Hilltop Villages

One of the salient characteristics of this sun-drenched, Arcadian landscape of Tuscany and Umbria is that many of the most prominent, picturesque, and historically and artistically endowed towns and villages are built on hilltops, surrounded by high stone walls. This is partly because Italy, until the 19th Century, was a tapestry of autonomous city-states, principalities, and republics, often at war with one another, and allied with various contending power centers on or off the peninsula--Florence, Milan, Venice, the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, and so on--so the need for defense against invasion was never far from their minds.

Not only do we live in just such a fortified, hilltop village, site of a famous and decisive battle between the allies of Milan and Florence, but over the past few days, we have visited several others. These include Monte Santa Maria Tiberino, a gorgeous high hilltop village in Umbria, visible on the horizon from our window, where we drove with the Quickes along a narrow, twisting, switchback road last Friday night for a concert in the Piazza featuring a theme and variations for oboe and orchestra by Johann Nepamuk Hummel, a dazzling flute concerto by Jacques Ibert, and Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.

Then, yesterday, we drove down to Montepulciano, another wonderful hilltop town in Umbria, where we visited an exquisite exhibition of privately owned Italian pre-impressionist paintings, a group called the Macchiaoli, whose emphasis on the play of light and shadow in Italian rural landscapes prefigured the techniques later taken up by Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh. We ended up at still another nearby hilltop village, Pienza, where the local cathedral was built right over the edge of a precipice, so that the area around the altar was visibly subsiding. Once again, the views we had, both within and around these towns, are better shown than described:

This is the Temple of San Biaggio, a classic Renaissance design, just down the hill from Montepulciano.

Here is Montepulciano as we approach it from below.