Three years ago, Mi and I visited Alice in Seattle over July 4th weekend. We had a great time. But i thought Seattle was way too homogenous comparing to SF, too clean, too new, too YUPPIE. SF was a lot more diverse and gritty than Seattle. I was very proud of our little city by the bay.

The past Sunday we landed in NYC for our first vacation with Noah. and for the first time i realized the hugh contrast between SF and NYC. SF is too homogenous, too clean, too new, too YUPPIE.  Mostly it is too filled with the same kind of Silicon Valley people.  But NYC, OMG. all the bibles i’ve been reading on city planning, on how to create a vibrant and energitic city. They were all written based on NYC! They are living it!

The amount of energy is contagious. So many people, so many shops, so many neighborhoods, so many stories happening, 24/7. Gui and Matthew came with us this time, too. They were equally impressed. “It is like Europe and China combined, but better”. “it is a truly urban cosmopolitan.”

London, Paris, and Rome were all once the cosmopolitan center of the world. Now they are still great urban cities where people have been enjoying urban living for centuries. But they are no longer as diverse as they used to be. Like Paul Theroux said in “The Pillars of Hercules”:

The great multiracial stewpot of the Mediterranean had been replaced by cities that were physically larger but smaller-minded…they…had sorted themselves out, and retreated to live among their own kind. I had yet to find a Mediterranean city that was polyglot and cosmopolitan.

Even under the Ottomans, Smyrna had been full of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Circassians, Kurds, Arabs, Gypsies, whatever, and now it was just Turks; Istanbul was the same, and so were the once-important cities of the Adriatic..It was hard to imagine a black general named Othella living in Venice now, though there were any number of Senegalese peddlers hawking trinkets there.

Certainly London and Paris are better than the current port cities of the Mediterranean. But when it comes to diversity they can’t hold a candle to New York. I met a British trador on my 3 weeks Ecudor trip, and we became really good friend. She blurred out once at dinner during our trip, “i’ve never met a Chinese person outside of a Chinese restaurant while i was in Europe.”  That was 2002. Things must have improved in the past 10 years. But the US have at least a few decades ahead of Europe in that respect.

Not sure if i’m crazy, but i’m seriously tempted to move to New York for a year or two. Just to experience such a great city first hand.  It is amazing it takes me this long to appreciate it.  I’ve visited NYC after i graduated from College. One would have thought being young, i would have loved the fast pase and the aggressiveness of the city. But it only intimidated me then.  Somehow, walking the same street, watching the same fast paced city living around me, i’m no longer bothered by its aggressiveness or its fast pace.  Maybe it was like swimming in treacherous river.  On one hand, i’ve learned a thing or two about myself and the world, so i could navigate it better. On the other hand, i also felt more grounded that I am no longer afraid of being sweeped away by the current.

Oct. 2002, when I visited Mi in NYC for the first time, he took this photo of me in the Temple of Dendur.

Nine and half years later, May 2012, he took this photo of me and Noah at the same place in the Metropolitan Museum.

During our trip to Italy in the Fall of 2009, we fell in love with Siena at first sight. Finding the couple of images from Siena for this new WordPress theme brought back flood of fond memories…

Piazza del Campo

Biccherne Covers

Gui suggested Siena as we were planning our trip. She reminded me of its appearance in the book we both loved: “Winds of War” by Herman Wouk.

He took a bus to Siena, a three-hour run up a rutted scary mountain road. Twice before he had visited the bizarre little town, all red towers and battlements and narrow crooked streets, set around a gaudy zebra-striped cathedral, on a hilltop amid rolling green and brown Tuscan vineyards.

Since the fourteenth century – so Byron had learned – nothing much had happened in Siena besides the Palios. A rich city-state of the Middle Ages, the military rival of Florence, Siena in 1348 had been isolated by the Black Death, and frozen in its present form as by a spell. A few art lovers now drifted here to admire the fourteenth-century paintings and architecture. The world at large flocked to Siena twice a year to watch the mad horse races, and otherwise let the bypassed town, a living scene out of an old tapestry, molder in the Tuscan sunshine.

Coming from the tourist swarming Florence, we loved seeing all the university students and locals walking around town when we got off the bus at Siena(an hour and 15 minutes bus ride away from Florence). We loved going into churches and museums and finding ourselves the only visiters and we could linger in peace without being asked to pay at every door way like in Florence.

The only drawback was our visit coincide with a sudden chilly spell that literately froze the town. It was not so bad during the day when the sun was out. But in the evening, the temperature dropped to 2-3C. The first night we put on every single piece of clothing we had in our luggage and braved the evening streets. We quickly admitted defeat. Grabbed two sandwich from the nearest deli and returned to our hotel room for some warmth.

We also encountered our first pleasant surprise of the trip: Biccherne Covers at “Archivio di Stato Siena” (Siena State Archive).

Biccherna is the Italian term used to describe small painted panels, named after the chief financial office of Siena, were initially created as covers for the state ledgers or administrative balance sheets between the 13th and 17th centuries. The biccherne provide a fascinating window into the daily life of an Italian city-state and evolving republic at the dawn of modern economic thinking.

In 1257 the Office of the Biccherna, …inaugurated the custom of commissioning panel paintings from the best artists in the community to function as the covers of its semi-annual collection of public ledgers.

The layout of the boards remains unchanged: at the top there is the painting and at the bottom the inscription bearing the date, the names of the main components of Biccherna, the arms of their families.

We first encountered these covers on our first walk to the Duomo (the “zebra-striped cathedral” described in Winds of War). A young man sitting in a small shop painting his version of these covers. They were fantastic. I then found out about the free tour at the State Archive where hundreds of such cover has accumulated and being preserved.

I loved the combination of the painting, the inscriptions, and the binding materials: gold plate mixed with jet-black inky background, metal studs, leather strips. They looked like those magic books from Harry Potter! ZM loved the varied and vivid arms from different families.

Who would have thought something so beautiful could have been created for tax records! Only in Italy!

The two books on the left were from the State Archive. The two on the right were done by the young man in the shop.

No photos allowed during the tour, so i only managed to snap a couple of not so well preserved books in the display case prior to our tour.
No catalog of the covers can be found in any of the bookstores in Siena. I only managed to get a thin little book with Italian and some small photos of these covers before we left Siena.
But i managed to find a few more digital copy of the cover (most of them are not of very good quality) and made a Picasa collection. It is a shame this treasure remained so little known:

Biccherne Cover – Siena

Here are a few more photos from our trip.

People enjoying the sun at Piazza del Campo. I loved this Piazza, it is so airy, lively, and peaceful. It reminded me of the square in front of Pompidou at Paris.

I loved this photo that ZM took at the back of the tower of Siena. Real people actually live here! It is the biggest disappointment we had of Florence, there don't seem to be any real people living in the center of town anymore. It feels like a theme park.

We were the only visitors to this Church on top one of Siena's three hills: Santa Maria dei Servi. We ran into an old couple from New Mexico on our way out. They insisted on taking this photo for us.

"The Zebra-Stripped Cathedral"

One of many pathways leading to Piazza del Campo

A good meal at Antica Trattoria Papei.

Our hotel receptionist recommended Antica Trattoria Papei to us. It is one of the local’s favorit restaurnts, too. The meal was good. The view was fantastic. It was tucked away in the back of the Campo, but it has a view open up to the valley and half of the town below. On our second and last night in Siena. We walked across the Campo, through the narrow medieval path way, toward the open terrace where the restaurant was located. I loved the church bell echoing through the valley. The bell tolled for the slightly fading dusk light, for the green valley opened up in front of us, and for the last shade of pink in the horizon.

I love Siena.