Handpicked experience · Florence
Florence, Italy
Three Tuscan towns with a countryside lunch, a cathedral whose greatest work is boarded over most of the year, and 172 popes watching from the nave.
Long road stretches through the countryside between the towns
A led visit inside Siena Cathedral, with entry
Unstructured time in Siena, San Gimignano and Pisa
A three-course meal with a tasting at an organic Chianti estate
The Leaning Tower of Pisa seen from close range
Commentary in English
A day that crosses Tuscany from Florence and back, with three towns and a meal in the countryside between them. Most of the questions people ask about this itinerary concern how much of it is led and how much is your own, so that is where this starts.
Commentary runs on the road and inside the cathedral at the first town, which is where a guide earns their keep. In the towns themselves the time is yours, to eat, climb a tower or sit in a square as you prefer. The day starts early from a stated meeting place, and everything is delivered in English.
Worth knowing before you walk in. The floor is the masterpiece: fifty-six inlaid marble panels worked on for roughly two centuries by dozens of artists, sibyls and allegories and a massacre of the innocents rendered in stone rather than paint. For most of the year it lies under protective boarding, uncovered for only a few weeks, typically from late summer into October. Arrive expecting the walls and you will not be disappointed; arrive expecting the floor and check the calendar first.
The black and white banding on every column is heraldry rather than decoration. Siena's arms are half black and half white, and the city's founding story explains it: Senius and Aschius, sons of Remus, fled Rome and made sacrifices that sent up one column of black smoke and one of white. Which is also why she-wolves nursing twins turn up all over a city that spent centuries at war with Florence — Siena claims the same ancestry, through the other brother.
Look up in the nave and 172 terracotta heads look back: every pope from Peter down to the fifteenth century, each labelled, running in a frieze around the whole church. Several are outright inventions. It is one of the strangest pieces of interior decoration in Italy and almost nobody photographs it.
Two things reward the short stop. The town makes Vernaccia, a white old enough that Dante put it in the Purgatorio, describing a pope doing penance for the eels he had drowned in it; it became Italy's first denominated white in 1966. And the queue in the main square is for gelato from a shop whose owner has taken the world championship more than once — ask for the saffron or the rosemary.
Organic here means no synthetic sprays, with copper and sulphur still permitted, which is a real constraint in a humid valley. The grape is Sangiovese, whose name means the blood of Jupiter. The modern recipe descends from Baron Bettino Ricasoli, twice prime minister of a barely united Italy, who in 1872 set the blend down in a letter; his formula demanded white grapes, and only in 2006 were growers finally allowed to leave them out altogether.
The last stop is a photograph rather than a climb: going up needs a separately booked timed slot, involves 251 steps and admits no bags. What is not obvious from the ground is that this is still a functioning campanile with seven bells, one for each note of the scale, kept silent for much of the twentieth century out of fear that ringing them would shift the building further.
Cancellation is free up to a day ahead. Bring cash for anything you want in the towns, and water in summer.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
Enough to get you oriented and through the cathedral, and no more. Everything after that in each town is self-directed, which is either the appeal of this itinerary or its drawback depending on how you travel.
Only if your date falls inside the short window when the boards come off, usually a few weeks between late summer and October. The rest of the year the panels are protected and you see the walls, the pulpit and the frieze instead.
Those are the city's armorial colours. The legend has the two founders, sons of Remus, raising sacrificial smoke that rose in one black column and one white — which also accounts for the she-wolf statues around town.
A labelled series of 172 papal portraits in terracotta, running as a continuous frieze from the first pope to the fifteenth century. Some were modelled from imagination, since nobody had any idea what the early ones looked like.
Taste the local white, which carried Italy's earliest denomination for a white wine and gets a mention in Dante, and join the gelato queue on the main square — that shop's owner is a repeat world champion.
No. Going up is a separate timed reservation with 251 steps and no bags allowed. The stop here is at ground level, which is where the photographs are taken anyway.
No. You make your own way to the stated meeting place for an early departure. Cancellation is free up to a day beforehand.