Giostra

Wow, Arezzo takes its jousting seriously. I thought it was going to be sort of Ren Faire-ish, but instead everyone was displaying their team colors, fights broke out, and we heard an endless series of chants about the promiscuity of the girls of the rival quarter. (The city is divided into quarters, and each quarter has a jousting team. The Accademia is in the quarter of the Crucifizione, whose heraldry flies on all the neighborhood lampposts.)

So, everything got started with processions and drumming and trumpets...


...and we crowded into a piazza, with people peering out of upstairs windows just as they'd do on a rooftop in Wrigleyville...




...and then the medieval color guard performed a really quite impressive routine involving a lot of precision tossing and catching of banners.



(What the pictures can't show: the trumpets suddenly going from processional fanfares into the theme from Pirates of the Carribean.)

Then another procession, involving knights in full armor and absurdly exaggerated headpieces that must have been painfully heavy--eighteen-inch bronze eagles perched atop their helmets and so on. (These pictures also show the net separating the jousters from the bleacher crowd; I'm not sure whether it was for our protection or theirs.)



Then, the jousting, which proved pretty much impossible to photograph. Each team sends two riders to charge at a statue that represents a Saracen. The Saracen is equipped with a target, a swinging lead mace-style weight, and a whip. And once the lance hits the target, the Saracen spins around very fast. The riders are (I think) awarded points based on the accuracy of their hit, whether the whip or the weight hits them, and whether their lance splinters on impact (which counts double). There's much cheering and speculation about the score. The spectators up in the surrounding buildings hold up their fingers to show the groundlings what they think the score will be. And a trumpet fanfare before the loudspeaker announces "Punti: Cinque" or whatever.

Crucifizione's archrivals, San Andrea, won. I have heard that they're despised because they're the rich privileged neighborhood. Also that there's some sort of communist-fascist rivalry there, although I no longer remember which quarter was which. I do know that in our quarter they are hated enough that one of the Crucifizione supporters wore a sticker--the sort of thing that had been printed and mass-produced--that read Bianco Verde Bastardo. (The San Andrea colors are white and green.)

So we trooped home, defeated, but still, in one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.



And now the villa is full of the sounds of the music students singing and running through virtuosic piano pieces, and it's time to read about the history of commedia dell'arte. Tomorrow morning we start Feldenkrais, acrobatics, and voice.