Like many other Italian cities, Siena faced repeated feuds and gang warfare. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries its government attempted to control these groups through staged and regulated "civic" battles, which became quite popular.

Faced with an already centuries-old culture of intramural violence, Siena's earliest communal governments sought to - condone" and control what they could not eliminate by also initiating an annual Sienese version . . . the Game of the Helmet, it was a city-wide group combat, pitting Siena's most populous terziere [neighborhood] against the other two. For generations, thousands of Sienese, participating under their military banners, wielding wooden weapons (maces, swords and spears) and throwing stones, sought to drive their fellow citizens from the Piazza del Campo under the watchful eyes of their elected officials looking on from the windows of the Palazzo Pubblico, the seat of government...