Italy
Pienza
A pope rebuilt his birthplace as an ideal Renaissance city, five streets and one flawless piazza.
Five streets, one piazza, and a view that drops clean away to the Val d'Orcia. Pienza smells of pecorino; it drifts from every cellar doorway on the Corso, each shop offering a different age from milky-soft to crystalline. The proportions feel deliberate because they are.
Pienza was rebuilt in three years, 1459 to 1462, after Pope Pius II commissioned Bernardo Rossellino to turn his birth village into an ideal Renaissance city. Cathedral, papal palace and town hall frame Piazza Pio II as one composed thought, and UNESCO lists the tiny centre as a landmark of humanist town planning. The terrace behind the Palazzo Piccolomini was built as a viewpoint over the Val d'Orcia, architecture deliberately framing landscape. The town's other export needs no framing: pecorino di Pienza, ageing from fresh to flinty in the cellars along the Corso Rossellino.
Solo
The town fits in the mind as a single thought: a morning of cheese, an afternoon on the panoramic walk, and the pleasure of understanding why a pope rebuilt his village.
Couple
Share a pecorino board at every age, then take the Val d'Orcia panorama at sunset from a piazza built on one man's idea of perfection.
- Pius II had cathedral, palaces and town hall raised together in three years from 1459.
- The Piccolomini terrace was designed as a picture frame for the Val d'Orcia below.
- Cheese cellars along the Corso pour pecorino at every age, from fresh rounds to long-aged wheels.
- UNESCO lists the centre as a founding example of Renaissance humanist town planning.
Pecorino di Pienza is the town's true currency; taste it stage by stage along the Corso Rossellino.
Hand-rolled pici under pecorino and cracked black pepper eat sharper here than Rome's version ever does.
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