How Montalcino was built and evolved over time

Montalcino is a defensive work with a town inside it, and the best building in the commune is somewhere else entirely.

The Fortezza

Built in 1361 by Sienese architects on a pentagonal layout. The shape is the interesting part: a pentagon with angled bastions is a design for covering every approach with fire, which is a more sophisticated military idea than the square keeps of a century earlier. It worked — the fortress was besieged repeatedly and never submitted, and it was still good enough in 1555 to hold the last of the Sienese republic for nearly four years.

What survives is a complete circuit you can walk, now with an enoteca inside it. A fortress repurposed as a wine shop is a fair summary of what happened to this town.

The town

Montalcino is built along and around the hill below the fortress, in local stone, with sloping streets and buildings packed tight inside the old defensive line. There is no great square and no cathedral of consequence: this was a garrison town and a market, not an art centre, and its fabric is plain. The pleasure of walking it is the views that open between buildings rather than the buildings themselves.

The Abbey of Sant'Antimo

Twenty minutes south at Castelnuovo dell'Abate, and architecturally in a different league from anything in the town. A Romanesque Benedictine abbey standing by itself in cultivated fields, with no village grown up around it — which is unusual and is the whole effect: you come over a rise and it is simply there, in the open.

The abbey's own account dates the foundation, as legend, to the ninth century and the time of Charlemagne; it does not give a construction date for the present church, and this page does not supply one. Restoration began in 1870, which tells you it had been let go for a long time first.

The vineyards, which are also construction

The 310.31 km² of this comune have been cleared, drained, terraced and planted over centuries, and the current layout is recent: most of what you see was planted after the 1960s, when eleven producers became two hundred. The landscape around Montalcino looks ancient and is, in its planting, largely modern.