Siena…

Siena…
Between the buildings, we were contained by the narrow streets where the sky intruded as a knife seemingly cleaving the mass of the city. Along with all of the students, I too was mesmerized by the Duomo. We spent two hours sketching… or should I say, "learning to see" the inside body of this magnificent building: the hexagonal crossing that conjured a mysterious forest of columns and arches; the shift in the nave from one angle to another just slightly deviant from the first – betraying the resistance of soils and the desire to magnify man's fleeting passage from the city of man to the city of God; the horizontal banding that bestowed a sense of compression, of wieight, even as it lengthened the horizontal nave and dematerialized the stone.

I am not sure, but the students seemed to dance in their eyes as we entered the Piazza del Campo for the first time. I still feel like running across the bowl of this most civil space: a slow spiral that takes me alongside the chapel and into the courtyard of the Palazzo Publico where I would meet the sky!

Between the narrow streets and the vistas as we ascended and descended the hills that have birthed this city (I doubt its mythic origin as founded by Senus, the son of Remus, and prefer to think of Siena as birthed by the hills… by the land herself…).