Siena

As we drove to Siena, or rather, of course, as Daniel drove and I looked out the window, I realized that, even though I'd been to Italy four times before, I'd never seen the Tuscan countryside.  I lived in Rome and took trains to see other cities, but the quintessential Tuscan countryside I knew only from movies and photos and paintings and books.  I just kept looking out the window, in awe of the rolling hills and thinking that we must need more rain for these fields to look so green.

We sat in the main piazza, the campo, a huge sloping piazza, and ate pizza.  The police officer walked around telling people not to leave trash and pointing out trash cans.

We let Sebastian make our itinerary: the Campo, Museo Civico, Torre de Mangia, a park, the duomo.

Museo Civico...Sebastian and Connor sat with me in a room here, a room with a parable of good government.  The Council of Nine in Siena (1285-1355) had paintings in this room commissioned to show good government and bad government.  The three of us talked about the meaning of a parable; the wall depicting bad government with violence and unhappiness and mayhem; the wall depicting good government with people lining up to get a judgement, a scale, serene countenances.  We talked about a Council of Nine like a City Council, this making sense since Daniel ran for Waltham City Council a year and a half ago.  Our kids don't usually want to go to museums, so I loved sitting with the boys as they looked at these paintings, commenting on the good and the not-good of the paintings and of government.

We found a field and played freeze tag.

We climbed the Torre de Mangia (tower) that made me love Siena more because the views were that Tuscan countryside and the roofs were that orange-y color all over Siena.  This is what I was looking for on this spring break trip -- not sightseeing so much as hanging about,...the kids looked out from each lookout onto the piazza, searching for the police officer who had the job of telling people not to litter.