Pienza Geography, Climate & Nature

Pienza sits on a ridge with a valley on one side, and the relationship between those two things is the whole design of the town.

The site

The village is at 491 metres, in a municipality of 122.96 km² — a large territory for 2,091 people — on a long east–west ridge in the province of Siena. The historic centre occupies the crest, which is why it is narrow: there is a main street along the spine and short lanes dropping off it to either side.

The Val d'Orcia

South of the ridge the land falls into the Val d'Orcia, and this is the landscape the town was built to look at. UNESCO inscribed it in 2004 under criteria (iv) and (vi), across 61,188 hectares in the provinces of Siena and Grosseto. The citation is unusual: it was listed partly because the landscape "has been depicted in works of art from Renaissance painting to modern photography" — the hills are inscribed for having been looked at.

What you actually see is "gentle, cultivated hills" broken by gullies and punctuated with villages — clay country, worked for centuries, with the pale eroded crete showing through where the slopes are steepest.

The neighbours

Montalcino is about half an hour west on the far side of the valley, and is also inside the Val d'Orcia inscription. Montepulciano is about twenty minutes east and is not. Siena is about an hour north-west.

What it means for a visitor

Pienza is the easiest walking of the five towns in this group: it is small, the centre is essentially level along the ridge, and nothing requires a climb. The lanes off the spine are short. For the valley itself you need a car.

Pienza is at 491 metres on an exposed ridge, and the practical point about its climate is what it does to the view.

What each season does

• Winter is cool and damp rather than severe, with grey spells and wind on the ridge. The compensation is specific to being up here: on still mornings fog fills the Val d'Orcia below and Pienza sits above it in sun, with the hilltops standing out of a cloud layer. That is the single best thing the weather does for this town, and it happens most often from November to February.
• Spring is changeable and wet early, and the valley turns its most intense green — the Val d'Orcia of the photographs is a March-to-May landscape.
• Summer is hot and dry, and the same hills go pale gold and then brown. The bare, sculptural version of the view that appears on book covers is an August one. There is little shade in the streets.
• Autumn is the best of it: warm days, cool nights, clearer air than summer haze allows, and ploughed earth replacing stubble below.

The practical consequence

Decide which valley you want before you book. Green, with wheat means late March to May. Gold and bare means July and August. Ploughed and empty under low light means November. They look like different places, and the fog mornings of midwinter are a fourth option that almost nobody plans for.

Pienza's municipality covers 122.96 km² and almost all of it is farmed. That is not a criticism — the Val d'Orcia was inscribed by UNESCO in 2004 precisely as a cultural landscape, 61,188 hectares of it, because the cultivation is the thing of value.

What is actually here

• The crete. The pale clay soils of this valley erode into bare, rounded forms and gullies, and those eroded faces are a habitat in their own right — sparse, unstable, grazed rather than cropped, and home to a specialised flora that arable ground does not support. The gullies that interrupt the "gentle, cultivated hills" in UNESCO's own description are the ecologically interesting part.
• Arable and pasture occupy the workable slopes: wheat, fodder and grazing on a rotation that has been running for centuries. Structurally simple, but the field margins, tracks and hedge lines between parcels carry bramble, elder, wild rose and hawthorn and function as corridors.
• Cypress and oak. The cypress avenues and isolated groups that define the view are planted, and they matter out of proportion to their area: in open arable country a line of mature trees is the only vertical cover for miles. Fragments of oak woodland survive on the steepest ground.
• The town walls and roofs hold the usual old-masonry community — swifts, martins and bats — in a landscape with almost no natural cliffs.

The honest framing

This is agriculture, and its beauty is the point of the listing rather than incidental to it. The ecological interest here is the crete and the question of what the field margins and cypress lines connect. For woodland, the higher ground south towards Monte Amiata is the direction.

Open, farmed, long-settled country: the wildlife here is the wildlife of field margins, gullies and a village's old roofs.

Birds of the open valley

This is raptor country and the sightlines are exceptional, because you can stand on a ridge at 491 metres and look down over miles of open ground. Common buzzard and kestrel are constant; marsh harrier and short-toed snake eagle are possible over the valley in season. In spring, hoopoe and European bee-eater arrive and are heard before they are seen, and skylark sings over the wheat. Little owl uses the farm buildings and is often visible at dusk on a post or a wire.

The village as habitat

Pienza's old stone gives swifts, swallows, house martins and bats the cavities that modern buildings and open farmland both lack. Standing in Piazza Pio II on a summer evening with the swifts screaming around the Duomo is a genuine wildlife experience requiring no effort at all.

Mammals

Wild boar are abundant and are the mammal most likely to be met on a track at dusk — not dangerous if left alone, a sow with young excepted. Roe deer use the woodland fragments and the gullies, and red fox, stone marten, badger, crested porcupine and European hare work the margins. The hare is unusually visible in this landscape because there is so much open ground.

Where to look

The lane behind the cathedral at first light, scanning the valley for raptors — the best bird-watching in this group of towns, from a public path with a railing. Otherwise the field tracks below the town early in the day. Stay on the tracks: this is working farmland and most of what you can see is somebody's crop.