I’m utterly fascinated by humans’ sense of scale. It’s the kind of thing one thinks about rarely, but then suddenly it will confront you in unexpected ways at unexpected times. Siena, Italy is one of those places, and this summer was one of those times.
All vehicles are space ships
I remember grappling with this notion when a close friend told me about through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. He would walk 20-25 miles each day, and then every so often, he’d catch a ride into a nearby town to load up on food and do some laundry. He talked about how sometimes the closest town would be back the way he’d just come, and how bizarre it felt to be in a car and retread an entire day’s hike in mere minutes.
We take for granted how modern vehicles have allowed humans to master scale. For almost all of human history, the fastest a human being ever moved through physical space was the top speed of a horse. (Or, I suppose, anyone who managed to mount an ostrich or cheetah.)
(Another exception is any person who achieved terminal velocity by falling off of some very high cliff. But of course, that particular experience would end quickly, and they wouldn’t have had time to describe it to anyone.)
Can you imagine putting someone from the year 1890 in a 2003 Toyota Corolla and driving them down a highway at 82 MPH (which is the approximate top speed of a 2003 Toyota Corolla before it shakes itself apart)? They would immediately panic and then vomit from motion sickness.
What’s truly bonkers is that the reaction of a person from 130 years ago would be identical to the reaction of a person from 1,300 years ago.
The same is true of heights. No human ever looked down upon the Earth from any height greater than the tallest mountain until someone floated very, very high in a balloon.
Notably, the first time a person drifted off of the planet in a balloon was 1783. A mere hundred and twenty years later, we had piloted and powered aircraft. Just 11 years after that, airplanes were being used to perform reconnaissance in WWI. By the end of the next world war, we’d discovered the jet stream. Shortly after that war ended, we were salivating over who would get into outer space first.
It took humans millions of years to figure out how to float into the sky. Less than two hundred years after that, people walked upon the moon.
Today, we completely take for granted that we can get from one continent to another by sitting in a chair in the sky for a few hours.
A curious sense of scale, indeed. I digress.
A walking city
Siena, Italy is a place where your sense of scale is stretched and challenged in a different way.
Siena is a medieval city. Though today its population spreads beyond its old walls, the heart of the city is unquestionably inside them. The interior area of the walls comprises no more than a couple square miles.
Unlike typical cities where cars dominate and pedestrians have to accommodate, in Siena, it’s the other way around. It’s almost entirely a walking city. There are a few motorized vehicles—a handful of taxis, too many scooters, one bus, and a smattering of cars owned by residents, but they don’t really fit.
In fact, most people who own cars have to keep them in carparks outside the walls. If you want to have one inside, you need a special permit, and Siena caps the total number of permits. Thus, if you want one, someone has to voluntarily give theirs up, or you have to wait for a permit holder to die.
At first, it’s incredibly refreshing, and at times exhilarating, to just…walk everywhere. Closest restaurant? A one-minute walk. Need groceries? Three minutes away. Meet a friend for an aperitivo at their favorite bar? Five. Bus station? 10. Train station? 20.
The simplicity of it is what I love the most. You don’t need your keys. You don’t need to think about parking, or fuel, or anything. You just…stroll. And stroll back. And window shop, or pick up a walkin’ around beer (WAB) from a corner store, or nab some gelato, on the way back. Easy peezy.
And you bump into people that way, which is so fun. I can’t tell you how often we would be walking from somewhere in Siena and unexpectedly encounter a friend or acquaintance, or witness some curious or interesting thing. That just doesn’t happen when you’re in the car, driving from point A to point B.
Indeed, the closest analogue most of us have to this is the shopping mall—a format that existed in a rather precise time in human history (late 20th-early 21st century), and mainly for people within a limited age group (12-18 years old).
And because Siena is so dense, you can cover tons and tons of ground, relatively speaking, by walking a mile instead of driving 20.
Most visitors to Siena will begin pondering why more places aren’t like this. Why can’t we have more walkable cities like this? Why are we slaves to cars?
After a while, though, the limitations of walkability start to bug you. It kind of depends on how you measure a trip in your head. Is it five minutes away? Well heck, that’s nothing! But it might be half a mile, and you have to walk down a quarter-mile-long decline and then up a quarter-mile-long incline, in 100-degree weather. Thought of that way, it’s less appealing, because calculating the journey is less about time and more about effort.
And so, a mile becomes a significant distance. Two miles? Better bring provisions. Three miles? Ugh, forget about it.
Time, and time again
One of the things that makes Siena a special place for experiencing a changed sense of scale is the way it condenses time. It brings the medieval closer to the modern.
Siena was founded some 800 years ago, so many of its structures date from the 13th century. (A favorite and mind-boggling anecdote: The city has a historic fountain called Fontebranda that predates the Etruscans, which means it’s existed in some form or another for at least 3,000 years.)
Eight hundred years has always seemed an impossible amount of time to me. Probably because as an American, all of our built environments and recorded history is at most only half that old.
(I know, American history did not begin with colonizing white Europeans. I’m talking about this type of historical record—the architecture, the written records, and so on. You know what I mean. Please don’t make me type the words “genocide” and “erasure” in this essay. [Ack, there they are!])
In the U.S., we view buildings and documents from the late 19th century as “old” and “historic,” so much so that we go to great lengths to preserve them. But in Siena, structures—or modifications to structures—from that same time period feel annoyingly new.
Although Siena’s medieval history is carefully and purposefully preserved and protected, it’s not dead. The city is not a museum. Their cherished Palio (a horse race), the contrade (their neighborhood-like social organization), and all the pageantry that comes from both, is more a continuation of the past than anything else.
That is, they aren’t remembering traditions; they’re still actively participating in them. And the participation isn’t cursory or perfunctory…they CARE. They don’t win the Palio and then go home; they shake with joy and relief, and then vault themselves into intense celebrations. The most unruly soccer hooligans have nothing on a Sienese grandmother celebrating her contrada’s first Palio win after a 20-year drought.
To experience Siena is to simultaneously be in a time machine and also be squarely in the present. The place feels almost immortal. Not inevitable—there’s a fragility to this special place and its traditions, and a certain amount of luck involved in its survival so far—but immortal.
The idea of immortality is implicit in the terra in piazza, which is the dirt that is reused every year in the Piazza del Campo (the city center) to create the track for the Palio.
Yes, reused, or at least that’s what they say. For each annual Palio, they truck in what is ostensibly the same sandy soil, fill the walkway around the Campo, and pack it down firmly with water and machines to create the track. After the Palio, they remove it all and store it.
The track itself, then, is a time machine. For the Sienese, they can walk where their ancestors walked—literally the same particles of earth. Their contrada’s last victory occurred here, and future memories will be imprinted in each granule (hence the annual tradition of helping “set” the earth by walking over it with family and friends—yet another of Siena’s rituals). It’s a beautiful way to connect oneself simultaneously with the past and future by placing yourself in the middle of both as a piece of connective tissue.
It (doesn’t) belong in a museum
I couldn’t help but try and think of an analogue for this phenomenon—of participation in living, breathing, preserved, continuing traditions—in my own world. There aren’t any that extend back hundreds of years, certainly, but folk music is not a bad example. There’s so much of it in the U.S., in particular.
All popular Western music has roots (or at least grafts) in folk music. People like Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Rhiannon Giddens have gone to great lengths to not only preserve folk music, but to keep it relevant. Today, Giddens studies the old styles and preserves them in part by performing them live on stage. Meanwhile, thousands of people play old styles and old tunes, and insert some of their own flavor and evolve them. Especially genres like the blues.
But the key is that people enjoy these things in real time, unironically, and also as nostalgia and a connection to the past. They do not merely observe this music with fascination; they feel it. They sing along at the top of their lungs. They go home and learn how to play clawhammer banjo.
I don’t have a clear point to land on here. Just a series of observations about scale, and the curiosity I find in marveling at it. It feels good to have your mind stretched beyond its typical, day-to-day shape.
Planes, trains, automobiles, and feet. Years, centuries, and millennia. And so on. What a world.
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