Italy
Tuscany & the Centre
The Renaissance where it happened, plus Siena's rivalry and the hill towns between.
Destinations
Florence
A banking city that funded the Renaissance and kept nearly all of it inside a twenty-minute walk.
Siena
A medieval city that lost to Florence and was preserved by losing, arranged around a shell-shaped square.
Bologna
Forty kilometres of porticoes, the oldest university in the world, and the best eating in Italy.
Lucca
An intact Renaissance wall, four kilometres round, wide enough on top to be a park, with a Roman amphitheatre turned into a square inside it.
Arezzo
A hill town with Piero della Francesca's greatest fresco cycle and none of Florence's queue.
Places to see
Everything recorded across Tuscany & the Centre, in one list.
Brunelleschi's Dome
Four million bricks laid without a centring frame, climbed between its two shells by 463 steps.
Uffizi
The Medici collection in the offices Vasari built for them, and the reason people book Florence months ahead.
Bargello
Donatello, Michelangelo and the sculpture the Uffizi queue never sees, in a 13th-century prison.
San Miniato al Monte
An 11th-century facade above the city, with Gregorian chant at vespers and almost no crowd.
Piazza del Campo
A shell-shaped square sloping to the town hall, with the Palio run round its edge twice each summer.
Siena Cathedral
Striped marble inside and out, over an inlaid floor uncovered only a few weeks a year.
Portico di San Luca
666 arches climbing four kilometres out of the city so a procession would never get wet.
Il Quadrilatero
The medieval trades quarter, still laid out by guild, still selling food at seven in the morning.
The Walls
Four kilometres of intact Renaissance rampart, planted with plane trees in 1818 and used as a park ever since.
Piazza dell'Anfiteatro
The oval of a Roman amphitheatre, built over in houses, which is why the square is that shape.
Things to do
Vespers at San Miniato
Gregorian chant in an 11th-century church above the city, at 17:30, free, and almost always uncrowded.
The 666 arches to San Luca
Four kilometres of covered walkway climbing out of the city, built so a procession would never get wet.
Round the walls on a bicycle
Four kilometres of Renaissance rampart, planted with plane trees in 1818 and used as a promenade ever since.
Accommodation & restaurants
EuropeDoor lists neither, yet. Both are business listings rather than editorial entries: they need an operator who claims them, a verification tier and a way to keep prices current, and all three are blocked on the same thing as everything else commercial here. How listings will work · what is built and what is blocked.
Publishing a scraped hotel list would be quick and would be the first unverified thing on this site. That is the trade being refused.
The record
What this atlas holds about Tuscany & the Centre. The counts are derived from the region's own destinations and move when it does; the seasons and the daily cost belong to Italy and are repeated here rather than looked up.
- Destinations
- 5
- Places recorded
- 10
- Experiences
- 3
- A full pass
- about 10 nights
- Best months
- May, June, September, October
- Typical day
- €70–175 per person
Food, events and practicalities are on the country page
They belong to Italy rather than to Tuscany & the Centre, and repeating them on every region page is how two copies of a fact start disagreeing. Italy →