1. Fonte Gaia, 1342

Per trasportare l’acqua dalla lontana zona dello Staggia (verso Castellina in Chianti) fino alla Piazza del Campo, Giacomo di Vanni di Ugolino (detto poi Giacomo dell’Acqua) impiego’ circa otto anni, spesi principalmente per scavare grandi canali sotteranei (detti ancor oggi Bottini) I quali, prossimi alla citta’, si allargavano in vere e proprie gallerie rivestite di mattoni, di eccezionale interesse tecnicoartistico. Si racconta che Carlo V, dopo una visita ai bottini senesi esclamasse che Siena era formata da due citta’ altrettanto belle, una sotto terra e l’altra sopra.

L’acqua giunse in Piazza del Campo attraverso un bottino maestro, probabilmente nel 1342, ‘e per la qual cosa i senesi per Siena si fece gran festa’. e la fonte, detta pertanto fonte gaia, fu costruita l’anno seguente 1343.

Piero Torriti, Tutta Siena Contrada per Contrada (53-54)

To transport the water from the distant zone of the Staggia river (towards Castellina in Chianti) all the way to the Piazza del Campo, Giacomo di Vanni di Ugolino (afterwards called Giacomo of the waters) spent nearly eight years, principally in excavation of great subterranean canals (afterwards called bottini), which were enlarged near the city to become genuine hallways lined with brick, of exceptional technical-artistic interest. A story recounts that Carlo V, after a visit to the Sienese bottini, exclaimed that Siena was formed of two cities of equal beauty: one below ground and another above.

The water arrived in Piazza del Campo by way of a master bottino, probably in 1342, and out of joy, the Sienese had an excellent party. The fountain, for this reason called Fonte Gaia, was constructed the following year, in 1343.

The first thing to get used to was what they did to my name. A nice, heavy and sensible syllable, in the Italian mouth Cole turned into Coh-leh, an irrepressibly cheerful and floaty thing. I considered using my first name instead, but years of avoiding it had become a habit. The idea of anybody calling me Darya made me feel like a small child caught in the middle of a shameful act.

In the end it was the first day of Italian class that resolved my dilemma. With very little to-do, the professor insisted we each choose an Italian name, to save her the effort of pronouncing our foreign monstrosities. I scanned the list sceptically. Ada, Alba, Anastasia, Brigitta, Chiara, Donatella, Francesca, Irma, Isotta (I wrinkled my nose at the idea), Laura, Piera, Susanna... every single name ended with an a. It was hopeless, I was going to have a floaty name for the next six months. My eye glanced over Gloria, but no, it was too glorious. Gaia? I thought. Gaia, I tested it out. Not bad, not too long. The irony of the name amused me a bit. I looked over at the girl next to me. She looked up and smiled, and I said in a low voice, ‘What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name Gaia?’

‘Joy,’ she said promptly. ‘Like the fountain in the piazza, have you seen it yet?’ her eyes were open with wonder. I scanned my memory of the past three days but I had seen too much and very little had sunk in. ‘No,’ I shook my head, and returned to the list.

An internal ‘no,’ as well. I didn’t want to be called Joy! Nor did I want to be named after a fountain. Gaia – no. Nora? No. Bianca? No. I skipped back to the top of the list. Aurora? I rolled the r’s experimentally and with a clumsy tongue. There was a certain charm in having a name I could barely pronounce. Ariele? The r was easier because of the vowel clusters, and it was the only name on the entire list that didn’t end with an ‘a’.

The students were already being called on to announce their new names. ‘Caterina,’ said a blond in the first row. ‘Michele,’ said a tall boy behind her in a frightening accent, followed by a Duccio, a Tiziana, an Arianna and a Giuseppe. Then there was a scuffle and some giggling, as the next girl, slightly pudgy and with skin tending towards ruddy, wanted to be Caterina as well. She asked in a girlish voice if the teacher would skip her.

The instructor sighed and rolled her eyes. She was tall and tanned, with brown hair in some sort of chignon and expensive looking sunglasses perched on the top. There were freckles across her nose, and although she appeared in her mid thirties, she could have been either younger (aged by the tan) or older (thanks to excessive beauty products and careful excursions to the gym.) She was wearing white pants, frighteningly pointed white shoes, a white knitted top that showed off her tanned arms and a large gold necklace.

‘This is going to take forever,’ the girl next to me whispered. I shrugged hopelessly. ‘I’m going to be called Ilaria,’ she added with a smile. ‘I’ve always wanted an aristocratic Renaissance name, in reality I’m Brianna like half of England, and what fun is that?’

Without meaning to, my stomach started to clench at Brianna/Ilaria’s chattiness. She wants to be friends. She’s looked at me and decided that I’m the one. I knew this with absolute certainty, eerily remembering once when I had done the same: walked into a classroom to meet the eyes of someone, and without knowing them, knew they would be my friend and companion. Without meaning to I thought of that first day of Astronomy 101 last September, of walking into the class late and my eyes scanning the room for a desk. All the eyes were on me, and somehow despite all of them, despite Karen and Mike saving a seat for me, my eyes met the stormy grey-green eyes of Madrigal Williams, and it was the seat next to her that I chose.

But the eyes staring at me were currently blue, of the black rimmed and mascaraed variety, and they were full of worry. ‘Are you okay, Gaia? That’s your name, right? You’re Gaia?’ Her English accent dragged me painfully back to reality, and I sunk my fingernails into my hand in anger. You have to get a grip, Cole, I said to myself, trying to ground myself with the force of my own name. And then I realised the conversation ball had passed me long ago, and I was left in the middle of a class of foreigners, and I was Gaia. And there was no choice any longer, it was done, thanks to Brianna/Ilaria.

Class passed in a blur of introductions. ‘Piacere!’ the instructor beamed, shaking Caterina’s hand.

‘Pee…um…pee-uh-chair?…ey?’ the blond replied uncertainly with a strong southern accent. I scanned the first week of the syllabus and tried not to listen to the conversation taking place around me.

Italian 1, Italiano per principianti

dr.ssa Fabbiana Sartorini

Lezione 1: introduzioni

compiti: Leggere Italiano di Oggi, capitolo 1 “Chi sei? Di dove sei? ”

Esercizi pg. 1-2 nel quaderno

Lezione 2: ripasso di capitolo 1, la grammatica di introduzioni

Esercizi pg. 3-4 nel quaderno

Lezione 3: discorso del vocabolario nel primo capitolo

Scrivere: una tesina di una pagina sulla tua citta.

I scanned down through the chapters: “Scusi, per andare…”; “Che lavoro fai?”; “In Famiglia.” A new chapter every Monday, I realised. I wondered why the professor thought she should write a syllabus entirely in Italian when the class was specifically geared to those of us who had never studied any. She had already told us that we needed to buy a textbook – presumably it would correspond with the syllabus, and she had drawn a complicated diagram on the chalkboard to show us how to get to the bookstore. I couldn’t make any sense of her diagram.

I was not entirely sure how I had gotten to school today. The first part of the trip was relatively easy. My Italian host sister Isabella had already accompanied me on the bus twice out of the past three days. I got off the bus in the center and followed the mass of humanity through a square and down a busy and winding street. After this, I had no idea what I did, but somehow I had arrived. And on time, which was more than I could say for some of the students.

This bookstore did not look like it would be easy to find. Feltrinelli, I read myself the name of it. ‘On the Via di Citta’. Feltrinelli, the double L sticking on my tongue before the final pert flick of the I. It almost made up for the nasty ltr consonant cluster in the beginning. Feltrinellum, I contemplated. I missed Latin, where I felt in charge of the world, and where the world was all on paper. In Italian if I mispronounced a word no one would understand me. In Latin even the best scholars make up their own pronunciation half the time.

Ilaria jabbed me with her elbow and I started, staring at the instructor with trepidation. It was my turn to say something, and I had no idea what.

“Buon giorno, signorina!” she smiled a very tanned, white toothed smile at me, and I presumed that I should respond.

“Buon giorno, signora,” I said cautiously, still surprised each time my tongue attempted to roll an r and failed. I waited for her cue.

“Come stai?” it came right as I expected.

“Bene, grazie.”

She nodded, well enough pleased by my responses, and passed on to Stefano, behind me. He looked like a punk, and something in his expression reminded me again of Madri. I turned quickly back to the papers on my desk, trying not to lose it again.

Get a grip, I reminded myself. Get a grip…Gaia. I felt rather grim at the idea of lasting the next five months with such a name. Greek, I thought. “Of the earth,” and often the name of a goddess. But naturally we weren’t in a Greek speaking country. Here, people thought Latin first – Gaia: gaiety. Joy. I personally preferred the previous connotation. Not gaiety, lightness and cheer. I wanted to be tied down, rooted.

(Buried,) the little alien in my head said tearfully. I could tell that I was losing focus again, but to my great relief, it was time for the lecture to end. Ilaria looked over at me with her outlined eyes widened in rage, and I tuned back into to what the teacher was saying: “Don’t forget to do your compiti, class!” Still so cheerful, her precise vowels reminding me that I was in a foreign universe. Ilaria was clearly outraged.

Everyone exited the classroom in a relieved jabber of native languages. Stefano behind me left with another boy dressed in oversized, ripped black, gabbling together gutturally in German as they zipped up their ratty black coats. Ilaria started complaining the minute we were out of earshot of the teacher, as she delicately wrapped a silk scarf around her neck. “Who does she think she is, giving us homework! This is Italy, for God’s sake, why are we to do all these ‘compiti’ instead of enjoying ourselves?” I shrugged wanly, unable to think up a response. Her scarf exactly matched her eyes, and I felt very short and American in comparison to her tall waify sophistication.

“Do you want to learn Italian?” I asked her hesitantly, after a minute. Ilaria giggled. “Sure,” she said, “If I can find a cute Italian boy to teach it to me.” She was leading me back the way I had come – I thought, up a short street and then suddenly stopped short. “You want to go to the bookstore, right? To get our textbook?” Ilaria looked over at me. “Or hey! I could give you a tour! You haven’t really seen much of Siena yet, have you?”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t mind going to get the textbook,” I hazarded.

“Well, let’s do that first, then,” she said, her long long legs striding off to the right, and her long pink flowered skirt flapping behind her. She created quite an image in the middle of all the grey stone, I had to admit. Her coat was long and black, her skirt peering pinkly out from under it. With her blond hair and blue eyes, it was clear from the stares of the people she passed that she wouldn’t have trouble finding an Italian boy to teach her some “Italian.” I tucked the ends of my wool scarf tighter into my ski jacket and began slowly to trail behind her.

“Why are you walking so slowly?” She called out to me, smiling. I felt awkward to see all the Italians turn and look at us, foreigners in the middle of them. I wished Latin were still a spoken language. The little alien spoke again, “but gaia, GAIA,” he whispered, “what would you have to say to them?” I picked up my step and caught up with Ilaria.

“Sorry,” I said breathlessly, “but my legs aren’t as long as yours.” She stared at me incredulously.

“Are you kidding, Gaia? You’re the only person in the class who’s nearly as tall as I am! You have a dancer’s body, are you one?” I nodded uncertainly, wondering where she was going with this.

“Are you going to dance here, in Siena?” her eyes were opened wide, excited.

“No…” I paused. “I arranged to use a studio to practice, that’s all. But I don’t really want to perform…for awhile.”

“What happened? Why not? Are you any good?” She immediately overwhelmed me with questions, and I stared at the street ahead of us, not a single car in sight, and tried not to be homesick for anything familiar. The street was paved in uneven blocks of grey stone, matched together in an odd herringbone pattern instead of straight across like bricks. The buildings on either side of the street were made of the same sort of stone, grey and variations of grey, grey green, grey yellow, grey brown. We passed a great open area and I read the street sign posted on the nearest building. “Logge del Papa,” it said. Square of the Pope, I repeated to myself. I looked around, and my gaze immediately snagged on a tall arched structure to my left, with an evil looking gate keeping people from entering. In front of it there was what looked like a few parking places. Most importantly, however, was the entablature. Across the top of the three arches, it proclaimed in fabulous, clear Latin PIUS II PONT MAX GENTILIBUS SUIS PICOLOMINEIS. Yo, I thought, pleased with myself all of a sudden. There’s the loggia, and there’s the pope. It all makes sense.

“This,” Ilaria said importantly, and pointed to the building to our right, “is the Piccolomini palace. They were one of the famous families in Siena during it’s years of power.” Piccolomini, I thought, swivelling to look at the logge again. This must have been their personal piazza.

“Which were the Sienese years of power, Ilaria?” I finally interrupted, confused. “And how do you know all this stuff already?”

“Oh, I’m sharing an apartment with these three other girls, and they are all Italian. So they took me on a tour and told me all this stuff. And,” she giggled, “I kind of have a perfect memory for history. I’m a history major in University, did I tell you that? I love all this stuff, the families that were in power and the palaces they lived in…”

She looked like she might swoon from excitement.

“Um, Ilaria?” I tried to get her attention back. “When were those years of power you were talking about? Like during the Renaissance, or before?”

“You bloody Americans!” She was almost shocked, but not quite. “You don’t think history was around before you were!” I shrugged, trying not to get personal.

“I just didn’t know,” I said. “I read a travel guide before coming here but I was distracted, I guess.”

“You read a guidebook? Gaia, you’re crazy. I have been reading about Siena and Florence and the middle ages for years, and you say you’ve come here and don’t even remember what was in a guidebook?!”

I shrugged. Ilaria had basically understood the situation. If I’d planned to study abroad, I would be in Rome right now. The alien keened, and I tried to focus on the loggia instead of thinking about my winter vacation. Siena, I concentrated. Hill town, possibly Etruscan, possibly Roman. Sena Giulia in Latin, I mused, then realised I’d escaped from Ilaria again.

“So, tell me then,” I said to her, recalling her attention from the top of a nearby tower. Before she could do more than turn to me, I heard a sound that made me freeze. It wasn’t an American siren with its two equal long tones, but I knew an ambulance anywhere. I turned around to see where it was coming from – there was a garage that had been hidden from sight by the three arched loggia, but now I could see it clearly, just as a white and orange striped ambulance sped out into the street in front of me, the lights on top flashing blue instead of my familiar white and red.

I still thought I might throw up.

“Away from here,” I said blindly to Ilaria, turning towards her and propelling her in the opposite direction.

“Calm down Gaia, calm down. It’s already passed.” I could hear the siren echoing in the narrow streets, warning the people to move out of the way as that single vehicle careened through the narrow stone alleyways. I didn’t want to remember any of that and I tried to think of nothing but the stones underfoot saxa…(saxa saxorum saxis saxis), grey stones and being bound to the earth with this new name of mine.

Ilaria was leading me by the arm down the street now, and I admitted to myself that I was relieved the person to choose me as a friend had a motherly side. At least until she started asking questions again.

“Are you okay? What happened? Gaia, you turned so white I was frightened that you were going to faint!”

I focussed on the street and the absense of ambulances and disturbing memories. I cleared my throat, “No, I’m fine now. I don’t like ambulances, that’s all.”

Ilaria didn’t look convinced but she decided not to press the situation. We turned right at an intersection, onto a street that had rather more people on it and, I learned as I heard a honking behind me, cars which were trying to make their way through the pedestrian-only center, with slow success. Ilaria seemed to know her way around, and I followed behind her uncertainly, still linked by her grasp of my arm, until we turned under a red awning which said “Feltrinelli” in white letters, into a bookstore.

The bookstore smell that overwhelmed me immediately transported me back to the Wallingford College bookstore, where I had browsed for so many hours.

(Escaping already? Can’t you face reality?) the alien jeered at me, but it was already too late. I was already back in Astronomy 101 as the teacher intoned his rules of the class in a sleep-inducing monotone. “I will introduce you to the wonders of the sky! Each one of you will be stunned at the magnifence that is above you, and that you have never thought to calculate before. With Kepler’s laws, every one of you will become a master of the cosmos!” I tuned out his zestless lecture and looked at the girl to the left of me out of the corner of my eye, watching as she scrabbled messily through a binder, and finally extracted a single sheet of loose leafed paper.

On the top, right hand corner in tiny handwriting she printed her name. I read it. “Madrigal Williams,” it said. Underneath, she wrote “Astronomy 101.” On the next line: “September 6.” That was today. She painstakingly copied the name of the textbook off the board.

I hadn’t written anything in my brand new wire bound notebook yet. I knew the bookstore would have a sign for the textbook. I hated this class already, and I was in a foul mood that I, a Latin and dance major, had to take astronomy at all. The professor looked like he had never been out in daylight. Karen and Mike weren’t going to be that much help. Both of them were chemistry majors, and I wasn’t sure why they were taking Astronomy 101, which was specially designed for those of us who only took it to fill a science requirement for graduation.

I looked around the class, but everyone was enthralled, their eyes glued on Professor Blum as he extolled the wonders of the stars. It was only at the end of the class, as we were shoving our notes back into our respective backpacks, that I saw, instead of a row of neat notes on Madrigal William’s single sheet of paper – a massive dragon clambered up the right margin and, snaking across the heart of the page, breathed a great tongue of fire right into the title of our new textbook. I looked up at her but her eyes were downcast. She was shorter than me, dressed in a child’s tshirt and a plaid skirt, and with the row of freckles across her nose, looked about 10. I studied this new mystery in front of me, but before I could conjure up a word of introduction, she walked past me, her eyes vaguely glazing over me as she wandered out the door.

(You should have known then!) the alien accosted me drily. But how? I wondered. How do you know things about people, how can you guess what they are like, what kind of psychoanalysis would come up with the truth behind that dragon? There was a tap on my shoulder just as I realised I had been standing like a statue in front of the guidebooks to Siena. I turned, and Ilaria smiled at me. “Here they are!” she chirped cheerfully, holding two shiny green textbooks in her hand, the workbooks piled underneath them. “Shall we go for a tour? We can stop in a bar afterwards and do our homework together!”

I took the proferred books and followed her to the cash register. I already knew I had to draw the line at studying together. It was about time to go home, but I figured walking around the city would be good for me. Sooner or later I had to figure out how to get home, at the very least.

We left the store and walked into a cold, gusty wind. “What have you seen?” Ilaria asked. I shrugged, shivering. “I saw some streets, that’s all. I don’t remember anything in particular.” She looked exasperated at my answer. “Have you seen the piazza? You would remember that for sure! And what about Fonte Gaia, that’s your name now, so you have to know about that! Have you seen the duomo, even?” I wrinkled my brow, not sure what a duomo was. Duomo? Domus? A house? Latin was clearly not going to help me out much here.

“Why don’t you take me to see those things, then?” I suggested. “Then can you show me how to get to….uh, La Lizza? I have to get home, I should take the number 5 bus.”

Ilaria smiled, glad to finally have some input. I felt relieved that she didn’t push me to go into a bar with her. My host sister had taken me into one, insisting that I try an Italian coffee. The mass of people had frightened me, sitting at the tighly packed tables that nearly barred the exit, crowding up to the bar four deep, an organic, dynamic neighborhood sharing the day’s gossip in between downing cups of coffee. It was impossible to get the barista’s attention, and when we finally had, then there was no space at the bar to drink our coffee. I was loathe to edge in between the two enthusiastic, gesticulating men in front of me. My host sister, on the other hand, had only smiled and said, “Nannini’s is the most popular, especially at this hour,” as though the crowds were a positive thing.

We were walking back the way we came, down a bit of a hill. When a car honked, barrelling toward us, we had to step into the people next to us, all cramming ourselves into the doorway of a shop to let the car pass. Finally Ilaria ducked down into a stairway under an arch, and we walked into the light of a huge open area. I didn’t know where to look. After all the darkness, the sudden pale yellow winter sunlight was a shock. Far in front of me at the bottom of the piazza, a huge tower loomed brick coloured with a bizarre shaped white top. I thought of a giant needle pointing up into the sky, threaded end up. Between that and me there was a gigantic shell shaped expanse of herringbone patterned brick. I felt like I was on the caldera of a volcano, peering down into the depths. People dotted the pavement, sitting in tight herds against the cold. I looked closer and realised they were eating ice cream.

“Come on!” Ilaria was already tugging me in closer. “This is Piazza del Campo, this is the most important piazza in the entire town. I can’t believe no one brought you here to see it. Our school is nearby, do you remember? And the fountain, look it’s right here, right in the middle.” She dragged me towards a white protrusion in the middle of the piazza, high in the center. From here everything was down, a shell with the curve at the top, and at the bottom, a tiny drain. I wondered if the water was supposed to flow out of this fountain down that drain, but on closer inspection it was unlikely.

The fountain was white – a big white marble rectangle with delicate carvings all around the inside. The entire thing was surrounded by a four foot iron fence. I squinted at the carvings in the glare of the wintry sun and was impressed, not only by the quality of the work but by the nooks and crannies the pigeons had turned into home. The water had a delicate skim of ice around the edges, and I stared into the clear aqua depths and saw the circular brown memories of money thrown in by tourists during the summer. Water flowed into it from animal heads at intervals around the edge of the rectangular pool. “This is it?” I asked Ilaria. “This is the Fonte Gaia?” She nodded. “Isn’t it incredible?” she beamed. “All the incredible carving, and look how the water pours out down below, you can even drink this!” I frowned. I wasn’t too sure about drinking the water from a fountain. Aren’t they supposed to be just for public display? But sure enough, below the level of the fountain, on the marble base, there were two lion’s heads spitting out water into small basins. I supposed it didn’t freeze because it was constantly moving. “Let’s go, let me show you the duomo!” She was already tugging at my arm towards the left, up a small hill away from the piazza. Two Italian boys, dressed in button up shirts and fashionable shoes, eyed her as we passed, and I felt both unfairly overlooked, and relieved because of it. Duomo, I reminded myself, and then home. Home, and the short walk that I well remembered even after only three days: down a hill and up a short driveway to an apartment building where I had use of a dance studio. And the key, all to myself. Alone. Sola.

*

Excerpt from A History of Siena through the Fountains, by Cole (Gaia) Ostrovsky.

Fonte Gaia, according to the only historian to write obsessively about Siena’s water, was Siena’s symbol of the quattrocento, the way fonte Branda was a symbol of the duecento, and fonte Nuova a symbol of the trecento. What he meant was that it was a new style of fountain, never before imagined in Siena.

Fonte Gaia, unlike the fountains before it, did not consist of arches, crenellations and gargoyles with basins hiding in the depths of a gothic vaulted ceiling, and it had no hint of either Roman or Etruscan history. Fonte Gaia was an entirely medieval creation, made with the intention of being a piece of public art, to reflect the joy and beauty of life in the Sienese republic. The people of Siena must have seen this as the ultimate decadence. They depended on water for their very life. Having water in a fountain which was designed to be beautiful, sculpted by the greatest sculptors of the age, as well as functional was a way of bragging to all that entered Siena’s central piazza – we are rich enough to share water with everyone who enters this town – for free. When water poured for the first time in the fountain in the center of the piazza, there was an explosion of partying and excitement which lasted for at least a month. The decorations for this stupendous fountain were originally carved by famous sculptor Iacomo di Maestro Pietro di Filippo della Quercia, and which were finished only in 1419, a good number of decades after the completion of the fountain itself. However, these original sculptures were subject to so much wear that finally they were replaced by a new set by Tito Sarrocchi.