Tuscany's Finest - Siena

‘For those involved in governing the city, the main problem is one of beauty’ once remarked an alderman of Siena, Tuscany’s finest city and the best-preserved medieval town in Europe. Siena is immediately likeable, neatly encased within its ancient city walls, and free of cars in the city centre. It is always a delight to wander through its narrow-arched streets, to explore the maze of dark, stepped alleyways, cobbled lanes and hidden fountain-splashed piazzas, and to discover its ancient palaces, its ornate balconies, its outstanding galleries and churches... no wonder Charles Dickens called it a ‘Venice without water’.

A Florence counterpart

The city has always provided an intimate antidote to its neighbour and eternal rival, Florence, just 65km to the north. Smaller, simpler, and more welcoming than Florence, its appearance is distinguished by its impressive hilltop site – built, like Rome, on seven hills and set amid what Virginia Woolf described as ‘the loveliest of all landscapes’. Its Gothic architecture provides a perfect foil to the Renaissance treasures of Florence, and the predominance of rich reddish-gold brick, rather than honey-coloured stone, gives the city a soft luminous glow as it basks in the Tuscan sunshine. More decorative but less intellectual than Florence, it is also less weighed down by history.

Historical perspective

The site of Siena was originally an Etruscan settlement that later became the Roman city of Sena Julia, founded by Senius, son of Remus (one of the two legendary founders of Rome). Hence the famous symbol of the suckling she-wolf became the civic badge, seen wherever the republic held sway. The Middle Ages saw Siena’s heyday, when it became one of Europe’s wealthiest cities, with a thriving textile industry. Much to the envy of Florence, it also boasted the first international banks in the world, raking in money from the whole of Christendom on behalf of the papacy.

During this time, Sienese painters (including Duccio di Buoninsegna, Simone Martini, Giovanni Pisano and the Lorenzetti brothers) were shaping the history of Italian and European art, with their early experimentation in techniques of perspective, their refined Gothic stylisation and their minute attention to detail. Appropriately, the city’s reddish-brown soil, rich in ferric oxide deposits, gave its name to the pigment ‘burnt Sienna’, so beloved by the great master painters. Their works can be seen today in several of the city’s galleries. The ninth-century Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala, a hospital for 800 years, now counts among Italy’s top galleries with its huge old wards smothered in frescoes. Siena’s main gallery is the Pinacoteca Nazionale. Here, many works depict the surrounding countryside with its softly-hued hills and vineyards, apricot-and butterscotch-coloured farmhouses and neat rows of cypresses, but ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ by Bartolo di Fredi shows a particularly realistic glimpse of the city at the height of its 14th-century glory.