Val d Orcia
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Val D'Orcia, Inscribed 2004 As A Cultural Landscape), A Fourteenth Century Sienese Agricultural Territory Maintained In Its Designed Form · San Quirico d Orcia, Tuscany
This is the landscape people mean when they say Tuscany: bare clay hills in long smooth waves, a single farmhouse on each crest, cypresses planted in rows along the ridges and in clumps around the chapels, and the whole thing turning from green to gold between April and July. It is not accidental scenery. The valley was laid out as an agricultural territory by Siena in the fourteenth century and the look of it has been deliberately maintained since, which is why UNESCO inscribed it as a cultural landscape rather than a natural one. Inside it are Pienza, a village a pope rebuilt as an ideal Renaissance town in three years, Montalcino and Montepulciano making two of the biggest reds in Italy, thermal springs at Bagno Vignoni where the village square is the hot pool, and an abbey in a wood where monks sing Gregorian chant. It is best driven, slowly, with no fixed plan, and it rewards first and last light more than any other landscape in Italy.
Via Dante Alighieri 33, San Quirico d Orcia, Tuscany, 53027, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the roads, the viewpoints and the landscape itself are public and have no hours. Village churches and small museums open daily with a long early-afternoon interval and shorter winter hours. Brunello estates at Montalcino are mostly BY APPOINTMENT at times they set; Montepulciano cellars keep shop hours. Sant'Antimo opens daily with sung offices at set times. The free thermal pools at Bagno Vignoni are open ground. Book estates before building an itinerary.