Siena, Djenne and everything else..!

 

The sun is shining from a cloudless sky and  summer seems to have returned once more to Siena. The Piazza del Campo is of course the place to be on a Sunday- at least for a while, to look at people in this marvelous place. People must have been sitting here being happy in the sunshine for 800 years or maybe more… The Piazza is the heart of the city- or perhaps the womb? a gentle, embracing space, a neutral area in this city of ancient rivalries which dissolve here on the shell-shaped Campo. It is a most democratic place: during the Palio it costs nothing to be here, in the centre of the events, and at other times, while some sit and sip their wine or aperitivos in the smart bars and restaurants that border the Piazza,  you can  take advantage of the best place in town for free to eat your sandwiches and to stretch out in the sun for a while on its gentle slope. What other Piazza offers that comfort?

                                                                              

Have been absorbed in flat hunting in the last week and have seen some wonderful places- meanwhile there are other developments far away in Mali, where the little bogolan textile business is still alive with Dembele, my old bogolan master at the helm. He has just completed an order for Colefax and Fowler in London, who wanted to reorder our ‘Grande Vague’, a popular pattern they ordered some years before.

 And here it is, drying in the sun by my old home in Djenne:

And that is not all: if you read my old blog www.commutingtotimbuktu.blogspot.com  you may remember that I was going into the chicken business with my old bartender, Maman.  He bought 1100 chicks nearly 2 months ago.            

                                 

And they are now grown and all going well should be sold in the coming week! I think the foot below the chickens on the picture might be Maman’s…

There is also still manuscript business going on: a trip to Mali to try and launch the digitization studio in Gao will most probably be arranged within a month or so!