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Few Italian cities wear their medieval past as completely as Siena. Where Florence rebuilt and modernised across the centuries, Siena was largely frozen in time after the catastrophic plague of 1348 and a long period of Florentine domination that followed, and the result is a city whose Gothic core has survived almost intact. The fan-shaped Piazza del Campo, one of the great public spaces in Europe, still functions as the city's living room, sloping gently down to the Palazzo Pubblico just as it did when the Palio horse race was first run here in the seventeenth century. That race, held twice each summer between the city's seventeen contrade, or neighbourhood factions, is not a tourist spectacle staged for visitors but a genuine civic obsession that shapes Sienese identity from birth.

The contrade system is worth understanding before you arrive, because it explains why Siena feels less like a museum piece and more like a city with a fierce internal life. Each neighbourhood has its own church, museum, fountain, and colours, and rivalries between them run centuries deep. Walking the narrow lanes of Terzo di Città, Terzo di San Martino, or Terzo di Camollia, the three main districts that radiate from the Campo, you pass doorways hung with silk banners and plaques marking contrada boundaries that most residents could recite from memory.