Siena

Top things to do in Siena

1. 01

   Piazza del Campo - the brick shell the whole city tilts into

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   Nine wedges of herringbone brick divided by lines of pale stone, one for each member of the merchant council that laid it out, sloping down to the town hall at the bottom of the bowl. It sits where the three ridges of the city meet, which is why every main street eventually funnels you into it through an archway rather than around a corner. The marble fountain at the high side is a nineteenth century copy of a famous fifteenth century one whose battered originals are in the museum across town. Nobody moves you on, so this is where the city eats lunch, walks the dog and waits out the afternoon.

2. 02

   Palazzo Pubblico and the Museo Civico - Lorenzetti's Good and Bad Government

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   The town hall was built for a committee, not a prince, and its best room makes the argument out loud: three walls painted in the late 1330s with an allegory of just rule, a city and countryside prospering under it, and opposite, a tyrant with his court of vices over a landscape of burnt farms and armed men. It is the largest secular fresco scheme to survive from medieval Europe and the ruined half is if anything the more unnerving. Next door is a huge Maestà by Simone Martini and the disputed knight-on-horseback fresco facing it, and the rest of the rooms carry the propaganda of a republic that took its own myth seriously.

3. 03

   Torre del Mangia - four hundred steps up the town hall tower

   scenic history

   Raised in the second quarter of the fourteenth century and deliberately topped out level with the cathedral on its higher ridge, so that civic and church power stood at exactly the same height. It is named after its first bell-ringer, a spendthrift whose nickname meant something like eater of his own earnings. The stair is a narrow brick shaft with a stone lantern at the top and numbers are capped and timed, so slots go early in the day. The reward is the square directly beneath you as a flat pattern, and beyond the roofs the clay hills in every direction. The small marble chapel at its foot was a vow made in the plague year.

4. 04

   Duomo di Siena - striped marble, a Pisano pulpit and the inlaid floor

   culture arts history 👍 Popular

   Black and white banded inside and out, after the colours of the city's own shield, with a sculpted west front and a pavement of fifty-odd inlaid marble panels that artists kept adding to for five centuries. The octagonal pulpit carved by Nicola Pisano in the 1260s, crowded and violent, is one of the founding objects of Italian sculpture; there is an early Michelangelo group on one altar, a Donatello bronze, and a domed chapel by Bernini off the north side. The floor spends most of the year under protective boarding and is uncovered for a stretch running from late summer into autumn, which is the one thing genuinely worth timing a visit around.

5. 05

   Libreria Piccolomini - Pinturicchio's frescoed room off the cathedral nave

   culture arts history

   A single hall built to hold a cardinal's uncle's books, painted at the very start of the sixteenth century with ten enormous scenes from the life of that uncle, the humanist who became Pope Pius II. The colour has barely faded because the room was shuttered for long periods, so it comes as a shock after the dim striped nave outside: turquoise skies, processions, a shipwreck, gold everywhere. Illuminated choir books lie open down the middle and a Roman marble group of the Three Graces stands in the centre.

6. 06

   Museo dell'Opera and the Facciatone - Duccio's Maestà and the church that was never finished

   culture arts scenic history ⭐ Highly recommended

   In 1339 Siena began swallowing its cathedral inside a far larger one turned ninety degrees; the plague and some bad engineering stopped the work, and the right-hand aisle of that abandoned nave still stands as a bare wall with windows onto the sky. You climb a spiral stair inside it for the highest and best view in the city, cathedral on one side and the tower on the other. The museum below occupies the walled-in aisle and holds the front and back panels of Duccio's Maestà, carried through the streets to the high altar in 1311 and later sawn apart, along with Giovanni Pisano's weathered facade statues.

7. 07

   Battistero di San Giovanni and the Cripta - the bronze font and the frescoes found under the floor

   culture arts history

   Because the cathedral sits on a slope, its east end is propped on a lower church that you enter down a flight of steps from behind. Inside is a hexagonal marble font ringed with bronze panels by the best sculptors of the early fifteenth century, Donatello's Feast of Herod among them, which is a compressed lesson in what changed between late Gothic and the Renaissance. Alongside it, rooms filled in with rubble for seven hundred years were reopened at the end of the 1990s to reveal wall paintings from before Duccio in almost unfaded colour.

8. 08

   Santa Maria della Scala - the pilgrim hospital facing the cathedral

   history culture arts

   For most of a thousand years the long building opposite the cathedral steps took in pilgrims off the road to Rome, raised abandoned children and treated the sick, and it is now a museum that burrows down several floors into the hillside. The great ward is frescoed in the 1440s with the hospital's own daily work, which makes it one of the rare medieval interiors showing ordinary life rather than saints. Below are the weathered original panels of the square's fountain, a dark chapel, a warren of tunnels and the city's Etruscan collection. It is the least crowded of the big sites and the one people are most surprised by.

9. 09

   Pinacoteca Nazionale - gold-ground Sienese painting, usually to yourself

   culture arts off beaten path

   A Gothic palace on the cathedral ridge holding the story the city tells best: room after room of painted panels on gold from Duccio and Simone Martini through the Lorenzetti brothers to the odd, dreamlike fifteenth century painters who kept working in the old manner long after Florence had moved on. It is quiet to the point of feeling closed, the labelling is sparse, and it is the clearest place to see that Siena had its own school and stuck to it.

10. 10

    San Domenico and the house of Saint Catherine - the city's other saint

    history culture arts

    A vast plain brick preaching church on the western ridge, deliberately barn-like, holding a chapel with Sodoma's frescoes and, kept in a reliquary, the head of Catherine Benincasa, the dyer's daughter who browbeat a pope into leaving Avignon and returning to Rome. Down the steps below is her family house, converted over the centuries into a stack of chapels and loggias, and below that again the great arched fountain that watered the wool trade and gave the neighbourhood its name. The three together are a short, steep and very Sienese walk.

11. 11

    The Palio - ten bareback riders, three laps of the square, twice each summer

    culture arts history 👍 Popular

    Ten of the seventeen neighbourhoods run each time, drawn partly by rotation and partly by lot, on horses assigned by lottery and ridden by hired jockeys who can be bought off up to the last second. A ring of earth is laid over the brick, the corners are banked with mattresses, and the race itself takes about ninety seconds after hours of processions and false starts; a horse that loses its rider can still win. Be clear-eyed about it: this is not a normal visiting day. The centre is closed and jammed, the standing crowd in the middle of the square cannot leave once the entrances shut, there is no shade and the seats on the balconies are private and expensive. Horses have been injured and killed here, and the race is genuinely contested for that reason. Going in the days around it, when the trial runs happen and the neighbourhoods eat outdoors at long tables, gives you most of the atmosphere and none of the endurance test.

12. 12

    The contrade - seventeen neighbourhoods, their fountains and their museums

    culture arts off beaten path

    The city is carved into seventeen contrade with boundaries fixed by a Bavarian governor in 1730, each with a name and animal - goose, snail, caterpillar, porcupine, tortoise, she-wolf - its own colours, church, headquarters, museum of past race banners and a modern fountain where babies are formally welcomed. Walk with your eyes up and you can tell exactly which one you are in from the flags, the wall plaques and the street lamps, and you can feel the line where one ends. Several museums open by appointment through the contrada itself, and the allegiances, alliances and long-running enmities are explained to visitors with total seriousness.

13. 13

    Santa Maria dei Servi - the best view back at the skyline

    scenic culture arts off beaten path

    A big unfinished-fronted church out on the southeastern edge of the walls, with a grass terrace in front that gives the postcard view of the whole city: cathedral, tower and rooftops stacked on their ridges. Inside is a stern thirteenth century Madonna painted by a Florentine artist taken prisoner after the battle the Sienese still talk about, plus a chilling Massacre of the Innocents. Almost nobody makes the walk out, which is the point.

14. 14

    Fortezza Medicea and the Orto de' Pecci - ramparts and a green valley inside the walls

    scenic nature wildlife

    The brick fortress on the northern edge was thrown up by the conquering Florentines to hold the city down, and its ramparts are now a wide gravel walk with the best sunset outlook over the western hills. On the opposite side, a green valley of vegetable plots, an olive grove and a medieval-style farm run by a social cooperative sits directly under the town hall tower, reached by a lane down from the square. Both are free to wander, both are full of locals rather than visitors, and together they show how much open ground the walls still enclose.

15. 15

    The Sienese table - pici, cinta senese pork and the old spiced sweets

    food

    The signature pasta is pici, a thick hand-rolled spaghetti that is rolled rather than cut, served with garlic and tomato, with breadcrumbs, or with wild boar or duck. The local pig, a grey-belted breed from the surrounding woods, turns up cured and roasted; bread is unsalted and gets used up in bread-and-tomato soups. The sweets are medieval trade goods that never went away: a dense fruit-and-pepper cake sold in flat discs, soft almond diamonds and hard spiced biscuits. The wines around the city are Chianti's southern end, with two of Italy's most serious reds grown less than an hour away to the south.

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