Siena, Italy

Ah, Siena: The land of moving statues, lactating she-wolves and thirsty pigeons!

Moving Statues
While staying in Cortona, we made a day trip to the Tuscan city of Siena. Miles, the youngest of our Cortonian Cortonese Cortite... of our crew from Cortona, certainly appreciated the number of shiny moving statues the city boasts. That foreign exchange program they set up has really shown tremendous results. (N.B. the statues don't actually move unless you give them some money, and if you take a photo, be prepared to give extra money or they will gang up on you as agreed in the Moving Statue Concord of 1927.)

Lactating She-Wolves
Like Cortona, Siena was first settled by the Etruscans and placed on top of a hill. My guess is that they settled it on top of the hill straight away, rather than settling it first and moving it uphill later on. Either way, it was settled by Senius, son of Remus. Remus was the brother of Romulus, Rome's namesake and the first of the line of Roman kings. Romulus and Remus were the sons of Mars and a human mother. According to legend, they were raised by a she-wolf, and so statues of Romulus and Remus under the teets of the she-wolf were erected in Rome. When Senius and he brother, Aschius, left Rome, they stole one of these statues from the Apollo Temple. So while similar statues can be found in Rome and represent Romulus and Remus, the statues in Siena represent Senius and Aschius. (Sounds to me like they kind of ripped off some tradition from Rome.) When they fled Rome, one brother was on a white horse, and the other a black one. This is where the shield and colors of the city come from. (That sounds original at least.) I'm not sure if Aschius then had two sons who, in turn, stole a statue from a temple in Siena and ran off to settle their own copy-cat city... I'll have to look into it. The whole black & white thing, though, these Siena folk stuck with it: they carted in special stones to build the cathedral in black and white.

Thirsty Pigeons
Pigeons can be found in great abundance in nearly every city in Europe (except maybe Germany, but we'll discuss the reasons for this later in the Big Trip). In prior travel, I've noted that Parisian pigeons are especially fat and that New York pigeons rarely have all of their limbs and eyes... well, the pigeons of Siena are living the good life. Judging by their appearance, they seem to eat as much as the pigeons in Paris while going to a New York Sports Club without loosing a foot to a taxi. Let's just say that they are svelte. We came across a group of especially active pigeons roaming around a statue of a dog of some kind. These pigeons seemed to rule the fountain as well as the coup. Then, as we were leaving the city, we noticed a man in a suit, carrying a pigeon by its wings. I'm not sure if he owned the pigeon, recently hunted the pigeon or is guardian of the dog statue that the thirsty pigeons desecrated. Whatever the case may be, he sent a small message to the pigeons of Siena that while pigeons may land on our statues and shit on our heads, we have opposable thumbs.

Loads of beautiful photos of Siena here.