How Montepulciano was built and evolved over time

Montepulciano is built along a ridge too narrow to spread on, and everything about its form follows from that.

The linear plan

There is one main street climbing the spine from the lower gate to Piazza Grande at the summit, with short, steep lanes falling away on both sides. A town on a narrow ridge cannot have a grid and cannot have a second centre, so Montepulciano stacked its grandeur along a single route and put the best of it at the top. Walking up the Corso you pass progressively more expensive palace fronts, which is not an accident of taste but a consequence of the geometry: the summit was the only prestigious address.

Florentine architecture, imported

Because Montepulciano was Florence's ally and possession from 1390, it got Florentine architects. Michelozzo designed the Palazzo Comunale; Palazzo Tarugi is attributed to Antonio da Sangallo the Elder or Vignola. The material is the local travertine and stone, but the idiom is Florentine — rusticated ground floors, regular bays, cornices — set down in a town whose neighbours built in Sienese brick.

The Duomo, and what unfinished means

Built between 1594 and 1680, and the façade was never clad. What you see is the structural brick that was always meant to be faced in stone, left exposed for three and a half centuries because the money ran out after 1559 and never came back. It is architecturally instructive: most Italian churches hide their construction, and this one shows it.

San Biagio, the designed object

Below the walls, and built to be looked at from every side. Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, 1518–1545: a Greek cross in pale travertine, symmetrical, raised on a platform, with open country all round and nothing abutting it.

Free-standing centrally planned churches are the holy grail of High Renaissance theory and almost never got built in open ground — cities had no room. San Biagio has the room, which is why it is studied. The travertine goes gold in the late afternoon and the building is at its best then.