Sienna #1: Tortura

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Sienna in most of its places is more city-fied than New York, or Rome. What do I mean by that? Look at this image. See the sky? See the trees? The clouds? See nature all around?

Nope, they're not there. Sienna grows 380 degrees around you. Look up and the buildings seem to merge. Look right and left and they seem to melt down upon themselves. Look down and there's no trace of the earth which has forced the city builders to form such difficult stone skins around them. In a way Sienna seems to be a cast of city poured over then worked into the rock and dirt and hills. Of course San Francisco's like that but its boulevards and streets are so wide that there's a view of earth or sea in one direction or another. And there are trees everywhere.

Not here. I took this picture at 1:25 on a sunny afternoon. The shell beneath your feet is itself feet deep. Thousands of years of building over building has created a kind of magnificient hive. I like cities. I live in a city that's about the size of Sienna. But while visiting this place is amazing, living there... that would be hard as the steep streets that bind it to its mountain.