The shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, the town square, which houses the Palazzo Pubblico and the Torre del Mangia, is another architectural treasure, and is famous for hosting the Palio horse race. The Palazzo Pubblico, itself a great work of architecture, houses yet another important art museum. Included within the museum is Ambrogio Lorenzetti's series of frescos on the good government and the results of good and bad government and also some of the finest frescoes of Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti.
The open site was a marketplace established before the thirteenth century. Siena may have had earlier Etruscan settlements, but it was not a considerable Roman settlement, and the campo does not lie on the site of a Roman forum, as is often casually suggested. The site was low sloping ground among the three hillside communities that coalesced to form Siena: the Castellare, the San Martino and the Camollia. It was paved in 1349 in fishbone-patterned red brick with nine lines of travertine radiating from the Palazzo Pubblico, the focal point of public life in the Republic, in symbolism that connects the public work with the Committee of Nine, the Noveschi who governed Siena, 1292-1355. From the sunlit, treeless piazza, eleven narrow shaded streets radiate into the city.
The palazzi signorili that line the square, housing the families of the Sansedoni, the Piccolomini, the Saracini, have unified rooflines, in contrast to earlier tower houses— emblems of communal strife— such as may still be seen not far from Siena at San Gimignano. In the statutes of Siena, civic and architectural decorum was ordered
"...it responds to the beauty of the city of Siena and to the satisfaction of almost all people of the same city that any edifices that are to be made anew anywhere along the public thoroughfares...proceed in line with the existent buildings and one building not stand out beyond another, but they shall be disposed and arranged equally so as to be of the greatest beauty for the city."[1]
The unity of these Late Gothic houses is effected in part by the uniformity of the bricks of which their walls are built: brick-making was a monopoly of the commune, which saw to it that standards were maintained. (Ingersoll)
The Fonte Gaia ("Fountain of Joy") was set up in 1419 as an endpoint of the system of conduits bringing water to the city's centre, replacing an earlier fountain completed about 1342 when the water conduits were completed. Under the direction of the Committee of Nine, many miles of tunnels were constructed to bring water in aqueducts to fountains and thence to drain to the surrounding fields. The present fountain, a center of attraction for the many tourists, is in the shape of a rectangular basin that is adorned on three sides with many bas-reliefs with the Madonna surrounded by the Classical and the Christian Virtues, emblematic of Good Government under the patronage of the Madonna[2]. The white marble Fonte Gaia was originally designed and built by Jacopo della Quercia, whose bas-reliefs from the basin's sides are conserved in the Ospedale di St. Maria della Scala in Piazza Duomo. The former sculptures were replaced in 1866 by free copies by Tito Sarocchi, who omitted Jacopo della Quercia's two nude statues of Rhea Silvia and Acca Larentia, which the nineteenth-century city fathers found too pagan or too nude. When they were set up in 1419, Jacopo della Quercia's nude figures were the first two female nudes, who were neither Eve nor a repentant saint, to stand in a public place since Antiquity.
At the foot of the Palazzo Pubblico's wall is the late Gothic Chapel of the Virgin that was voted for by the Sienese, after the end of the terrible Black Death of 1348.
The semi-annual famous horse-race of Siena, the Palio, is held in the piazza.
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