Il Palio di Siena

Private access to Italy's most storied horse race — a ninety-second event built on a year of preparation, and the most considered way to attend it.

There is no event in Italy that explains the country to a foreign visitor as efficiently as the Palio di Siena. It lasts ninety seconds. It has been run, in essentially the same form, since 1656. It is not a sporting event in any modern sense; it is a civic and religious rite that the city of Siena has kept alive while the rest of Europe has watched its equivalents disappear. To stand in the centre of the Piazza del Campo on the second of July or the sixteenth of August at seven-thirty in the evening, with sixty thousand Sienesi pressed shoulder to shoulder around a single oval of red earth, is to understand something about Italy that no other event will tell you.

The Structure of the Race

Siena is divided into seventeen contrade — historic neighbourhoods, each with its own name, colours, patron saint, museum, fountain, and church — and the Palio is the race in which ten of these contrade compete each summer for an enormous painted silk banner. The contrade that race are determined by a complex rotating system; the horses are assigned by lot three days before the race; the jockeys are professionals who ride for whichever contrade hires them. The horses, importantly, run with or without their riders. A contrada whose jockey is unhorsed during the race can still win.

There are two Palios each year. The Palio di Provenzano is run on the second of July, in honour of the Madonna di Provenzano. The Palio dell'Assunta is run on the sixteenth of August, in honour of the Assumption of the Virgin. The August race is the older and, by tradition, the more prestigious. The July race is the more accessible to visitors, with marginally more available accommodation in the town in early July than in August. We arrange both.

The Days Before the Race

The Palio is not, in any meaningful sense, a single afternoon's event. It is a four-day rite that begins on the morning of the day the horses are assigned and concludes with the parade and the race itself. There are six trial races — three trials in the morning and three in the evening of the four-day window — and each is run in front of a packed Piazza del Campo. There are processions through the contrade, evening dinners on the streets at trestle tables that may stretch for half a kilometre, blessings of horse and jockey in the contrada church on the morning of the race itself.

We strongly recommend, for clients attending the Palio, that they arrive in Siena three days before the race rather than on the day itself. The three days are, in many ways, the more interesting experience. We arrange, with introductions made in advance through the network of relationships our office maintains in the city, attendance at one of the contrada dinners on the eve of the race — an experience that is not commercially available and that depends on personal invitation. We arrange the contrada blessings on the morning of the race, when the horse is led into the church and the priest's words are translated, briefly, by a guide who has lived in the city long enough to be trusted within it.

Where to Watch

There are three ways to watch the Palio, each with its own character and its own access requirements. The first is from the centre of the Piazza del Campo itself — free, but reached only by entering the piazza by mid-afternoon and remaining inside it, in increasing density, for five hours, with no bathroom access. We do not arrange this for our clients. The second is from a balcony or window of one of the palaces that ring the piazza. These windows are private property, owned mostly by old Sienese families, and they are let — at considerable cost — for the afternoon and evening of the race. We secure them through the relationships we maintain with the families who own them. The view is, frankly, the best view of the Palio it is possible to have. Champagne is served on the balcony from around five. The race itself is run beneath one's feet.

The third is from one of the temporary grandstands erected against the buildings on the lower curve of the piazza. This is the cheaper option, and we will sometimes arrange it for a portion of the party, with the principal guests on the balconies above. It has the merit of placing the spectator close to the dirt of the racing surface; the dust kicked up by the horses falls onto the front rows.

What to Make of It

The Palio is the most concentrated demonstration we know of one of Italy's deepest virtues: the persistence of meaningful local identity in a continent that has, in the last fifty years, traded a great deal of it for a more uniform modernity. The contrade are not pageantry. They are functioning social institutions to which most Sienese belong by birth and to which they devote substantial parts of their lives. The race is the moment at which the city sees itself most clearly. Foreigners are welcome to attend, and the Sienese are unfailingly courteous to those who do, but the event is not for them. It is for the city.

This is, we think, why visitors who attend with the right introduction find it among the most affecting two hours of any Italian journey. Ninety seconds of horse race; four days of city; four hundred years of continuity. There is nothing else quite like it.