The Palio: A Balcony With a View

Editor's Note: Earlier this week, Frankie Dettori posted images on his Twitter account from the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, where he attended the Palio-the twice-annual spectacle that draws up to 50,000 spectators. The TDN's European staff attended last year's July 2 Palio, producing this video by Patty Wolfe, and this story by Emma Berry. Chris McGrath also attended the event, and has filed the report below.

As they carried the stretcher away, the crushed guardsman raising a gingerly thumb to the applause of the crowd, you suddenly began to know how Miss Honeychurch must have felt. For just as things are never quite the same for the heroine of A Room With A View, after she sees a man stabbed in Florence, so all the gorgeous, visceral complexity of Italian life is about to be slashed open in another Tuscan square. First in this violent, unexpected accident; then in hours of pageant and tense ritual; and finally in the helpless paroxysm of disorder, lasting little over a minute, that terminally unstitches all presumptions about the theatrical scope of a horserace.

All through the afternoon, neighbourhood parades have followed their drummers along hot narrow streets, a contagion of noise and agitation pulsating through the veins of Siena until finally disgorging into its heart in the Piazza del Campo.

Though the Palio will not be run until dusk, the thousands already crammed into the square have long been trapped in the sun's feverish glare. For some, it is all too much: every now and then a litter is hoisted over the barriers to complacent murmurs of sympathy from the privileged, gazing down from windows, balconies and a few tiers of bleachers.

And then, just before the arrival of the great parade, the sense that we are being drawn towards some precarious margin–between immutable tradition and uncontrollable risk–is magnified by the horrifying misfortune of the guardsman.

He is among a dozen mounted carabinieri in 19th Century uniform who open the ceremony by jogging round the track until launching a cavalry charge, swords drawn, out of the corner of the square. But his horse, alarmed by the tumult, rears up. The rider falls to the ground and watches stricken as–slowly but inexorably–the great beast topples over and slams into his vitals before rolling away.

Those in this corner of the square gasp in unison, and crane forward anxiously. Miss Honeychurch, no doubt, would have fainted. In that moment, all the drama still to come has already found its key. But someone sees the guardsman's legs moving–and suddenly he is forgotten. For he is still being treated when an apocalyptic boom reverberates around the facades girdling this shell-shaped, cambered triumph of civic architecture.

The cannon has signalled the entrance of the first contrada in the parade: the first aerial ballet between two flag-throwers, the first procession of neighbourhood dignitaries, the first jockey mounted on a great charger. All, despite the heat, are trussed and stockinged in exquisite medieval livery. And here, in their wake, is the first of the actual Palio runners. With just a heraldic pennant draped over his withers, like an altarcloth, the innate splendour of the horse outshines all the butterfly exhibitionism of the men preceding him.

But an arduous test of his temperament has only just begun, for immediately behind comes the drummer leading the next contrada into the square, pounding a beat of relentless menace. At intervals, the entire parade pauses so that all flags (and the perimeter of the square accommodates half a dozen contrade at a time) can be flung simultaneously. Each Palio runner, as a result, must paw the sanded cobbles maybe for a full hour. For every step, in between, is slow and coolly measured–as though to stem the febrile tide of anticipation now coursing through a citizenry so manically partisan that if a woman goes into labour outside her own contrada, she will have its soil brought in and spread beneath her bed.

By the time the parade is over, the fervour is nearly tangible. The heat has become saturated by noise: the hum of the immense crowd; the grave, insistent summons of a great bell, high in the campanile of the Palazzo Pubblico; sporadic anthems from the band.

But then, as the runners finally emerge, an unearthly silence steals across the shadowed square. It is as though the sun, dipping behind the last rooftop, has trapped all sound in its dying rays: 40,000 people, one by one, register the sacred quality of the moment. Very soon all you can hear is the feet of the horses circling behind the start and the screaming of swifts.

For now comes the defining drama of the Palio. Not, paradoxically, the bone-splintering mayhem of the race itself; but the prolonged crisis where absolutely nothing happens. After all the protracted choreography to this point, nobody knows who now holds the script. As a result, the start evokes the machinations of Victorian jockeys to beat an Epsom Derby favourite, by the orchestration of serial false starts.

It certainly isn't the starter, who summons the riders in turn to take an allocated position between the starting ropes, until only one remains behind. And while the race can only start when this last jockey elects to dart in and join them, his power is also illusory.

For minutes at a time, his entry between the ropes is blocked off by another rider. Only those who grasp the nuances dividing one contrada from another, or uniting them both against a third, can begin to interpret the constant jostling and manoeuvring meanwhile detaining the other jockeys.

You do, however, begin to notice a pattern: every time the horse blocking the entrance to the start is finally backed away, to allow the run-in rider access, a particular rival is invariably pointing the wrong way. And, sure enough, the run-in rider promptly retreats from the gap and starts patiently circling behind the rope again. This goes on for 10 minutes at a time, until the starter wearily orders them all out to renew the whole charade.

And it is then that you see brazen negotiation resume between the riders. They have all established what intricate “arrangements” are in play, and now have to find a way to over-ride them. The consequences of these transactions, after the race, can be appalling. Sometimes jockeys are pulled down by toughs from their own contrada, and beaten and kicked to a pulp on the track. Consummate horsemen as they need to be, the riders are deplored as mercenaries. It is hard to imagine any bribe sufficient to justify hurtling bareback between all this masonry, thrashing each other with whips, when you are likely to be all but lynched immediately afterwards.

Arguably the Palio rider requires less courage to face the certain perils of the race itself than the uncertainties before and after. As the starter becomes ever more vexed, the imprecations of the crowd more blood-curdling, and rival inducements more confusing, simply to retain so impassive an air–when the race could start from one split-second to the next, but doesn't for nearly a full hour–is itself the stuff of heroism.

And then, after a couple of false starts have brought the mob to a delirium of impatience, out of nowhere the race is abruptly underway. But even this release of animal instinct, through three dizzy laps, does not really achieve real liberation from all the human stratagem invisibly binding the riders until that point. It feels more like an implosion: a final collapse of nerve under the cumulative pressure of distrust, disgust, disorder.

Barely seconds later and already they have scuttled through the first lap; and three horses have already lost their riders. Uniquely, these are still engaged in the race. If a riderless horse is first to complete the Palio, he is pronounced the winner: an apt tribute to his innocence; to his total freedom from the venality of those manipulating his bravery and speed.

Before you know it, the cannon is booming again: once for the winner; next, the ultimate ignominy, for the runner-up. By the time the third gets his salute, the track is already full: hundreds are jumping the barriers, intent on various sanguinary agendas even as horses are still galloping round the track. Some sprint to protect riders, hustling them away to safety; many more are looking for blood, however, and in one corner of the square a riot is promptly underway between mutually outraged contrade. Loose horses are marooned in their midst, and only by a miracle refrain from some lethal contribution of their own to the flailing of limbs around them.

Eventually a detachment of riot police makes a desultory intervention, before spending the evening cordoned across the junctions between inflamed contrade. Your mind goes back to the fate of the first figure of authority on the track, squashed under his own horse. And if you haven't actually blacked out in the meantime, you have certainly been taken–much like Miss Honeychurch–to some unfamiliar, dangerous and captivating recess of Tuscan life.

Because what makes the Palio so compelling, even for those of us immune to local feuds and fealties, is its absolute, seamless authenticity. Above all else, it sheds light on the definitive, undefinable Italian phenomenon of furbizia. Which, among many other things, means that the lawlessness of the race itself merely extends the candid disregard, beforehand, for officialdom as embodied in the starter–not least when compared to that of various contrada bigwigs, in sunglasses and magnificent suits, shaking hands so conspicuously on the track prior to the race.

Dignity and respect, here, are established quite beyond those norms that seek to impose order on life's unscripted theatre and violence and passion. Miss Honeychurch, on coming round, was amazed to learn that the murderer had tried to kiss his victim, and given himself up to the police. “How quickly these accidents do happen,” she says. “And then one returns to the old life!” But she doesn't, of course. And nor do any of us, after our first Palio.