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Siena: City of Secrets
Jane Tylus’s Siena is a compelling and intimate portrait of this most secretive of cities, often overlooked by travelers to Italy. Cultural history, intellectual memoir, travelogue, and guidebook, it takes the reader on a quest of discovery through the well- and not-so-well-traveled roads and alleys of a town both medieval and modern. As Tylus leads us through the city, she shares her passion for Siena in novelistic prose, while never losing sight of the historical complexities that have made Siena one of the most fascinating and beautiful towns in Europe. Today, Siena can appear on the surface standoffish and old-fashioned, especially when compared to its larger, flashier cousins Rome and Florence. But first impressions wear away as we learn from Tylus that Siena was an innovator among the cities of the first to legislate the building and maintenance of its streets, the first to publicly fund its university, the first to institute a municipal bank, and even the first to ban automobile traffic from its city center. We learn about Siena’s great artistic and architectural past, hidden behind centuries of painting and rebuilding, and about the distinctive characters of its different neighborhoods, exemplified in the Palio, the highly competitive horserace that takes place twice a year in the city’s main piazza and that serves as both a dividing and a uniting force for the Sienese. Throughout we are guided by the assured voice of a seasoned scholar with a gift for spinning a good story and an eye for the telling detail, whether we are traveling Siena’s modern highways, exploring its underground tunnels, tracking the city’s financial history, or celebrating giants of painting like Simone Martini or giants of the arena, Siena’s former Serie A soccer team. A practical and engaging guide for tourists and armchair travelers alike, Siena is a testament to the powers of community and resilience in a place that is not quite as timeless and serene as it may at first appear.
311 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 23, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 1, 2024
This was a tough one to get through. It provided some good facts and places to visit while I’m in Siena. But there was a complete lack of narrative structure / flow which made it very hard to engage with or learn much from. It just felt like random ramblings at many points
Quotes (raw from Kindle):
1260, when the Sienese unexpectedly defeated a large Florentine army in the now godforsaken town of Monteaperti
first city to pave its streets and its main piazza, saving residents and horses from continual onslaughts of mud and worse (1298); first to have a constitution in the vernacular (1309); first to have a publicly funded university (1321); first to use the cambiale or promissory note (1720s); first to bar traffic from its center (1965
Records about Siena disappear until the first century BCE, when a town called Saena Julia became a military colony the year Augustus became emperor
These modest beginnings are a far cry from the story invented in the late Middle Ages to accommodate a more august one: how the twin sons of Remus, Romulus’s unlucky brother, fled Rome on horseback and arrived in the area that is now Siena, improbably lugging a statue of the wolf that had nurtured their father and fratricidal uncle. One twin, Senius, lingered near the banks of the Tressa— then more of a river than it is now— and founded Siena, building the castle that would come to be known as Castelvecchio at the area’s highest point. The other twin, Ascius, drawn to the river Ombrone, founded Asciano some twenty kilometers to the southeast. It is to these stories that Siena also owes the colors of its ubiquitous balzana, or flag. The simple white and black refer to the colors of the horses that transported the boys to Tuscany, or perhaps to the two plumes of smoke that rose when they offered thanks to Apollo and Diana for protection. These stories are also the reason for Siena’s many statues of a wolf, in some cases shown with twin boys
An equally powerful and improbable myth dominates the story of Christianity’s origins in the city a millennium later. A young Roman nobleman, Ansano, was invited by an angel to preach the gospel in Siena and so, like the twins, he came north. The skeptical Sienese imprisoned him in a tower thought to adjoin the church known simply as the Prison of Sant’Ansano, open only one day a year— December 1— for his feast day. His thrilling voice emanating from the tower won over so many that he became known as the “Baptist of the Sienese.” One trial by fire and another by boiling oil, both carried out in Selva territory, in the ditch behind what is now the looming hospital (called, appropriately, the Ditch of Saint Ansano) failed to silence him. He was smuggled out of his tower in the middle of the night and taken to the town of Dofana, where martyrdom by decapitation put an end to his preaching
The Fisiocritici were founded in 1691 with the intention of “scrutinizing and studying the secrets of nature, and as though we were judges, to refute with the aid of the natural sciences whatever’s false so as to better understand what is true.” This process of sifting and winnowing could explain why the Fisiocritici’s emblem is the lapis lidius, the touchstone or “rock of comparisons” that merchants and moneylenders of old used to distinguish false gold and silver from true
All of Siena is in many ways a tribute to Mary, savior of the Sienese against the Florentines at Monteaperti six years before Sansedoni pleaded with a pope. The Duomo is a tribute to her assumption, the Spedale across the piazza a tribute to her annunciation. And the Campo is said to be designed in the shape of her mantle that protects the Sienese beneath it
In the enormous room originally called the Sala del Consiglio, where Siena’s leaders gathered to discuss affairs of state, locked in for a month or two at a time to ensure that they accomplished all they needed to do during their brief term in office, Mary looks out serenely over all
Volto Santo, the holy face. This life- size crucifix, it was once believed with more passion than today, was carved while Christ was on the cross by Nicodemus, who supplied his own tomb for the body of God’s son
Most of them took the Via Francigena, the “French road” that connected the two most prosperous and populous regions in Europe—
Tuscany and Flanders— by way of Champagne, famous for its fairs
One recent study suggests, not without justification, that the highwaymen and roving bands of mercenaries were largely responsible for Siena’s decline after the tremendous plague of 1348. The petty thieves were one thing, the powerful and unpredictable condottieri with their loyal followers were another. These mercenaries were always looking for work, ready to accept bribes in off years not to lay waste a village or lie in wait and kidnap merchants on the road
the church of Saint Nicholas on the right would have been one of the final stops for prayer (torn down to build the psychiatric hospital protected by the same saint, who became the patron saint for Italy’s mad
modest origins of the word banco are telling. It comes from the bench or table where money was counted and exchanged. The earliest “banks” were little more than roadside stands where money changers awaited the arrival of pilgrims; our English “bankrupt,” as Penny Marcus once reminded me over lunch, comes from bancarotta, or broken bench, meaning that the bankers’ money had run out
Although the abbey’s founder, Galgano Guidotti, had an interesting purgatorial past. A spendthrift knight, he was en route to Jerusalem to kill Muslims and make money when an angelic voice drew him to a hillside in Montesiepi, not far from Siena, and told him to dedicate his life to solitude and penance. To symbolize his change of heart, he thrust his sword into a stone— possibly a source of the King Arthur legend
Buying up the countryside, then giving it over to the Spedale upon one’s death to feed the orphans, the hungry, and the pilgrims who crammed its halls enabled many men like Ristoro Menghi di Giunta to have their cake and eat it too: to enjoy their ill- gotten gains in life, then to proceed to the afterlife knowing those gains would be handed down not to their own families but to the needy. Thus the charitable works undertaken by the Spedale and the grance were supported, even rendered possible, by uncharitable behaviors
In the beginning was the road: la strada, as in the title of Fellini’s film. And from the road came the con- strada, which eventually contracted to contrada: a road with (houses).
The original reasons for forming the contrade may have been defensive. Their common link was that they were inside Siena’s ever- shifting walls, and they began as administrative units organized around the need for military recruitment with an eye to maintaining peace both inside and outside the city. Roberto Barzanti calls them an urban police force, responsible for executing orders from the authority of the Comune— making sure that citizens within a given district paid their taxes and that services were carried out. When the “enlightened” Hapsburg prince Leopold II banned the city’s zealous lay confraternities along with all other pious organizations, the contrade began absorbing religious practices as well. And when half a century later Napoleon closed most of the churches and monasteries, the suddenly empty chapels and convents became places for rituals both secular and sacred, housing the cloth or palio that gives the Palio its name and serving as the contrade’s headquarters or società
Quotes (raw from Kindle):
1260, when the Sienese unexpectedly defeated a large Florentine army in the now godforsaken town of Monteaperti
first city to pave its streets and its main piazza, saving residents and horses from continual onslaughts of mud and worse (1298); first to have a constitution in the vernacular (1309); first to have a publicly funded university (1321); first to use the cambiale or promissory note (1720s); first to bar traffic from its center (1965
Records about Siena disappear until the first century BCE, when a town called Saena Julia became a military colony the year Augustus became emperor
These modest beginnings are a far cry from the story invented in the late Middle Ages to accommodate a more august one: how the twin sons of Remus, Romulus’s unlucky brother, fled Rome on horseback and arrived in the area that is now Siena, improbably lugging a statue of the wolf that had nurtured their father and fratricidal uncle. One twin, Senius, lingered near the banks of the Tressa— then more of a river than it is now— and founded Siena, building the castle that would come to be known as Castelvecchio at the area’s highest point. The other twin, Ascius, drawn to the river Ombrone, founded Asciano some twenty kilometers to the southeast. It is to these stories that Siena also owes the colors of its ubiquitous balzana, or flag. The simple white and black refer to the colors of the horses that transported the boys to Tuscany, or perhaps to the two plumes of smoke that rose when they offered thanks to Apollo and Diana for protection. These stories are also the reason for Siena’s many statues of a wolf, in some cases shown with twin boys
An equally powerful and improbable myth dominates the story of Christianity’s origins in the city a millennium later. A young Roman nobleman, Ansano, was invited by an angel to preach the gospel in Siena and so, like the twins, he came north. The skeptical Sienese imprisoned him in a tower thought to adjoin the church known simply as the Prison of Sant’Ansano, open only one day a year— December 1— for his feast day. His thrilling voice emanating from the tower won over so many that he became known as the “Baptist of the Sienese.” One trial by fire and another by boiling oil, both carried out in Selva territory, in the ditch behind what is now the looming hospital (called, appropriately, the Ditch of Saint Ansano) failed to silence him. He was smuggled out of his tower in the middle of the night and taken to the town of Dofana, where martyrdom by decapitation put an end to his preaching
The Fisiocritici were founded in 1691 with the intention of “scrutinizing and studying the secrets of nature, and as though we were judges, to refute with the aid of the natural sciences whatever’s false so as to better understand what is true.” This process of sifting and winnowing could explain why the Fisiocritici’s emblem is the lapis lidius, the touchstone or “rock of comparisons” that merchants and moneylenders of old used to distinguish false gold and silver from true
All of Siena is in many ways a tribute to Mary, savior of the Sienese against the Florentines at Monteaperti six years before Sansedoni pleaded with a pope. The Duomo is a tribute to her assumption, the Spedale across the piazza a tribute to her annunciation. And the Campo is said to be designed in the shape of her mantle that protects the Sienese beneath it
In the enormous room originally called the Sala del Consiglio, where Siena’s leaders gathered to discuss affairs of state, locked in for a month or two at a time to ensure that they accomplished all they needed to do during their brief term in office, Mary looks out serenely over all
Volto Santo, the holy face. This life- size crucifix, it was once believed with more passion than today, was carved while Christ was on the cross by Nicodemus, who supplied his own tomb for the body of God’s son
Most of them took the Via Francigena, the “French road” that connected the two most prosperous and populous regions in Europe—
Tuscany and Flanders— by way of Champagne, famous for its fairs
One recent study suggests, not without justification, that the highwaymen and roving bands of mercenaries were largely responsible for Siena’s decline after the tremendous plague of 1348. The petty thieves were one thing, the powerful and unpredictable condottieri with their loyal followers were another. These mercenaries were always looking for work, ready to accept bribes in off years not to lay waste a village or lie in wait and kidnap merchants on the road
the church of Saint Nicholas on the right would have been one of the final stops for prayer (torn down to build the psychiatric hospital protected by the same saint, who became the patron saint for Italy’s mad
modest origins of the word banco are telling. It comes from the bench or table where money was counted and exchanged. The earliest “banks” were little more than roadside stands where money changers awaited the arrival of pilgrims; our English “bankrupt,” as Penny Marcus once reminded me over lunch, comes from bancarotta, or broken bench, meaning that the bankers’ money had run out
Although the abbey’s founder, Galgano Guidotti, had an interesting purgatorial past. A spendthrift knight, he was en route to Jerusalem to kill Muslims and make money when an angelic voice drew him to a hillside in Montesiepi, not far from Siena, and told him to dedicate his life to solitude and penance. To symbolize his change of heart, he thrust his sword into a stone— possibly a source of the King Arthur legend
Buying up the countryside, then giving it over to the Spedale upon one’s death to feed the orphans, the hungry, and the pilgrims who crammed its halls enabled many men like Ristoro Menghi di Giunta to have their cake and eat it too: to enjoy their ill- gotten gains in life, then to proceed to the afterlife knowing those gains would be handed down not to their own families but to the needy. Thus the charitable works undertaken by the Spedale and the grance were supported, even rendered possible, by uncharitable behaviors
In the beginning was the road: la strada, as in the title of Fellini’s film. And from the road came the con- strada, which eventually contracted to contrada: a road with (houses).
The original reasons for forming the contrade may have been defensive. Their common link was that they were inside Siena’s ever- shifting walls, and they began as administrative units organized around the need for military recruitment with an eye to maintaining peace both inside and outside the city. Roberto Barzanti calls them an urban police force, responsible for executing orders from the authority of the Comune— making sure that citizens within a given district paid their taxes and that services were carried out. When the “enlightened” Hapsburg prince Leopold II banned the city’s zealous lay confraternities along with all other pious organizations, the contrade began absorbing religious practices as well. And when half a century later Napoleon closed most of the churches and monasteries, the suddenly empty chapels and convents became places for rituals both secular and sacred, housing the cloth or palio that gives the Palio its name and serving as the contrade’s headquarters or società
October 1, 2025
Tylus' prose is as circuitous as the labyrinthine streets of Siena; ideas jump in and out, tangents lead to tangents, and sentences run on like they're trying to escape you. I admire her intentions–Siena is a city full of unexpected surprises and interwoven histories–but the delivery fell short.
June 19, 2016
The title of this book is completely misleading. I was expecting some actual secrets and mysteries, some unexplained happenings or at least *rumors* about some unusual things that happened in Siena. But it's got none of that. It's just the author's reflections about her travels to the city.
There is quite a bit of interesting information to be found here, but the writing style makes it really hard to look up anything specifically, and it made it hard for me to enjoy the book purely for entertainment. The word that kept coming to my mind over and over was "meandering."
I enjoyed what I learned from the book, just not the way of getting it. Again, if you don't mind the writing style, the information presented is pretty interesting.
There is quite a bit of interesting information to be found here, but the writing style makes it really hard to look up anything specifically, and it made it hard for me to enjoy the book purely for entertainment. The word that kept coming to my mind over and over was "meandering."
I enjoyed what I learned from the book, just not the way of getting it. Again, if you don't mind the writing style, the information presented is pretty interesting.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews