The chronicles of Siena

Siena, a medieval and a Renaissance city perched on a hill and surrounded by red earth, has changed little in my lifetime.

Indeed, not much has happened there since it lost its republican independence five centuries ago and was subsequently absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

To learn an accent

English Grand Tourists, young tourists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who spent years travelling around Europe to learn about culture, language and geography, went there in great numbers in the 18th century.

Learning the Italian language (they had spoken only French in Turin and English in Florence) was the major draw, for it was widely believed that the Siennese spoke in accents exquisitely refined.

Many of them learnt something of manners as well, finding that a few lessons learnt made an impression far stronger.

Ancient democracy

We should visit this ancient seat of democracy where there was never a princely court, the nobility was unostentatious and a populace renowned for its sense of equality and independence made its share of contribution to the city's governance.

We should also visit it because not only is it physically unchanged from the years when it was a power in the land of Italy but because everywhere in the narrow streets and alleys that so often become a steep flight of steps, the young come out to play, the old to parade their worldly substance and the dogs to empty their bowels.

And in the scrupulous care lavished on its ancient monuments, we find evidence of an inherited collective memory.

Medieval pageantry

The most celebrated manifestation of this is the Palio, the callous race of horses around the Piazza del Campo, the fan-shaped amphitheatre that is the secular heart of Siena.

An event dating back to medieval pageantry, the race takes place on July 2 and August 16.

As it results in the falls and deaths of horses (the riders are inconsequential), I have no wish to see it but as there is an old Siennese saying, “the Palio lasts all year'', this terrible phenomenon must be acknowledged as a rite that, just as the bullfighters of Spain, constantly reasserts the Siennese identity.

Monuments aplenty

There are other metaphors of continuity that are just as ancient. In the Palazzo Pubblico, the frescos of good government and bad, the earliest of political-propaganda paintings and the earliest of observed landscapes, date from the halcyon 1330s, just before the city's prosperity was blighted for ever by the Black Death.

On the highest point of Siena's disconcertingly steep hill lies the cathedral, a glorious building striped in black and white, embellished with barley-sugar columns; there was once a plan to quadruple its size but this proved as futile an ambition as the Tower of Babel, and its grandiose ruins are a reminder of pride's fall.

In the Cathedral Museum — Duccio's great homage to the Virgin Mary, the guardian of the city — the altarpiece called Maestà (Majesty) is on view.

It is one of the greatest paintings the early Italian Renaissance has seen, and which dates from the early 14th century.

Glory lost

In all these, you have the essential Siena, a city that was as glorious as any in Italy seven centuries ago but which never recovered from the economic effects of the Black Death.

There were some pretty painters in the 15th century and some even attempted to be grand — witness the brilliantly colourful frescos in the cathedral's Piccolomini Library and in Santa Maria della Scala, the hospital on its west front.

In the 16th century, there was an exciting but brief flicker — that of the High Renaissance in Beccafumi's ceiling for the Sala del Concistoro in the Palazzo Pubblico — but after this, there was nothing but oblivion.

The National Gallery of Siena (Pinacoteca Nazionale) must not be missed, its masterpieces cheek by jowl with the accidents of rack, ruin and survival.

In the cathedral, there are sculptures that are attributed to Michelangelo and Bernini, the authenticity of which I cannot bring myself to believe.

Nicola Pisano's marble pulpit of 1269, however, is a marvel of the age.

In the baptistry front, Donatello's bronze relief of John the Baptist's death is worth a day's march.

Do not visit the Palazzo Chigi unless you are a glutton for punishment — it is what can only be described as an old queen's collection.

Far better old masters can be found any day of the week in Christie's and Sotheby's.

Food failings

Intellectually and aesthetically, Siena offers a feast but food in her restaurants — cooked to death and as salty as the Dead Sea, with rosemary the overwhelming flavour of meat, potatoes inedibly soggy and green vegetables nothing but a mush — can be classified as plain disgusting.

It also confirms the opinion of my barber that no Italian north of Naples knows how to cook.

How is it that one can buy in shops cheeses that are sublime but is given ruined meat of all kinds in every single restaurant in town?

Grand prices

For the first time in many years, I stayed in a rather grand hotel — the Grand indeed — where dinner (paid for by another guest), though international in its ambition, was beyond any criticism.

A simple Continental breakfast there, however, cost exactly as many euros as my single flight cost — £26 (Dh191) — and my undying habits of economy drove me to a nearby bar for coffee and a fresh spring roll instead.

Go there ... Siena ... From the UAE

From Dubai

Austrian Airlines flies daily to Florence via Vienna.
Fares from: Dh2,750

Air France flies daily to Florence via Paris.
Fares from: Dh3,730

Al Italia flies daily to Florence via Milan.
Fares from: Dh4.010

Info courtesy: The Holiday Lounge by Dnata . Ph: 04-3166160