The great fountain scavenger hunt!

Saturday's are wonderful day days for adventures in Siena and this one was no exception. It began a little slow as Saturdays are want to do with a lack of a schedule and all but before long Mollie and I found ourself in the city center with a brilliant idea! We were going to find every contradas fountain. We already knew where quite a few were from our previous wanderings of the city but many were completely unknown to us. We started at the fontebranda, claimed by l'oca and made our way from there. Some were easy like tartuca, torre, leocorno, or pantera but others were hidden and required asking for directions and lots of searching, like civetta, and nicchio. My personal favorites were lupa and giraffa, lupa because it is beautiful, and giraffa because a baptism into the contrada was happening and we got to see it all. Valdimontone was an interesting story: we were wandering through their contrada way out of the city center and very very empty. There was no tabbacheria to ask at and no natives walking by so we went into their church and decided to just take a break and figure it from there. When we left the church we were going to just abandon that contrada when I decided to ask 3 older people who looked like they lived in the area. The lady looked a little confused by our question and one of the gentleman told us they don't have a fountain then the lady said something like " why would we want a fountain, those are boring, we have an incredible view" at which point the other gentleman opened some large wooden gates we were standing in front of and beckoned us in. It turned out to be their contradas headquarters with the view that had been mentioned and I admit it was indeed breathtaking and much more beautiful than any of the fountains we'd seen. There was a small sculpture of a ram ( their mascot) that we took a picture of to complete the scavenger hunt and then we just marveled at our good luck to be allowed inside their headquarters which really aren't open to strangers. It was quite an incredible experience and I can honestly say that we completed the greatest scavenger hunt ever!!!