Siena

Siena is a city that never left the Middle Ages, and means it.

It is built of warm brick on three hills in central Tuscany, a tight medieval maze that fans out from the Piazza del Campo, the great shell-shaped square where the Palio horse race has run for centuries. The center is closed to cars, so daily life moves on foot through stone lanes to the striped marble Duomo and among the contrade, the old neighborhood clans that still define who people are here. It is an art city to rival Florence at a fraction of the size, with a serious university, a major teaching hospital, and some of the most beautiful countryside in the world at its gates: the vineyards of Chianti and the bare hills of the Crete Senesi and the Val d'Orcia.