Arezzo and Cortona: Piero della Francesca and the Etruscan Hills

Eastern Tuscany is quieter than the wine routes to the west and the art cities to the north. Arezzo contains one of the supreme achievements of Italian fresco painting. Cortona is one of the oldest cities on the peninsula. Together, they reward the traveller who has moved beyond the obvious programme.

The church of San Francesco in Arezzo is not, at first approach, an imposing building. Its exterior is plain, its entrance unremarkable, its position in a modest square one block from the main corso gives no indication of what is inside. What is inside is the Legend of the True Cross — the fresco cycle painted by Piero della Francesca between 1452 and 1466 in the chancel of the church, across three walls and a lunette, in twelve scenes whose formal intelligence and atmospheric beauty represent, by the common judgment of art historians across a century and a half of sustained attention, one of the summits of Italian Renaissance painting. We spend an hour in this room, in the company of a specialist whose knowledge of Piero's technique, iconography and spatial method is both deep and communicable. The hour is the argument for the entire journey to eastern Tuscany.

Piero della Francesca was the most mathematically sophisticated painter of the fifteenth century, and the Legend of the True Cross is his most complete demonstration of that sophistication. The spatial depth of each scene — the recession of the architectural forms, the geometry of the ground plane, the precise angles of the figure groups — is calculated with the rigour of a theorem rather than approximated by intuition. The quality of the light — a cool, even, shadowless illumination that Piero maintained across every scene regardless of its narrative time of day — produces an atmosphere of uncanny stillness that has been described as the most distinctive quality of his art. And the colour — the pale blue of the Piero sky, the grey-green of his grass, the particular quality of his rose and his ochre — is a visual language unlike any other painter's and entirely his own. We arrange private access to the Cappella Bacci outside normal visiting hours for a visit whose duration is determined by the depth of the engagement rather than by a timed entry system.

Arezzo Beyond the Fresco: Vasari, Gold and the Antique Market

Giorgio Vasari — the architect, painter and art historian born in Arezzo in 1511 whose Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects established the disciplinary framework for the study of Italian Renaissance art that is still operative today — designed the Logge Vasariane, the elegant Renaissance arcade that runs along one side of the Piazza Grande, and his house in the Via XX Settembre preserves, in its frescoed rooms and painted furniture, one of the most complete surviving Renaissance domestic interiors in Italy.

The Piazza Grande hosts, on the first weekend of every month, one of Italy's most important antique markets — a gathering of dealers from across the country whose stalls occupy the piazza and the surrounding streets and offer a range of objects, from Roman bronzes to nineteenth-century silver, that makes it a destination in its own right for those with a serious interest in the decorative arts. Arezzo is also the gold-working capital of Italy, with a jewellery manufacturing tradition of great depth and a cluster of designer workshops whose work ranges from traditional Florentine goldsmithing to contemporary design of international quality.

Cortona: The Oldest City in Tuscany

Cortona occupies a high ridge above the Val di Chiana and Lake Trasimeno with the settled authority of a city that has been occupied since the Bronze Age and that has, across three millennia, accumulated an archaeological and artistic heritage entirely disproportionate to its current scale. The MAEC — the Museo dell'Accademia Etrusca, one of the oldest museums in Italy, founded in 1727 — houses the Lampadario etrusco, a large bronze hanging lamp of the fifth century BC whose twelve flame-holders take the form of satyrs and sea monsters in a composition of technical virtuosity and visual intelligence that represents Etruscan metalwork at its most accomplished. The Diocesan Museum contains two Annunciation paintings by Fra Angelico — from different periods of his career, each of extraordinary quality — in a setting of intimate scale that allows the kind of sustained, close attention that is almost impossible in the overcrowded rooms of the Uffizi or the Prado.

Piero della Francesca painted the Legend of the True Cross with the rigour of a mathematician and the sensibility of a poet. Standing before it in the quiet of the early morning, with no one else in the chapel, is one of the rarest experiences we know how to design.

The Essentials

Best season: Year-round; October for the chestnut harvest and the Val di Chiana light

Signature experience: Pre-opening access to the Cappella Bacci in San Francesco with a Piero specialist

Stay: Arezzo historic-centre hotels; or a converted farmhouse in the Chiana valley below Cortona

Combine with: Perugia and Lake Trasimeno (30 min), Val d'Orcia (one hour west), Florence (one hour north)

Every journey we design is entirely bespoke — crafted around your preferences,your pace, and your desire for the exceptional.

Begin Your Journey