(ANSA) – SIENA, JUNE 28 – The Palio di Siena recognized by the Ministry of Culture as an ‘expression of collective cultural identity’ and as material testimony – based on the provisions of the Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code – a restriction has been placed on 17 flags and 6 drums of the Sienese Contrade considered as ‘particularly significant in their life and history’. A process started in 2019, promoted by the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Siena, Grosseto and Arezzo and by the Central Institute for the Intangible Heritage of the Ministry of Culture and conducted in collaboration with a large scientific committee. The core of the project is an ethnographic research conducted by Professor Katia Ballacchino, with which the contemporary richness of the complex world of the Palio di Siena was documented.
“An important result for the city – explained Mayor Nicoletta Fabio -. The project carried out by the Ministry of Culture to safeguard the Palio di Siena has inclusively concerned and involved all our Contrade with the aim of enhancing our identity heritage”.
The flags and drums, with ministerial decrees, were chosen as representative elements for their particular historical and ethno-anthropological interest, in relation to the performative and public, but also intimate dimension of the festival. Among the symbols chosen are, among others, a 1700 flag of the Bruco district or the flag of Queen Margherita of Savoy of the Drago district; but also the imperial drum called “Lorenzo Guasparri” of the Selva district and a reproduction of the sixteenth-century flag of the Torre district. “The restrictions – explains the Municipality – do not intend to ‘freeze’ the assets but to preserve and guarantee their current uses and meanings, enhancing their link with the intangible cultural heritage of the Palio di Siena, with the history of the Contrade and with the lives of the people who built, sewed, used, played, lived and, in some way, enhanced them over time and continue to do so”. (ANSA).
