Sky Lark : Afloat above the rose-red city of Siena

The two huge flowered balloons lifted us gently from the dew-wet grass of a valley meadow, through a primordial mist and into a place of sunlight and silence. Somewhere far below we could hear dogs barking but couldn’t see them. We were like an airborne bouquet suspended between a dazzling blue heaven and a fog-shrouded netherworld.

I could almost hear my Sienese friend and guide Lucia Coppi saying: “See, it’s just like I told you. In Siena, the sacred and the profane are always mixed up together.”

One by one, from nearby hilltops, castles and villas poked their towers out of the clouds as if to take a look around. Swirls of mist lay snagged like chiffon in the tops of trees.

On the horizon, the rose-red city of Siena materialized as if by magic, rising through the clouds like some medieval saint’s fervent vision. First visible was the slender brick Mangia Tower that crowns the town hall, then the baptistry tower of the striped cathedral. Next came the cathedral’s glistening white dome, and, finally, the rosy tiled rooftops and reddish-pink walls that define the color that artists call burnt sienna. The tower hovered in the distance like an apparition, tantalizing as a hallucination. Then, like smoke, the mist began to slip away.

While we stood in our baskets in awed silence, the invisible dogs began barking in counterpoint. We could feel the heat from the flame overhead and hear the throaty roar of the burner as Mike, the pilot, directed a burst of hot air into the huge silken balloon, and we climbed a bit higher, above our friends in the balloon behind us, for a better look at the medieval city that lay ahead.

Ballooning provides a special viewpoint for some of the earth’s extraordinary places: Kenya’s Masai Mara during the migration of the wildebeests; the snow-covered Swiss Alps in winter; the architectural splendor of the Loire Valley chateaux and Austrian castles, or the vineyards of Burgundy during the autumn harvest. Most ballooning excursions are seasonal and sell out quickly, so plan and make reservations well ahead.

There were 10 of us in the six-person rattan baskets on this balloon adventure in Tuscany, all, by coincidence, from Southern California. We were a real estate developer and his wife, two interior designers, an actor, a theatrical agent, a retired businessman, an energetic and spunky octogenarian who was making her fourth ballooning excursion and two writers.

When my wake-up call came that morning and I looked out the hotel window into the gray, misty pre-dawn, my heart sank. We certainly would not be able to fly on a day like this.

But we were told that test balloons showed there was a good chance of finding winds to carry us over the city. Still half-asleep, we mumbled greetings to each other and tumbled into two chase vans, each pulling its own balloon squeezed into a wicker basket mounted on a two-wheeled trailer.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Siena we turned onto a series of roadways that got progressively narrower until finally, on a dirt road little more than a track, we stopped to inflate the balloons in a damp, foggy field.

Once in the air, as we drifted closer we could see the city sprawled across its three red-clay hills in an irregular shape that looked something like an ancient animal.

“There is nothing in the world quite like Siena,” art historian Bernard Berenson wrote. “It is a medieval city that might be likened to a rare beast, with heart, arteries, tail, paws and teeth. Only the skeleton is left intact, and it is enough to astound us.”

On this exhilarating morning, it seemed to resemble the Chimera from Etruscan sculpture with the head of a lion, the horned head of a goat growing from his back and a serpent for a tail.

Siena, more than anywhere else in Italy, is a place still living unself-consciously and comfortably in the rich golden afternoon of the Middle Ages.

Siena hit its stride about the middle of the 13th Century, when it defeated archrival Florence in the battle of Montaperti. The city grew and prospered for 100 years until the Black Death decimated medieval Europe.

Siena then closed its city gates to the Renaissance that two centuries later struck Florence with a fever of creation. But not Siena. It was forever fixed in its own time--the late Middle Ages.

Sienese artists continued to paint in stylized Byzantine and Gothic flatness, ignoring the new Florentine passion for perspective. And in 1555, the Florentines conquered Siena, something the Sienese don’t like to discuss.

“The Sienese don’t want to change,” my friend Lucia had said with a sigh the day before, when we had coffee together in the campo. “They like to have always the same things; otherwise they are scared.”

From the balloon I could look down to where Lucia and I had sat in the tilted, shell-shaped piazza, and I wished she were still there so I could call down and wave.

Instead, my impulsive “Buon giorno!” from overhead startled workmen who were removing packed, golden dirt from the track laid down for the Palio, which had taken place a few days before.

The famous Palio is an odd combination of medieval spectacle and fierce, violent horse race that has been run each summer since the 11th Century. Twice a year, July 2 and Aug. 16, dirt is brought from its storage place outside town and tamped down around the perimeter of the piazza to make the parade route and race track.

Some scholars think the Palio may have come from the Etruscans, mysterious early settlers of the region who were obliterated by the Romans but who gave their name and certain arcane and cabalistic customs to the present-day Tuscans.

It was the Etruscans who first developed strong city-states similar to the 17 contrade , or districts, in Siena today.

The contrade , most of whom were named for animals, probably began in the Middle Ages as neighborhood military companies.

Today they function as extended families that compete in the Palio. They also bring a sense of family and neighborhood responsibility to life in Siena. The district in which a baby is born determines his contrada , and despite where he moves for the rest of his life, he will always be known for the name of his animal contrada , whether it is Owl or Eagle or Unicorn.

“Everyone knows each other,” Lucia said. “If you don’t behave in a certain way, you are pointed out. In a contrada , if a young person is not happy with his life, if he is going to get in trouble with drugs or something, everybody tries to help him. Otherwise, the honor of the contrada would be ruined.”

There is said to be virtually no crime or gang activity in the city. Perhaps this is due in part to each person’s intense loyalty to his contrada , which includes bonding behavior, such as wearing colors and the insignia and shouting expletives against rival districts during the frenzied days of the Palio.

From ground level I had never fully appreciated the way the campo is neatly divided into nine herringbone-brick wedges that become a fan with the points radiating downhill--a practical design element originally intended to channel away rainwater.

For a moment, the shadow of our balloons brushed across the Mangia Tower, and I could see the pigeons around the rim of a green square of water, the Fonte Gaia or Fountain of Joy.

The narrow medieval streets below, restricted to foot traffic, wound tortuous and intricate routes shadowed by the steep old buildings that line them, until they burst, dazzlingly, into the brilliant clarity of the campo.

“In other cities, when you want to meet someone you telephone and make an appointment,” Lucia said. “Here, you go to the campo, to the cafes, and you always find who you are looking for.”

The campo stands almost equidistant between the sacred and the profane, the cathedral and the Monte dei Paschi bank. The latter, founded in 1472 and housed in the graceful Palazzo Salimbeni, has been the heartbeat of Siena for more than 500 years.

Half the profits of the bank go to the city (last year the total was 40 billion lira). A local saying defines the three kinds of employment in Siena: having a job at the bank, being retired from the bank and waiting to get a job at the bank.

From the balloon the stripes of the cathedral appear to be the same black and white as the colors of Siena--the polarity between light and darkness, good and evil. But up close they are dark green, the marble tinged with copper.

Beside the duomo it is possible to see the Facciattone, the ghostly skeleton of the “new” cathedral that opened its doors in 1330 to show how rich and powerful the Sienese had become. Then came the plague of 1348, which killed nearly two-thirds of Siena’s population of 60,000.

Workers and master masons died and all building stopped, never to be started again. It still is open to the sky, as are green parks and spaces where wooden houses--which rotted or burned--once stood. Today the population within the walls of the city is about 30,000, half of what it was in the Middle Ages.

Just before our balloon returned to the 20th Century by setting down in the soccer stadium, we soared over the vast, stern Church of San Dominico, where relics of St. Catherine of Siena--her shrunken, leathery head and a thumb--are displayed.

A local dyer’s daughter and one of 23 children, Catherine entered the Dominican order in 1360 at the age of 13, scourging herself with whips and fasting with an anorexic’s passion.

The pale, bone-thin nun, depicted holding a spray of white lilies in one of the many paintings of her in Siena, nursed countless victims of the plague of 1374 without ever becoming ill.

Her contemporaries considered that a miracle. Some latter-day scholars have suggested another explanation: that long-term exposure to vast amounts of tannin found in dyes may have protected her.

Born and raised in the Goose contrada , St. Catherine is Siena’s patron saint. And therein lies what Lucia calls a typical Sienese story:

“There was a priest--he is dead now--who used to wear the colors of the Goose under his robes. He really wanted the Goose contrada to win the Palio race, so every day he lit candles in front of St. Catherine. The day of the Palio came, but the Goose did not win. So this priest, he came back to St. Catherine and he put out all the candles and said, ‘Just for that, you stay in the dark!’ ”

For information about balloon excursions in Siena, call Buddy Bombard’s Great Balloon Adventures toll-free at (800) 862-8537, or write to 6727 Curran St., McLean, Va. 22101. The Bombard brochure contains various seasonal balloon adventures in Europe.

Other balloon adventures are available through Abercrombie & Kent’s African safaris, P.O. Box 305, Oak Park, Ill. 60303, toll-free (800) 323-7308, and Hemphill Harris/Horizon Cruises, which offers ballooning in Burgundy in conjunction with luxury hotel barge cruises. Write 16000 Ventura Blvd., Suite 200, Encino 91436, or call toll-free (800) 252-2103.

Five-day programs including hotel, meals and sightseeing are scheduled June 15 and 21, 1990, at $3,572 per person, double occupancy. The seven-day Palio Adventures, which also includes tickets to the Palio and other related events, start June 27 and July 1 for $5,270 per person, double occupancy.

Lucia Coppi, an official Siena city guide, is fluent in English and an expert in art history and local culture. She can be reached at (0577) 286-262 in Siena.