Restaurants

Siena has a pretty good cafe culture, and during the passeggiata, Sienese cozy up to the bar of the cafes lining Via Banchi di Sopra and Via di Città to gulp down espresso and sample finger-size pastries and slices of panettone (dry cake) and Siena's famous, dense, barlike panforte. (It comes in many types, most a variation on a thick honey paste binding nuts and bits of candied fruit, a holdover from the cane sugar-less Middle Ages.)

Sample the bounty at Siena's top cafe, the bustling Nannini, Via Banchi di Sopra 22-24 (tel. 0577-41-591), which also has a gelateria branch several blocks farther along at Via Banchi di Sopra 99 (no phone). The cafe is open Monday from 6:30am to 8:30pm, Tuesday through Saturday from 6:30am to midnight, and Sunday from 8am to 8:30pm. Its pastry and panforte "factory" is outside the walls at Via Massetana Romana 42 (tel. 0577-285-208).

Few smaller operations turn out panforte anymore, leaving this traditional sweet to be mass-produced by Sapori and Nannini -- though recently, Nannini gave over its panforte production to Sapori, so while they're still labeled separately and the formulas may differ slightly, in effect they're all the same now.