SIENA&Toscana

Siena · 8 min read

Siena's Goldsmiths Work to Commission

Where the city's gold and silver actually are

Siena has a goldsmithing tradition its own Comune names in those words, and almost none of it is in a shop window. The city's silver is commissioned: a prize made new every year for the Palio, a papal gift that has belonged to the city since 1459, a university master that puts students' jewellery designs into working goldsmiths' hands. The antiques trade is the opposite — regulated, dated, and in one square on one Sunday a month. This page is about where to look. It names no shop, and the reason is in the last section.

Start with what the city says about itself

The Comune's tourism office sets out what Sienese craft is: working clay, hand-painted ceramics, restoration, metalworking, artistic decoration on wood. Its craft section holds four pages — artisanship in general, the Mercato nel Campo, the historic shops, and Sienese ceramics.

There is no goldsmithing page, and no antiques page.

Read that as a map, not a verdict. Siena's gold and silver are not missing. They are not retail. They are commissioned by institutions, they are made to be given, and they end up in museums — which is why walking Via di Città looking for them is the wrong search.

The commission that happens every year

The Masgalano is the prize for the best comparsa among the seventeen contrade — for elegance, dignity of bearing and coordination through the Corteo Storico that precedes both the July and the August races. It is not an old object polished up each summer. It is commissioned new, and unveiled in the Cortile del Podestà alongside the Drappellone.

The 2026 Masgalano was presented there on Thursday 26 June, the work of Antonio Benocci, whom the Comune describes as an artist and orafo senese — a Sienese goldsmith — with Berenice Arcamone, in the Comune's words a young artist trained at the Saltarello school. It was offered by the Unione Italiana dei Ciechi e degli Ipovedenti, Siena section, in memory of Enrico "Ghigo" Giannelli, its provincial president, who died in 2018.

What they made is worth describing, because it is the tradition arguing for itself:

  • The main structure is silver, following the curve of Piazza del Campo — a shape that is also the letter C, the mark of the Unione Italiana dei Ciechi e degli Ipovedenti.
  • The flags of all seventeen contrade are executed in pierced silver. The shell's surface is polished silver, worked with herringbone motifs that echo the accoltellato, the brick paving of the Campo itself.
  • At the centre is a silver hand, reading Braille — built up from silver sheets soldered together, the fingers arched as if holding something valuable. It points to a lectern in celluloid, the material Braille has traditionally been written on.
  • Cut into that lectern, in Braille: "Ghigo, guidato dal suo sapere, rese Siena faro per chi vuol vedere" — Ghigo, guided by his learning, made Siena a beacon for those who wish to see.
  • The arms of the Comune di Siena, the Magistrato delle Contrade and the Comitato Amici del Palio complete it.

The Comune's own account says the work marries the preciousness of the materials with la sapienza della tradizione orafa senese — the accumulated skill of the Sienese goldsmithing tradition. That is the city, on the record, saying the tradition is present tense.

The prize itself is not medieval either. The Comune's official guide records that the Masgalano was revived in 1950, on the initiative of the Amici del Palio, and that the winning contrada is decided by a points system, with commissioners posted around the track. The name comes from the Spanish mas galante. Whichever contrada wins it keeps it: the object goes into a contrada museum and stays there.

If the Corteo Storico is what you are watching for, how to watch the Palio covers the day itself, and the seventeen contrade is who is being judged.

The one that has been here since 1459

The benchmark object is in the Palazzo Pubblico. The Rosa d'Oro was given to the Comune di Siena by Pius II Piccolomini on 4 March 1459, on the anniversary of his first year as pope — the Golden Rose being a gift popes made each year to churches, sanctuaries, cities and eminent people, in regard and admiration and, as the Comune puts it without flinching, to reaffirm their influence over a territory.

It was made by the papal goldsmith Giovanni di Simone Ghini.

For most of its life in the city it sat in the small room off the chapel known as the Anticappella. Since 11 December 2025 it has had a permanent display of its own in the Cappella dei Signori, inside the Museo Civico — which is to say inside the Palazzo Pubblico you were going to visit anyway. If you want to see what a Sienese-commissioned goldsmith's object looks like at the top of the range, this is the one to go and stand in front of, and it costs no more than the museum ticket.

The part that is still being taught

The Università degli Studi di Siena runs a first-level master in Storia, design e marketing del gioiello — the history, design and marketing of jewellery. It is not a memorial: the university's own admissions catalogue lists it for the academic year 2026/27, with applications closing on Monday 15 March 2027, and it ran the year before.

What the course does with its students is the interesting part. For the exhibition that accompanied the Rosa d'Oro's new display — Florent in auro. Gioielli per la Rosa d'oro di Pio II, curated by the master's academic referent Paolo Torriti — the students designed jewellery inspired by the Rosa d'Oro, and the finished prototypes were then made up in companies and in goldsmiths' workshops during their end-of-course placements.

That is the answer to whether any of this survives. It survives as a training pipeline with real workshops at the end of it.

The antiques trade has a date

Siena's antiques trade is not a shop question. It is a market, it is in Piazza del Mercato, and the Comune regulates it as street trading.

The cadence is published, and it is specific. In approving a new Piano and Regolamento for trading on public land — passed unanimously by the Consiglio comunale on 19 March 2026 — the Comune set out that the antiques market falls on the third Sunday of the month, except in August, when it moves to the fourth Sunday to avoid clashing with the Palio. The same thing happened in practice in 2024, when the Giunta pushed the August market back a week for exactly that reason.

On that rule as written, August 2026's antiques market is Sunday 23 August — the Sunday after the Palio. We have derived that from the Comune's rule rather than read it off a calendar, because the Comune publishes no per-date calendar for this market, and the event page on its own site for it is a stale 2024 entry. Check with the Comune before travelling for it.

Two things in that same regulation are worth knowing if you are trying to read Siena's commercial centre:

  • Concessions for market pitches now run ten years, under the regional law — these are long-term traders, not a weekend flea market.
  • In the central "zona commerciale 1" the Comune has stopped issuing new pitch concessions, and has reserved the right not to renew the ones that exist when they expire — currently at the end of 2032. That is a city deliberately not filling its centre with more stalls.

Siena's markets covers the December Mercato nel Campo and the rest of the city's market life.

How to judge a workshop

The city itself models the test, and it is a single question: who made this, and will you say so?

Every year the Comune stands in the Cortile del Podestà and answers it out loud. The Masgalano is presented with its maker named, its collaborator named, its donor named and its materials described. An art historian explains it. That is what provenance looks like when nobody is hiding anything.

Carry the same question into a workshop:

  • Who made it, and where? A maker will answer with a person and a place. A reseller will answer with a region or a material.
  • Was it made here, or brought here? Both are legitimate businesses. The difference is what you are paying for, and you are entitled to know which one you are in.
  • For gold and silver, ask about the mark. Italy regulates this by law — legislative decree 251 of 22 May 1999, in force since October 1999, is titled Disciplina dei titoli e dei marchi di identificazione dei metalli preziosi, and gives its second chapter to the identification mark. We have read the decree's title and structure and not its operative articles, so we will not tell you what a given mark must contain. We will tell you that the framework exists, that a maker knows their own mark, and that "who made it" is therefore a question with a documentary answer rather than an opinion.

What this page will not do

It will not rank shops, and it will not print a "best of".

That is not modesty. A page listing the good goldsmiths of Siena becomes, within a season, a page that businesses ask to be added to — and the moment a place on it can be requested, the list stops telling readers anything. The workshops worth your afternoon are the ones that answer the question above, and you can ask it yourself in thirty seconds.

The same discipline runs through the last workshops of Siena and what to bring home from Siena, which is where the practical buying advice lives.

Practical Information

The Rosa d'Oro: Cappella dei Signori, Museo Civico, Palazzo Pubblico, Piazza del Campo. Included in the museum admission — the ticket detail is on the Museo Civico's own page.

The Masgalano: presented each year in the Cortile del Podestà of the Palazzo Pubblico, at the same ceremony as the Drappellone, ahead of the July race; contested at the Corteo Storico before both Palii. Free to watch from the Cortile.

The antiques market: Piazza del Mercato, third Sunday of the month; fourth Sunday in August. No hours are published by the Comune, and no dated calendar — confirm before planning around it.

The master: Università degli Studi di Siena, Storia, design e marketing del gioiello, first level. Applications for 2026/27 close 15 March 2027.

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Sources

Everything on this page was fetched and read on 14 August 2026, at the Comune di Siena's own pages and the Università degli Studi di Siena's own admissions catalogue. No figure here is carried from a guidebook, a listing site or a search result.

Two limits, stated where you can see them. No date is printed for the 2026 antiques market on the Comune's authority — the 23 August above is derived from the Comune's published rule, and is labelled as such in the text. And no shop, dealer or workshop is named anywhere on this page, because none was verified, and because a ranked list would be worth less than the question it replaces.

By the Siena & Toscana editors

The editorial desk

Last full review 14 August 2026. Every factual claim on this page was checked against the issuing authority's own material — the comune, the consorzio, the museum or the operator, not a secondary write-up — and the check is recorded with the date it was made. This page carries dated figures and is scheduled for re-verification by 1 March 2027. Where a source could not be reached, the page says so rather than filling the gap. If you find something wrong, tell us and we will correct it and re-date this line.

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Official Sources

Cross-referenced with Visit Tuscany, Terre di Siena and the Comune di Siena.