Hill Towns trip: Siena, Italia

When we got to our hotel Monday night we had some time to kill before we met for dinner, so a bunch of us plopped in one room and flipped around on the tv for a while. We found this infomercial for an instant ab workout machine that was totally hilarious…it wrapped around your stomach (or shoulder, or butt, or wherever), vibrated, and applied heat. And presto! Fabulous abs! It was so poorly done and went on and on and we were all just cracking up.
We went out to dinner as a whole group, but at separate tables. The menu included fried calf brain and squash blossoms, and a few people were adventurous enough to try it. The general consensus was that it had good flavor, but the texture weirded many people out (too gummy/rubbery). Sarah and I split an appetizer of polenta with a gorgonzola sauce…delicious. For my main dish, I ordered leek risotto, which ended up tasting more like wild rice. It was good, but not quite what I was in the mood for. Also, Cinzia had told us that the region was known for its fagiloi (white beans), so I got some in a tomato sauce. They were good, but nothing extraordinary…oh well. Everyone at my table got desserts, so I got to sample. The best was a coconut blancmanche with dark chocolate sauce, which tasted like a cross between marshmallow fluff and some sort of light, fluffy pudding. It sounds weird, but it was actually quite delicious.
After dinner, a bunch of us hung out in the Campo, which is a large open square that’s shaped like a semicircle (sort of) and slopes down toward the middle of the straight side. It’s the main hangout spot in town, and even though there aren’t chairs or steps in the middle, people just sit right on the brick ground and just chill. We followed suit, and also took lots of night pictures. I took a 360 degree panoramic that came out beautifully, and then Jeff decided that I should try to get a full pano in one shot, so basically just lower the shutter speed and spin in a circle…needless to say they just came out as blurs. We then met up with D.Bell and a bunch of students at an outdoor bar/café place and hung out there until we got too tired and went back to our hotel. Typical overseas story: Jeff ordered a Manhattan, and the waiter got confused, saying he didn’t understand. Kendall clarified that it was indeed on the menu, but he still couldn’t get it. He asked what was in it, and Jeff told him bourbon and vermouth, and the waiter replied “Ohh, Mahn-att-ahn!”
We woke up to a good breakfast with American coffee (don’t get me wrong, I love cuppuccini and café macchiato, but I’ve missed just sitting down with a cup), then headed out to Il Campo, this time to sketch. We spent an hour there, which was a nice way to start the day. I did a perspective that I’m pretty proud of, especially considering all of the crazy angles and slopes of Siena. We then gathered and climbed the tower of the civic building (the Torre del Mangia). It was so foggy out that the rust on the handrails had turned sticky, so by the time we all reached the top, our hands (and some of our jeans and jackets as well) were covered in sticky rust that we couldn’t remove until we got downstairs to the bathroom. The abundance of fog also meant that we didn’t have much of a view, which was interesting from the top of a huge tower. If we got close to the edge and looked straight down, we could see bits of the Campo, but other than that everything was just grey. Considering the lack of a view, we actually ended up staying there for a while (all 23 of us) just taking silly group photos and hanging out.
After our decent, we went into the Palazzo Publico (the building to which the tower is attached), which is now a museum. We saw lots of frescoes, wooden inlay, and many old, warped ceilings. The museum also housed “The Effects of Good & Bad Government”, which was nifty. We were all fairly tired by the end of our visit, so we found lunch and took some time to relax. A group of us went to a sit down restaurant and all ordered margarita pizzas, which were packed with oregano and totally tasty.
We then met at the Duomo as a class and went inside. Until entering, I’d forgotten that I had case studied this church my senior year at EWS with Easterling, so I freaked out a little bit when I got inside because it all came rushing back. (I’m sending him a postcard.) The interior is all horizontally black and white striped (different stones), and the piers are absolutely massive. The floor is made up of inlayed stone, and I’m pretty sure it tells a story, though I’m not sure what it is. Apparently the floor is covered for the majority of the year to preserve it, so we were lucky to be there when we were! The level above the column capitals was lined with busts of popes all around the nave and transepts and into the apse. A fun history story: years after the church was completed, they made plans to turn the existing nave into the transept of a new church. If completed, this church would have been the largest European church in all of Christendom, but the plague hit and they didn’t get much done. Today, you can see the start of the new façade, the columns for the right aisle (which have been covered to make a museum), and white stone spots in the ground where the columns on the left side of the nave would have gone. We climbed tiny spiral stairs (I mean tiny, our feet barely fit on them) to reach the top of the new façade, which afforded a spectacular 360 degree view of the entire city and surrounding countryside. Many pictures were taken, including some that Vivian got from the ground looking up at us with her crazy zoom lens.
After reassembling, we went back to the hotel to grab our bags, then got back on the bus.

PICTURES: the crazy 360 pano of the Campo, the interior of the Duomo, and the start of the Duomo's new nave that wasn’t completed (the top of that is where we went, you can see people up there!)