Montepulciano Culture

Architecture, and why it is this good

Montepulciano has buildings out of proportion to its size because from 1390 it was Florence's ally and then possession in Sienese country, and Florence sent its architects.

Michelozzo — Cosimo de' Medici's architect — designed the Palazzo Comunale on Piazza Grande, and it is a deliberate echo of the Palazzo Vecchio: Florentine austerity planted in Siena's backyard as a political statement. Palazzo Tarugi on the same square is attributed to Antonio da Sangallo the Elder or to Vignola. Sant'Agostino adds a Baroque layer.

The Madonna di San Biagio

The most important building here, and it is outside the walls. Antonio da Sangallo the Elder designed it and built it between 1518 and 1545: a Greek-cross church in pale travertine, free-standing on a platform in open fields.

Centrally planned churches were the great theoretical project of High Renaissance architecture — the perfect form, meant to be comprehended in the round — and almost all of them were built hemmed into cities where that was impossible. San Biagio is one of the few that got the setting its design demanded. That is why architects make the trip, and why walking all the way round the outside before going in is the right order.

The unfinished cathedral

The Duomo was built between 1594 and 1680 and its façade was never faced in stone. Bare brick, on the grandest square in southern Tuscany, for three and a half centuries. It is the most eloquent thing in Montepulciano about what happened to the town after 1559.

The Bravio delle Botti

On the last Sunday of August, and running since the 14th century: the town's contrade race heavy barrels uphill through the streets to Piazza Grande. Not a reconstruction, not staged for visitors — a genuinely old and genuinely brutal contest up the same slope the whole town walks every day.

The wine, and the name problem

Vino Nobile di Montepulciano: Sangiovese, minimum 70%, up to 30% complementary red varieties, at least two years' maturation from the 1 January after the harvest with 24, 18 or 12 months in wood depending on the option, and a Riserva needing three years including six months in bottle and grapes of at least 12.50% natural alcohol. DOCG since the 1980 vintage. Rosso di Montepulciano uses the same grapes and may be sold from 1 March of the year after production.

And the thing worth saying plainly: the Montepulciano grape is a different variety, grown mostly in Abruzzo, and has nothing to do with this wine. One word, two unrelated wines.