Piazza Grande is also the place where, in June and September, an event that will greatly delight young visitors is staged: the Giostra del Saracino. This is an evocative re-enactment of the exercises that were once carried out to prepare to face the Moors: the four quarters of Arezzo challenge each other in period clothing in breaking the shield of the buratto, but taking care not to be hit by the puppet representing the Saracen.
The Joust as we see it today was born on August 7, 1931 with an edition sui generis. The resumption of the Saracino is above all daughter of that reconstruction of the glorious Italian past proper of Fascism. Encouraging the revival of traditions was considered a vehicle of consensus. Between the end of the Twenties and the beginning of the Thirties, several popular events came back to life, among which the Palio of Asti, the Calcio in costume of Florence and the Gioco del ponte of Pisa. At a local level, from the mid-twenties, the local associations were born with a recreational function.
The traditional anecdote has it that it was the Arezzo correspondent of the newspaper "La Nazione", Alfredo Bennati, who initiated the rebirth of the . While looking for the recipe of a cake in the civic library, he comes across by chance the booklet describing the Joust of 1677. Here he finds the story of a joust played in honour of Baron Siri on the occasion of the feast of San Niccolò and a series of rules that represent the core of the current technical regulations. Shortly afterwards, the legend tells that Bennati himself, being in Pescaiola, noticed a group of children holding broomsticks like spears and running, imitating the gallop of a horse, to hit a figure drawn with charcoal on a wall: "What are you doing?" he asked. "We are playing a game of tumbling," they answered. He thus realized that the chivalrous tournament he had read about in the library was not a mere memory of the past, but a tradition still alive in popular culture.
A visit to the museum dedicated to the Giostra del Saracino in the Porta Santo Spirito district, located in one of the sixteenth-century bastions that once delimited the district itself, is also a must: inside you can admire medieval costumes, banners and decorated lances.
