the map of the historic Contrade for the Palio horserace in Siena
Like all foreigners visiting Siena for the palio horse-race, and despite my 4 years living in Siena, I keep getting confused about the contrade territories.
Many times I tried searching the internet for this and could not find any clear mappings of the contrade, so, while the original 1729 document establishing the boundaries might be interesting for historians (both for the ancient italian language and the many changes in Siena’s urban planning) here’s my little ‘Google Earth ready’ KML contribution to help visitors in orienteering around and get more involved in the palio race itself, with a clear georeferenced mind-map of the contendants.
The file, still under ‘heavy’ (?) development, was build by translating in latitude, longitude coordinates a sketch I found in a local leaflet, so excuse any approximations; icons are from http://www.ilpalio.org/ and http://www.paliodisiena.biz/; you can search for your hotel or any address in Siena with GoogleEarth’s search box and see in which of the contrade that location actually is.
Graphical charts with the historic wins stats of each of the contrade will soon appear in the pop-up infoboxes; a google Maps porting of the same KML file is also being developed, but still needs major fixes both at the javascript and the layout (css), take a look anyhow: the ‘Palio di Siena’ on google Maps: Contrade.
Hopefully I’ll be able to find some time to finish this stuff in time for the 2009 palio events: july 2nd, august 16th – see you aruond in Piazza del Campo!
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