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Pienza and Orvieto

ITALY | Wednesday, 4 January 2012 | Views [1250]

Morning fog, Montalcino

Morning fog, Montalcino

The morning fog that blanketed the valley looked surreal from our hotel balcony.  The romance faded with the visibility as we drove down into it on our way to the tiny but, oh so charming, town of Pienza.  The Val d’Orcia area was sort of a Medieval planned community, pastoral valleys and hill towns combined, developed for its beauty and sustainability in the 15th Century as part of the “humanism movement” by Siena’s nobility.  It has stood the test of time and today is a UNESCO World Heritage site.  Pienza, a tiny jewel of a town, was known as Corsignano before “local boy made good” Pope Pius II decided to remodel it in the Renaissance style.  It was renamed Pienza in his honor when the work was finally completed 100 years later.

Few residents were out as we wandered around taking photos and sampling the local pecorino (sheep) cheeses.  We covered all of the dozen or so lanes, visited the 550 year-old church and still had a few minutes left on our 60 minute parking meter.

We left Tuscany for Umbria and the hill town of Orvieto.  We parked in the lot below town and took a series of escalators, stairs, ramps and moving sidewalks up the to the old town.  Lunch was our first order of business, followed by a visit to the Duomo.  Rick Steves devotes several pages in his Italy guidebook to the Duomo but it didn’t thrill me nearly as much as the ones in Siena or Florence.  Orvieto, like San Gimignano, is too much of a tourist town for my taste.  I much preferred Volterra, Montalcino and Pienza.

 

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