Tuscany's medieval masterpiece — the Palio horse race, Piazza del Campo, and ribollita
Siena is a UNESCO World Heritage hill city in Tuscany whose medieval centre was frozen in time after the Black Death of 1348 wiped out half its population and ended its rivalry with Florence — a catastrophe that paradoxically preserved an extraordinary Gothic cityscape of brick palazzi, contrada neighbourhood churches, and the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, considered the finest medieval public space in Europe. The Palio di Siena — a bareback horse race around the Piazza del Campo held twice a year since the Middle Ages — is not a tourist spectacle but a genuine neighbourhood tribal war betwe…
Siena was Rome's most formidable rival in Tuscany and one of medieval Italy's wealthiest cities — its banking families financed popes and kings, and the Monte dei Paschi di Siena (founded 1472) is the world's oldest surviving bank. Sienese painters Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers defined Gothic Italian painting before the Florentine Renaissance. The Black Death of 1348 killed approximately 50,000 of Siena's 100,000 inhabitants in months, collapsing the banking system and ending construction of what would have been the world's largest Gothic cathedral — the incomplete Duomo…