Montepulciano

Where it sits. Montepulciano runs along a narrow limestone ridge at just over 600 metres between the Val di Chiana to the east and the Val d'Orcia to the west, in the far southeast of the province of Siena. The plan is dictated by the ridge: a single spine, the Corso, climbs from Porta al Prato at the low northern end to Piazza Grande at the summit, with side lanes dropping steeply off both flanks. It is a demanding town to walk — the ascent is continuous for roughly a kilometre and a half — and the reward at the top is a square that opens abruptly onto views reaching to Monte Amiata in one direction and Lake Trasimeno in the other.

The story behind it. Founded in the early Middle Ages on an older Etruscan settlement, Montepulciano spent centuries as a contested frontier town between Siena and Florence and finally attached itself firmly to Florence in the fifteenth century. That allegiance is written across the architecture. Florentine architects arrived with Florentine ideas: Michelozzo rebuilt the Palazzo Comunale with a rusticated travertine front and a battlemented tower that consciously imitates the Palazzo Vecchio, and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder and Vignola gave the Corso a series of classical palace façades. The result is a town whose skyline is medieval and whose street elevations are Renaissance.

What you actually see today. Piazza Grande holds four different faces of civic power: the Palazzo Comunale with its climbable tower, the unfinished raw-brick front of the cathedral, the Palazzo Nobili-Tarugi and the Palazzo Contucci with a working wine cellar beneath it. In the corner stands the Pozzo dei Grifi e dei Leoni of 1520, a well framed by two columns and an architrave carrying the Medici arms between griffins and lions. Inside the Duomo, built between 1594 and 1680 to a design by Ippolito Scalza, hangs Taddeo di Bartolo's great Assumption triptych of 1401 above the high altar, alongside dispersed fragments of Michelozzo's tomb for the humanist Bartolomeo Aragazzi. Below the walls to the southwest, reached by a cypress avenue, stands the church of San Biagio, begun in 1518 by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder: a Greek-cross temple in honey-coloured travertine with one completed bell tower and one left as a stump, and one of the purest High Renaissance interiors in Tuscany.

On screen. Montepulciano is the place where the Twilight films put Volterra. The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) needed an Italian city for the Volturi, and although Stephenie Meyer's novel names Volterra, the location team scouted more than a dozen towns and settled on Montepulciano as the closest match to the book. Principal photography, which had begun in Vancouver in March 2009, ended here on 29 May, with hundreds of local extras in red cloaks staging the invented festival of Saint Marcus. Piazza Grande plays Volterra's main square, and the tower of the Palazzo Comunale is the clock tower beneath which Edward prepares to step into the sunlight. Two things are worth knowing before making the trip:

• Volterra, the town in the book, is roughly 100 kilometres northwest and appears nowhere in the film
• The fountain Bella runs through has no permanent counterpart in Piazza Grande, which contains a stone well and no fountain at all — the square was dressed for a week, not preserved

Montepulciano also appears in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), one of several towns in that film standing in for a single fictionalised Tuscany.

Wine. Vino Nobile di Montepulciano was the first Italian wine granted DOCG status, in 1980. It is made mainly from Prugnolo Gentile, the local clone of Sangiovese, which must form at least seventy per cent of the blend, and it is aged for a minimum of two years, three for a Riserva. It has nothing to do with the Montepulciano grape of Abruzzo, a completely separate variety that produces a completely different wine — a confusion that catches out visitors constantly. Several historic producers keep cellars carved into the soft sandstone directly under the Corso, including Contucci beneath its palace on Piazza Grande and De' Ricci with a spectacular vaulted descent, and most offer tastings without appointment.

Getting there and timing. The town lies about seventy kilometres southeast of Siena and ninety minutes from Florence by car; the nearest useful station is Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, twenty minutes away by bus or taxi, on the main Florence–Rome line. Cars must be left in the lots below the walls, and a shuttle runs to the top for those unwilling to climb. The Bravìo delle Botti on the last Sunday of August sends teams from the town's eight contrade pushing eighty-kilogram barrels up the same slope, preceded by a week of costumed dinners. April to June and September to October give the best combination of weather and space; harvest activity peaks in late September.