Learn about Tuscany

Introduction

Tuscany is the part of central Italy where a cluster of medieval city-states -- Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca among them -- grew rich enough, and stayed independent of one another long enough, for each to build a complete civic and artistic identity of its own. The result is a density of art, architecture, and deliberately shaped landscape spread across the whole region rather than gathered into a single capital.

The land runs from the Apennine ridge in the north and east down to the Tyrrhenian coast, taking in the marble mountains of the Apuan Alps, the Arno valley, the vineyard hills of Chianti between Florence and Siena, the cypress-lined Val d'Orcia further south, and the flat, once-malarial Maremma along the southern coast. Offshore, the Tuscan Archipelago includes Elba, where Napoleon spent his first exile.

Administratively the region is the Metropolitan City of Florence plus nine provinces -- Arezzo, Grosseto, Livorno, Lucca, Massa-Carrara, Pisa, Pistoia, Prato, and Siena -- covering roughly 23,000 square kilometres with about 3.6 million residents, over half of them in the Arno corridor between Florence and the sea.

For visitors the useful geography is a different one. Most trips turn on four things: Florence as the transport hub and the densest concentration of Renaissance work; Siena and the walled hill towns -- San Gimignano, Pienza, Montepulciano, Volterra, Cortona -- as the medieval counterweight; the wine country of Chianti, Montalcino, and Bolgheri; and a coast and islands that draw mainly Italian holidaymakers rather than international ones.

Tuscany is easy to travel in and correspondingly well used. Florence, Pisa's Piazza dei Miracoli, and San Gimignano absorb very large numbers of day visitors, and the major museums need booking ahead. The Maremma, the Casentino forests, the Lunigiana in the far north, and the Apennine valleys carry a fraction of that traffic, and are where the region still reads as ordinary rather than curated.

Geography

Tuscany is built on three parallel bands: an Apennine and Apuan mountain wall along the north and east, a belt of clay and sandstone hills through the middle where almost every historic town sits on a summit, and a coastal plain that was malarial marshland until it was drained. The Arno cuts across all three, and has flooded Florence repeatedly.

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History

Tuscany is what happened when no single power could control central Italy. For three centuries Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca fought each other as independent republics, each spending its own wealth on its own cathedral, walls, and painters. Florence eventually won, the Medici turned the victory into a state, and much of what the others built simply stopped being altered.

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Culture

Standard Italian is essentially Tuscan, fixed by Dante and formalised in Florence. The region's culture still runs on that kind of local specificity: a horse race in Siena contested between city districts rather than staged for visitors, a wine classification that had to be rewritten because Tuscan producers broke it, and bread that is famously made without salt.

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Climate Patterns

The coast is Mediterranean and mild, the interior noticeably more continental, and the Apennines get a real winter. Florence is the outlier: it sits in a hill-ringed basin that traps heat, making it hotter in July and August, and colder in January, than its position on the map suggests.

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