The Walking Dead and Freedom

For the past two years, I was dismayed at how many of my friends were watching and discussing on social media the series, The Walking Dead, and its companion, Fear the Walking Dead, two related shows about an apocalyptic world when Earth is struck by a mysterious virus originating from space.

Humans turn into the walking dead (zombies) when they die from natural death or from this virus. Everyone is infected, the CDC can do nothing about it, and it is actually blown up to prevent the escape of other variants of the virus. Nobody can evade the “turning” into flesh-eating zombies when they die of natural death, viral disease, accident, or are bitten by “walkers.”

The Bible says that the dead shall rise again but Christians had imagined that the risen dead would be normal humans again, not slow moving and guttural zombies who must feast on fresh blood and live tissue in order to survive.

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead. (Isaiah 26:19)

In the Walking Dead, the action takes place on the southeastern area of the United States. In the companion series, Fear the Walking Dead, which intersects at some point with some of the Walking Dead characters, the story is told how the virus occurred on the west coast, the trials and tribulations of characters in Los Angeles area, San Diego, Mexicali, Tijuana, and  other compounds on farms in Mexico.

Life transforms from the mundane to a survival of the fittest, kill or be killed, kill or be bitten, a constant battle that takes the main characters from town to town, along familiar roads now strewn with abandoned bloody cars, and an ever increasing army of walking zombies in search of a living, breathing victim.

A group of survivors, led by officer Rick, eventually finds a prison with tall fences, barbed wire and cells that can be cleaned of corpses and the walking dead. This prison becomes their freedom, their home for the foreseeable future. They feel safe inside, they can grow food in the courtyard, they have some medical supplies scavenged along the way or during their daily incursions “outside.”

Outside is a world of danger, gloom and doom, so frightening that the alternative of living inside a prison for the rest of their lives seems like safety from harm, a bleak world, but secure. The world is far from secure, as various living, breathing groups survive by praying on the weak and the defenseless.

The virus cannot get to Sheriff Deputy Rick Grimes' group and the dreaded walkers, the feared zombies with sharp teeth, are neutralized by the existence of the prison fence. The prison, with its enforced fences and gates, becomes the symbol of freedom. Designed to keep people in, the prison becomes safe heaven and keeps undesirables out. However, in greater numbers, they can still break down barriers and the chicken wire fence.

The viral pandemic destroyed the world as they knew it and there was no going back. They were driven into abject fear by their own friends and relatives, infected by a virus and now dead. Fear and the instinct for survival at all costs had become the epicenter of their lives.

I could not help but recognize the same real or imagined fear, in our world, a panic bordering at time on mass-driven hysteria, that is still driving our population in the United States and around the globe, two years after the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration of a pandemic.

President Trump brought into the White House and on the world stage two specialists, Drs. Fauci and Brix, who proceeded to scare the American population with death and dying on a daily basis. Dr. Fauci never left the White House, coloring the proverbial “sky is falling” with various colors of fright.

The abject fear drummed up and identical narratives repeated on every venue of mass communication by eager to please journos, drove the population at first forcibly into lockdowns and then by personal choice behind a mask and self-exile behind closed doors. People’s homes were no longer their castles, they became their voluntary prisons from which they communicated with the outside world by virtual Zoom calls and smart phones.

People gave up their freedoms immediately because they were driven into mass hysteria by globalists with a plan to fundamentally change their lives into the Marxist Shangri La they envisioned as a way to control everything from the Build Back Better platform of the Great Reset agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The Great Reset | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

Build back what? Voluntary prisons? Better jails and isolation? By rules devised by a few psychotic billionaires and U.N.? Build better fairy dust solar and wind energy so we can stop using fossil fuels like the United Nations has been advocating for seven decades but nobody listened? Plunging us into medieval darkness and despair? Funny how suddenly prominent world leaders  inserted the same rhetorical phrase, Build Back Better, into their speeches. And they were all doing it for the World Economic Forum’s The Great Reset agenda, ‘never let a crisis go to waste, global communism/fascism.

An engineered for gain-of-function virus provided an amazing excuse to do all the things psychotic globalists at U.N. couldn’t – engage planet lockdown, destroy fossil fuels, destroy medicine, get rid of a lot of old people, reduce consumption drastically, reduce the food supply, reduce water usage, reduce land use by a whopping percentage, and force humanity back into the dark ages.

You are not just hiding behind a prison barbed wired fence to find freedom, you are hiding behind a soulless mask, where your social cues are hidden, your empathy and compassion are diminished, and you experience constant fear. Behind a mask, people tend to become more prone to outbursts of violence, less empathetic, and they tend to dehumanize their peers.

Your life is not much better than officer Rick’s group in the Walking Dead, or those in Fear the Walking Dead, hiding in your home prison as a safer alternative to the dangerous outside world governed by a virus created as a bio weapon in Wuhan, you struggle to escape the Corona-19 Virus, and in the process you have lost your freedom and your humanity in one fell swoop.

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                            

Scientific Nutrition, Food Lines, Excess, and Worms

Photo: Compliments of DeWitt E.

It is inconceivable for those born after 1989, who never experienced want of anything, that at one time, the proletariat of the communist dear leader Ceausescu had to survive on a decreed daily rations of food and to stand in line from the middle of the night until stores opened and people fought for the food delivered in the morning.

Standing in food lines had become a method of survival and a national sport. Families involved their children, as young as five, to stand in lines to keep the place for a relative waiting in another line, always carrying an expanding string shopping bag reminiscent of a fishing net and extra cash.

Experiencing shortages of food because of war is something that even developed nations had to endure willingly to make sure that nutrition was available to all. For example, during WWII, there was a ration card issued to shoppers. The reason was obvious, the men were fighting a war and there were less people engaged in the economy to produce enough supply to satisfy demand while more resources were going to the war machine.

But the shortage of food people experienced for decades under Nicolae Ceausescu had to do with his ambitious communist plan to develop the heavy industry, no matter how unprofitable, and to pay off the debt to the west at the expense of the standard of living of the population.

The Communist Party had developed norms of “rational nutrition” based on medical criteria of age, gender, profession, physical condition, and energy expended on the job since the 1964. In case you wonder why they would embark on such endeavor, it was because communists do not leave anything to chance, everything you do must be controlled and enforced by law.

As shortages became more pronounced in the 1980s, the Communist Party issued new legal guidelines for nutrition. A huge control apparatus of propaganda was put into motion: doctors, college professors, the health ministry, the agriculture ministry, nutritional specialists, the communist press, the labor unions, and other political organizations sanctioned by the Communist Party. The declared official scope was to improve the population’s health. But the reality had all to do with the financial situation at the time. The economy was suffocated by Ceausescu’s ambition to pay off western debt and by his very expensive megalomaniacal projects to glorify him and his communist rule. He was, after all, the “maverick.”

A specialized commission proposed by the Health Minister in 1976 took its sweet time to develop norms of “rational nutrition.” It was not officially approved by the Communist Party’s “The Great National Gathering” until 1984. This “rational” program of nutrition led to a general suffering of the entire population unlike any other before.

People were starved but did not have to eat grass, leather, or engage in cannibalism as was the case in Ukraine. The man-made famine in Holodomor (Ukrainian for ‘murder by hunger’) happened in 1932-1933 when 28,000 people a day died of starvation. Stalin’s Soviet regime had taught Ukrainian farmers a lesson they never forgot. http://holodomorct.org/

An article in “Financial Times” of October 25, 1984, mentions that “Romania surprised its skeptical creditors by paying off a debt of $1.5 billion in the first 9 months of the year.” The same article mentions the fact that the payoff was achieved at the expense of the deplorable standard of living of the population, as evidenced by “the sad lines in front of all stores.”

Speaking about Romania paying its debt off ahead of schedule, Washington Post quoted Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona) in April 1989: "Fuel and electricity have been rationed for years. Staple foods, including milk, bread and flour, are rationed, and in many localities even these are unavailable. Meat is a rarity; soup bones only occasionally appear in stores. Decades of financial mis-planning and inefficient industrial development have led to the dire condition of the Romanian economy, making it the poorest in Europe after Albania." https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/04/14/debts-paid-romania-says/89557c5f-9f4d-4810-8e15-91538f134a3f/?utm_term=.c580cd34e479

The communist party leaders concealed the draconian rationing of food to pay off its debt by implementing the “scientific program of feeding the proletariat.”

The severe food shortages gave rise to black markets and hoarding, even though having excess food was punishable with jail time. People also bartered food and services to survive. Food lines became an economic input and the “entire social life developed around the obsession of finding food.” The terms “malnutrition” and “starvation” were replaced by the euphemistic concept of “rational nutrition.” http://www.istorie-pe-scurt.ro/cum-arata-o-cartela-pe-vremea-lui-ceausescu-programul-de-alimentatie-rationala/

An American who lived in Romania in 1983-1986 attested to the many horrors of Ceausescu’s reign of terror called the Golden Epoch. Speaking of food rationing and long-term malnutrition, she said, “I regularly saw people stand in line all day to buy a Styrofoam cup with a few broken eggs in it.  Unrefrigerated raw milk was sold on street corners on hot summer days.”

She continued, “Romania was rich in oil but Ceausescu shut down the urban heating grids [villagers burned wood for heat and there was no running water or indoor plumbing] in the middle of winter so that he could export the oil to the west for hard currency.  The very young and the very old dropped like flies.  We had no heat, no hot water and no cooking gas for 5 months out of the year.  We actually saw miles long gas lines right next to oil refineries.”

Joe Keller, an attaché to the American Embassy in the mid-80s, told another interesting story about food. He had picked up two bags of cherries from a street vendor at the airport. He was having friends over that evening to watch a movie. One of the children went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and came back horrified, telling her parents that there were worms in the kitchen. Sure enough, the table was covered in fruit flies’ worms. Some had crawled out of the cherries they had all consumed in the dark while watching the movie.

I don’t think I had ever eaten fruits in my childhood that did not have fruit flies’ worms. It was extra protein. Years later I wrote a story about that called Wormy Banana. https://ileanawrites.blogspot.com/2012/06/wormy-banana.html

Unscientific and chaotic means of running the socialist economy gave rise to decades of misery caused entirely by the communist dictatorship with its “golden” dear leader Ceausescu and his wife Elena.

The arbitrary and forced industrialization of Romania under his reign of terror gave rise to industrial giants which produced goods inefficiently, with massive energy consumption, massive raw material use, and high costs at the expense of the destitute people. Food and water were always rationed and in short supply and electricity and thermal energy were delivered arbitrarily on the whims of the apparatchiks in charge.

Nobody dared to object as the communist ideology ruled supreme. This perverse philosophy intended to shape the “new man,” a human being willing to enthusiastically approve and cheer the dictator’s random and destructive political and economic decisions.

Copying North Korea and China, Ceausescu developed his cult of personality. Millions were required to idolize and sing praises to the dear leader and his wife. Revisionist history placed him and his wife in the hall of revolutionaries, turning them into “the mother and father of the country.” Ceausescu, with just an elementary education, became the Honorary President of the Academy. https://istoriiregasite.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/romania-in-timpul-regimului-ceausescu/

While malnourished proletarians lived in Spartan conditions, barely heated concrete block apartments often without hot water and even cold water, the dear leader was chauffeured to different residences and his family luxuriated in the “Spring Palace” in Bucharest, built in the mid-60s.  This permanent family residence was decorated with one of a kind gold leaf mosaics, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, mahogany, rose, and teakwood furniture, hand-made brocaded draperies and tapestries, an extensive collection of original paintings and sculptures by famous Romanian artists, a trophy room, a wine cellar, and a bunker. There was Limoges, Baccarat, Mainz and other expensive porcelains and crystals. The 5,000 square meters residence had 170 rooms spread on two levels and a basement (88 rooms). His Swiss bank account was flush with millions of dollars. https://www.punctul.ro/in-vizita-la-fosta-resedinta-a-familiei-nicolae-ceausescu/

While the proletariat stood in food lines, subjected to “scientific nutrition,” the communists engaged in obscene excesses.

The Prison that is Socialism

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

Imagine a large prison with beautiful mountains that you are not allowed to climb because you are too poor to afford the gear and you must get a permit from the warden. These mountains grow blue spruce and pine forests where bears and other creatures dwell but you cannot visit because important people are hunting brown bears and they’ve paid huge sums to shoot them under the supervision of the game warden.

If you wanted to hunt, it would not be possible because you did not have a license or a hunting rifle. Such weapons had been confiscated from the entire prison population long ago. But the warden and his men are well-armed and prepared to round up the bears or whatever God’s creatures his higher-ups were in the mood to slaughter for sport with their high power rifles.

This prison has beautiful rivers but you don’t own boats and canoes, only those who control the prison can afford expensive boats and licenses to go fishing or to spend leisurely afternoons on the water and on special lakes reserved only for those in power. Some of the rivers are the pride and joy of the elites, but most are heavily polluted by industrial activity because the watchers don’t care about environmental conservation.

This prison has cinder block towers for the residents forced off the land and crowded onto nine-story blocks made of reinforced concrete. The captives within can go about on foot, by train, by bike, and by rickety buses.

They are told how much they can eat and how many calories they can consume daily. It is degrading to be forced to stand in line to get daily rations of food but they are used to it if they want to survive. If they are lucky, they can find better choices twice a year, on Easter and at Christmas.

There are churches that perform baptisms, marriages, and burials. Church bells can be heard joyously ringing on religious holidays but sadly when someone passes. Death is inevitable for those in power and the prisoners alike, they are all equal eventually.

Nobody lives better than their neighbors but they look with envy at the wealth of their captors. The block informers make sure there is a detailed dossier on the comings and goings of every prisoner. Once in a while, a few are rewarded for their loyalty with a trip to a wellness spa with mineral waters and stinking Sulphur baths with magical healing properties.  The majority is not loyal; captive subjects just gave up any resistance in the face of utter defeat, mental and physical. They are very tired, overwhelmed, and in survival mode.

The mountains are rich in minerals and gold, but nobody can go explore even though everyone owns the mountains. If they start digging or even ask to dig, they get arrested for trespassing and theft.

If you want to travel, you have to have enough money saved from your hard labor and ask permission from the state police which is in charge of giving out passes. The police always says no unless the prisoner is an exceptional athlete or musical genius in which case they are told yes but a security police guard follows them around the clock to make sure that they do not escape this beautiful prison built specifically to keep everyone in.

Food is scarce in this well-maintained and state of the art prison; everyone is thin, but not necessarily healthy as nutrition lacks a lot to be desired. People are not given vitamins or supplements unless they are really sick when often time it is too late.

The theoretically trained doctors experiment on the prison population with no consequence for their mistakes. How can one sue the watchers? There is nobody to watch the watchers, they do what they want.

The hospitals are oozing decay and negligence; equipment is rusty, sheets are stained and torn, medicine is missing, and if a prisoner is 70 years old, he/she is left to die because they are old anyway, they’d lived long enough; and the prisoners have no one to complain to or to protect them, crowded as they are in the large wards with chicken wire beds and rusty metal stands which were once painted white. Dubious stains cover the dirty walls, the floors, and even the mattresses.

Patients can pray to God in beautiful churches or in their cells but it seems that priests have forgotten them and are favoring the elites. The church has become an instrument of manipulation, preaching the agenda of the highest contributor. God is definitely lost in the incense wafting from a priest’s silver censer.

It looks dystopian inside but to the world, the outdoors is breathtakingly beautiful and the streets are clean. The prison warden has armies of gypsy bees sweeping the streets and, if as much as a cigarette butt is thrown on the ground, the offender is taught a painful and expensive lesson.

This prison has clean schools where directed curriculum is strict and approved by the chief warden, followed religiously by thousands of busy teacher bees supervised by principals with a waspy demeanor. Prisoners pay for all these equal benefits with their lack of freedom, pretending to work every day while the prison system pretends to pay them in their paternalistic generosity.

Many prisoners tried to escape this jail by cutting the barbed wire at the border, making a run for it and getting shot, or swimming across the large southern river and drowning. Few managed to flee and escape this prison. Many paid the ultimate price while attempting to find freedom.

The democracy spelled out in the socialist republic’s constitution was often hurled at these prisoners as a threat that democracy had gone to their heads and they better behave or else.

This dystopian prison country was the police state called socialism. One day the prisoners had had enough exploitation and mounted a revolution with the help of the army, arrested the socialist dictator who was trying to escape by helicopter, and executed him and his wife after a brief trial.

That free men and women from other societies want this kind of prison in their countries today, it is baffling to those who escaped the police state called socialism.

 

Exodus from Tyranny

If you are trying to escape from your country and they shoot you in the back, that’s not a nation, it’s a prison. Nobody would risk it all if life was good and happy. No Cuban would get into a rickety boat or try to swim in shark-infested waters to the U.S. shores if life was so great in Cuba. People attempt to escape oppressive, tyrannical governments that keep their bodies and minds imprisoned in conditions that most Americans cannot fathom.

People escaped the communist Iron Curtain in many ingenious ways since the Bolsheviks closed borders to the West. They were not allowed to see how much better people lived under free market governments. Some would be defectors made it and some did not. They escaped by boat, U-Boat, hot air balloons, chair lifts, cars, small planes, crop dusters, swimming, crawling, hiding in the car engine compartment, hiding inside passenger seats, evading their guards at sports competitions abroad, digging tunnels under the border, and traveling with fake passports. The human ingenuity to escape oppression and to seek freedom is boundless.

Checkpoint Charlie Museum documents many escapes and fails, including the death of Peter Fechter who bled to death in front of the white border line and before the eyes of the entire world on August 17, 1962. He became the symbol of what is wrong with socialism and communism – the communist party government keeps people fenced in like a prison and, if they try to escape, they will meet a swift death. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum claims that 1,303 people were killed until 1989, trying to escape from the German Democratic Republic, a communist stronghold, to the Federal Republic of Germany.

Few stories of successful escapes are as complicated as Albani’s. I wrote the two-part account of his 1969 escape from communism and the return a year later to help his wife defect as well. Albani became a successful engineer who worked for years in New York. http://canadafreepress.com/article/albanis-escape-from-communism-and-his-free-life-in-america1 http://canadafreepress.com/article/albanis-escape-from-communism-and-his-free-life-in-america

I never understood why young liberals yearn for socialism with such passion when none of their activist “role models,” Hollywood types and political figures, is in a hurry to move to the paradise they advocate for the rest of the millennials who are gullible enough to believe them.

I did not see Bernie Sanders move to the socialist paradise he promoted during his campaign and still does. On the contrary, he is happy in Vermont, with his expensive cars and homes.

I never saw a Hollywood star or a public person, activist, community organizer, or politician seek medical treatment and surgery in Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea. Michael Moore told us they had the best medical care in the world and it is free.  What a deal!

Never mind that their hospital wards are decaying in a pathetic state of disrepair, neglected, dirty, with urine, feces, and caked on blood stains. Never mind that Venezuela, once a prosperous nation, after 18 years of Chavez’s and Maduro’s socialism, cannot even produce enough food, toilet paper, medicines, and gasoline for its people, even though it has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

Venezuelan millennials demonstrate against the regime weekly, to no avail. Their parents believed the socialist lies and voted in the rapacious socialists who stole the country’s wealth and became billionaires at the expense of the hapless poor to whom they threw a few freebies now and then as pacifying bones. As the regime keeps printing money without the backing of goods and services, the inflation rate in Venezuela has already skyrocketed to 720 percent after so many years of socialist “paradise.”

Community organizers, agitators, and socialist apparatchiks are not very good at planning centralized economies successfully. They have failed everywhere they tried on their way to communism. They have the gift of gab, policing, theft, and oppression.

Who knew that standing in endless lines in hot or cold weather for food, medicine, toilet paper, and other essentials spoiled American leftists take for granted, makes us better humans and enrich our lives?

I am still waiting to see western citizens crossing the border illegally into North Korea or Cuba because socialism is so great and desirable. The few Americans who were dumb enough to visit North Korea and ask for political asylum are imprisoned there.

According to Petrisor Peiu, shortly after the communist regime took power in Romania, 1945-1960, the country lost, by historians’ account, most of the intellectual elites. Those who remained and/or survived were reintegrated (indoctrinated) into society with many restrictions to their freedoms. Communism destroyed the fabric of society to such an extent that recovery has been very slow. It is hard to erase decades of fear, indoctrination, and welfare dependency mentality.

After 2000, according to United Nations’ estimates, 3.5 million Romanians, 17 percent of the population, left for greener economic pastures. Since the integration into the EU in 2007, 14,000 doctors and 30,000 registered nurses left, leaving behind only 57,000 doctors. In the massive brain drain, 300,000 engineers and other technical personnel sought residence and employment in other countries as well.

If socialism and communism are so great, why are so many people leaving? And once they get wherever their destination is, why are they trying to install through voting the very socialist or communist society they’ve fled? My educated guess is that the deep socialist and communist indoctrination from schools and colleges, coupled with youthful idealism, are hard to overcome.

If Fabian socialism of Western Europe is so enviable and desirable, why are they such a basket case of failed multiculturalism, drug culture, Muslim rapes, and bankrupt governments who tax their citizens to death?

Smart and cautious Venezuelans, who have seen the writing on the wall for a long time, are fleeing to neighboring countries in expectation of worse to come. Nobody wants to leave their loved ones and friends behind but have no choice. I should know, I left everything behind in 1978 and seldom do I regret that decision. But the freedom from communism exacted a heavy toll nevertheless.

 

 

Day Trip to Volterra and Siena

Volterra Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

After a morning of twists and turns, hair pin curves in which speeding motorcyclists taking terrifying chances would dangerously zigzag with death-defying speed between the lanes of traffic, we got closer to Volterra. As the road got narrower and narrower, Volterra rose from the hills like a medieval clay-tiled gem surrounded by intensely green trees, yellow tiled roofs, and dizzying drops. With much fewer visitors than San Gimignano, Volterra was a tranquil place with a well-preserved Roman theater dating back to the first century B.C., excavated in 1950, columns, and Etruscan ruins.

Considered one of the “twelve cities” of the Etruscan League, Volterra was known as Velathri. It is believed that the surrounding area has been inhabited since the end of the 8^th century B.C.  There are excavations of Etruscan tombs in Valle Bona. The Etruscan City Walls have two well preserved gates, Porta all’Arco (3^rd-2^nd centuries B.C.) and Porta Diana.

Volterra

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

The Guarnacci Etruscan Museum displayed thousands of funeral urns dating back to Archaic periods, a bronze statue, “Ombra della sera,” (Shadow of the Evening), and “Urna degli Sposi” (Urn of the spouses), an Etruscan couple’s effigy sculpted in terra cota.

Photo: Wikipedia

 

Piazza dei Priori is a well-preserved medieval Tuscan town square; the Palazzo dei Priori is the town hall built in 1208-1257.

The Volterra Cathedral, enlarged in the 13^th century, had a ciborium, a free-standing baldachin in the sanctuary. It was used at times to emphasize the altar and other times to hide it.

Volterra Roman Theater

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

Walking through the narrow cobbled stoned alleys, with the sun barely peeking through buildings erected too close to each other, casting shadows and cool air on a sunny early May day, I compared the surroundings with the images of Volterra cast in Luchino Visconti’s 1965 movie Sandra.

Medici Fortress Prison with famous restaurant

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

The Fortezza Medicea (Medici Fortress), built in 1474, is a prison and houses the famous restaurant by the same name where the meals are prepared by inmates. I was not sold on the idea of eating a meal prepared by people who did not just broke the law but committed murder by various means, poison coming to mind. I did not say a word about its existence to my husband who would never miss an opportunity to eat an Italian meal, even one prepared by inmates.

The Renaissance era fortress is a high-security prison for criminals who serve at least seven year sentences. Even though customers must pass a background check, several checkpoints, and eat with plastic forks and knives, since the prison administrators started operating the restaurant in 2006-2007 as a rehabilitation effort, the tables in the Medici fortress are booked weeks in advance. I find it peculiar that people are willingly subjecting themselves to such scrutiny just to eat a meal prepared and served by criminals.

Not far from Volterra is Lajatico, home town of the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. He gives annual concerts in Teatro del Silenzio, concerts that are attended by people from all over the world.

Peering from the upper road down to the Roman theater, I imagined the majestic Greek tragedies played on stage for the entertainment of the Romans long ago. Behind me I found Fabula Etrusca, a tiny gold showroom with unique Etruscan pieces, one of a kind. The tiny display windows were stylishly decorated but contrasting oddly with the rock walls and stony building carved into the rock with a heavy iron gate, steps going down into a dungeon with an electronically locked metal door with grates that slid like a prison cell door. The limited lighting focused mostly on the pieces displayed on dark blue velvet. It was somewhat spooky funereal and the prices were steep. A lady appeared out of nowhere and seemed very unfriendly and stiff, almost like a jailer. I could not find the exit fast enough and some fresh air.

On the way back to the underground parking garage, we found a store famous for its alabaster works of art. Preoccupied with the beauty of mushrooms, I bought one carved in clear alabaster and three inexpensive elastic bracelets faceted from real stones and polished into geometrical shapes.

I was ready to move on to the next stop, Siena. I really wanted to see the fan-shaped piazza called Campo where the famous Palio is held each year.

Tuscany Hills

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

We backtracked most of the slopes and dangerous curves of Tuscany on the way to Siena. The GPS kept taking us on one-way streets which were impossible to escape. Italians were honking at us, shaking their fists, and some even stopped their cars in the middle of the one-way road, got out, and started yelling obscenities and making not so nice hand gestures in our direction.  We laughed at them and continued on our way. Somehow I think there is a picture of us somewhere in the traffic department in Siena, the poster of stupid American drivers who do not know what a one-way street is.

Streets of old Siena

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

We finally found a parking spot about .7 km from the Piazza del Campo, the shell-shaped square. We walked very slowly as my knees have had enough and I was in excruciating pain. The streets were narrow and dark with a distinct medieval look.

Siena Cathedral

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

On the Siena Cathedral (Duomo), a Capitoline Wolf reminds the visitors of the legend that Siena was founded by Senius and Aschius, sons of Remus who was murdered by his brother Romulus. Fleeing Rome, the two sons took with them to Siena the statue of the famous she-wolf who nursed the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus. Senius and Aschius rode white and black horses on their journey from Rome, a source of inspiration for the coat of arms of Siena with a white band on top of a dark band.

Capitoline Wolf statue

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

Etymological scholars argue about the origin of the name Siena. Some say that it comes from Senius, others from the Etruscan family name Saina, the Roman family Saenii, or even the Latin word senex (old), or from the Latin verb, seneo (I am old).

Sarcophagus of St. Catherine

Photo: Wikipedia

 

Siena was first inhabited by Etruscans (900-400 B.C.) and then by a tribe called Saina. Etruscans were good planners; their settlements were built in forts on top of hills that could be easily defended against invaders.  Etruscans were outstanding farmers who used irrigation to grow food on terrain sometimes less suitable for agriculture. During Emperor Augustus’s reign a town called Saena Julia was founded on the same location as documented in 70 A.D.

An Italian Romanesque-Gothic masterpiece, the Duomo, built on top of an existing church which in turn was built on top of a pagan temple dedicated to Minerva, was meant to be massive when the construction began in the 12^th century, but lack of funds because of wars and the plague forced the Sienese to reduce its size by the time the façade was completed in 1380. The inlaid marble floors are among the most intricate in Italy, the artistic work of many master craftsmen. The pulpit was sculpted by Nicola Pisano. Frescoes were painted by Ghirlandaio and Pinturicchio. Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti and other famous sculptors left their imprint on the cathedral.  

The famous Campo in Siena

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

Suddenly, the narrow streets ended in a gate with downwards stairs which opened into Piazza del Campo, the famous shell-shaped town square in front of the Palazzo Pubblico with the tall tower, Torre del Mangia. The sloping square was a disappointment for me because I imagined it so much larger. The photos I had seen are always taken from the air, making the square look deceptively much larger.

A view from above of the Campo square

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

 

We found a comfortable outdoor restaurant of the many encircling the square and had an early dinner while watching young people have a celebratory fight with pillows in the middle of the square, egged on by a female DJ from the local radio station.

The Palio (horse race) is held in this cobbled square twice a year, on July 2 and August 16, a competition reflecting the medieval rivalry of wards (Contrada), and a significant part of the culture of the town.

Each of the seventeen wards has a mascot representing a city neighborhood that was formed originally as battalions for defending the city. The trophy is a painted banner or Palio with the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Each race commissions a new Palio by famous artists and then is retired in the Contrade museum. During the Palio, the entire town is festively decorated with lamps and flags with the colors of the teams. I had to purchase such a Contrade scarf which locals wear during the festivities.

A Sienese takes Palio very seriously; they are baptized twice, once in the Catholic Church and a second time in the fountain of their own Contrade. A dangerous competition, the Palio is surrounded by celebrations and banquets before the event. The city pretty much closes many roads in order to accommodate banquets in excess of 1,000 people.

With pomp and circumstance, drummers and flag twirlers dressed in traditional medieval costumes accompany the horses and the riders on the day of the event, first to the Contrade parish church for prayers and dedications and then in a procession along the route, in the streets, and ending in the Piazza del Campo, a traditional parade called Corteo Storico.

Each Palio can only accommodate ten of the seventeen Contrades. Seven teams run who had not run in the previous year’s Palio, and three are drawn from the remaining ten. The bare back riding race that lasts three minutes is dangerous for both the horse and the rider. Practice races take place three days before the actual race. Horses on their way to practice are cheered by crowds as the stars of the show. Emotional Italians take the race and winning very seriously. Vets are available during the race and cushions have been placed at the most dangerous corners of the course to protect both horses and riders in case of falls.

I counted at least six beautiful churches and a historic Siena synagogue. Most notable was the sanctuary of Santa Caterina, with the old house of St. Catherine of Siena. The miraculous Crucifix of the late 12^th century from which the saint received her stigmata is housed here, including a 15^th century statue of St. Catherine.

Palazzo Salimbeni was the original headquarters of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, one of the oldest banks in continuous existence in Europe. The Palazzo remains in their possession to this day.

The city’s beautiful botanical gardens are cared for by the University of Siena. The Siena Jazz School, Enoteca Italiana in the Medici Fortress, and patrician villas that display the artistry of Baldassarre Peruzzi contribute to the unusual charm of Sienna.

We limped back to our car which, surprisingly, was still there and had not been issued a ticket even though we far exceeded the posted 60 minutes. At that moment in time, Siena looked to us much more beautiful in our rear view mirror and we were elated to get back to Florence.