The entire piazza is filled with dozens of long tables covered with white tablecloths and bright red napkins, but there are so many guests that more chairs and tables march out of the square and right up the hill, following the sinous curves of street.

Red and white flags flutter at the edges of stone palazzi, banners hang from the sills of windows, and bold red and white candelabra light up the darkness.

It is the night before the Palio, the famous horse race steeped in pageantry, and the distict of the Giraffe is celebrating with a good luck dinner in the street.

Four or five hundred people are eating, drinking, and cheering at the top of their lungs.

At one long table, fifty teenaged girls sing a special song that teenaged boys at a separate table answer with their own enthusiastic verses, tribal behavior a cappella.

Everyone is wearing the red and white colors of the Giraffe, even the priest and the long-haired blond jockey, who is the object of the kind of rapturous attention usually reserved for rock star.

Passionate speeches about victory in the race receive the delirious cheers of the crowd. Young boys, serving dinner off long wooden pallets that look straight out of Brueghel, pass plates full of salty prosciutto, spicy salumette, and chicken-liver crostini, then ravioli, roast beef, soppressata, and potato salad.

The people of Siena are divided into seventeen contrade, or district, each with its own symbol, its own church and museum, its own motto and flag, its own patron sait, even its own fight song. Everyone is passionately loyal to his or her contrada, and these are the contrade that participate in the horse race called the Palio.

Each is like a state within a state, a little fiefdom with intense loyalties and enmities that erupt on the occasion of the horse races that have gone on since the Middle Ages and, in the current form, for the last four hundred years. A contrada means as much as family to a Senese and is in fact like an extended family that embraces everyone. The Palio itself takes place each year on July 2 and August 16, when the city erupts in a frenzy of emotion.

The August Palio, the more solemn and important of the two, is run the day after the Assumption of the Sacred Virgin, patron saint and protector of the city. The city is at a fever pitch for an entire week. It begins on the day that the horses are chosen and paraded to the Campo.Great groups of contrada members parade, arms linked, through the streets, singing song to the horse. "O balla, tu sei la stella," The August blessing of the palio begins with the Corteo dei Ceri e dei Censi, the procession of the candles and tributes, when the palio is escorted to the Duomo, where it remains until the day of the race.The ceremony is almost eight hundred years old.On the day of the Palio, each hors is taken into the church os its contrada, where it is sprinkled with holy water and blessed with utmost seriousness by the priest, who ends by urging it to win, although that particularly addition is not part of the religious ceremony.

A palio is , among other things, an excuse for members to meet at table. The contrada is like home, and the good luck dinners the night before the big race have entirely different menus each year. Most are planned and cooked by the best chefs and cooks in the contrada, some professional and some amateur.Menus include everything from a modest regional dish like zuppa frantoiana, a white bean soup usually served at the end of the olive harvest to such exotic dishes as spaghettini del Maharaja, made with a curried besciamellasauce, or Mexican horsd'oeuvres.. Tortellini alla panna, in a cream sauce, the traditional pasta of Bologna, has turned up at good luck dinners.

Dishes may be inspired by medieval and Renaissance Tuscany, may be rustic food become chic ,panzanella, or may simply be delicious dishes such a rich lasagne or panforte ice cream.

Whatever is served, the tablesare jammed.It used to be that good luck dinners were small, but now there may be as many as one thousand people, depending on the size of the contrada. Palios are remembered and reenacted and become part of the life story of a contrada. Il palio dura tutto l' anno that is to say Siena lives its Palio all year long.