The Taylor Five

For Day 3 (the first real full day anywhere) we toured “Dana style.”  What is Dana style?  Well, it is like most things Dana style, by the book with heavy attention to research.  Lots of this…

And this…

And some of this…

So, back to day 4.  I claimed this as my day.  The day we toured Nick Style.  What is Nick Style?  I’m glad you asked!  Some in our party used the adjectives “lazy” and “uninformed” to describe it, though I find “free-form” and “fun” to be more accurate.  We left the assorted junk (backpack, camera, guidebook) behind, since I was tired of carrying things, and just walked town to see what we would see.

Siena is a good place for this.  The perfect scale for it I would say.  Everything is walkably close, but you couldn’t possibly see everything there is to see in several days.  It’s just compact with meandering side streets that can lead to great overlooking views or arch-canopied dead ends.  The thing is you never know which until you head down the alley and find out.

So we meandered.  We headed down a hill and came upon the Sanctuary of Saint Catherine of Siena.  Being a good protestant, I had no clue who she was, but fortunately someone in our family reads guidebooks and was able to supply this information.  Cathy was a girl unlike other children (depicted in the painting as a haloed child levitating up the stairs while others in the background played with dolls) who had a vision of herself marrying Christ (also painted).  We had heard tales that somewhere in the many churches of Siena her head and thumb where preserved as relics of the church.  Those were on our “that’s just too weird to not see” list of things not to miss.

Anyway, back to it.  We checked out the Sanctuary of St Cathy, which was an attractive, reverent sort of place with what I would guess to be “quiet please” signs.  There was some small danger of us being swept over to Catholicism until the gaping door to the gift shop broke through the worshipful spirit and brought us ringing back to reality.

From there we headed up the hill to the Church of San Domenico.  It was big, with a brick exterior, but, unlike the Duomo we had seen the day before, is a rather plain and simple kind of place.  We spent about 20 minutes lying on our backs in the very soft grass outside.  (I bet you won’t find that sort of luxury in any guidebook.)  Inside, you could tell in places that someone had tried to spritz up the place in times past with the same black and white stripe motif, but it a had been plastered over with nice layer of builder beige a few centuries ago.  Another notable difference from the Duomo: the votive candles you could purchase from the plastic tub beside the alter were only .50 euro (a full 1/2 off the Duomo price).

From there, more gelato and back to the room for the now regular afternoon nap.  After that we went out to our now favorite Siena family restaurant.

The next day we learned a weakness of the Nick Style.  Someone was reading the guidebook again.  Turns out the head and thumb (when not loaned out to other churches) of Saint Catherine was housed in the Church of San Domenico, and we had missed it.  Now we would just have to go back (see Day 6 for this and more exciting details).