L'Italo-Americano

N ational Geo- graphic asked the question in 2 0 2 3 : c o u l d Pienza be the most beautiful town in Italy? Its writer decided that it was, after looking out from the walls over the Val d'Orcia, where the hills run toward Monte Amiata and the roads disappear between fields and cypresses. Pienza has had that effect on people for a long time, although there is one reason its beauty may feel unusual: much of the town was designed that way. Until the middle of the fif- teenth century, Pienza did not exist; the place was known as Corsignano, a fortified Tus- can village southeast of Siena, important chiefly because Enea Silvio Piccolomini had been born there in 1405. Piccolomini had an unusually wide life even by Renaissance standards: scholar, diplomat, poet and humanist, he trav- eled through much of Europe before entering the Church comparatively late, became bishop of Siena and, in 1458, was elected pope as Pius II. When he returned to Corsig- nano the following year, he did not simply decide to build himself a palace, he decided to remake the center of the town. The architect he chose was Bernardo Rossellino, who had worked with Leon Bat- tista Alberti, one of the great t h e o r i s t s o f R e n a i s s a n c e a r c h i t e c t u r e . A l b e r t i a n d other humanists had spent years thinking about propor- tion, order and the relation- ship between buildings and civic life; Corsignano gave Rossellino the rare chance to apply those ideas not to a sin- gle façade, but to the heart of an existing settlement: a new center was inserted into the old village. Work began in 1459, and within a few years, Corsignano had acquired a new cathedral, papal palace, bishop's palace and town hall, all arranged around a trape- zoidal piazza; a new main street, today's Corso Rosselli- no, linked the gates, while h o u s e s f o r c a r d i n a l s a n d members of the papal court appeared along it. UNESCO records around forty public and private buildings con- structed or rebuilt during the p r o j e c t , i n c l u d i n g t w e l v e houses near Porta al Giglio intended for ordinary resi- dents. The best place to see what Pius II and Rossellino were trying to do is Piazza Pio II. To begin with, the square is trapezoidal rather than rectangular, which allows it to appear wider than it is and g i v e s t h e c a t h e d r a l m o r e room than the confined site w o u l d o t h e r w i s e h a v e allowed. Rossellino arranged the buildings around it with equal care: Palazzo Piccolo- mini on one side, Palazzo Borgia on the other, and the town hall opposite the cathe- dral, its civic tower deliber- ately kept lower than the c h u r c h ' s b e l l t o w e r . T h e arrangement gave each insti- t u t i o n i t s p l a c e , w i t h t h e cathedral enjoying the great- est prominence, as one might expect in a town rebuilt at the expense of a pope. The cathedral is rather surprising because Pius had traveled extensively in north- ern Europe and had devel- oped a particular liking for the churches he had seen t h e r e . I n s t e a d o f a s k i n g Rossellino for an interior modeled on the great Italian churches, he wanted some- thing closer to the German h a l l c h u r c h e s , w h e r e t h e nave and aisles rise to nearly the same height, and the tall w i n d o w s a d m i t p l e n t y o f d a y l i g h t . T h e r e s u l t i s a Renaissance cathedral with an interior that owes a good deal to the architecture of southern Germany: hardly t h e o b v i o u s c h o i c e f o r a papal building in Tuscany. His palace, however, had a t h o r o u g h l y F l o r e n t i n e model, as Rossellino drew inspiration from Leon Bat- t i s t a A l b e r t i ' s P a l a z z o Rucellai. But the site at Pienza offered an advantage that no palace in central Flo- rence could match: beyond the rear of Palazzo Piccolo- mini, a three-story loggia looks south across the Val d'Orcia, with a square hang- i n g g a r d e n i m m e d i a t e l y below it and the countryside s t r e t c h i n g a w a y b e y o n d . After passing through the rooms of the residence, a vis- itor could step out onto the loggia and look across the valley, which must have been one of the great pleasures of owning the place. By then Corsignano had acquired a new name, Pien- z a , or the city of Pius, in honor of the man paying for its transformation. Renais- sance popes were seldom embarrassed about attaching their names to things, and Piccolomini had the addi- tional satisfaction of seeing his own birthplace renamed after him. Unfortunately, he had little time to enjoy what he had commissioned: elect- ed in 1458, he died at Ancona in 1464 while preparing a c r u s a d e a g a i n s t t h e Ottomans, leaving Pienza as the principal architectural achievement of a pontificate t h a t h a d l a s t e d o n l y s i x years. T h e w o r k w a s n e v e r extended to the whole town, but what Rossellino complet- ed was sufficiently unusual to attract the attention of his- torians of Renaissance archi- tecture, who recognized in Pienza one of the earliest a t t e m p t s t o r e d e s i g n a n urban center according to a single plan. When UNESCO added the historic center to its World Heritage List in 1996, it described the project as the first application of Renaissance humanist ideas t o u r b a n p l a n n i n g , a n d acknowledged its influence o n l a t e r d e v e l o p m e n t s i n Italy and elsewhere. F o r t u n a t e l y , P i e n z a remained small enough for the rest of the town to carry on much as before, and it is still possible to walk from R o s s e l l i n o ' s c a r e f u l l y arranged piazza into streets that have little of its architec- t u r a l f o r m a l i t y . T h e r e i s Corso Rossellino, the main street running through the center, and then there are Via dell'Amore and Via del Bacio, names that sound as t h o u g h s o m e b o d y i n t h e tourist office invented them, although they belong to the town's older street nomen- clature. Outside the walls, the Val d'Orcia continues to p r o d u c e t h e s h e e p ' s m i l k cheeses for which Pienza is famous, and the shops along the streets are well supplied with pecorino, which has become almost as effective a reason to visit as the Renais- sance buildings. N a t i o n a l G e o g r a p h i c r a i s e d t h e q u e s t i o n o f w h e t h e r P i e n z a m i g h t b e Italy's most beautiful town, which is a difficult competi- tion to judge in a country with so many candidates. Pius II, at any rate, would probably have been delighted by the suggestion. He had set out to turn the little Corsig- nano of his childhood into a town worthy of his new posi- tion, and although he did not live long enough to see how its reputation would develop, he managed to give his birth- place a new name, a cathe- dral, a palace and a piazza that people still travel to Tus- cany to see. Not bad for a r e i g n t h a t l a s t e d o n l y s i x years. GIULIA FRANCESCHINI Pienza: beauty by design in the Val d'Orcia THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 16 L'Italo-Americano ALL AROUND ITALY TRAVEL TIPS DESTINATIONS ACTIVITIES A street in the historic center of Pienza, the Renaissance town redesigned by architect Bernardo Rossellino at the request of Pope Pius II (Original image created for L'Italo-Americano with the assistance of AI); inset, Pecorino di Pienza (Photo: Massimo Santi/Dreamstime)

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