Holiday season in Siena

It’s been rather quiet here for the past few days. I suppose it’s probably been because of the lousy weather that we have stayed pretty much close to home. It’s been pretty much rain for the past few days with occasional breaks of sunshine. Aside from the daily passegiata, or Sunday stroll down to Peccati di Gola for caffe we have really spent most of our time working on projects.


Susan brought along several bears to work on and is presently completing a design all her own: a candy cane bear made from – you guessed it – red and white mohair strips pieced together. It is really cute of course. Too bad she can’t get plugged into the craft community here this Christmas!

Although I’m presently without the big digital camera I’m managing to take a few photos now and then with my (lousy) little Nikon S1. Yesterday (Sunday) there was a unique demonstration put on by the local fire department (“vigili del fuoco”) on the Piazza del Campo.


They showed off their skill in falling from heights onto a large air bag, rather like Hollywood stuntmen I suppose, and also demonstrated their teamwork setting up a ladder and climbing it just about anywhere. In this case in the middle of the piazza! I did take some video of that and hope to use it to continue my practice on Apple’s Final Cut Express video editing software.


So little else is new but that is changing. There is a little market (“mercatino”) set up in the old market place for the holidays, just behind the Piazza del Campo. Some of the vendors appear to be from northern Europe, selling local food items (Germany and Austria) and holiday trinkets (Poland). It’s really quite nice actually. There is even a family down from Germany (we think) who run a Thai restaurant there and who are serving Thai food! Delicious! (Actually they serve Thai at one end and German at the other.) This little market will be replaced on 18 December by a market selling little pieces of antiquarian objects.

Another, much larger holiday craft market kicks off this Thursday at the other end of the town, and will stretch along Piazzas Matteotti and Gramsci on into the fortezza. Naturally we’ll check this out and get back to you.

In fact there are quite a few things going on in Siena this time of year., music concerts throughout the city as well as markets selling a wide variety of local items for the holiday season. There will also be ice skating available at the La Lizza gardens from 17 December through 14 January. I plan to put online here on the blog as well as on my website a complete listing of what is exactly going in Siena this holiday season.

And the lights are on in the city and it makes for a wonderful late evening stroll down the quiet streets, water glistening off the stones and showing the reflections of the overhead lights. Anyway, it’s pretty cool to be here really, bad weather (“maltempo”) or no.

Speaking of Germany, this weekend we head off to Germany to visit Christina and Glen in Giessen, just north of Frankfurt. The plan is for us to take an early morning train to Pisa, fly Ryanair to Frankfurt’s Hahn airport (a smaller satellite airport I’m told) and they will pick us up. We’ll spend a couple of nights with them and then on the 12th head into Frankfurt proper where we will try and catch all of the world-famous “frankfurter” attractions and stroll a bit before taking a bus to Hahn airport and spend the night at a nearby hotel. We’ll be ready to go for our return flight back to Pisa on the 13th. Should be a blast – I’m already getting geared up plenty of schnitzel.

Today the sun is out in bits and pieces so thought we’d take off for Florence on the bus. We’ll leave midday and spend the afternoon and early evening there, window shopping and enjoying their lights. We will probably have a bite of lunch somewhere off the main tourist track and then take an early bus back home. It is really quite the way to go, particularly when traffic inside Florence is now strictly limited, parking can be a real headache and you just never know about the weather right now. So hey sit back, relax and leaving the driving to, well, somebody else.

We hope to catch the Nature Train (“treno natura”) on Thursday and do some videtaping of this old steam locomotive as it wends it way through southern Tuscany. Friday we link up with Roberto to do videotaping of some exteriors for our Tuscan Voices project. We also hope to meet with his cousin Antonio Betti who owns and operates Peccati di Gola. Susan’s goal is to see how all those wonderful sweet things are made. My goal is to do for his shop what I did for Cantina in Piazza on my website. In fact my eventual hope is to turn my Siena site into a highly personalized and specialized guidebook of our experiences in Siena: that is on our experiences in wine, food, sweets, and unique handcrafted items.