The province of Arezzo, bounding Tuscany's northeast corner, is a land of castle-dominated hill towns, misty blue mountains, and the vestiges of Apennine forests. Snowy-white cattle graze in the wide Chiana Valley, while light industry toils at the edges of medieval centers. In the reaches of the mountains lie hermitages of ecologically minded vegetarian monks and La Verna, St. Francis's favorite spot to pray, where he became the first human to receive the stigmata.
This is the area where the brawny, humanist Renaissance of Florence meets and melds with the intangible, hazy spirituality of Umbria's green hills. This hybrid is perfectly displayed in the works of the region's two most famous artistic sons, Piero della Francesca and Luca Signorelli, both masters of mathematical proportion and of rarefied moods and landscapes in painting. Piero is the focus of his native Sansepolcro, and one of the main draws in Arezzo, a low-key city of amiable citizens and modest art treasures. Art-rich Cortona, Luca Signorelli's hometown, is an ancient Etruscan hill town that doesn't quite fill up its medieval walls; much of the space is occupied by oversize gardens.
Arezzo province has given us the melodic genius of Guido Monaco, inventor of the musical scale, and the earthy, bold painting of Masaccio, the first artist to master perspective. It brought forth the great poet Petrarch, whose classical studies and humanist philosophy rang in the Renaissance and earned him the moniker "the first modern man," and Giorgio Vasari, architect of the Uffizi, court painter to Cosimo I, and the Western world's first art historian. Vasari brought Petrarch's movement full circle by literally writing the book on the Renaissance. It's no surprise the ultimate Florentine of the Renaissance era, Michelangelo, was born in the forested hills east of Arezzo.
