Val d'Orcia

Where it sits. The Val d'Orcia is the valley of the Orcia river in the southern part of the province of Siena, between the Crete Senesi to the north and the extinct volcanic cone of Monte Amiata, 1,738 metres high, to the south. Its towns sit on isolated hilltops: Pienza, San Quirico d'Orcia, Castiglione d'Orcia, Radicofani on its basalt plug, and Montalcino on the western rim above its Brunello vineyards. Between them the land rolls in long clay ridges, ploughed in bands that follow the contours, with farmhouses set at the crest of a rise and cypresses planted along the drives that lead to them. The whole valley was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2004, not for a single monument but as a cultural landscape deliberately shaped from the fourteenth century onwards by the Republic of Siena.

Why it looks like this. The soil is a marine clay that erodes into smooth, almost featureless slopes and supports grain rather than forest, so the fields read as continuous curves without hedges. Siena's medieval government reorganised the valley as a granary, established the hilltop settlements and maintained the Via Francigena, the pilgrim road from Canterbury to Rome, which runs through San Quirico and Radicofani; the mezzadria sharecropping system then fixed the pattern of isolated farmsteads that survives today. Sienese painters used this scenery as the background to their panels, which is why the valley is often described, accurately for once, as a landscape that was painted before it was photographed.

On screen. Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) shot Maximus's home and the closing walk into the afterlife in this valley, on farmland below Pienza around the Terrapille estate, where a farm track lined with cypresses runs out across an open field of wheat. The shots are brief but they became the single most reproduced image of Tuscany in the world, and the estate has since had to manage the visitors it attracts. Anthony Minghella filmed much of The English Patient (1996) here as well, using the monastery of Sant'Anna in Camprena, on a ridge northwest of Pienza, as the bombed villa where Hana nurses her patient; the frescoed refectory that appears in the film was painted by Sodoma in the 1500s and the complex now operates as a guesthouse. Andrei Tarkovsky shot Nostalghia (1983) at Bagno Vignoni, whose village square is a large sixteenth-century thermal pool; the film's celebrated final ordeal, a man carrying a lit candle from one end of the water to the other, was staged in that pool with the water drained out.

What you actually see today. The classic viewpoints are compact and easy to reach by car. The chapel of the Madonna di Vitaleta stands alone on a ridge between San Quirico and Pienza; the cypress grove known as the Cipressi di San Quirico sits in a hollow beside the Cassia road; Podere Belvedere faces the sunrise from a knoll north of San Quirico. Bagno Vignoni's pool still steams at 49 degrees, though bathing there is long prohibited and the modern spas are next door. Montalcino gives Brunello, Montepulciano its Vino Nobile, Pienza its sheep's-milk pecorino, and San Quirico the Horti Leonini, a formal Renaissance garden left open to the public.

Walking it. The valley rewards travel on foot more than most Tuscan landscapes because the distances between hilltop towns are short and the ridges give continuous views. The Via Francigena is waymarked through the valley and the stage from San Quirico d'Orcia to Radicofani, about thirty-two kilometres, is one of the hardest and most spectacular on the Italian section, climbing to the ruined Rocca di Radicofani at just over 800 metres. Shorter options include the four-kilometre link between San Quirico and Bagno Vignoni and the farm tracks below Pienza. There is very little shade anywhere, water points are far apart, and the clay turns to a heavy paste after rain that makes the unsurfaced roads difficult for ordinary cars as well as for walkers.

Getting there and timing. A car is close to essential; the valley lies about ninety minutes south of Florence and forty-five minutes southeast of Siena, and the scenic route is the SP146 between San Quirico, Pienza and Montepulciano. Timing changes the pictures completely: the fields are green from March to early May, striped with poppies in late May, gold before the harvest in the second half of June, and bare brown earth from July until autumn ploughing. Morning mist pooling between the ridges is a feature of September and October and is the reason photographers concentrate there in autumn. August is hot, hazy and busy; winter is empty, often foggy, and many rural restaurants close.