Pienza

Where it sits. Pienza occupies a narrow limestone spur on the northern rim of the Val d'Orcia in the province of Siena, with Montepulciano ten kilometres east and San Quirico d'Orcia nine kilometres west. The town is essentially one long street, Corso il Rossellino, running the length of the ridge, with a single formal square opening off it to the south. Because the ridge falls away sharply on that side, the buildings on the south flank stand over a drop, and the walkway behind them looks straight across the clay hills to Monte Amiata. The built-up area is tiny — a visitor can cross it end to end in ten minutes — which is precisely what makes its ambition legible.

The story behind it. The village was called Corsignano and was unremarkable until one of its sons, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, born here in 1405, was elected pope as Pius II in 1458. He decided to rebuild his birthplace as a model town and gave the commission to the Florentine architect Bernardo Rossellino, who worked between 1459 and 1462 in a burst of construction that produced a cathedral, a papal palace, a bishop's palace, a town hall and the square that binds them. The town was renamed Pienza in the pope's honour. It is usually described as the first thoroughly planned application of Renaissance humanist urban theory, and UNESCO inscribed the historic centre in 1996 on exactly that argument. Rossellino overspent the budget several times over; the pope, according to a well-known account in his own memoirs, forgave him and raised his salary.

What Rossellino built. Piazza Pio II is a trapezoid, not a rectangle: the flanking palaces splay outward from the cathedral so that the façade appears wider and the space deeper than they are. The paving of travertine strips over brick herringbone reinforces the geometry. The Duomo has a travertine front of three arches under the Piccolomini arms and, inside, a hall church whose three aisles rise to the same height and are lit by tall windows — Pius had admired glass-filled Gothic hall churches in Austria and Bohemia and specified the effect. The apse was built out over unstable clay and has been settling since the fifteenth century; the floor visibly slopes towards the east end and old cracks run up the walls, monitored and repeatedly buttressed. Palazzo Piccolomini, modelled on Alberti's Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, holds a colonnaded courtyard and, on the valley side, a three-tier loggia above a hanging garden with the finest private view in southern Tuscany. It stayed in the family until 1962 and can be visited with the pope's apartments largely intact.

On screen. Franco Zeffirelli used Pienza for Romeo and Juliet (1968), dressing its Renaissance streets as Verona. Filming began in Tuscania at the end of June 1967 and moved on to Pienza, Gubbio and Artena before finishing at Cinecittà in Rome, so the Verona of that film is an assembly of four Italian towns and no part of it is in the Veneto; the balcony scene, the one sequence everybody wants to locate, was shot at Palazzo Borghese in Artena, south of Rome, and not here. Anthony Minghella shot The English Patient (1996) at the monastery of Sant'Anna in Camprena, on a ridge about ten kilometres northwest of the town, whose refectory frescoes by Sodoma appear in the film. And the wheat field that closes Gladiator (2000) lies directly below Pienza on the Terrapille farm, reached by a cypress-lined track that is now one of the most photographed farm roads in Europe. Three of the most recognisable landscape images in modern cinema were made within a few kilometres of this one square.

What else to see. The Pieve di Corsignano, the town's Romanesque predecessor, stands ten minutes downhill: an eleventh-century parish church with a cylindrical bell tower and carved portals, and the font at which Pius II was baptised. The Diocesan Museum in Palazzo Borgia holds Sienese panel painting and a fourteenth-century embroidered cope. Twentieth-century officials gave the side lanes sentimental names — Via dell'Amore, Via del Bacio, Via della Fortuna — that now appear on every second postcard. Pienza's pecorino, made from sheep's milk by flocks descended from animals brought north by Sardinian shepherds after the Second World War, is sold aged in ash, in hay or under walnut leaves in a dozen shops along the corso.

Getting there and timing. Pienza is about fifty-five kilometres southeast of Siena on the SP146, roughly an hour by car, and buses connect it with Siena and Montepulciano on a schedule that thins at weekends. Cars are kept outside the walls in paid lots. The centre is compact but the surfaces are old stone and the panoramic walkway has steps, so mobility is fair rather than easy. Late afternoon is the moment: the sun swings around to light the valley face of the palaces, the coach parties leave around 17:00, and the terrace behind the cathedral looks over a valley going gold. Spring and early autumn are best; summer weekends are busy and winter is very quiet, with several restaurants closed.