Dinner with the Contrada

In Sienna, our group was able to partake in one of Sienna's oldest traditions: il Palio. This is a basically a horse race in which different neighborhoods, called contradas, each have a horse that races. There are 17 contradas in Sienna, but only ten get to race. They are chosen by lottery. This has been going on since the medieval times. I'll talk more about the actual Palio in another post. In this post, I want to talk about what we got to do the day before the Palio.

Each contrada is represented by an animal. There's a goose, a dragon, a turtle, a unicorn, leopard, and so on. The members of each contrada have a scarf with their colors and animal on and they are given this scarf at birth. The day before the Palio is a day of practice races. At night, each contrada then has a big feast. Our group was invited to the one; we were essentially adopted by a contrada. We became honorary members of the Tortuca clan, the turtles.

We went to the dinner around 9.30, having missed the two practice runs. When we went to the neighborhood square where dinner was being held, I saw rows of long white tables that were already set with silverware and plates and had some wine on it already. We had an assigned table and we sat down.

One of the marks of the Palio is that it is steeped with tradition and ceremony. Dinner opened with a quick speech by the head of the contrada in which he thanked the ladies serving. The servers were all members of the contrada, and there were probably about 30 of them ranging from about 13 to 50. They prepared all of the food themselves and they passed it out to everyone. We were served family-style, but there were still probably a couple hundred people there. It must have been a lot of hard work but it didn't seem as though they were tired or minded at all. They sang the contrada song and did a dance before they started the meal.

The food was really good--it was more of a traditional Italian meal, with the appetizer and then the primi piatti and the secondo piatti and the salad course and then desert. There was plenty of time in between courses to allow for digestion and plenty of wine, too...they kept passing out bottles! We had to leave before desert, around midnight, because we had to drive back to Florence for the night and the bus driver was going to leave us. The meal took so long that we made it to midnight without getting desert! But it was worth it because it was an amazing experience.

You could see how close the contrada was. Everyone knew each other; before the meal, people were walking around and talking with each other. One of my favorite parts of the meal was the table of guys who were probably in their mid-twenties. Throughout the evening, they would just randomly (and loudly) break into the contrada song. I thought that it was really cool that a group of younger people was singing the song, because you probably wouldn't have that as much in the States; tradition isn't valued as much in the U.S. as it's valued in Italy. The Tortuca contrada was also favored to win, so when the jockey got up to speak he got a huge response that I don't think any U.S. jockey would ever receive. The Palio is a huge part of life in Sienna; they look forward to it twice a year and it is really a huge issue of pride for the contrada. To win is a huge deal.

I'll talk more about the race itself later--that was an experience!