Siena Historic Centre

Where it sits. Siena sits about 70 kilometres south of Florence, on three converging ridges of clay hills at around 320 metres, with the Chianti country to the north and the bare Crete Senesi to the south-east. The three-ridge topography explains the whole town plan: the main streets, Banchi di Sopra, Banchi di Sotto and Via di Città, follow the crests, and every cross street drops steeply away. Where the ridges meet is a natural amphitheatre, and that hollow became the Piazza del Campo. The historic centre is enclosed by seven kilometres of walls and is almost entirely closed to cars, which gives it an unusual quiet for an Italian city of 53,000 people.

The story behind it. Siena's golden age ran from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century, under the oligarchic Government of the Nine, when it was a banking rival to Florence and its painters — Duccio, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers — led Europe. That confidence produced two extraordinary buildings. The cathedral, largely completed between 1215 and 1263, is banded inside and out in black and white marble, floored with 56 inlaid marble panels that are uncovered only for a few weeks each year, and lined off the north aisle by the Piccolomini Library, frescoed by Pinturicchio between 1502 and 1507 in colours that still look wet. Beside it stands the Facciatone, the surviving wall of a colossal new nave begun in 1339 that would have made this the largest church in Christendom; the Black Death of 1348 killed perhaps half the population and the project stopped where it stands. Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472, is the oldest bank still trading. UNESCO inscribed the historic centre in 1995.

On screen. Siena carries the first act of Quantum of Solace (2008). After the pre-title car chase from Lake Garda, Bond arrives in Siena during the Palio, drags Mr White out of the boot of his Aston Martin DBS, and takes him to an MI6 safe house. White escapes, and the ensuing foot chase is built entirely from Sienese vertical geometry: Bond and the traitor Mitchell run across tiled rooftops above the packed Piazza del Campo, fight on the scaffolding and rope hoists of a building under restoration, crash through a glass roof and drop into the horse pens and stalls used on race day, where Bond shoots him. The unit worked in the city in spring 2008, months away from either running of the Palio, so the race crowd and the rooftop action were staged for the camera and intercut with race material rather than filmed live. The result compresses the town: the roofs, the Torre del Mangia silhouette and the Campo's brick fan are all genuine, but the route the chase takes is a cut, not a walk.

What you actually see today. The Palio itself runs on 2 July and 16 August. Ten of the seventeen contrade — the neighbourhood corporations that organise Sienese social life from birth to burial — race bareback three times around the Campo on a track of tufo laid over the paving, and the whole thing is over in about 90 seconds. On any ordinary day the Campo is still the finest civic square in Italy: nine brick segments radiating to the Palazzo Pubblico of 1297 to 1310, whose Sala della Pace holds Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government, painted 1338 to 1339 and still the sharpest piece of political art in Europe. The Torre del Mangia rises 88 metres beside it, with 400 steps to the top. The Fonte Gaia at the high end of the square is a nineteenth-century copy of Jacopo della Quercia's fountain, carved by Tito Sarrocchi in 1858 after the original had weathered beyond saving. Opposite the cathedral, Santa Maria della Scala spent a thousand years as a pilgrim hospital and is now a stacked museum running four levels down into the hillside, with the frescoed Pellegrinaio ward on the upper floor and Etruscan material at the bottom. Climb the Facciatone for the one view that shows how the abandoned nave would have dwarfed the church beside it.

Getting there and timing. Trains from Florence take about 90 minutes and arrive below the city, connected by escalators up into the walls; the Tiemme coach from Florence is faster at around 75 minutes and drops you at Piazza Gramsci inside the centre. Pisa airport is roughly two hours away. April to June and September to October are the best months for walking a town this steep. The two Palio days are extraordinary but brutally crowded, and the centre effectively shuts down; the trial races in the preceding days are easier to attend. Winter is cold, damp and quiet, and the museums are yours alone.