The Best of Tuscany

The top destinations in Tuscany, Italy

Florence - Birthplace of the Renaissance, hometown to Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Donatello, Giotto, and dozens other of Old Masters—and repository of Michelangelo's David, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, Brunelleshci's dome, and 1,001 other seminal works of art and architecture. To break up the Art Hsitory 101 nature of it you can peruse the artisan workshops of the Oltrarno, bargain in the San Lorenzo leather market, dig into a hearty meal of bistecca fiorentina steak with Chianti wine, and fine your own, perfect Room with a View moment.

Pisa - Pisa's "Field of Miracles" is a grassy lawn sprinkled with some of the msot gorgeous Romanesque architecture in Italy, from the Duomo (in which local luminary Galileo discoverd his law of pendulum motion by watching the swinging chandeliers) to the statue-studded Baptistery (home of an intricately carved pulpit and near-perfect acoustics) to the famous church belltower that just can't seem to stand up straight, giving pizza restaurants the world over something to print on their delivery boxes.

Siena - This Gothic antidote to Renaissance Florence is an overgrown hilltown of fine food, brick palaces, and a laid-back lifestyle. It's civic buildings and the mighty zebra-striped Duomo are filled with some of the greatest examples of late Gothic painting in Europe, and its streets are crowded with strolling locals, not blattering automobiles.

San Gimgnano - The "Medieval Manhattan" is unique in Italy for being the only town to preserve more than a dozen of its medeival stone towers, holdovers from the bad old days of the Middle Ages bristling the skyline above vineyards producing one of Italy's finest white wines.

Lucca - Elegant city girdled by might 16th century brick bastions (the tops of which have now become a tree-shaded park encircling the city) where everyone gets around by bicycle. Fantastic Romanesque churches, Renaissance frescoes, fine opera, a piazza that takes its form from an ancient Roman amphitheater, and one-tenth the crowds of nearby Pisa.

Montepulciano - A postcard Tuscan hilltown of Renaissance palazzi lining the steeply sloping main drag and warrens of tunnels in the rock uinderneath housing some of the finest wine cellars in the world—and, more importantly, where the wine tastings are free.

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