Word: siena
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...most horse races, a whip lash in the face is considered bad manners, at least. When it happened twice last week to a jockey in Siena, Italy, he quit and let his whip-wielding rival win. Instead of being barred for life for such tactics, the winner was wined & dined, and a sonnet composed in his honor was distributed throughout the town...
...Siena Polio, the world's oldest horse race,* anything goes. Since the jockeys ride for the honor of the Siena town wards (which bear such symbolic names as Giraffe, Dragon, Unicorn and Wave), partisan passions begin to rise well before race day. This year Unicorn hired away (for a rumored 900,000 lire) the Giraffe's jockey, a movie stunt rider and a two-time winner named Pietrino. Pietrino, a Polio veteran much in demand, had been known to change colors before...
...20th Century taxpayers, one of the world's least esthetic individuals is the faceless Moloch known to them only by his title, the Collector of Internal Revenue. But officials in the art-loving, 13th Century Italian republic of Siena were tax collectors of a different sort. When the camarlingo (chamberlain) completed his six months' term, he had his parchment records bound between two wooden panels, and commissioned some of the republic's most eminent artists to decorate the covers with tempera paintings. In Florence's Strozzina Gallery last week, some examples of such fancied-up account...
More than a hundred of these tavolette had been recovered from Siena's archives. Many of them were portraits of the camarlinghi themselves seated stiffly at broad desks with their secretaries. But later samples included fragments of the brilliantly colored, elaborately detailed painting of Siena's prime: virgins with patterned golden haloes, battle scenes, street scenes. Among the anonymous panels on exhibit, experts thought they could distinguish the work of such important Sienese artists as Taddeo di Bartolo, Stefano di Giovanni Sassetta and Ambrozio Lorenzetti...
...soldier in a remote Alpine outpost during World War I, Sani had started whittling to while the time away. Afterward he found work at a rich artist's villa in the province of Siena. The artist gave Sani plenty of time off for sculpture, taught him to work in stone. Sani insists that today he still carves just "to pass the time and make some money for my wife." But his works, on exhibition in a Milan gallery last week, could stand comparison with the most sophisticated examples of modern Italian sculpture...