10. Fonte Follonica, 1226 (ricostruzione)

La stradina, sulla destra dell’Oratorio, porta alla Fonte di Follonica, fra le piu’ belle fonti medioevali di Siena ed oggi purtroppo semidistrutta ed in gran parte interrata. Si intravedono tre grandiosi archi romanici in cui sono incassati archi gotici. Se ne ha notizia fin dai primi del Duecento.

Piero Torriti, Tutta Siena Contrada per Contrada, pg. 339

The small street, on the right of the Oratory, leads to the fountain of Follonica, among the most beautiful of Siena’s medieval fountains and today unfortunately partially destroyed and for the most part interred. Three grandiose Roman arches can be glimpsed, in which there are embedded gothic arches. This fountain is noted historically from the beginning of the thirteenth century.

I snapped the textbook shut with a sigh, looking over one last time at Ilaria’s empty seat. She had finally done it. She had gotten the guts up to skip class, and I hadn’t. I wondered with a pang of worry whether she was okay, and whether I should go track her down, but my days of confidence, of stubbornness, and believing that I could do good in the world seemed long past. Nonetheless, my spirits lifted, because today I was working in the bar, and then going to dinner with Fede and Sr. di Gaspari. I had told Dinah the night before, and she only raised her eyebrows and told me to keep her posted. I wasn’t sure what she was referring to, the illustrious banker, or the barista.

I waved goodbye to Stefano, who winked back at me. He was now outfitted in a black Nirvana sweatshirt with his ratty pants, and I felt a bit of joy to see my hometown recognised. I thought vague cheerful thoughts of Seattle as I walked along the now familiar streets from school to the bar.

When I arrived, I noticed that Fede looked tired and harrassed. I deposited my things in the back room, and came out to help.

“Giuseppe left at 11 this morning. He said he felt sick,” he gasped out when I came behind the bar. I immediately understood the import. Giuseppe was the other barista who helped in the morning. If he had left at 11, that meant for an hour and a half – the busiest hour and a half, Federico had been entirely alone. I threw a few loads of dishes into the wash, cleaning the bar with a frenzy, organising the sandwich section, refilling the fridge with cold drinks. The work cleared my head, and I wondered why I had bothered to get a college degree when I could just do this for my entire life.

And dance, I thought. Dance and be a barista. What a fabulous combination. Maybe I’ll do this after I graduate. I suddenly felt a shiver of cold panic, realising that after this summer I had one last tiny year of college in which to determine my entire future. I worked even harder, pumping out one espresso after another until Federico gave me a disbelieving look. When I looked at my watch, it said 3.30.

“Mamma mia!” he exclaimed, “I have never seen someone work so hard for so long without getting tired.”

“Too much energy,” I shrugged with a smile. I felt another shiver as I realised what I had said, as Federico’s gaze changed slightly, and the air charged with some unnameable force.

When, I wondered as I turned away to hide my blush, when are we going to dispel these forces we are creating? Luckily a slew of customers came in, and I cheerfully poured juice and created magnificent sandwiches for their grumbling stomachs.

I paused some immeasurable amount of time later, to lean against the counter and survey the clean silence in front of me. I sipped my juice and luxuriated in being useful, when Fede came out of the back bearing supplies. He deposited them on the table in front of me, leaned against the wall next to me, and proceeded to say nothing.

The silence rose. What is this suddenly about? I thought with confusion. I didn’t want a boyfriend in January, what’s changed? Why all of a sudden do we look at each other with these frighteningly electric looks, and say nothing and it means everything?

I was very good at keeping men at a distance – a exercise learned in ballet class from a young age. Unlike other students that I could name in the dance program at Wallingford College (actually, all of them,) I made an effort to be friends with all the male dancers, and to sleep with none of them. This, along with my generally hard working and easy going nature, made me a favourite when theatre season came around, and random dancers were needed for random bits of acting.

The result of this, of course, was that I interacted seldom with guys that I might consider interesting. I didn’t really want to date a dancer anyway, they were usually full of themselves, and although I adored dancing, it was a private thing to think about, not for sharing. Among my dining-hall table of science geniuses, I had hung out with and occasionally made out with Seth, a physics major, for a large part of freshman year, and had that intense two month fling with Dorian sophomore fall. Junior fall, there was Jack, of course, but despite all of Madri’s teasing, nothing ever came of it. And then it was too late. He probably wouldn’t have been that interesting, I consoled myself, although even now I didn’t really believe it. But what sort of person wants to spend their life sitting around waiting for fires? Station 33 couldn’t possibly have enough action to make it a very exciting job. There were about 1000 fire calls a year, and maybe 20 of them would be house fires.

But does that mean, I thought disbelievingly, that this is my first real consummated crush? It wasn’t a high school sort of thing, giggling with the girls in dance school over the guys I danced with, and whether they might sink to the level of kissing someone ten years their junior…just so I could be kissed. It wasn’t at all like the casual dating that took place at Wallingford College. It was much more subtle and permeated the fabric of my existence. If I didn’t happen to see Fede, my day was grey, gauzy, unfinished. It was his ability to see through me to what I meant to say. I somehow knew that Federico never saw me as a stupid bumbling foreigner. He saw somebody who was called Ariele, and he understood things about her that I didn’t even understand.

Then the beginning of the evening rush hit, and we were catapulted into motion. As my stomach started to growl I felt a glimmer of excitement about this dinner we were going to. I had never actually had an entire conversation with…with Marco, I stuttered. His general aspect made me think of him as a nearly elderly businessman, rich and world weary, wise and with a closet full of fashionable suits. Despite this, he didn’t really look that old, just settled. I supposed he was even rather attractive. I wondered offhandedly what sort of wife he had.

She would, I concluded, be very Italian and incredibly stylish and, I frowned, probably a pain in the ass. Federico poked me in the middle of this thought, and I looked around to realise that we had served everyone, kicked them out, and cleaned the entire place spic and span, and I had been too lost in my thoughts to realise.

Dude! I thought joyously, what a way to pass the time! Then I thought, with a sort of sinking feeling in my fluttery gut, that without Federico it wouldn’t be fun at all. I glanced over at him as he cleaned the counter one last time, at his frazzled dark curls, and I thought of the flecks of fountain-aqua blue in his green green eyes, and how his irises had a distinctive forest green line around them, the greenest green I had ever seen an eye achieve.

I looked at his button down blue shirt and fitted jeans, and thought with a smile that he looked, without a doubt, far more sophisticated that anyone I had ever dated. He was the kind of guy who makes you feel cool just being out with him, because anyone who’s seen with someone so fantastic, must not be too bad, I analysed.

“Eh yo! Ari!” I suddenly realised he was staring back at me, laughing and trying to get my attention. “Where did you go for a minute there? Get your stuff, it’s time to go.”

Marco di Gaspari was waiting for us right outside the door, on the dot of 7 pm. I shrugged into the black coat and slung the book heavy pack onto my shoulder, yearning for a day when I wouldn’t need to carry schoolbooks anywhere. In three, we left the bar behind in the twilight and walked across town to the Piazza. “I made reservations for a place here,” Marco said, as I tried to get used to the idea of not calling him Signore anything.

We entered a small restaurant nearly in the middle of the piazza, the doorway hidden by the larger and more tourist hungry locales surrounding it. The ambience was calm and full of a floaty music, and the waitress seated us with a smile and brought us menus. I had no idea where I ought to sit, but found myself, as though it were natural, seated next to Federico, thighs touching, on a long bench seat against the wall. Marco was across from us, in a chair.

I surveyed the menu, listening to them talk to each other in the tones of people who are comfortable together. Then I set the menu down, confused. “How do the two of you know each other so well?” I asked, wanting some explanation.

They exchanged a look.

Then the waitress came to take our order, and my feeble question, framed in foreigner Italian, was lost, wafted away in the shuffle as we fumbled with menus and contemplated culinary delights.

“Are you sure you only want a salad instead of a second, Ariele?” Marco asked me with an expression of worry on his face. I nodded, used to this type of question.

“I’m a dancer, I can’t always eat everything I want,” I said. “I have to stay svelte to dance.”

Both Federico and Marco looked at me analytically for a second, as though trying to conclude whether I was just concocting excuses for not eating. Annoyed by the attention, I took the napkin and began to arrange it elaborately on my lap. It was a heavy fabric napkin, the extravagant white kind that make you feel guilty for marking them with wine and permanent tomato sauce stains. As I played with it, I noticed that it had a design cleverly knitted into the fabric. I ran my fingers over it, but I couldn’t feel a difference. I looked closely. It was an image of the Torre di Mangia -- the eye of the needle tower, visible if I ducked to look out the window. The representation was quite nice.

Marco cleared his throat. Fede was nibbling on a piece of bread. “So, Ariele, you’re interested in the fountains here in Siena?” I nodded. “I’m doing a project for school on them,” I explained, not willing to admit that it was any more personal that that.

“What do you think of them?”

Federico watched us with interest, not seeming disturbed that the conversation excluded him.

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I think they’re depressing,” I said. He was surprised by this.

“Why depressing? Don’t you think they’re a fabulous part of our heritage?”

“Yes,” I agreed, because of course they were, “But they’re dead. No one cares about them anymore.” I hesitated, not sure how to frame what I wanted to say. I frowned with concentration. “Everyone who made the fountains exist is dead, and their lives are worth nothing because the fountains don’t matter.”

“But you think the fountains don’t matter?” Marco frowned, his hazel eyes intent on me. I was trying to put into words something I had barely thought to myself, but it felt important. What was I trying to say? I chewed my lower lip, trying to think.

“Once,” I said finally, “Fontebranda was important. It was so important, that if somebody for example poisoned the water, they would immediately be executed with the worst death penalty that the Commune could think up. Right?”

I looked at Marco to see if he’d understood. I hadn’t been very sure on how to explain ‘death penalty,’ in Italian. Both him and Federico looked sort of flabbergasted. “Eh, Ariele, what have you been reading?” Fede interrupted, jokingly.

Marco just nodded, following my train of that.

“And now?” he prodded.

“Now of the whole fountain only a third remains, you can’t drink it, no one would care if the fish were poisoned – the whole point of it was to be drinking water! All the work that all those people did in the middle ages went to waste, because the fountain is useless!” I felt oddly near tears, thinking of the endless lines of medieval men who had hunkered in tunnels for their entire lives, hoping to bring water to Siena.

“But Ariele,” Marco said forcefully, “What about all the years from 1100 until 1950? What about the 850 years – and maybe more, when the fountain was still a central aspect of life in Siena? Are you saying that history doesn’t matter? Only if something is useful now, does it have value?”

I shook my head. That wasn’t quite right. “It’s…it’s…” I hesitated. “The fact that in Siena we could still use the water from the fountains. It’s the fact that instead of preserving them, they are going to waste and turning into ruins.”

“But Ari, you’re contradicting yourself! People don’t have respect for things they can’t use. If, in the middle of the quattrocento, a fountain was useless, or the water went bad, they didn’t think of the historical value, because it had none! Form followed function, and when the function was compromised, they destroyed it, they took the bricks to make their houses, or make their lives a little easier.”

“But then why do we have any fountains at all left?”

“Because now we have respect for history. In the middle of the quattrocento, they could have built another fountain if there was need for it. Now, we have other ways of doing things, but there is a need for us to respect our origins. That is the value of the fountains now.”

“So,” I paraphrased, “Now we want to keep symbols of the past, without actually repeating it?” I wasn’t sure if I was still talking about the fountains. “Doesn’t history repeat itself?”

Marco frowned. Federico was watching me with a strangely hooded gaze. If some of the fountains had been ruined, what was saving other ones? What had saved a few and left others to disintegrate? Why had it been Madri to go, and not somebody else? Why does one person collapse under pressure, and another withstand it?

Had I collapsed under pressure? Should I rip my EMT card in half, was I done for good? Or was this a vacation?

Was I like Fontebranda, still around, but with parts interred, vanished, scarred?

I was lucky that our food arrived in the silence, because I wasn’t intending to share my thoughts. I relished my pasta with funghi, sipping the wine thoughtfully. The food was good. I was glad to be here, I realised. In a way, Madri did me a lot of good. I thought that she hadn’t given me any adventures, but she taught me to skateboard. And she’s the reason I’m here, having an adventure, being Ariele.

Marco sat back in his seat, his plate clean.

“History, my dear, follows certain unfortunate patterns.” He looked at Federico, who was still eating and didn’t look back at him. “However, progress is distinct from history. We stopped using the fountains in the 1950’s because all of a sudden we all had water inside our own houses. What luxury! Why should we go to the old, boring fountains when there is this new novelty, running water in the house, instead?”

No, I thought, realising. It’s Madri who’s like a fountain. Marco’s right. You can’t cling onto things that are going to crumble under your fingertips. I set my fork down with a silvery clang, and wiped my lips discreetly on the classy napkin.

“Then what’s the value of the fountains, now that there’s water in the house?” I asked.

“What! Do you think, in the middle of the 1950’s, that we’re going to demolish them? NO! We turn them into viable tourist attractions. You know, Ari, that the EU has given Siena money to restore the Fonte di Pescaia. This is not a matter for us alone – they are an Italian historical monument. They are a connection between the Roman times and the present.”

“So other people do care about them?”

“Yes! And they spend their valuable time renovating these ‘useless’ fountains. Have you ever heard about the Association for the Diana?”

I nodded, remembering the two mud caked strangers exiting the doorway of Fontanella. “I met some people who told me how to join it, a few days ago.”

“Ariele – a few years ago that association, made up completely of volunteers, excavated a fountain that had been nearly underground. So you see, there are dedicated people out there. The fountains won’t vanish as long as the Association, and the EU, and the Commune, and people like you, continue to care about them. That’s what makes them important, don’t you think?”

I nodded, glad that he spoke clearly when he came out with this complicated sort of discourse. The phantom of Madri’s things, that box I was afraid to look in, flickered before my eyes. Would I be ready, ever, to excavate pieces of who Madri was, and be a living memory to her? The idea scared me. Would I always carry the burden with me of who she was, and how she had died? I picked my fork back up to finish the last bit of pasta before the waitress took it away.

Then Federico spoke up. “Then there’s Fonte Follonica, Marco. What example is that?” he sounded slightly bitter, and I wondered what this discussion had been leading him toward. Marco looked curious. “What about the Fonte Follonica, Fede?”
“Have you ever seen it?”

Marco shook his head. “I saw a picture once.”

“Well, some friends of mine in the contrada took me to see it a few years ago, with Caterina.” He looked out the window, distancing himself from us, for a second. “It makes you think about neglect, that’s all.”

“Neglect?” I repeated, not understanding the word. Marco said it to me in English, barely needing to think before translating. I shivered, surprised how his thoughts had paralleled mine. Then I wondered if this would have been easier in English. But I wouldn’t have said nearly as much in my native language, where I could screen my thoughts, and say things with such greater subtlety. Not for the first time, I wondered who exactly Ariele was.

“But Fede, on the topic of the contrade,” Marco said it with a sneer, and all of a sudden I was shocked to see the animosity on their faces. I shivered, and felt Federico’s hand rest on my thigh, comforting and warm.

“What about them?” he asked stiltedly, trying to be neutral and, even more oddly, not succeeding. I wondered what it was about the animal-themed neighborhoods in town that could get two friends staring at each other this way.

“Water,” he responded impatiently, turning to me. “Ari, do you know about the contrade fountains?”

I shook my head. “What are they?”

“When a child is born in a contrada, it’s baptised into that contrada. This is done with the water from the fountain of that contrada. This is your example of history repeating itself, Ari.”

“How so?” I didn’t understand his point.

“These fountains are relatively new, from after the 1950’s. So you can imagine, the people of Siena still worship our water. We haven’t forgotten the years without water, and the years with little water, or the years of carrying it uphill from the fountains.” I nodded, half smiling, and then froze. I could feel it. I could feel the way I tilted my head, the way Madri had, the way I let a ribbon of hope into my eyes, to shine into them – grey, not green and stormy, but backlit with the same shine. Then I relaxed. She’s here, I thought. Madri’s not vanished history, either. I tuned back in to what Marco was telling me.

“Now, each contrada has a baptismal fountain – I am sure that you’ve seen some of them, and just didn’t know it. These fountains have as their source the same water that flows in the fonti that interest you so much. And they, as a central part of each contrada, are thus a central part of Sienese life now.”

I would have asked them which contrade they belonged to, and why it mattered, but the food came and distracted me. I felt anyway that something had been said and I needed to think it over. I didn’t want to continue the discussion quite yet.

As we were standing to leave the restaurant, Fede suddenly said, “Let’s go see it.”

“What?” I responded.

“Fonte Follonica?” asked Marco dubiously. He looked mildly disturbed. “I think it’s not really open for evening strolls, Federico.”

I looked over at him, again surprised to see that they were behaving like enemies instead of friends. I didn’t understand what it was about, nor did I really understand his comment.

Is it interesting?” I asked, wondering what could be different about Fonte Follonica. My mind raced, Follonica, I thought. Via di Follonica. I study there! I suddenly placed the street, the tiny little road that went down into the contrada of the Unicorn, right by the Universita per Stranieri. There was a fountain there? Maybe at the bottom of the hill, inside the gate. I had never entered the gated street, figuring it was just houses.

Fede was already leading the way, Marco following reluctantly but with curiosity. I settled the everpresent backpack on the fabulous trenchcoat and followed them out of the piazza. I contemplated Marco, in front of me. It was hard to connect him with the ‘di Gaspari’ that people had muttered about in the bar, and that shocked Dinah and Riccardo. He was certainly still well dressed, but he didn’t seem like someone who was super important. He never talked about work. He never made it seem like he and Federico hadn’t grown up together on the same street.

Although now that I thought about it, I had no idea of either of their childhoods, or their relative ages. Funny, I thought, the things you know about people and the things you learn slowly, bit by bit over time. It’s different when you grow up with other kids, there are things you just know because you were all there together. I thought of the six of us, dancing together in Seattle in a small studio on Queen Anne. Whenever I thought of my childhood, or of high school, or the important moments in my youth, it revolved around those other five kids, three girls and two boys, and our dance aspirations.

Fede slowed down and caught my hand up with his. I felt a quiver in my gut and supressed it. No, I thought crossly, go away. I clung to his hand anyway, feeling his own tension, and wondered again where it was that we were going, and why this fountain was suddenly so shrouded in mystery.

Fullones, I thought suddenly, making the connection with something I read. Follonica not because of the town of Follonica, but because fullones, in latin, are the fullers. And the fullers needed a source of water which was plentiful and far from everything else. who did the * which they did there. Fons Follonica.

We walked along the street, familiar, and down to past my school to the metal gate. It was evening, nearly nine at night, and rather dark. I wondered if we were going somewhere that was going to be difficult. The gate was open, and we passed inside. Marco was now on my right side, almost shrinking away from Federico on the left. We walked down the street and entered another gate, into a big backyard full of people sitting around in small groups. Fede raised his hand to a group and they hailed him, but no one budged. We walked around the entire backyard, and down to a simple wooden fence.

“This is the beginning,” Fede said, and I remembered later that he had said it this way, with weight and importance.

This was the beginning. We walked down a grassy strip of land, then hairpinned. Continued, down, another hairpin. We passed a bench and entered a grove of olive trees, shiny leaves grey and white in the nearly full moon. Fede angled us further over to the right of the hill, down down and over over toward something. There was no trail after the first few switchbacks, and we tripped over weeds, the three of us linked hand to hand as we scampered down the steep hill face.

Remembering Fonte Nuova, I thought, this must be one doozy of a fountain, if it is this far down. The further down, the more water.

Then I thought of coming down here to get water, and I wondered how they had ever managed. In between the weeds, I managed to huff out this question to Marco, who responded abstrusely, “Not for long.”

I figured I wasn’t going to get better answers until I saw the fountain. Fede led us down to a fence, the only thing visible a giant yellow tractor on the other side of it. He opened the fence and motioned me through the gap between two sections that had been left open.

I still didn’t get it. I looked around, and there was the tractor. On the left was an open area, all dirt shining whitely in the moonlight. We hopped down to where there was a proper roadway, and I looked around.

We were in a construction site. The little construction headman’s house was on the right, by the gap in the fence. In front of us was the Caterpillar. On the left was a great blank area. But where was the fountain?

Only as Federico determinedly led us straight, and Marco steered me behind him, all the while muttering something rude about his shoes, did I see it.

I was frozen in place, I was never going to move, stunned by a clear picture of the betrayal of history. Baptised by water, I thought, and buried in dirt. Madri, I thought, and they led me forward, stumbling on the rough ground. In front of me, like three shy eyes, were three hesitant, tiny arches peering out of the dirt. High above them, on what I realised was the top of the fountain, blossomed a tall pillar hanging scary looking wires.

Marco saw me looking at it and cleared his throat. “That’s for the well,” he said. “From on top there was a hole in to the water. That is there to bear the weight of raising it.”

Fede led us around towards the caterpillar. And down, still down, always down into the dirt that had recently been excavated. There were rough stairs under my feet, and two great pillars, as I walked into an entranceway of what was clearly once the most elaborate fountain of Siena. I was around what would have been the right side of the fountain, facing three doorways. On the left, it was a window, looking into the darkness inside the three arches. Below that there was a single basin that must have been newly excavated. The water inside looked murky and muddy. The entire ground in this area was muddy, full of water that had to go somewhere. To the right there was another window. In the middle, there was a doorway. The mud between me and the doorway was too great, though, and I saw this just after Federico did.

“I think I’ll wait here,” Marco said into the silence in a hushed voice, as Fede led me away to a tiny hole around the front of the fountain. We ducked through a short tunnel and came out on the edge of the basin. From here it was elementary to step into the doorway, and with careful footsteps, we entered the fountain.

The silence inside was the unmoving silence of death. We stood on dry ground in the far right of the three arches. I could peer out the top of the arch, out towards the excavated field. The legs of the arch vanished into the mud. The ceiling was, I guessed, a meter and a half above my head.

I thought of the great, airy arched vault of Fonte Nuova. Once upon a time, I knew this with total certainty, standing here I would have been levitating in mid air. I felt myself standing on dirt that didn’t belong, on the inside of a fountain that had sunk ten feet underground (or maybe more, I could never judge such things), and I believed once again that I had stepped into a dimension of reality that didn’t exist. Federico held my hand in an almost religious silence, standing next to me on the dry hillock, and we listened to the gurgle of a hose, visible as a green snake on the ground in front of us, pump the water out of the fountain, so the workmen might come tomorrow and rescue a tiny piece more of fonte Follonica from the death of history.

We went out the arch, high enough above ground that it was easy to step up and out of the fountain into the evening air. I turned one last time to look at the cross vaulted ceiling not far above me.

I’ll be back, I promised it silently, violently. I’ll be back, and I will never, ever be so close to you, ceiling. I will never see you like this again. I thought of coming down this way on a path of Serena stones, crosshatched like on every street in town, and seeing Fonte Follonica in front of me, shimmering with the blue reflection of sky on water, tall and proud in the valley. It was Marco who dried my tears on his silk tie and led us around to stand on top of the fountain, eyeing suspiciously the great hulking monster of a well.

It was a well. This was clear, there was a hole, there was the great tall pillar. I could see how you would attach a bucket to the hook, and around the other side there was a wheel that once upon a time turned. It was quite ingenious, but I felt jumpy, standing on top of a fountain covered in weeds and bits of brush, as though there might be an unseen hole for me to fall through, into the muck below. I felt the chilly fingers of the past as they ruffled my hair and petted my forehead, the world still hazy with tears I couldn’t stop from falling.

Then Marco said drily, “I at least need to pretend to be an upstanding citizen. Shall we return?” And the spell was broken, as we walked off the back of the fountain onto Caterpillar tracks, and followed them back to where I had left the long coat and backpack. I dressed in a silence which continued all the way back up the hill, tactile contact our only reminder in the absense of breeze that we were still together.

As we skirted the garden of the Contrada of the Leocorno, Marco and Federico muttered together. Fede pressed a button in a doorway, and the gate swung open. The two men hugged tightly, kissing each other with a singularity of purpose that only Italian men can get away with, as though a pact had been made, and Federico turned to me.

“Marco will drive you home, he also lives in that direction,” he said. “You’re working all weekend, right?”

I nodded assent, pleased that my weekend would be full of useful things to do, not aimless and dragging. We exchanged the standard cheek kisses, slowly, almost reverently, and I returned to the moment standing under a cross vaulted dome, alone in nine centuries of muddy silence. Fede grabbed my hand, squeezed it for a sudden indrawn breath, then turned away, and as Marco turned to go I rushed to follow.

We went down the street, not towards Porta Romana, where I knew there was space for car parking, but down the hill, toward the Piazza. Toward, I recalled, where I had seen a faucet and a bunch of parking spaces.

Sure enough, he motioned me towards a black Alfa Romeo, and I felt a buzz of excitement to be in a car inside the city wall.

“Don’t you have to have a permit to have the car in here?” I asked.

“Yes,” Marco said, “But my grandparents have a house in town, and I work in town, and because of this I have a permit to the streets near my grandparents neighborhood, and one for the streets near the bank.”

This was the first time I had ever heard Marco mention the bank. I nodded, understanding, as he pulled out of the parking space and we rattled down the street, towards the great arch, and the ring road around the city towards petriccio.

A silence hung in the air, bred by viewing the fountain. Finally, “It’s not just the fountains, is it, Ariele?”

“No,” I responded, almost surprised to realise that nobody knew, that all of my thoughts which seemed sometimes to take up far more than the available space in my body, weren’t visible to all.

“Could it be dangerous for your career,” I asked, “to go wandering in forbidden areas after dark?” I asked him.

Marco laughed rather sadly. “I have done much worse things than that, Ari, and my career is doing fine.” I sensed a but somewhere in there, but he didn’t continue. His career was fine, but something else wasn’t? Had his marriage failed or something?

I gave him concise directions, until he pulled up in front of the apartment building. “Where do you live, Marco?” I asked curiously, and he pointed off in the vague direction of the rolling hills off in the west. I waved goodbye, realising again how little I knew about these friends of mine. I suddenly felt a regret, as I watched the black car drive off, that I would be leaving Siena knowing so little about people. As though I barely lived here, I thought, climbing the stairs to the top floor. As though I have been blind and dumb, buried in the mud of Fonte Follonica, waiting to be excavated, instead of listening, and excavating the cares and worries of these people who are my friends.

*

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

Records of this fountain assure us that its origins are Roman. It is without a doubt one of the oldest fountains of Siena, and was for many centuries the most beautiful. Originally the façade was of three great Roman arches, with pointed gothic arches inside. Now, however, the Roman-arched exterior has crumbled, and the slightly pointed inner arches are the only that are still intact.

Of the fountain, these three arches are nearly all that remains visible. Fonte Follonica, due to being in the deepest valley of Siena, far from the city, was quickly superceded by others that were easier to get to. By the mid duecento, when other fountains were being built and Siena was politically extremely stable, Fonte Follonica was being forgotten, and began to slowly sink underground.

The reasons for this are quickly evident. A fountain in a deep valley, fonte Follonica suffered from an overabundance of water. When this water was no longer regularly used and taken away by the inhabitants of the city, it overflowed the basins and weakened the underlying ground. The fountain had been built in unfortunately soft ground, and as it weakened further, the incredible weight of the enormous fountain was enough to begin its descent underground.

The Commune then sold the fountain, along with all land surrounding it, to the friars of San Giovan Battista, who were farmers and worked the land. They passed it on to the friars of Santo Spirito, but the results were always the same. Despite a few feeble attempts by the Commune in later centuries to recover control of the fountain, their interest and their finances were never convincing enough, and the fountain continued to sink.

It is only in the last few decades that Fonte Follonica has been saved from a slow death by cabbages and dirt. Revived interest by the Commune and the Contrada of the Unicorn have unified and attempted to reacquire enough land to – importantly, provide an outlet for the water that will need to drain from the fountain if it is recovered from its burial site. Whether they will lose interest in the middle of the project, or whether they will succeed in eventually creating a “Museum of Water” in Siena, remains to be seen.

If I could have gone myself to excavate a few square meters of earth, to make my sunny blue vision come true – I would have.