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We only had one day in Siena, and unfortunately we wasted it on watching the Palio.
The Palio is an annual bareback horse race in Siena which they run the outskirts of the town centre. We had heard it was really worth going to see as it was really chaotic and the only rule of the race was you can’t hit the horses in the head, but anything else goes. It sounded like it would be interesting to see, but it was definitely not!
We got there at 3pm for the race to start at 730 (we were told to get there early so we didn’t get locked out), we then sat around doing nothing for the next 2 hours until the parade started, the parade then went for 2 hours with (what seemed like) every single person that has ever had anything to do with the race walking through it, by this stage we were contemplating leaving, but had heard the race was so worth seeing, we held out.
Then the race horses finally came out and they went to start the race, it took ANOTHER 2 hours to get the horses lined up to start the race, so in total, we waited around 6 hours to see a 3 minute horse race that had no carnage in it whatsoever! It was cool to see how passionate Italians get about there sport, but I think we could have done without it!
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