Description
An authoritative, richly illustrated history, and affectionate celebration, of Siena, one of the best-loved and most-visited cities in Italy. Occupying a hilltop site in the midst of a vast, undulating landscape – between the wine-producing region of Chianti to the north and the truffle-filled woods of the Crete Senesi to the south – Siena is as much a magnet for contemporary tourism as Florence. Jane Stevenson tells the story of how the city rose to its astonishingly productive cultural heyday in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries before suffering a catastrophic late medieval decline in the aftermath of the Black Death. But she also reveals how it transcended this early loss of power to enjoy a prosperous civic afterlife and cherished position as a uniquely well-preserved medieval city.
