The red-brick city that gave its name to a colour — the sienna earth pigment mined from the ochre clay of the Crete Senesi hills — where the scallop-shaped Piazza del Campo hosts the bareback horse race that the 17 city wards have been fighting over twice a year since 1656, where a 14th-century fresco depicts urban life with a realism 150 years ahead of the Renaissance, and where 3,000 m² of marble inlay floor in the cathedral are covered for most of the year to protect carvings that took 175 years to complete.
The 1338 Fresco of a Bustling Medieval City That Art Historians Call the Earliest Monumental Depiction of a Recognisable Urban Landscape in Western Painting & The 505-Step Tower Built So No Other Structure in Siena Could Be Taller Than Its Civic Government's Bell Tower
The 3,000 Square Metres of Cathedral Floor Covered for Most of the Year Whose 56 Marble Inlay Panels Took 175 Years to Complete and Are Fully Visible Only from Mid-August to Late October & The Double-Sided Altarpiece That Marks the Moment Byzantine Flatness Began to Yield to Three-Dimensional Space in Western Painting
The Ideal Renaissance City Built in Four Years by a Pope Who Called It His Greatest Achievement and Said He Could Not Look at It Without Pain That He Must One Day Leave & The 13th-Century Cistercian Abbey That Lost Its Roof in 1786 and Has Been Framing a Rectangle of Tuscan Sky in Its Gothic Arches Ever Since