Siena is famed as the city of the palio, a break-neck horse race run by bareback riders over three laps of the magnificent shell-shaped piazza del Campo, twice a year during the summer months. The palio has been extensively studied by scholars of varied disciplines, but the social structures that give shape to that small city's fierce internal rivalries, articulated around seventeen districts or contrade, has not previously received much attention beyond local studies. For the same internal rivalries that manifest in the horse race have also given rise to a vast local production of studies of the individual contrade, whose scholarly value is varied, and whose accessibility outside of Siena itself is at most patchy.

Aurora Savelli's volume sets out to provide a scholarly study of the contrada, identifying the historical origins of this neighbourhood or district sodality and tracing its development down to modern times, a longue durée project that spans half a millennium. By so doing, the author sets out to identify continuities and major changes in the social makeup and institutional standing of the contrade within the city's administration. While this is a legitimate aim, it is nonetheless also true to say that this is only partially achieved. One problem stems from the chosen chronological sweep: the real meat of the book deals with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (chapters 3–5 and appendix documents), and here the author argues convincingly for the initial emergence of the contrada from among the artisanal classes and the subsequent widening inclusion to the nobility, invited in as ‘protectors’ of these associations. However, in the final section of the book, which looks at the contrada phenomenon within the context of the ‘invention of tradition’ thesis (as influentially developed by Hobsbawm and Ranger) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its medieval origins are subjected to scrutiny. Savelli strenuously argues that the search for such origins rests largely upon the ideologically motivated misunderstanding of the contrada as having its roots in the civic militias of Siena's golden age, and the equation made between martial civic participation and independent republican rule, what has sometimes been called Siena's ‘gothic dream’. Yet to overlook any continuities and origins for the contrada before the city's loss of independence in 1555, as Savelli does in chapter 2, seems rather to lose sight of the elements of continuity that lie at the basis of book's aims, and the success of the contrada as an institution. While there is rarely a direct overlap between the territorial boundaries of the contrade with parishes, nor even with the late medieval fiscal and administrative compagnie (which are barely even mentioned), it is nevertheless true that it was around churches and from within these compagnie that the first signs of artisanal sodality emerged. Careful archival work on these continuities, from the later fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries will surely throw up interesting findings, as has been shown with the emergence of the potenze in Florence in this same period, for example. Furthermore, while parishes and compagnie may not provide the direct origins for the contrade, the latter's spatial and territorial expression, as well as the increasing regulation of their administrative hierarchies, owe much to these precedents. It is indeed a great pity that the author has not really addressed the territorial expression of the contrade, an aspect which is key to the essence of their identity and competitiveness. The modern city is thickly layered with visible signs that denote their borders and boundaries, in the form of majolica tiles, flags, decorated lamps and so on; though it may be difficult to trace these boundaries back in time with precision, discussion of border disputes and conflicts would help to illustrate the physical and geographic expression of these local community groupings (there are no maps in the book).

Siena. Il popolo e le contrade assembles an impressive array of evidence, and brings the discussion of this out of the exclusive confines of locally produced and consumed volumes of contrada history, although some of the assumptions of local scholarship remain. As mentioned above, the major focus of primary research and of the documentary appendix centres on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and perhaps in transforming the original Ph.D. thesis into a book, a decision might have been taken to publish this material alone, leaving the post-1800 considerations for another. Savelli publishes some of the earliest contrada statutes (1663 and following), and in the body of the text provides useful individual biographical studies and collective prosopographic analysis that document changing contrada memberships. Unquestionably an urban phenomenon, whose success was rooted in Siena's ambiguous status after its annexation to the Medici Grand duchy, the changing role and definition of the contrade within Siena would seem to trace that city's relations with outside powers. It is to be hoped that Savelli's study will make it easier for historians to see behind the layers of local myth-making, to assess the contrade within the broader context of district government, religious confraternal associations, lay artisan brotherhoods and other means by which urban communities have collectively expressed local group identity.