Siena, a great banking and textile rival of Florence in the Middle Ages, slumbered through the Renaissance. As a result, it has preserved dozens of Gothic palaces and churches, and its museums are filled with a distinctive and decorative style of painting. Between there and Florence is one of Tuscany's most picturesque regions: the castle-topped hills and Arcadian vineyards of the Chianti, Italy's most famous wine district.
Siena is also the center of hill-town territory, a landscape of small mountains and river-fed valleys watched over by stony medieval towns perched on the taller peaks. West of the city, in some of the tallest mountains of central Tuscany, hide two of the more famous hill towns: San Gimignano still sprouts more than a dozen medieval towers, and Volterra is an ancient Etruscan center and modern workshop of alabaster artisans. Nearby, but seldom visited, Massa Marittima makes a great excursion off the beaten path into a city from the Dark Ages.
Wine Tasting in the Chianti
You can find many people's idea of earthly paradise in the 167 sq. km (65 sq. miles) of land between Florence and Siena, known as the Chianti. In fact, the British have such a history of buying up old farmhouses and settling here it's often referred to as Chiantishire. It isn't hard to see why they come -- the tall, closely gathered hills are capped by ancient cities and medieval castles, and the stream-fed valleys are dotted with expanding market towns. All is often shrouded in a light mist that renders the blue-gray distance inscrutable and cloaks the hills in a mysterious rural magic. Many of the rolling slopes are planted with olive groves that shimmer dark green and dusty silver, but some 4,000 hectares (9,880 acres) are blanketed with marching vines. The grapes that grow from these gnarled, woody "question marks" form the primary capital in the region's bacchanalian economy.
This is the world's definitive wine region, in both history and spirit; these hills have been an oenological center for several thousand years. In fact, one local grape, the Canaiolo nero -- one of the varietals that traditionally goes into Chianti Classico -- was known to the ancients as the "Etruscan grape." The name Chianti, probably derived from that of the local noble Etruscan family Clantes, has been used to describe the hills between Florence and Siena for centuries, but it wasn't until the mid-13th century that Florence created the Lega del Chianti to unite the region's three most important centers -- Castellina, Radda, and Gaiole -- which chose the black rooster as their symbol. By 1404, the red wine long produced here was being called chianti as well, and in 1716 a grand ducal decree defined the boundaries of the Chianti and laid down general rules for its wine production, making it the world's first officially designated wine-producing area. In the 19th century, one vintner, the "Iron Baron" Ricasoli, experimented with varietals using the sangiovese grape as his base. Working off centuries of refinement, he eventually came up with the perfect balance of grapes that became the unofficial standard for all chianti.
Soon the title "chianti" was being used by hundreds of poor-quality, vino-producing hacks, both within the region and from far-flung areas, diminishing the international reputation of the wine. To fight against this, Greve and Castelnuovo Berardenga joined the original Lega cities and formed the Consorzio del Gallo Nero in 1924, reviving the old black rooster as their seal. The consorzio (still active -- their members produce about 80% of the Chianti Classico that's bottled) pressed for laws regulating the quality of chianti wines and restricting the Chianti Classico name to their production zone. When Italy devised its DOC and DOCG laws in the 1960s, chianti was one of the first to be defined as DOCG, guaranteeing its quality as one of the top wines in the country. Today, of the 100 sq. km (39 sq. miles) of vineyards in the hills between Florence and Siena, some 6,972 hectares (17,221 acres) are devoted to the grapes that will eventually become Chianti Classico and carry the seal of the black rooster.
