Seven Seasons in Siena (16 page)

Anyway, it's all merry chaos and it looks like a hell of a lot of fun; I'd love to have been there. It seems impossible that
anything can top this, so I'm betting this is the last parade, which Dario confirms it was—except for the
official
victory parade.

“That took place two months later. It started at the Fortezza and wound all through the city. We decided on a medieval theme. Each member had a specific role to portray; I was from the popolo and had to lead a sheep on a leash through the streets. The men even grew beards to get into character. That night we had a street party open to everyone, for which we produced medieval coins that our guests had to use after entering our territory. Every corner of the contrada was set up with expensive tableaux, period music, animals, and so on.

“That was the official victory parade. The official victory
dinner
took place the following day in Piazza San Francesco. The horse had a place of honor next to
il tavolo della signoria
. As is the custom, during the meal delegations arrived from our allied contrade—the Porcupine, the Tower, the Shell—bearing lavish gifts, such as wild boar and a precious sculpture, but they didn't dine with us. At the end of the dinner and after the speeches, there were fireworks.

“Then, some weeks after the victory dinner, we have the
cena dell'asta
, in which the pole that held the drappellone is ceremoniously presented to the captain; it's all he gets from the victory he so tirelessly worked to realize. And the
cena del piatto
, when we return to the town council the silver plate that was fixed above the drappellone. Then there's the backwards dinner, where we all cross-dress….”

“This is going to go on a while, isn't it?” I ask, feeling my head start to throb.

He chuckles. “It would if I could remember all of them. A
Palio victory can easily prompt between seventy and eighty celebratory meals. And I'm certain there are people who take part in every one of them.”

“It's amazing you're not all obese.”

“Oh, everyone works far too hard for that. The amount of organization involved—you can imagine. Look, here.” He shuttles forward to some new scenes of the interior of the San Francesco parking garage, where a dinner of some fifty brucaioli is taking place on one of the escalator landings.

“We decided that since the garage is in our territory, we should claim it,” he explains. “So we moved in the tables, chairs, and food, then set up, served, and afterward cleaned up as though they were never there. It looks like everyone is enjoying himself, but believe me, there's a furious amount of effort that takes place behind the scenes.” And in fact it does look like a fairly boisterous affair, with each passerby on his or her way up the escalators offered a glass of wine, and a guitarist (Claudio, the contrada's pied piper) leading the others in a recital of the contrada's greatest hits. At this point I'm wondering if it would even be possible for the Caterpillar to assemble without bursting into song.

At the start of the viewing Dario was dead tired from his labors, but now he's reenergized; he looks through his stack for another DVD. He finds one that features an outing undertaken by several members of the contrada, in fulfillment of a vow. They swore that if Berio gave the Caterpillar a victory, they'd travel twenty miles on foot to visit him at his stables. And here they are, making good. Of course they've got a cameraman along; in addition to being tireless songsters, the brucaioli are relentless self-chroniclers.

It's strange to see Gianni and the others trussed out in hiking
gear; Sienese men—for that matter, Italian men—generally do not wear shorts. But a twenty-mile walk can be construed as an athletic undertaking, so I suppose it makes sense. Still, it seems odd to be confronted with so many of their knees.

Notwithstanding, it seems like a pretty happy fellowship, though I have to wonder how long the trek actually took them; their pace seems to be roughly that of a Roman emperor on progress, with the entire imperial court in train. They might've been on the road anywhere between five hours and a year and a half. Of course, when they reach the stables, there's a celebratory lunch. And much, much cosseting and adulation of Berio. PETA should see them now. Racing is, of course, a dangerous sport; but what else are these animals to do? They're racehorses; they need to
race
. We've bred them over the centuries for this specific endeavor; it's in their DNA. To argue that they mustn't race because of the risk involved is specious unless you also furnish a means by which they can find fulfillment—can achieve release for the imperative we've instilled in them.

I find myself actually speaking this aloud; a sign that the wine is beginning to take serious hold. Never mind, there's only Dario to hear, and in his case it's very much a matter of preaching to the choir. He's found something else for me now, a set of photographs of a recent Caterpillar pilgrimage to the Vatican, where the members enjoyed a special audience with the pope. One shot shows the blessing of one of the contrada's artifacts, an altarpiece adorned with the Madonna and child, with Benedict XVI flanked by both Fabio the rector and Gianni the captain. Dario points out, with a wry grin, that Gianni is wearing blue jeans.

I actually knew about this Roman jaunt; several of the brucaioli posted about it on Facebook—as they also regularly post about their parties, competitions, dinners, and expeditions. It all comes at me now, in a rush: the sheer dynamism and social energy of these people. How can I expect, dropping in on them every couple of months, to understand a thing about them—to comprehend for even a moment the kind of encompassing sense of community that drives its members not only through each day but through their entire lives? The prospect is not only daunting; it may be unobtainable.

I may be saying this aloud as well. But Dario isn't listening; he's wrapped up in his frustration at not finding something he's looking for. “There's another event,” he says, filing through the plastic cases. “They bring the prize banner to the cemetery and present it to those who are no longer with us. Even in death, you remain part of the community. Ah!” He pulls a DVD from the pile and shows it to me. It's of the August 2003 race. “We've seen the celebrations,” he says; “now let's see what it was all about.”

“We just saw it last night,” I remind him.

He gives me a look that says,
But not yet today
, and pops it into the player.

Watching it again—seeing the preliminaries unfold, the excitement, the phenomenon of an entire city holding its breath; the uncanny explosion of the race itself, with its cometlike velocity; the tsunamis of euphoria that sweep over the piazza afterward—we're utterly silent until Dario says, “What is it about the Palio that makes it so emotional? I'd feel this way even if I were watching the Giraffe win.”

I completely understand him. The reason I've said nothing
is the lump in my throat; I'm overcome with a kind of ecstasy by transference. What I'm feeling is a vacation from my own problematic Americanness. I'm tapping into something that's utterly free of irony, of cynicism, of condescension. I'm allowing myself—
freeing
myself—to
believe
. There's a risk in giving yourself over, heart and mind, to something so new, but it's new only to me. To the Sienese, it's ancient. And if I needed a reason to trust my instincts, I could find it beaming from every one of their faces.

At last Dario's energy finally rushes out of him. He switches to the news and collapses in a heap. I seize this moment to drag myself up to my room and tumble into bed.

Lying there, with the light of the moon spilling over me like milk and the ceiling spinning so determinedly I can still see it after I shut my eyes, I wonder about this compulsion to connect—this urge to understand. Where does it come from? If it's from some deeper need in me, maybe I shouldn't look to the brucaioli to fulfill it—not immediately, anyway. Maybe it's up to me to make some gesture first, offer some sign of commitment, some pledge.

And that's when I remember my own victory vow from a year ago: I promised to walk from Vagliagli to Siena.

…

 
HAVING RENEWED MY ACQUAINTANCE
WITH GIULIANO
Ghiselli at the captain's dinner, it seems almost natural that he should show up the next morning on C3 Toscana, Siena's TV station, talking at me while I have my cup of orzo and biscuit as breezily as he addressed me the night of the cena. This, it turns out, is one of his documentaries—
Fra Cronaca e Leggenda
, or “Between History and Legend,” in which he tours some of the less renowned streets and byways of Siena, offering conflicting accounts of how they've come to acquire their names, including both the official version and the folkloric alternative—most of which, Dario tells me, he just made up. He's an amiable, engaging host, and I enjoy myself tremendously, though the folkloric accounts all seem to hinge on idiomatic phrases that I don't really understand. But even through the thicket of wordplay it's clear that Giuliano knows Siena backward, forward, inside out, and upside down (and some of the camera angles make this quite explicit, to the point that I actually get a little dizzy).

So I arrange to meet him for a drink. He's a fount of knowledge on Caterpillar history and legend, and I'm eager to soak some of it up.

We're to rendezvous at the nameless bar the brucaioli patronize so loyally. Despite the briskness of the air I seat myself at one of the two small outdoor tables; it's still a kick for me, feeling sufficiently confident to place myself here at the literal crossroads of Caterpillar society, where you can see, and be seen by, everybody. Not that anybody much is out and about today; the streets are noticeably quieter in late autumn than they are in high summer. But that just makes it easier to spot Giuliano when he comes ambling up the street, hands folded behind him. After we greet each other and sit down, he initiates the first of many steps involved in lighting his pipe, a process which, for me, compares with the Japanese tea ceremony as an example of mere consumption elevated to civilized ritual. It takes a certain kind of man to smoke a pipe, a certain gravitas, which Giuliano, despite the nimbleness of his wit and his readiness to laugh, seems to possess in spades.

We get a round of drinks; I order a Sangiovese, thinking I still have to learn to drink like an Italian, but Giuliano pulls a fast one on me by ordering coffee. Too late for me to switch; but the Sangiovese will at least take the chill off. Then we get down to talking. I have a few very particular things to ask him, the first of which concerns the
Palio straordinario
of 1945, held in celebration of the end of World War II and hence called the
Palio di pace
—the Peace Palio. Ironically, it ended in a piazzawide fistfight—with the Caterpillar at the center of it. I of course understand that after so many years without a race (the contrada associations had essentially shut their doors at the outbreak of hostilities in 1939) there might be some long-suppressed tensions bubbling beneath the surface. But how did a Palio devoted to peace degenerate into the exact opposite?

“We were meant to win that Palio,” says Giuliano. “The most coveted horses in the extraction were Folco and Mughetto; we got Mughetto, the Dragon got Folco. So we knew that they would be our principal rival. But the Dragon had won just four days earlier, in the Palio of August 16, whereas we hadn't won since 1922. So we felt that our time had come.

“Accordingly, we offered deals to all the other contrade to get them to support our victory. Only the Dragon and the Tortoise refused outright. Then, on the day of the race, the Tortoise took objection to a false start and withdrew from the race in protest. That left only the Dragon as a threat to our victory. Remember, they had won just four days earlier. They had no hunger for victory, not like we did. Our jockey, Biondo, offered theirs, Rubacuori, a huge sum of money—and this was in a time of postwar poverty, when such funds were scarce.

“Despite this, when the race began the Dragon immediately took the lead, followed by the Caterpillar, and thus it stayed all the way to the finish. At which point we exploded in anger. We chased Rubacuori around the piazza. Then we went and took the banner from the Dragon and shredded it. Perhaps inevitably, a brawl followed, which was so intense that even some of the soldiers of the Allied troops got involved.

“As a result, not only was the Caterpillar disqualified, but we were made to pay for a new drappellone, repainted by the original artist. But the scoundrel, when he depicted the Dragon on the banner, he put a tiny caterpillar on its tongue, can you imagine?”

That does seem more than usually provocative, even by
Sienese standards. “But the Caterpillar and the Dragon,” I say, “you're not rivals today, as I understand it.”