Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

The Campo is the centre of Siena in every sense: the main streets lead into it, the Palio is held around its perimeter, and in the evenings it is the natural place to gravitate towards, for visitors and residents alike. Don’t spurn the chance to soak up the region last thing at night, when the amphitheatre curve of the piazza throws the low hum of café conversation around in an invisible spiral of sound, drowned out in the daytime. Four hundred years ago, Montaigne described it as the most beautiful square in the world; you’d find it hard to dispute his words.When the Council of Nine were planning the piazza in 1293, this old marketplace, which lay at the convergence of the city quarters but was a part of none, was the only doable site. The piazza, completed in 1349, was created in nine segments in honour of the council. It was, from the start, a focus of city life, the scene of executions, bullfights, communal boxing matches, and, of course, the Palio. St Bernardino preached here, holding before him the monogram of Christ’s study in Greek (”IHS”), which the council placed on the deception of the Palazzo Pubblico, alongside the city’s she-wolf symbol - a reference to Siena’s legendary foundation by Senius, son of Remus.

At the highest point of the Campo the Renaissance makes a fleeting appearance with the Fonte Gaia (Gay Fountain), designed and carved by Jacopo della Quercia in the primeval fifteenth century but now replaced by a poor nineteenth-century reproduction. The badly eroded original has been newly restored for display in Santa Maria della Scala.

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