En Route to Pienza
The Via Cassia SS2 meets the SS146 toward Pienza at San Quírico d'Orcia; the tourist office is at Via Dante Alighieri 33 (tel. 0577-897-211), open April through October (and Dec 19-Jan 6) daily from 10am to 1pm and 3:30 to 7pm. This farming village with its 12th-century Romanesque Collegiata makes a good half-hour diversion. The travertine church has three elaborate medieval portals. The front entrance is the oldest and most intricate, a Lombard-style affair with animal heads as capitals, a receding stack of carved arches, friezes of dueling fantasy animals, and columns made of four slender poles knotted in the middle. To the right side is the second portal, perhaps by Giovanni Pisano, with telamon columns posing atop lions' backs. Another kneeling telamon supports a nearby window arch. The smaller, final portal dates to 1298. Inside is a Sano di Pietro polyptych (any coin in the box will light it up) and a set of 15th-century intarsia choir stalls by Antonio Barili that were originally set up in a chapel of Siena's Duomo. Down the block in the main square is the entrance to the Horti Leonini, a Renaissance Italianate garden (1580) with geometric box-hedge designs and shady holm oaks, originally a resting spot for holy pilgrims on the Francigena road from France to Rome. It's open daily from sunrise to sunset.
Five kilometers (3 miles) south on SS2 is Bagno Vignoni, little more than a group of houses -- a few of them fine spa hotels -- surrounding one of the most memorable piazze in Tuscany. The Medici harnessed the naturally hot sulfur springs percolating from the ground by building a giant outdoor pool that fills the main square, lined with stone walls and finished with a pretty loggia at one end. Even St. Catherine of Siena, when not performing religious and bureaucratic miracles, relaxed here with a sulfur cure. Alas, swimming is no longer allowed on the main square, but there's a modern pool below. To see the springs in their more natural state, take the second turnoff on the curving road into town and pull over when you see the tiny sulfurous mountain on your right. The waters bubble out here in dozens of tiny rivulets, gathering in a pool at the bottom, and there's a fairy-tale view, especially on misty days, of the Aldobrandeschi Rocca d'Orcia.
Eighteen kilometers (11 miles) farther down the SS2, in a land filled with dramatically eroded swathes of crete, Radicófani glowers from atop its basalt outcropping; the tourist office is at Renato Magi 25 (tel. 0578-55-684 or 0578-55-905; open July-Aug daily 9:30am-1pm and 3:30-7:30pm; Sept-June Sun only, same hours). The remains of the Rocca fortress (tel. 0578-55-867) are surrounded by a medieval warren of streets and houses with outdoor stairs in stony gray basalt; all were seriously damaged by explosions and earthquakes in the 18th century. The castle, built by Hadrian IV -- the only English pope -- is most famous as the base of operations of the "gentle outlaw" Ghino di Tacco, immortalized by both Dante in his Inferno (Purgatorio, Canto VI) and Boccaccio in the Decameron (day 10, tale 2). Ghino was something of a Robin Hood figure, robbing from the rich to give to the poor -- and taking a hefty share himself. It's open November through March Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 5pm, April through October daily from 10am to 7pm (until midnight July-Aug). Admission is 3€ ($3.90).
There are some della Robbia terra cottas in Radicófani's churches of San Pietro and Sant'Agata, and the views from Radicófani of the surrounding rugged farmscape can be especially evocative when there's a morning mist melting shadows into soft relief. The locals call the region the Mare di Sassi ("Seas of Stones") -- an assessment with which Dickens, Montaigne, and other grand tourists heartily agreed. Those intrepid early travelers all stayed at the Palazzo la Posta, a hotel converted from Grand Duke Ferdinando I's hunting lodge along the road south out of town down to Via Cassia. The 1584 structure was designed by Buontalenti, but these days it sadly crumbles by the roadside across from a 1603 Medici fountain.
