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Friday, September 19, 2008

Trip to the Contrada Museum

Siena is famous for its annual horse race,The Palio, which is actually held two times during each summer in the main piazza in the city. The entire city of Siena is divided into 17 "contradas," or neighborhoods, that compete against each other in the Palio each year.
To get a sense of how intense the rivalry is... take the rivalry between BYU and U of U and times it by 500 years- some of the families here have been in the same contrada for that long! We were lucky enough to get to go to one of the contrada museums- usually tourists aren't allowed in. The museum has all of the history and artifacts from dating from the 1600's- pretty amazing!



View of Tuscany from the patio

1 comments:

modell said...

So cool that you got to see that museum. So, they have it twice during the summer? That would be awesome to see that sometime!