The steak I can't remember

Hi,

I went to Siena when I was very young, with Kat — my girlfriend then, my wife now. Two kids wandering around a city.

I had gone there to check a book. Three books, actually. I'd studied Siena in Villa and in Guidoni, and I walked the alleys looking for the things I had read: the hill ridges hiding under the streets, the point where the three systems meet, the piazza that is the shape of the ground before it is an idea. I walked with my nose in the air and my head inside a book. Kat followed. Always patient, always involved — and that is probably the magic still holding us together today. Both of us looking up. Both of us distracted.

What stayed with me from that day, though, is none of it.

What stayed is the heat. Enormous heat. A steak, in the evening — superb, one of the best I can remember — and I have no idea where we ate it. The red wine. And the sweat afterwards, walking full and happy through a city that is real, greedy for pleasure, and beautiful.

Here's the funny part. I spent an entire day verifying that Siena is a project — and it is; this week's piece makes the whole case: topography as urban plan, the piazza as a political act, a city that wasn't grown but decided. All true, all documented. But what the city actually left on me, after all these years, isn't the project.

It's a steak with no address, and a girl walking patiently behind me while I looked at the roofs.

I remember Guidoni. I don't remember the restaurant.

Talk soon,
Giulio Romano — The Slow Architect

P.S. This week's piece is on Siena: the three hills, the Campo as a political declaration, the cathedral that never existed, the invisible river under your feet. [LINK]. The reading list at the bottom is Guidoni and Villa — the same books that were rattling around my head that day in the alleys. And if you notice that some of the photographs aren't mine, now you know why: I was too busy verifying a book to photograph the city.