Twice each summer, Siena’s Piazza del Campo transforms into a medieval battlefield. The Palio is not a costume party. It is a bare-knuckle horse race between seventeen contrade, the city’s historic neighbourhoods, and the competition is fierce. Jockeys ride bareback around a dirt track laid over the cobblestones, whipping each other as often as they […]
Categories: Italy, Sights, Wellness, Relax & Sports
Fourteen stone towers cut a jagged silhouette against the Tuscan sky, their medieval pinnacles rising like fingers reaching for heaven. From the ramparts of Rocca di Montestaffoli, vineyards stretch in every direction, geometric rows of Sangiovese vines fading into a golden haze. The cobbled Via San Giovanni climbs past stone houses that lean inward, their […]
Categories: Italy, Religious Monuments, Sights, Sights
The sun-baked bricks of the Piazza del Campo hold the heat long after the crowds have gone home, radiating warmth into the cool Tuscan evening as the shadows of the Torre del Mangia stretch across the sloping shell-shaped square. You can feel the centuries beneath your feet. This is where Siena’s medieval soul lives, in […]
The Abbey of San Galgano is one of Italy’s most atmospheric and romantic ruins, a roofless Gothic Cistercian abbey in the Tuscan countryside near Siena, whose soaring walls and empty window arches frame nothing but sky, and whose nearest hilltop hermitage houses the legendary Sword in the Stone, Italy’s own Excalibur. Abandoned in the 18th […]
Categories: Cities, Italy, Religious Monuments, Sights, Sights
The rolling hills of Chianti stretch out in every direction, a patchwork of vineyards, olive groves, and cypress-lined lanes that has remained largely unchanged for centuries. This is the landscape that produces one of the world’s most famous wines, a ruby-red DOCG that has been crafted here since the 13th century. But Chianti is more […]
