Photo: Siena, Piazza del Campo 13 August 2026, first day of Palio. ©Maria, author’s cousin. 

Mid-August: some lazy thoughts from my sofa.

“What if, in Siena, it didn’t stop raining until Christmas Eve? Would the Palio¹ be run on Christmas Day?” my partner asked me on the second day of watching the green flag² hanging from Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. “I don’t know, I guess we just have to wait and see”. Cities live on different temporalities. Echoing ancient rituals, remembering sacred space, requalifying damned places. Time and space together exercise a particular sense of belonging. In the medieval city of Siena, these rhythms of temporalities still exist as something vibrant and are tightened together in the Palio, a horse race approximately five hundred years old. All year round, thousands of tourists walk the narrow streets of Siena, consuming the city as a disposable landscape. But then, twice every summer, Siena reminds its citizens, guests, and tourists how ancient civic structures and laws, reinterpretations of territory and rivalries, are able to resist the capitalistic way of seeing the city. The Palio brings together space and time, providing a perfect case to reflect on what Henri Lefebvre called rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004), and its importance in studying the dynamics between rituals, bodies, old glories, and contemporary challenges. The Palio is a synthesis—or a rhythmanalysis—between the city’s legal geography and its temporal dimensions. Twice a year for about ten days, this dialectic resists the contemporary phenomenon that hits many a small urban reality: the commodification of time and the objectification of public space. And this is what inspired my mid-August lazy thoughts.

The green flag is still hoisted and we have time to kill, so I narrate to my partner the many details, rules, and stories about the Palio, only to find myself unexpectedly very involved— not just as a Senese, but a legal geography scholar! Siena famously has a soft spot for the common good and the civitas (Skinner, 2003). Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s illustrious fresco “Le Allegorie e gli Effetti del Buono e del Cattivo Governo”, dated 1340 AD, was commissioned by the ‘Nine’—as the ancient government was known—to instruct the rulers who wandered through the rooms of the Palazzo Pubblico. It is still housed there today, and even now, the City Council’s guests at the Palio—representatives of institutions, members of Parliament and other important dignitaries—take a tour of the Lorenzetti room before watching the race from the trifore. This concern for Siena’s territory and for the governance of the city is also reflected in another document, one that is not so much artistic as legal. To put an end to territorial disputes, in 1729, the then Governor of Siena, Violante of Bavaria, signed the new ‘Bando dei Confini’ (Boundary Proclamation), an edict aimed at dividing the city into 17 districts—the current 17 contrade that compete in the Palio—which are territories, each with its own square, church and headquarters. Since 1729, Siena has remained divided in accordance with this edict, which still serves as a legal precedent in disputes over territory and property between neighbouring contrade.

Killing time, thinking about territories, rivalries, edicts, rules, governance. While lying on my sofa in Lisbon (where I live) on a lazy mid-August afternoon waiting for the Palio in Siena (my hometown), shutters closed, Siena local tv channel Canale3 Toscana on streaming, I cannot help but think about Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis. In his book “Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life” (2004) he posits that time should never be understood without space and everyday life. Lefebvre’s attention to rhythm and to the pulse of a particular cultural event or space allows for a critique and the possibility of resistance. On the one hand, there is the tedious view of the infiltration of capital into everyday life (Lefebvre, 2004), on the other, the potential for immanent critique at the heart of the quotidian (Potts, 2015).

This also reminds me of the theme of this year’s drappellone,³ painted by Romanian artist Teodora Axente: the metamorphosis. As she unveiled the drappellone, Mayor Fabio commented on its theme:

History does not stand still; it does not belong solely to museums, archives or the pages of books. The Palio does not evoke a history frozen in an immutable past; it is not a repetitive account, nor a theatrical re-enactment of a finished past. Rather, it is a living force that, in its own way, breathes life into the present and the future.

This metamorphosis is more than a transformation, it is an immanent critique necessary to imagine the future. In this sense, the topic of the metamorphosis seems to be very distant from the commodification and capitalistic way of thinking about space and time. As Marxist geographers Harvey (1991), Soja (1989), and Lefebvre himself teach us, capitalism creeps into the ruins, the gaps, the holes that live in wounded cities. It takes space in the vulnerability of a shock, of what is now a post-: post-modern, post-war, post-industrial. It is more about rebuilding, rebranding, growth and changing the space rather than consciously embarking on a metamorphosis. In Siena, twice a year the Palio provokes and undergoes a metamorphosis; in doing so, is it teaching us how to resist to times and spaces defined by capitalistic dynamics of growth and expansion? Is the Palio, with its tensions, rivalries, strict norms, superstitions, religiosity, and paganism, teaching us to just wait, to take time, to postpone an event, in the hopes that sooner or later the rain will stop? Now that I’m getting used to living in a state of suspense, I welcome the green flag with a sense of pleasure. It’s raining: the Palio has been postponed again.

Another day of rain in Siena, another day of waiting. I start thinking about cities that transformed, that changed, losing their temporalities. The first that comes to mind is the city where I live: Lisbon. In 1988, a gigantic fire destroyed eighteen buildings, “dramatically materialized in those burnt ruins was the mismatch between Lisboa’s delusional image of herself and the reality of her downscaled, decentralized and precarious body”, as Pavoni (2021) tells us in his essay on Lisbon temporalities,

what was once the shiny capital of an ultramarine empire, had become a peripheral European city whose colonial prostheses had been drastically severed by the 1974 revolution, further aggravating her inconsolable saudade for the glorious past (p. 105).

Pavoni sees in this trauma the same shock that in medical terms is commonly termed the phantom limb syndrome. It is in these vulnerabilities that capitalism managed to infiltrate, transforming the city in her delusional image. The ways we live a city is about how space transforms a place, but also how time makes us feel about those places and invites us to experience them. 

When we think about European cities, we often imagine atmospheres and places encountered in books, films, stories, dreams. There are temporalities that we imagine, desire, project, that only survive in our imagination. Remember the imaginary of the broke, bohemian artist drinking cheap wine in Paris? Well, he has been replaced with natural wines and a real estate market that forces artists outside the city. Such imaginaries derive from rituals that belonged to a city in certain moments of time.

Here I am, secretly grateful to have time to sketch a few lines about Siena, its temporalities and Lefebvre. Rituality is part of a rhythm that gives space a sense of belonging. While on the sofa with Canale3 Toscana in the background, I start researching and reading about rituals, time, and urban space. I happen upon a call for papers of the University of Groningen⁴ (p. 1):

The conceptualization of time is an intrinsic feature of belonging. Those sharing the space of a community ideally share a sense of time, making temporality a powerful coordinating force (Baldwin & Keefer 2019). Living together in a community requires synchronization (Zerubavel 1981; Elias 1984; Lefebvre 2004; Rüpke 2011). This concerns both the pragmatics of regulating quotidian activities, but also the shared concept of the shape and depth of time. In the ancient world, claims to urban space are often bound to a sense of deep time, whether through tradition, ancestral ties, localized stories of city founders, heroes, and the gods.

This strikes me, because during the Palio, Siena is at the same time an ancient world, and the world of today. The Palio is a testimony of this metamorphosis, of this resistance to any other kind of infiltration, with the ability to change where necessary, and a tireless enthusiasm of telling stories and re-telling the past.

It is late at night, and Canale3 Toscana had to change its programme. During the 48-hour wait, 4 or 5 people gathered in the studio to watch and comment on a series of old Palios dating from the 1950s onward. For each one, there is a story to tell, a relative to say goodbye to, a memory to share. In this sense, “the conceptualisation of time is an intrinsic feature of belonging”.

At last, today is the day of the Palio, and the wait is coming to an end. From now on, the sense that time has stood still, the impossibility of it all, gives way to excitement. The contrade prepare for their race (their battle). There is the moment of dressing up, the blessings, the procession, and finally, the race. The city’s key locations, the political and religious institutions, and the square become the places where all these rituals take shape and follow a rhythm. Siena is made up of rituals, of images, of civitas, of myth, and laws. In the Palio, Siena brings different temporalities into everyday life. The complexity of Siena’s temporalities is an invitation to reject the separation of the temporal from the spatial, as Lefebvre taught us. The risk lies in reducing space to Euclidean proportions, abstracting concepts and accepting generalisations, thereby transforming the urban space into an image that is too distant from the city itself, detached and lost forever—easy prey for capitalistic interference. In this sense, there is a need for a more concrete vision of public space. Therefore, “localised time and temporalised space” (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 89), giving space to bodies, pulses, and the everyday, as Lefebvre notes, is a fundamental admonition in the implementation of public policies, in urban governance, and in the intrinsic resistance to the infiltration of capital, commodification and the commercialisation of our cities.

If it rains until Christmas Eve, the Palio will be run on Christmas Day. All we can do is wait.

References

Lefebvre H (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London/New York Continuum

Skinner Q (2003) L’artiste en philosophie politique. Ambrogio Lorenzetti et le Bon Gouvernment. Editions RAISONS D’AGIR Paris

Balestracci D (2010) Violante Beatrice Gran Principessa di Baviera. Vita e Storia di una Donna di Confine. Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena

Potts T (2015) Rhythanalysis: space, time and everyday life, The Journal of Architecture Volume 20

Harvey D (1991) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

Soja E (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso Press

Pavoni A (2021) Lisbon in a Phantom Limb. Desired Landscapes. Amagazine Reading Into Cities

1The Palio is a horse race held in Siena’s Piazza del Campo. It takes place twice a year, on 2 July and 16 August. The Contrade, which represent the city’s districts, take part. The city’s territory within the walls is divided into Terzi: Città, San Martino and Camollia, and within these into seventeen Contrade, with boundaries established in 1729 by the ‘Bando di Beatrice Violante di Baviera’, Governor of the City; these boundaries are still in force today and form one of the foundations of Contrada legislation. It is important to emphasise that the Palio is not a festival organised for tourist purposes; it is an integral part of the city’s political life. To know more about Violante Di Baviera as a woman and her edict, see in the references the book by Duccio Balestracci.

2According to the regulations, the Palio may be postponed to the following day in the event of rain. And if it rains the following day too, it is postponed to the day after that. And so on. The green flag, which is hung on the Palazzo Pubblico, is the message conveyed to the citizens: namely, that the Mayor and all those involved in the Palio have met and decided to postpone the Palio until the following day.

3The drappellone is also known as the ‘cecio’, which is a piece of canvas or fabric awarded to the winning contrada. It is, in fact, the actual trophy that is won. A different artist is commissioned to paint it for each Palio.

4https://www.rug.nl/research/icog/news/2024/1023-cfp-religioustemporalities.pdf