The Prove were run first. Early in the week a sandtrack was prepared, and as if by magic an amphitheatre of seats sprang up round the piazza. There are six of these prove, or trial races, for the selection of horses for the Palio; and they are run on the evening of the 13th, the morning and evening of the two following days, and the morning of the 16th of August.[7] The Palio festivities really begin on the 13th of August, for although the Sienese do not attend the prove in great numbers there are generally some thousand spectators who shout themselves hoarse with excitement; and feeling sometimes runs high when there is rivalry between ancient enemies like the contrade of the Oca and the Torre.
On that morning, too, the streets are full of peasants driving their white oxen in pairs before them to the annual fair, which is still held outside the Porta Camollia in honour of our Lady of Mid-August. It has dwindled considerably from the seven days' fiera which marked the occasion in the Middle Ages, but it is still a picturesque sight. The peasants drive standing up, like Roman charioteers, behind their milk-white steers, whose heads are bound with scarlet fillets, and their soft dewlaps girdled by a bell. The sellers of water-melons do a thriving business with the thirsty drovers, and the piazza is a sea of tossing horns and smooth white backs from the battlemented city wall to the column which marks the spot where Leonora of Portugal met her betrothed, the Emperor Frederick III.
On Sunday Siena was comparatively quiet, although there were prove in the Piazza del Campo both morning and evening, and a general air of merriment throughout the city. We heard mass in the cathedral where the banners of the various contrade hung from the piers of the nave; and the wonderful graffito pavement which, according to a seventeenth-century custom, is covered with boards for the rest of the year to preserve it from injury, was laid bare. And then we went down to Fontebranda to see how the Contrada of the Oca, Saint Catherine's contrada, was preparing for the Palio. We found it delightfully confident of victory. The sacristan of Saint Catherine's house took us into the chapel which was once her father's workshop, and would not let us go until we had heard the history of the many Palii which the victorious Oca had won in past years—assisted no doubt by the prayers of Santa Caterina in heaven to the holy Mother of God.
Siena: S. Domenico and the Via Benincasa.
The philosopher loves Fontebranda. To him it is the most romantic spot in Siena. It is certainly one of the most picturesque, whether you stand at the head of the steep Via Benincasa and see San Domenico's gaunt red walls towering above its houses, or whether you look towards the city from the church. A winding road leads up through gardens from the Valley of Fontebranda to the city gate. Above the wall tall, green-shuttered palaces rise tier on tier to the cathedral, whose delicately arcaded dome and tower crown the hill. To the right the loggia'd houses of the tanners sweep down the Via Benincasa to Fontebranda's mediaeval fountain; and the keen, unpleasant smell of the tanneries, which was one of the first things we noticed in Siena, is everywhere. Fontebranda is changed but little since the days when Saint Catherine lived there with her parents. Then as now it was full of tanneries, then as now the men worked half in their dark windowless shops and half out in the street: in her day the loggia'd houses were here; the yellow skins were drying in the road; and San Domenico, up whose hill she toiled to prayer, was the same grim fortress-church as now.
But I do not love Saint Catherine, her warlike spirit notwithstanding; nor do I love Sodoma's frescoes of her in the great church on the hill. And the Sienese themselves, though they give her great honour, do not seem to love her as they love the simple Bernardino. Splendid as her chapel is, magnificent as are her festas, she seems to be less in the imagination of Siena than Saint Bernardino, whose gentle life followed closely on hers as though the genius loci dared not trust her unruly people through that stormy century without a guiding spirit. See on how many houses is his seal of holy Flame! And how brightly it burns on the Palazzo Pubblico, especially towards nightfall, when the setting sun gilds the façade and fires the sacred monogram.
'Respect is what we owe, love what we give.' And so I would leave the philosopher to St. Catherine and his Fontebranda, and come to San Francesco and the little chapel beside it where San Bernardino prayed. The Sienese have lavished lovely things upon this oratory of the ardent boy, who forsook all and followed Francis in the love of Christ. Sodoma, Pacchia and Beccafumi have glorified it, and peopled its walls with the beautiful and mystic-eyed women of the Renaissance. But though they have enriched it, I am glad that circumstance has kept St. Francis' great church as it was first conceived—a bare and solemn building—a church for the followers of the man who loved poverty and simplicity, because through them he saw the way to God. Even now I would have it cleared of its black and white Sienese stripings; but its wide empty nave, the noble chapels of its transepts, its ruined islands of fresco, its stillness and its great simplicity, make it beautiful.