"Ah, here we are!" and Richard signalled the driver to pull up, as they reached the end of a narrow street.
"Oh, it is picturesque!" cried Irma, looking at the square before her. The great open space was hardly a square, but a piazza tending toward a semicircle, and slightly lower than the street. On the side farthest from them were several fine buildings, from one of which rose a high, square tower, of which Irma remembered to have seen many pictures. Then she recalled something she had just read. Surely Richard would know.
"Yes," responded Richard. "This is the very tower they are copying for the Provincetown monument. What a genuine Yankee you are to remember. There," continued Richard, "this is the famous Campo. It is in a hollow, where the three hills of Siena meet. How I should like to have seen it five or six hundred years ago, on one of those days when a fisticuff game was going on, or one of the more exciting donkey races. Oh, it makes our sports to-day seem tame, when we read what these old Sienese used to do. You see," he continued, without waiting for the girls to ask questions, "at one of these fisticuff fights one Sunday before Carnival, the fighters on one side grew so excited when driven off the ground that they fell upon their opponents with sticks and stones, and then with lances and darts, and all of Siena crowded to the neighborhood. The soldiers, the greatest men of the city, too, tried in vain to stop them, and some of the soldiers were killed. Then people who lived in the very palaces we're looking at threw stones out of their windows, but the mob only threatened to set fire to the houses."
"Well, how did it end?" asked Ellen impatiently.
"Oh, the fight would probably have continued to this day, if some one, after several soldiers had been killed, had not thought of getting the Bishop of Siena, and all the Friars here to come down to the Campo, and when they began to march in a solemn procession right through the thick of the fight, carrying the cross and other religious emblems, of course the fighting stopped. But naturally their games were not often as exciting as this."
"What were the donkey races like?"
"Oh, quite different. The city was divided into contrade, or districts, and on the days of the races each district appeared with its captain and other officers, with its special banner, and a donkey painted in its colors. The game was to get the donkeys to go twice around the Campo. No one on the field was permitted to have a weapon of any kind, not even a finger ring, but they could fight and push and do all in their power to prevent any donkey's winning, except that of their own district. After the donkey races died out they used to have buffalo races; you know," in a tone of contempt, "the kind of buffaloes they have in Italy, and later horse races, which they still have."
"Here on the Campo? How I should like to see them."