Santa Maria Assunta in Siena [jenna]

The train chugged away, taking the backdrop of the twenty-first century with it. Siena stretched ahead of us, small and lovely, contentedly seven hundred years old.

Once a rival to Florence, the little city of Siena was arrested by the plague, cut off before its growth boom could flourish and give it the power Florence later attained. Its architecture survives from the Middle Ages, its modern aspects—shops, cars, hip young Italians and tourists—merely layered on top or corking little holes in the structure. Terrible as the Black Death was, it left a segment of history intact that more powerful later years too often destroyed.

We climbed streets and stairs, wondering at svelte little boutiques tucked into brick walls with iron rings for tying up horses. The tiny, brightly-colored cars that Italians like to drive rattled across the cobblestones, fearless among the pedestrian traffic.

At the Il Campo piazza, a popular stop for both tourists and pigeons, we took pictures against the clock tower before heading onward. Our main goal was Siena's cathedral.

Green and white striped marble walls came into view first, rough at the tops and arches, obviously unfinished. The expansion of the duomo (Italian for cathedral) had been caught half-completed during the Black Death.

The front of the building stood facing away from us as we approached. We crossed the half-enclosed courtyard, rounded the corner, and all of us stopped to stare. Horses, bears, eagles, angels, lions, and myriad other carvings took their form from a high wall of pink marble. Biblical scenes filled in the peaks, brilliant images against gold backgrounds. It was wholly unlike anything I'd ever seen before, and though the high doors waited, it took me awhile to convince myself to look away long enough to enter.

The medieval carved stone floors, worn after centuries of booted tread, are uncovered for viewing only six weeks of the year. We got lucky. Even at the ticket booth, though, I couldn't at first drop my eyes to the floor. The walls and pillars all around me were of the same green and white stripe, with Gothic lines and points. Frescoes appeared regularly along the walls, and stars were painted into midnight blue peaked ceilings. Being American and used to finding age and grandeur in brick churches and concrete courthouses, I’d lost my breath at sight of the huge baroque wonders of Rome—but even Rome could not compete for beauty against the sharp upward focus of the older Goth.

Once through the ticket booth, I walked over to the first roped-off section of floor. There, traced into the marble, was Hermes Trismegistus. He held a book that—in Latin—said something about God the creator of all things and His Son the Holy Word. As a student of the alchemical influence on Christian literature, I nearly broke the solemn quiet with a squeal at finding the author of the Corpus Hermeticum on a cathedral floor. It was contact with the reality of the Middle Ages— when science and faith considered themselves friends, not enemies; when pagan thought was simply sifted and baptized, rather than abhorred as wholly evil.

Hermes was not my last startling discovery upon the floors. The Slaughter of the Innocents, a depiction of the murder of the baby boys in Judaea just after Christ’s birth, was difficult to look at without tears. Elsewhere, King David’s son Absalom hung caught in a tree by his hair. Men rode the philosophical Wheel of Fortune (Pat Sajack and Vanna White not included) from worldly might to poverty and back again; I had never heard of the mythic Wheel, but later learned that Christians used it to remember that the mighty will fall, and that the things of earth are only earthly.

Pillar bases, the baldacchino, music stands and gates—everything above the floor appeared to be carved or sculpted or painted. Michelangelo's St. Paul stood in one of the many corners, and at one point I peered through an iron gate into a little bit of paradise—flowers, candles, and a beautiful icon of the Madonna and Child. We lit a candle there, and stopped to pray.

Off to the side, a little library proved another treasury: illuminated chant manuscripts, enormous things meant to be read by a choir of monks all at once. The colors of illumination are like nothing else, I thought. We managed to sound out part of one of the chants together, two half-trained schola singers wrestling with quilismae and heavily flourished calligraphy.

We left the duomo with a long look back at the beautiful facade and met up with modernity long enough to stop for pizza.