On Sunday morning, July 9, I took a walk to the Basilica dell'Osservanza. To get to the church from our apartment on via Giuseppe Garibaldi (the general, revolutionary and father of Italy), I went outside the medieval wall of the city and took the 68 steps down the steep embankment to via Domenico Beccafumi (Siena's own Renaissance-Mannerist painter) that has an S-curve of bends. Beccafumi junctions in with a strada named after Siena's even more famous artist, Simone Martini. This street descends past La nuova Pasticceria and two roundabouts later you come to SP408. The highway goes under the railroad tracks and up a sharp beautiful walled-in bend. As you come out of the bend, the quiet strada of dell'Osservanza immediately turns right and crosses back over the highway. You are suddenly in the countryside. The dirt road leads to a rocky shaded trail that takes you up to the church. It is a short twenty-minute beautiful walk from the door of the apartment to the basilica, moving from the hectic traffic outside the city walls to the climb past gardens, olive groves and a wheat field. 

Ever since we started coming to Siena, I have been attracted to the stones beneath the city's geologic foundation, which is built on a hillcrest consisting of sedimentary deposits overlaid with clastic sandstones and conglomerates. Despite its silty marine base, the substrate is sufficiently strong enough for the city's construction that began during the Etruscan period. These hard, smooth stones are poorly cemented into the underlayer. Fist-sized, they look like potatoes and spill out of the hill's steep flanks during heavy rains. From a superior view looking down, the hill with its various ridges and ravines has a bird's foot shape. The ridges are indented with narrow, deep slopes covered in plant life that abate erosion. Private terraced vegetable gardens step down to the valleys below.

When I arrived at the church just before the eleven o'clock mass, parishioners were gathering. I lingered, and stood in the back listening to the service. Sweat dripped down my forehead, my shirt competely wet from the climb up. Once the nave emptied, I admired the Andrea della Robbia altarpiece in one of the side chapels. The Madonna at the front of the nave especially striking. (The Renaissance terracotta works by all of the Robbias, starting with Luca della Robbia, his nephew, Andrea, and Andrea's two sons, Giovanni and Girolamo, have all become some of my favorite art in Italy.)

Walking back down the gravel road, I noticed a bench built into the church's brick retaining wall. It was covered in leaves and dirt. I swept and cleaned it off with my hands, including hundreds of ants and their eggs underneath the debris. Buried in the corner of the bench was a small plastic container. I unscrewed its lid. A geocache.

On July 11, I returned to the rocky trail, surrounded by loud and constant cicada chatter and began collecing stones along the trail leading up to the basilica. My idea was to gather the stones and then handwash each one of them. This idea felt necessary, especially after finding a foam scrubbing pad lying by the side of the trail, as if it had been left there for me. 

For the next three days, with temperatures above one hundred degrees, I returned to the shaded trail. Slathered with mosquito repellent and with sweat dripping down my brow, I collected stones. I then cleaned each one and created a small pile on the brick bench below the basilica. The labor, along with its discomfort, became my art. The pain and burden I was willing to endure, but work I enjoyed, despite the heat, the humidity, the sweat and the heavy carrying. Little did I know what the finished piece meant until later, when I realized it had become a symbol of my experience and relationship of living in Italy since 2011.