Hi, we are all in Siena, Italy. Yesterday we went to see the Palio and there was a humongous crowd of 70,000 people. I couldn’t see over their heads so my Dad and my Mom had to lift me up. It was about maybe 6 hours before the actual race started because we came too early and we had to wait about an hour for the first festivities, but the first festivities were really funny. There were men on horses with swords. First there was the General apart from everyone else and there were maybe 18 other people on horses and they did one lap around El Campo (where they have El Palio). And then the second lap around when they were maybe a quarter of the way around, the General went charge and put his sword out front and started galloping and all the other people in formation behind him went into single file charging and then they went off into an alleyway. And then we had to wait maybe another hour till the next festivities which were flag waving and so they waved flags and it was very very cool. Two people had one flag each and they did interesting movements with the flag and then at one point they would throw their flags really high in the air and they would switch flags but they would catch them. Oh, I forgot to say there are 17 districts and 10 of them get into the Palio. They are The Noble Eagle, The Snail, The Flagship of the Wave, The Panther, The Forest, The Tortoise (this is the scarf I got because it is really cool), The Prior Owl, The Horned Lion (it looks like a horse), The Noble Conch Shell, The Veil of the Ram, The Tower, The Nobel Caterpillar, The Dragon, The Imperial Giraffe, The Porcupine, The She-Wolf, and The Nobel Goose.
There were three false starts because not all the horses were in the starting line (a rope) and so when they started not all the horses went at the same time. The dragon district was very smart and made a plan for him to win and purposely did not go into the starting line and then when he was going to go in, there was a side kind of open and he charged into there right as the rope went down and he was already running so he pulled ahead very quickly, but then it came into balance and he turned a corner and his horse slipped one way and he fell off. The Nobel Goose was in the lead, but then Caterpillar caught up and won! Once Caterpillar won, I saw that everybody was lifting the rider up and walking the horse in front of a huge crowd of Caterpillar fans and Laurel said that she saw a lot of people crying. I had no idea if it was because they hadn’t won in a long time or if it’s such a big thing that you celebrate all night. They celebrated all night. There were boys drumming and people doing flag tricks. Then also we went to El Duomo which is a dome in a cathedral and it was very very big. We saw them kind of reconstructing part of the wall because it was really old and so some of the stuff was fading and getting dirty so they were restoring it. Then we went to the crypt (a kind of underground place) with paintings on the wall called frescoes. And we went up and down everywhere in there and we saw huge paintings on the wall which they had actually recently found in 1999. The tickets we had bought were good for the crypt, the tower and the museum. We went to the museum after the crypt and saw stuff they had taken off of the old church and put copies on the present church to preserve the old ones. One of the statues was missing an arm and a head because it got so rotted away. One lion was missing his head and a foot. Then we started climbing up these stairs and went into a room called Duccio’s room and there was a lady explaining art in Spanish, Italian and English. We came in when she was speaking Spanish and we left when she spoke English. I was looking at the paintings on the wall and it was confusing to figure out which went first and the air was very disgusting in that room. We walked to more stairs and went to a room with relics and chalices and then we went through a little little door that we were going to a Tower in which had one way there and one way back down so we had to wait a minute or two for people coming down and then we went up and we had a straight way and we were behind German people. We walked up a long long long spiral staircase which got me kind of scared and then at the top there was these bridges and towers which I was looking over the side, but I got scared and then went up another staircase and we went up to the tippy tippy top which looked over El Campo. If the cathedral was open during the Palio, people could watch from there because it had a nice view of El Campo, but it was closed during El Palio. We went back down, had some lunch and then watched El Palio. Bye!!!
