A Weekend Under the Tuscan Sun With Rosetta Getty at the Palio Horse Race

A Weekend Under the Tuscan Sun With Rosetta Getty at the Palio Horse Race

I started coming to the Palio with my husband, Balthazar, about 20 years ago. If you’ve never heard of it, the Palio is one of the oldest horse races in Europe—for two days each summer, the central piazza in Siena, Italy, is transformed into a track, and neighborhood teams compete to win a painted flag, “the Palio.” It’s a big deal to the Sienese, and thousands upon thousands of people crowd into the Piazza del Campo to watch not just the race, but also the procession before it, where the neighborhoods—the contrade—march out with drums and flags and men in armor as precisely as they have since the Middle Ages. Since the first Palio of the summer happens right around the Fourth of July, Balthazar and I have gotten into the habit of inviting people to Tuscany to celebrate both events. A little of the Old World, a little of the New.

This year’s long weekend was a family affair—two of our children, Violet and June, were with us, as well as some of their friends, and so was much of my “work family.” There were some people I’ve known for ages, like Jamie Bochert—she and Balt have been hanging out since before he and I got married—and some friends I’ve made only since I launched my brand, like Elizabeth Olsen, and the artist Hayden Dunham, who I collaborated with for my most recent collection. Home base for everyone was the Villa Cetinale, one of the most beautiful estates in Tuscany, with some guests staying at the also-lovely Villa Pipistrelli, which has the nickname “Casa Balt” because Balthazar has been staying there for years and years. The Getty family has a long relationship with this area, starting from when Balt’s grandmother Gail bought a crumbling barn she saw advertised in the paper when she was living in Rome. This was back in the 1960s—there weren’t many foreigners with homes in Tuscany back then. Soon after Gail arrived and began fixing up her place, a lot of English families began buying properties—like Villa Cetinale, which is owned by the Lambtons. I’ve been to some crazy parties there—one with elephants, no kidding. Throwing our dinner on the back lawn at Villa Cetinale on Saturday night, it’s like we’ve joined that legacy. We didn’t have elephants, but we did have an amazing fireworks display to cap off the meal, and dancing on the courtyard with music supplied by Balthazar and Mia Moretti. It was a pretty late night; some of the guests we’d invited, people who’d happened to be in the area, were piling into their cars at almost 5 in the morning.

Needless to say, Sunday was easygoing—late night, and plus, most guests had traveled in on Saturday, some from as far as Los Angeles—and I wanted everyone to have ample time to relax. A bit of sunbathing or swimming in the Villa Cetinale pool; wander through the gorgeous gardens, maybe . . . Or, if you’re up for some serious exercise, you could climb the steps up to the hillside chapel. The story goes that the original owner of Villa Cetinale was a priest or maybe a bishop, but not a very well-behaved one, so the chapel was put all the way up on the hill, accessible by a very steep climb, as a form of regular penance. Midafternoon, we shifted location to Pipistrelli, where a classic Italian lunch awaited us. You know, nothing too complicated—pasta, mozzarella and tomato, avocado salad. Who doesn’t like that? I love it. And I love the unfussy vibe. Eat a little, take a dip in the pool, grab some wine, go back to the pool, or walk down to the old Greco-Roman road. In theory, you could walk all the way to the sea on the road. But we were due in Siena for dinner that night.

The Campo is already buzzing with pre-Palio excitement the night before the race. The outdoor tables at the trattorias rest on the dirt the horses will be running down the following evening, and both tourists and locals are out in force. This is the busiest time of year for tourism in Siena, but I really can’t emphasize enough that the Palio isn’t just a spectacle staged for visitors; the people who live in Siena are passionately committed to the event, and they’re super-competitive with each other. Notoriously, the art of the race isn’t the running—it’s the cheating. Everything’s fixed, and refixed, and fixed again in the preamble to the race. The jockeys are negotiating bribes right up to the starting shot. And then the race itself is chaos, three times around the track and if a rider falls off a horse, the horse can still win if it crosses the finish line first, on its own. This isn’t Ascot. We try to do the event right, though. On Monday afternoon, we bussed into town, split our group in two, and half the gang went to the trackside bleachers with Balthazar—that’s where you go if you really want to feel the race—and the other half came with me to our balcony suite over a gelateria. The balcony is where you go if you want the view, the totality of the event. It’s crazy to look up and see people hanging out windows at the top of medieval buildings, and look down and see thousands of people pressed into the heart of the Campo, at the center of the track. Our balcony was in the area that was meant to be cheering on the team with the goose emblem, but my daughter June had decided her heart was with Team Porcupine. Normally, Balt’s uncle has a horse in the race that we’re cheering—his crop is one that the racehorses are picked from each year—but this year, none of his horses had been chosen. So we could pick any side we wanted. In the end, Drago—the dragons—won the race, and all the fans came rushing out onto the track, screaming and crying and raising the Palio flag in glory. They’d go on marching around town with it all night, drummer in tow.

But we were en route back to Cetinale for a send-off dinner. Once again, the long table was laid in the back, but this time, we went for intimate and informal, with no seating cards and everyone grabbing ravioli and pasta Bolognese and fried chicken off the buffet. Balthazar was back on the decks—with our daughter Violet assisting this time—and lots of folks were back out on the dance floor. I think what’s nice about this event, and this is the third time I’ve hosted people as a “Rosetta Getty” thing, is that it’s authentic to me and my family. We have roots here, we’ve been coming here forever, and we’ve even been throwing these parties since forever, they’ve just grown organically. Now there’s a lot more organizing, and there are more people, but at heart, it’s the same thing we’ve always done—invite friends to join us for a joint celebration of the Fourth and the Palio. We’re making our own tradition.

As told to Maya Singer