Val d'Orcia

The Val d'Orcia is a rural area in the province of Siena, stretching from the hills south of Siena to Monte Amiata. According to UNESCO it was important in the Etruscan period and developed under the Roman Empire. The Via Francigena, a religious and trade route between Rome and northern Italy, crossed the valley, and in the Middle Ages pilgrims and merchants travelled it.

When the city-state of Siena expanded in the 13th and 14th centuries, wealthy Sienese merchants invested in farming and turned the valley into productive farmland, introducing a system under which small landowners paid half of their produce to merchants as rent. UNESCO links the landscape to the utopian ideals of the Renaissance, expressed in a painting of about 1339 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena's town hall and in works the merchants commissioned from painters such as Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro. In the 15th century Pope Pius II had his native village rebuilt as the ideal town of Pienza, now a separate World Heritage site.

After Sienese power weakened at the end of the 16th century the valley gradually lost its economic importance and remained comparatively poor and marginal for four centuries. In 1999, on the initiative of five municipalities, it was declared a regional park, and it was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2004.