Siena is quite a two-faced city. Not the people, you understand, I'm talking about the city itself. If you arrive at night, as I did, Siena does not make a good first impression - in fact, I would go so far as to say that, if I hadn't already had a room booked, I may have simply turned around and got straight back on the train.

Everywhere seemed dark and dingy, the roads were wide and congested with traffic beeping at other traffic, and the train station was just far enough out from the centre to make it a real pain getting in - it just wasn't the town I was expecting. When somebody mentions Tuscany, you think of all those long hot summers your rich friends used to boast about, sitting on their porch soaking up the Italian sun, surrounded by talking rabbits and chocolate rainbows (my rich friends used to enjoy winding me up quite a bit). Even the name "Siena" invokes images full of earth tones and of a happy yellow sun shining down on a gently rolling hill covered in vineyards. I was expecting Siena to be a quiet, quaint little old town, sort of a small Venice without the canals, and that perhaps I'd be able to open a dirty wooden door in the town wall somewhere and look out at a hundred miles of vineyards. What I seemed to have got instead was a large metropolitan city full of metropolitan people, where any door I opened looked out onto a hundred miles of urban sprawl. Not exactly the same thing, in my book.

But I said that Siena was two-faced, so let me explain what I mean by that. At night, as I may have mentioned, Siena does not exactly inspire me to write poetry - in fact, it is more likely to inspire me to tear all my poetry books up in disgust. In daylight, however, all becomes clear. For a start, those dark dingy streets - at least the ones away from the main roads where all the buses and cars fight for dominance - turn out to be very old, stone roads paving the way between a seemingly infinite number of piazzas full of statues and buildings so ancient that you don't want to stand too close in case they suddenly crack down the middle unexpectedly and fall on you. All the gelato vendors open for business selling Ice cream, the coffee shops and restaurants make every effort to fill every space outside their establishments with chairs and parasols, and everything suddenly springs to life. Every street is suddenly filled with happy laughing children, who clearly don't seem to go to school here but instead just follow their teachers around the streets all day pointing at things and eating gelato.
I suddenly see Siena for what it actually is - an ancient city full of fascinating medieval buildings, piazzas and churches, a colourful sprawling metropolis from days gone by, surrounded by a massive stone wall which separates it from the Tuscany I was expecting, which waits just outside. Looking down from above, Siena must look like something from a fantasy epic, a walled city of twisty roads and lopsided medieval buildings bustling with life and colourful characters but entirely surrounded by nothing but countryside, woodland and the odd village for miles in every direction.

But it was raining. Not a nice quick downpour which would soon give way to Italian sunshine and leave the air fresh and breathable, but that insistent all-morning-long drip drip drip which makes you want to stay at home and bury your head under the duvet. In order to save my camera from an early demise, I ducked into a coffee shop on the central square - Piazza del Campo - and complained about the rain to the waiter, who didn't exactly make me feel any better by shrugging and saying "I know, first since November, what are you going to do?" in pidgin English.
Piazza del Campo is the central square in Siena, although for some reason this square is shaped like a shell. I'll start again. Piazza del Campo is the central shell in Siena, and is unusual in that the entire space seems to slope gently downward towards the middle as if the whole of Siena was one day thrown into existence complete from some sort of black hole at the centre. This is where you will find most of the important ancient governmental buildings such as the Palazzo Publico (town hall), as well as the Torre del Manglia, which, at 88 metres tall, was once the tallest secular tower in Italy. Built in the fourteenth century, the name is a great example of the medieval sense of humour - Torre del Manglia means "the tower of the eater" in reference to the habit it's first guardian had of stuffing his face at every possible opportunity. But my favourite thing about the Piazza del Campo, and you really have got to admire the imagination with which Europeans often pull these things out of the air, is that, twice every year, they clear out all the chairs and parasols and hold a horse race - the Palio di Siena - around the outside of the piazza. And just in case this isn't bizarre enough, it's a bareback race - so no saddles allowed, just lots of people falling off and being trampled underfoot. Not sure I'm particularly thrilled at the sound of this, but I guess, in Europe, any ancient tradition that doesn't involve killing bulls with sticks or throwing goats from high buildings is probably something to embrace.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.