The best overall view of siena can be experienced from the tower in the city center. Once you get there, you can look down on all the rooftops in the city. Of course, everything is terracotta colored. It is amazing.
The reason for the long lag betweenn my last blog and this one is because I have been very busy in the sculpting studio. School will be done in end of June and I will attempt to go to some really exotic places before returning to Seattle end of July for a 4 week break from Italy. So I will definitely have some more pictures for you in the coming month.
Meanwhile ...
Last weekend I went to the beautiful tuscany city of Siena. Siena is about
65 kilometers South of Florence. It's about a 45 minute drive. But, there are so many places to stop
along the way, that it will definitely take you longer.
The best overall view of siena can be experienced from the tower in the city center. Once you get
there, you can look down on all the rooftops in the city. Of course, everything is terracotta colored.
It is amazing.
But, before you get to siena you can stop along the highways and experience many small towns. We stopped
at a place called monteriggiono. It is a very old walled city. This is what the wall looks like.
As we walked along the wall, I looked out into the italian countryside. This is a typical view of
Tuscany. Lots of patches of farmland with hills in the background.
Ok, so back to siena. Like many old cities in Italy, siena has giant gates in the old portion of the city.
You can walk through the gates and make your way to the center of the town. As we got near the
main piazza, we had to walk through a small passageway.
The dark passageway spit us out into a very bright and large piazza. It was completely covered with red
brick and people were laying around everywhere soaking up the june sun. This piazza is kind of in the
shape of a giant semicircle. Apparently, it is used for horse races in the summer.
The dominating feature of the piazza is a very thin and tall tower. You would think the first earthquake would
take down a tower like this, but it is still standing. On the edges of the tower are placed
marble figurines of wolves. Throughout italy, you will see the theme of the wolf quite often. You will
have to read up on Rome to find out why.
There is no elevator in the tower. There are over 400 steps, which makes it almost the same height as
the Duomo in Florence. After we climbed the tower we looked out and thats where I got the picture
at the top of this page. Also, you could look down into the piazza we entered and see a small
water fountain area I did not mention to you before. We looked at the "ant" people milling around
for a while and headed back into the very narrow staircases that circled downwards.
As mentioned above, the wolf is a common sculptural theme throughout italy. This was one of the several
wolf sculptures I saw in Siena.
I have no idea what this deep base wall relief sculpture was about, but it was interesting to
look at. Lots of little kids trying to get some milk from a woman. It was in a dark nook
just off one of the many winding roads in Siena.