TWO GAMES

Barbarians of Siena

TIMOTHY BEAUAIONT

Siena is a beautiful city; but it will be a long time before 1 want to see it again.

The Patio is one of the most ancient and gorgeous sporting events in the world; but I never want to see it again.

The second (and last) Palio of the 1970 season was held on 16 August. The city was closed to traffic; the Piazza therefore quiet in spite of the crowds; the Belltower of the Cathedral floated like a black and white Lego toy against the sky.

At a quarter past four, the racehorses and their escorts assembled for the grand bless- ing in front of the steps of the Cathedral and below the window of the Bishop's palace.

As each horse came to the front and the bannermen gave their display of twirling and tossing the great silken -flags, the prelate beamed and sketched the sign of the cross in the air, whilst carrying on a running con- versation with his staff.

Back to the Piazza where the stands around the sides begin to fill, the café tables are removed from the hard burnt Siena track and the enormous compound in the middle begins to fill with a steady stream of people flowing in from many sources, which are cut off one by one as a group of white- uniformed traffic policemen clear the course and close the doors leading on to it. The course is three-quarters cleared when a troop of operatic policemen with swords and plumes trot round the course finishing with a spectacular charge. So unlike the home life of our own dear Metropolitan Police!

Another half-hour and the pageant begins. The Mayor and the Corporation, the Palio itself—the banner of the Virgin which is the prize for the race—carried in a chariot drawn by oxen and the representatives of each of the sevehmen contrade or wards—all are dressed in gorgeous Renaissance cos- tume, the only sign of shoddiness being in the genuinely old pieces of armour.

Each contrada has a drummer, two ban- nermen, six squires, a captain in armour with drawn sword, a jockey also dressed in armour on a led nag, and then, bareback as it will be in the race save for an emblazoned cloth, the horse that will run the race and which will win if it passes the post first whether or not its rider is still mounted.

And so they file past for nearly two hours, the men of the giraffe in red and white, of the dragon in green and red, of the porcupine with its lovers' knot, of the scallop most gorgeous of all in blue and silver—had Chesterton seen the Palio when he wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill?

Meanwhile the steady stream flows through the last inlet until the inner square is a living mass of people and it seems im- possible that one more can fit in. As each contingent of the procession reaches the front of the town hall its members move into the seats of honour and one remembers with a slight shock that the procession is not just a pageant—it is the power of Siena, its magistrates and officials, and there, in the centre of the square is the rest of the town, passionately waiting for the climax of the day, one of the two climaxes of the year.

The pageant ended, the jockeys strip to their coloured leotards, mount and bring their horses to the starting line, then the can- non fires and the race begins. Five minutes later it is over.

The jockeys of the Tower and the Porcupine have slashed at each other with

their whips all up one side of the square.

Coming to the final bend of the second circuit the leading one of the two has cut the corner too fast and hit the turning post head on. The jockey has fallen, been kicked by a following horse and then dragged roughly from the track; the horse with a gaping wound in his head and gushing with blood has completed another circuit before falling dead. The jockey of the Porcupine has

passed the finishing post second, has been dragged from his horse by the first of the crowd to reach him, has scampered down the track crying with fear, an absurd little figure in a red white and blue striped leotard before

disappearing under the rain of blows poured on him by the crowd, with respectable matrons in the stands howling for his blood.

Renaissance grace has been succeeded by Renaissance barbarism. But it was more than Renaissance barbarism, for in the Renaissance there were rules which were obeyed unless it was advantageous to break them, not the complete absence of both rules and respect for life which must make every Patio a potential shambles.

Were there twenty-five or fifty thousand people in the middle of the square? It was impossible to count, all that matters is that they were packed in as tightly as you can pack people, in a dense mass surrounded by barriers. There was no central free space. no first and last. Those who fainted on the outskirts of the crowd in the blazing sun were passed overhead and pushed out on to the track whence officials half frog-marched them, slapping their cheeks to revive them.

off the track. No stretchers. What happened to those who fainted in the middle, God knows. One incident, one fight, in a crowd where tempers and enthusiasms were high could have led to many deaths underfoot.

It seemed there were no humane killers for the horses and no vets.

There were not sufficient police to protect the jockeys from violence. On the last dangerous bend—a sharper turn than ninety degrees—an unpadded post protruded into the course. These things were bad but the real canker at the heart of the apple which corrupted the whole was the anarchy of the race itself. Not just that anything was permissible on the course, whether slashing other jockeys across the face, or riding them into the barriers, but that it was expected that each jockey of a good horse would have been bribed to lose by some opposition faction. Therefore no defeat was deemed to be merited; only the winning jockey stood in no danger of being thought to have sold the race, and if the other nine factions wanted to lynch him for winning he could at least count on his sup- porters to protect him. No one wanted to protect the losers. They even had no personal friends since they were mercenaries and strangers: no Sienese would ride in the race: they had their future to think of.

Such. twice a year, is the official character of Siena, headed by its elected represen- tatives and blessed by Holy Church.. It is a recurrent reminder of that most valuable tenet of conservatism: that the veneer of civilisation is paper-thin and immediately underneath even in the most traditional country, is barbarism.