Piazza del Campo
— a shell of warm brick, tilted toward the tower.
Not only on a wall.
“A shell-shaped square in old Siena, paved in warm brick and divided by white travertine into nine wedges, one for each of the nine men who governed the city when the piazza was laid out. The whole space tilts down toward the Palazzo Pubblico and the Torre del Mangia. Mornings, the bricks are cool and the cafés are setting out chairs. Twice a year the wedges are covered with tufa earth, the perimeter is fenced, and ten horses run the Palio around the rim. The rest of the year, people sit on the slope and lean back against the warm clay.
Piazza del Campo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Piazza del Campo is the main civic square of Siena, in central Tuscany, about 70 kilometres south of Florence. It sits in the saddle where Siena's three hills meet, on ground that was the Roman-era marketplace and, before that, a drained marsh. The square was laid out in the late thirteenth century by the Council of Nine, the merchant oligarchy that governed Siena from 1287 to 1355, and slopes down toward the Palazzo Pubblico at its lowest point. The brick paving is divided by lines of white travertine into nine wedges, one for each of the Nine. The historic centre of Siena, including the Campo, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995.
The bricks were laid in a herringbone pattern and the paving was finished by 1349; the white dividing lines are travertine, the same stone that paves the rest of Siena's civic centre. At the lowest point stands the Palazzo Pubblico, begun in 1297 by the Council of Nine as the seat of the city government. Beside it rises the Torre del Mangia, completed in 1348 to a height of 88 metres and, when finished, one of the tallest secular towers in Italy. Opposite the palace, the Fonte Gaia by Jacopo della Quercia (1419) has marked the high end of the square for six centuries, though the panels in place now are nineteenth-century copies; the originals are preserved in the museum at Santa Maria della Scala.
The Palio di Siena runs around the perimeter of the Campo twice a year: July 2 (the Palio di Provenzano, for the Madonna of Provenzano) and August 16 (the Palio dell'Assunta, the day after the Assumption). Ten of Siena's seventeen contrade, the neighbourhood districts each named for an animal or symbol, race three laps bareback on borrowed horses. The course is the curved brick of the square itself, packed with tufa earth for the day and lined with mattresses at the sharp corners of San Martino and the Casato. The race lasts about ninety seconds. The modern twice-yearly schedule has been run since the mid-seventeenth century. Outside those two afternoons the Campo belongs to slow walkers and the cafés around its rim.