Pienza historical timeline

Pienza has the shortest construction history and the clearest one of any town in this rollout.

1. 1405 — Enea Silvio Piccolomini is born in the village of Corsignano, a humanist scholar, writer and diplomat who will become Pope Pius II.
2. about 1459 — as pope, he has the entire village rebuilt as an ideal Renaissance town and renamed Pienza, after himself. The architect is Bernardo Rossellino — Bernardo Gambarelli — possibly working with Leon Battista Alberti, the century's leading architectural theorist.
3. 29 August 1462 — the Duomo is consecrated, three years after the rebuilding began.
4. 1460s — Palazzo Piccolomini rises on the west side of the square as the pope's own residence, with a Renaissance garden behind it, and Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia — the future Pope Alexander VI — builds the Palazzo Vescovile. The Palazzo Comunale faces the church.
5. after Pius II — the project stops. Nothing extends the design, and that is why the idea survives intact: Pienza is a complete Renaissance proposition that was never revised.
6. later centuries — the town becomes, and remains, a small agricultural village of a couple of thousand people on a ridge. It is described by historians as the touchstone of Renaissance urbanism and the first application of humanist urban planning concepts.
7. 1996 — UNESCO inscribes the Historic Centre of the City of Pienza.
8. 2004 — UNESCO inscribes the Val d'Orcia, the valley Pienza looks over, under criteria (iv) and (vi) across 61,188 hectares — partly because the landscape has been depicted in art from Renaissance painting onward. The town and its view are now listed separately.
9. 28 February 2017 — the commune has 2,091 residents across 122.96 km².