A medieval market that was once the heart of this Tuscan town is to flourish once more in Siena's historic Piazza del Campo, the site of the world-famous Palio horse race each summer. The colours, sights, smells and sounds of the bustling weekly market will return to Siena's beautiful central square this Saturday.
The one-off event has been organized to commemorate 700 years since the medieval city's renowned collection of duties and rights, the Costituto, was set down in the common tongue. The market will open at 8am, with stalls selling farm produce, crafts and clothes. Experts have scoured ancient municipal records to recreate, as far as possible, the 14th-century layout of stalls. This will reflect the market's traditional division into two broad sections, one devoted to food, the other to general goods, as well as its sub-divisions according to the types of produce for sale.
The market existed on the site that later became Piazza del Campo long before it became a town square. It started life as an open, sloping field near the meeting point of three hillside communities that later merged to form Siena. A market thrived there informally before the 1200s but the site only developed into one of the greatest medieval squares in the mid-1300s, when it was paved in its current fishbone-pattern of red brick. The fast-paced, hectic Palio race, which draws thousands of visitors to Siena each year, emerged at the same time, originally staged in the muddy, sloping field and later in the new square. A written form of the Costituto was commissioned by the Nine, a group that ruled Siena for 70 years, and penned by a notary named Ranieri di Ghezzo Gangalandi between July 1309 and June 1310.
The order was to ''draw up, at the expense of the Commune of Siena, a statute of the Commune anew in vernacular in large letters, well legible and well written, on good sheepskin paper so that the poor people and the other people who do not know grammar, and the others, whoever wants to, can see and copy whatever they like and fancy''. The document was held in a public building and any citizen was free to enter and personally transcribe parts of interest. Today, the Costituto is contained in two manuscripts kept in the State Archives of Siena, described as ''Statute 19'' and ''Statute 20''.