We attended the first celebration of the festival on Saturday night. Meredith College in Italy was invited to be in the procession for the event that paraded around the town and into the piazza. It was a big honor to us and Meredith College to be invited to join their tradition. We went to a costume shop and rented costumes from the woman in charge of the procession. They were all renaissance costumes with several pieces. We especially had fun wearing the head pieces. They are large round doughnut shaped headbands. We paraded around town and into the main piazza in our costumes with the rest of the procession. The announcer even said where we were from and who we were. We had front row seats saved for us, which was great, but it did make me feel like I was being stared at. We get stared at pretty much all the time though, because we are foreigners in a small town.The program was fun and exciting. There was horse choreography, young ballet dancers, marching bands, a program with trained owls, fireworks, and lastly the flag wavers. Several of them will be out in the piazza at a time, each throwing his flag, catching it, and twirling it around, perfectly synchronized together. Then, at just the right moment, all will send their flag up into the sky. Each flag drops in different directions and are somehow each is caught by someone else. I don’t know how they manage to catch all the flags when they are trying to throw their flag to someone and catch a flag from someone else. The colors of the flags flying through the air bring a really festive and colorful mood to the center of town. When the program was over, we proceeded out of the piazza and around the town twice with drums and trumpets leading the way and announcing the procession.
The following Wednesday there was another event, the crossbow competition between the two sides of Sansepolcro. Inside the old walled city, there is a main square called the Piazza del Torre. The city is split into two teams through the middle of the Piazza. If you live on the side of the city where the gate leads to Rome, you cheer for the team Porta Romana. If you live on the side of the city where the gate leads to Florence, then you cheer for the team Porta Fiorentina. The names Porta Romana and Porta Fiorentina mean the gate to Rome and Florence. Men from each side join the crossbow competition and compete against one another shooting at targets. We cheer for the Porta Fiorentina because we live on that side of town in the Palazzo Alberti. Unfortunately, the Porta Romana won. That means that they represented Sansepolcro against the neighboring town of Gubbio just across the border into Umbria this Sunday at the Palio della Balestra.
The Palio della Balestra is the crossbow competition between Sansepolcro and Gubbio. It is the event the entire festival centers on. The tradition dates back to at least 1594 and maybe longer. It was started as a way to get men who weren’t in the military to be proficient with a crossbow in case they were needed as military back up. It always occurs on the second Sunday of September. The prize for the winner is a wool cloth called the “palium”, which is where the word Palio comes from. “Balestra” means crossbow.
We were fortunate enough to get tickets to the event and sit in the piazza with a wonderful view of the competition. First, everyone involved proceeds around the piazza. A priest says a prayer and blesses the people. Some flag wavers performed again, and then the competition began. A cylinder shaped target was set up on one side of the piazza and the men with crossbows were on the other side. They all shoot at the same target and no arrows are removed the entire time. This gives them a chance to try to knock the other team’s arrows out. Some do fall out. When everyone has fired one arrow, the judges come and get the target and take it away to judge it. I never figured out how the judging works, but Sansepolcro won! We were excited, especially since we on the Porta Fiorntina side had lost to Porta Romana side on Wednesday. However, this did mean that there would be more loud parades, drums, and trumpets outside my window all day!
Besides the events of the Balestra, I was also able to go to the Museo Civico with the Art History class. The Museo Civico is the famous art museum in Sansepolcro. I am not taking art history and I don’t know very much about it, so I decided to go when the Bankers, the art professors, were showing the art history class around. Sansepolcro was home to the renaissance artist Piero della Francesco. He is a well known artist in this area and he has several important frescoes in museums in throughout Italy and the world. The Museo Civico has one of his most famous frescoes, The Resurrection.
The Bankers gave us a lot of interesting information about The Resurrection that I would have never known if I had just looked at it. They had us close one eye and hold up a hand so that we could only see one side of the fresco at a time. We were able to see that the backgrounds and the position of Jesus were different on each side. The observer’s left side shows Jesus conquering and the right side shows Him judging. We also learned how frescoes were made. They must be constructed a very small segment at a time before the section of plaster on the wall dries. This painting is really important to the city. Not only is it valuable and historical, it actually saved Sansepolcro from being fired on by the Allies in World War II. The author Aldous Huxley had described the fresco as one of the most beautiful in the world, and the officer in charge of the Allied offensive in Sansepolcro remembered the quote and that the painting was in Sansepolcro. He decided not to fire on the city in order to save it, even though he had never seen the fresco! If not for The Resurrection, the city might not be anything like it is today.
I enjoyed learning about this fresco and I think that knowing some of the symbolism makes it much more meaningful. If I didn’t know some of these things about the piece, I would just say it was a pretty painting and move on. I am learning many things here that are not what I would normally study, that are making me well rounded. At Meredith, I pretty much stick to math and chemistry, which I love. I am looking forward to seeing more art next weekend. We will be heading to the city of art.
As much as I have enjoyed these two weekends to explore Sansepolcro, I am excited to be going to see another part of Italy. I am headed out to Firenze (Florence) this coming weekend. We are all working on our travel plans and trying to decide what to see. I personally hope to make it to the Duomo, Florence’s largest cathedral and one of the icons of Italy. Check back in next Friday to see how the trip went!
Ciao,
Meredith
I'm so jealous! Your costumes were gorgeous.
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