ABSTRACT
The Palio is a festival that has been many festivals. Born as a secondary event in a great civic celebration, it has become its central point and essential moment; begun as a pastime for nobles and dignitaries, it has ended up the popular festival of an entire city; intended as a simple horse race it has turned into a game complicated and enmeshed by a thousand twists and turns. The Palio is much more than a pageant and a horse race. There are those who have taken it for a splendid exercise in aesthetics, produced by a culture that had been through a period in which it created great art. In the Palio the Sienese resort to the most subtle machinations of rationality and strategy, but they want it to be a game of chance at the same time; they set about it with fairness and prevarication, by force and for love.
