Siena - City Tower and Barberi Balls

April 22, 2014

We got up early to climb the City Tower (Torre del Mangia) in Il Campo. K and T wanted to do it the day before but it had already closed for the night. The City Tower is Italy's tallest secular tower. Ha! It was named after a hedonistic watchman who consumed his earnings like a glutton consumes food. His chewed-up statue is in the courtyard. 

We started our adventure of climbing up 300 steps to the top. It got very skinny near the top and if someone was coming the opposite way you literally had to pin your body against the wall so that the person was able to pass. 

The stairs going up and up

The reward was at the top for climbing 300 steps. The views were just incredible. 

 After we all recovered from our hike up and caught our breath we started our decent down the tower. 

T leads the way!

As we got closer to the bottom they had an open area to look down onto Il Campo

Going Down...and down...and our legs are turning into jelly

We walked around for a little while before we had to check out of our hotel. We noticed another thing that was sold in almost every single store were bags of wooden balls called barberi. They were each painted with the colors of the contrades (the 17 neighborhoods of Siena). They had them in all different sizes from teeny tiny to the size of an apple. Children play with these balls here and race them on tracks. 

barberi balls

you might see one of these on a playground with children racing their balls

This is a building in Siena that has all the neighborhood flags on it

We checked our of our hotel and Joe went to get the car so that we could load up our luggage. 

The view from our room to the left

the view to our right

Open family room area for guests

We said goodbye to Siena and started our journey to Assisi. It was about an hour and a half to Assisi so this was just a quick trip.