famous and beautiful active abbeys (Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore and Abbazia di Sant’Antimo), the breathtaking ruin of Abbazia di San Galgano and the remarkable cloister at Torri, now privately owned and open to the public only a few hours a week.

A bit of history and more images of these remarkable places are here.

Most people, when they think Tuscany, think Florence and maybe San Gimignano with its 14 intact ancient towers. Siena, if considered at all, is an afterthought, maybe worth a day. What they are missing! As Rick Steves has so eloquently pointed out, Siena’s eventual political and economic irrelevance has preserved its Medieval identity, to our gain. It wasn’t always so, the irrelevance, i.e.

Borders of the republic of Siena from1125 to 1559. Graphic by brucointestino – Transferred from it.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63007664

From the early 12th C. to the mid 16th C. the Republic of Siena, consisting of the city and its surrounding territory, was one of the powerful warring city states of the Northern Italian peninsula, in a class with Milan, Venice, Florence, Genoa. It rivaled Florence in the arts and financial prowess during the 13th and 14th centuries. Devastated, like much of Europe, by famine and the Black Death, it was finally defeated by the Republic of Florence and remained under its rule, a backwater, until Italian unification in the mid19th C.

Even today the Senese* will tell you they feel treated like 2nd class citizens when it comes to political pork, but they are a proud and resilient people, valuing real pork more, living the good life. One aspect of that good life is the relative lack of vehicles within the walls of the city. Neither cars nor bicycles, with a few authorized exceptions, are allowed within the city walls, the restriction being policed by 24 hour cameras with heavy fines for transgressors.

Typically narrow streets lead down into Piazza del Campo, left, and up into Piazza del Duomo,right

Having locals for friends and guides meant we knew which porto to enter for a given destination, where to find parking (sometime free parking!) and how to use the parking meters, any one of which might have defeated us otherwise. Once the car was sequestered we roamed within the walls, up and down steep, narrow streets flanked by tall Medieval buildings bedecked with flags of the contrade. Small or large open spaces appeared associated with important edifices like Gothic palaces or ancient churches and, of course, the Duomo and the Piazza del Campo. A bit about each of these unique Senese phenomena follows in subsequent posts and their accompanying pages.

*I have retained the Italian spelling for some key words and render them in italics.

The Contrade of Siena

Siena is divided into three main parts each of which are further divided into contrade. Contrada in Italian means district or ward but these are much more than simply neighborhoods. They are a way of life: different populations in different states, held together by their histories and civic pride. In the Middle Ages Siena was said to have been divided into 59 contrade whose main purposes were to supply soldiers for mercenary armies and provide a mechanism to collect taxes.

Within each terzo are the contrade here identified by their flags

Over time the number and functions of the contrade have changed. There are now, and have been for about 300 years, 17 contrade di Siena, each having their own coat of arms, delimited territories, statutes, population, patron saint, museums, festivals, official representatives, church, baptismal fountain, motto, songs, allied contrada and adversary contrada. Every important event – baptisms, marriages, deaths, church holidays, wine festivals – are celebrated only within one’s own contrada. Loyalties are fierce and competition even fiercer, especially for the twice yearly run bareback horse race called the Palio.

More about the contrade and, in particular Bruco, which we visited, here.