Il Palio – Siena Horserace

palio1 A grand duke of Tuscany was once asked to fund the construction of a lunatic asylum in Siena. “shut the city gates,” was his response, “and you’ll have a fine madhouse ready made.” Wander round Siena for 50 weeks of the year and you wouldn’t have a clue where he got the idea from. The place is a slumbering open-air museum. Turn up for the Palio, though, and you can absolutely see that the grand duke had a point. At race time, for two weeks every year, Siena is a nuthouse. Twice a summer they run a horse race, the world famous Palio di Siena, in the main square, the Piazza del Campo. Tourists pitch up in their thousands and observe a ritual that has been played out in various guises since the Middle Ages. They come along assuming that what they’re going to see is, basically, the Derby in medieval costume. They’re always a bit surprised when, right in front of their noses, gangs of young I talian men start piling into one another for no apparent reason. All over Europe there are festivals where all they really care about is separating tourists from their Euros. But the Palio isn’t put on for pink-faced northern hordes in shorts. You could remove every one of them from the piazza as the race is about to s tart, and it wouldn’t make even the slightest difference to the atmosphere of seething frenzy and dementia. If possible, it would make it seethe just that little bit more. The truth about the Palio is it has less to do with horses and pag eantry than money, passion, violence and the Virgin Mary. The race is run on specifi c religious feast days between ten horses, each representing a contrada, or borough. (T here are 17 of these in the cit y, so if a contrada’s horse isn’t in this one, it gets to run in the corresponding race next year.) The contradas all have quaint historical names – Owl, Tower, Goose, Giraffe, Caterpillar etc – but there’s nothing twee about rivalries between certain contradas that are as palio4 bitter as any between local football clubs. A lid is kept on all this for most of the year, but when the Palio week comes round it boils over. Young Sienese roam the streets in the fourday- up singing an infi nite variation on the same medieval soccer chant, often very rude riffs on rival contradas. After the chants come the fights. Rivalries even go on behind closed doors. Marriages between members of rival contradas are often put on hold for the week, with one spouse or another returning to their family home. The ten horses for the race are chosen on the Or wellian principle that all are of roughly the same quality, though some are more equal than others. They are each assigned to a contrada by lots four da ys before the race. But having a fast horse is no guarantee of anything. It’s necessary to secure an advantage of other runners and riders. There are two ways of ensuring success: divine intervention, and bribery. Before the race the horse is blessed in the contrada church. If it deposits a s teaming pile of shit on the holy fl oor, this is for some reason taken as a splendid sign. But bribery is generally taken to be a more reliable method. The Sienese generally deny to outsiders that it takes place, but when I went one year I was told by someone from the M onte dei Paschi Bank, the oldest bank in the world, that their contrada had shelled out hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy off eight of the oth er competing contradas. That is standard practice. Contributions come from the palio3 floor up, with individuals who are not necessarily wealthy pledging huge sums. All the money is spent on the race. The jockeys are all hired from outside, mostly from Sardinia where they breed runty, gnarled young men steeped in the ways of mounted skulduggery. (In another life Gianfranco Zola would have made a perfect Palio jockey). It’s lucrative, but dangerous being a jockey. It’s not just that the baked earth surface laid round the outside of the Piazza del Campo is very far from a soft landing. It’s more that if they are suspected by their own contrada of taking a bribe, and deliberately falling off, they run the risk of a severe kicking. They are regarded as mercenaries, and therefore fair game. Particular dishonour is reserved for the contrada, which finishes second. This is Italy, where the conspiracy theory is king, and a runner up is always assumed to have been bought off, because a horse good enough to finish second is deemed good enough to finish first. One time I went, a jockey who steered his horse in second was severely beaten up before managing to lock himself into a loo in a bar to a void having any limbs broken. Another jockey I saw climbing over a high perimeter fence and scampering out of the Campo. Jockeys who look like they might be coming in second start braking hard, or miraculously unseat themselves on the final bend, though they know the jockeys around palio2 them are doing the same thing. Some spend up to a month in hospital. Ambulances speed into the Campo as soon as the race is over. The jockeys are as fiercely guarded as the horses (which can be subject to tampering, knackering etc) but cannot be policed during the trial races, which are run for three days before the actual race. Once they’re on the start line they can pass on offers and do deals out of earshot. There is a famous story that one contrada could only communicate its offer to a rival jockey by leaving a message on the loo paper of a trattoria they knew he would be taken to eat that night. Even then they had no way of knowing whether he accepted the offer till the race was over. In short, the Palio is unlike any horse race you will see anywhere else in the world. It’s not so much that the race is preceded by a two-hour medieval procession marked by spectacular displays of flag-throwing. Yes, the jockeys do without saddles, batter one another with sticks, and thrash one another’s horses. But what’s unique about it is that it matters. I’ve been five times, and the tension in the build-up has an intensity all of its own. They are greeted by an earsplitting roar as they enter the Piazza. As they approach a rope slung across their path, they begin to circle and a spellbinding hush descends as everyone turns to await the amplified voice of the man charged with organising the start. It’s perfectly normal for them to trade bribes as they line up to race and, if they’ve accepted a bung, deliberately obstruct other horses or fall off their mounts. So contested is the race that the starter – like the jockeys a hired outsider – never hangs around to see horses complete the three laps of the piazza. Once he has sent the horses on the wa y, he is whisked away by the police for his own protection. You can see why. The race itself takes no more than 90 seconds, but the start can often take half an hour, or more. Nine horses are required to line up in the order they are summoned to by lot, while the tenth horse runs in along the outside to start the race. But the jostling between jockeys is intricate, and interminable. As the light dims over the piazza, the tension in the air assumes practically sexual levels of intensity. palio5 “What language am I speaking?” says the starter to the jockeys. “This is not a start. If you can’t get in position we will have to stop and come back tomorrow.” And then, bang, they’re off. I climb up on the wooden fence near the s tart to get a better view. A teenage girl has the same idea and clambered up ne xt to me, but the only way she can keep her balance is to wrap her arms around me from behind. I’d never met the girl before in my life but she keeps screaming at the horses. “Cazzo! Cazzo! Entra! Entra!” Literally: “Cock! Cock! Go in! Go in!” Like the Grand Duke said, a madhouse.