The Palio

If you want to save yourself from my more extensive commentary on the Palio, Chris Moscato, a fellow digger summed up the excitement and feel of the Palio quite nicely:

AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More precisely, my evening at the Palio went thus:

Getting off half a day early from the dig on Tuesday was gratifying but the real treat was the plans for the afternoon; a trip to Sienna to watch an event that has been carried out since the Middle Ages-the Palio.

The Palio is a horse race held in the piazza del campo, the main square of the old city center faced on one side by the Palazzo Publico, the old political building I spoke about earlier. It is 3 laps around the outside of the square in 90 seconds but for the brevity of the race itself, the buildup lasts a week or more. As I mentioned in my sienna post, we caught a glimpse of the horse and jockey pairing on our trip. After that happens and the neighborhoods know what horse they will be racing they have a few days to practice with and train their horses through specially scheduled and protected private trial runs.

...but I'm getting ahead of myself. There are a couple of things you have to know about the finer points of the race to understand it fully. There are 16 districts in sienna, represented by distinct colors, crests and mascots ranging from the panther, giraffe, unicorn, and elephant to the caterpillar, snail, and fish. Because the track is so small, only ten compete at the actual event ( the remaining seven will race later in August). The organizers of the Palio are responsible for providing the horses while the districts each nominate one of their own to jockey.

The selection of the jockeys (and horses) is a lottery by the Palio panel. The horses are each lead before the panel and the public watching in the piazza then each district  sends in a representation singing their traditional district song as they lead their jockey into the piazza. They are order by number, as are the horses and the randomly paired by drawing slips of paper. This is done so as to give no team ancestral advantage or to manipulate the race in order to win consistently (we're looking at you New York Yankees). Instead it is mostly a game of luck and fortuitous circumstance that makes one district the winner, officially.

Unofficially, there is a lot of bribery involved. Districts are not greasing the palms of Palio officials but the jockeys. To keep the districts from posturing, the order of the jockeys across the track remains unreleased until the official start to even the odds. Once released an unknown amount of time will ensue while the jockeys jostle, flail, and insult one another, attempting to gain their ideal position for the race. 

the detonation of an explosive charge echoes across the piazza, signaling to the thousands of onlookers that the race is about to begin. The race itself runs for three laps of the Piazza del Campo, the perimeter of which is covered with several inches of dirt and tuff (imported and laid for the occasion at great expense to the city) and the corners of which are protected with padded crash barriers for the occasion. The jockeys ride the horses bareback from the starting line, an area between two ropes. Nine horses, in an order only decided by lot immediately before the race starts, enter the space. The tenth, the rincorsa, waits outside. When the rincorsa finally enters the space between the ropes the starter (mossiere) activates a mechanism that instantly drops the canapo (the front rope). This process (the mossa) can take a very long time, as deals have usually been made between various contrade and jockeys that affect when the rincorsa moves - he may be waiting for a particular other horse to be well- or badly-placed, for example.

...and finally, they are off. It's 90 seconds of tension and intensity as two hundred thousand people joined in one voice, screaming go in the varied languages of the world, predominated by the Italian "va!" or "vie!!". They speed around the track and the center of the piazza swivels with them, millions of eyes focused on the front runner.

When watching the race, we were behind a group of passionate women wearing the scarf of the Contrada Della Lupa, the wolf of Sienna with the sons of Remus nursing beneath her emblazoned on it's crest.  Through the jockeying the women vacillated between exultation and insulted injury as their jockey gained and lost position in the ranks. When the Palio was in progress they were jumping and screaming and gesturing to their jockey who maintained a solid fourth through the first two laps, with the goose in the lead until the last lap where he almost overtook him in the last meters. But alas, second by a hair and leading the rest of the track by near a second and a half.

After their defeat, the women subsumed to wholehearted grief, some even collapsing to the ground in the depth of their loss.

Soon after, we, along with everyone else began moving slowly towards the exit, to make the last train back into Montelupo for the night at 9:30. The streets were crowded and on the whole, jubilant at the conclusion of another polio in the Piazza Della Campa.