In love with economic disaster

We spent part of the last two weeks – as has become a family custom – mooching round Siena. And although, like Venice, the place can absorb a huge number of visitors before becoming unpleasantly crowded, we were by no means the only ones. That’s because, of course, Siena is just about perfect – an intact mediaeval town, with hardly a building later than the 16th century, but a living community, not a mummified museum. It is also a prime example of what most of us love to look at when we go travelling. Namely, economic failure.

Siena looks the way it does because of a series of disasters. At the beginning of the 14th century it was one of the most go-ahead places on earth, a prototype of the way we all live today. It was almost the size of Paris, one of the financial centres of Europe, a relatively democratic trading republic with a written constitution.