Montalcino attractions
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Montalcino has a fortress, a wine and an abbey, and the abbey is the one people forget.
The Fortezza, built in 1361 on a pentagonal plan by Sienese architects and never taken by siege, is the town's one monument and its best viewpoint — the Val d'Orcia on one side and the Brunello vineyards on the others. It holds an enoteca where you can taste across producers.
The cellars are the real attraction and need booking. More than two hundred producers work this comune, up from eleven in the 1960s, making some 330,000 cases of Brunello a year under rules that keep every bottle off the market until the fifth year after its harvest.
The Abbey of Sant'Antimo, twenty minutes south at Castelnuovo dell'Abate, is the most beautiful building in the commune: a Benedictine abbey standing alone among olives, whose own account traces its founding as legend to the ninth century and Charlemagne, and whose restoration began in 1870. It keeps no published timetable and charges no admission.
Beyond those: the town walls and streets, worth an hour; and the roads down into the Val d'Orcia, which are the reason to have a car.
