The great international exhibition “From Jacopo della Quercia to Donatello. Arts in Siena in early Renaissance”, open until July 10th 2010, could be the very chance to visit the splendors of this immortal city, delivered to us as it was in Middle Age, singularly untouched.

Siena skyline is one of the most famous in the world: the visitor approaching the City of the Madonna recognizes immediately its towers and its belfries, since far he listen the peal in the air

The main seat of the exhibition is one of the most important sites uptown, the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, a symbol of senese civilization: indeed, the people of Siena endowed itself of this institution, to protect poors and ills, since the first days of its history. In the huge and wonderful halls it is possible to esteem, beyond the pieces of the exhibition coming from all the world and reunited again under the vaults that saw them when they were originally made, frescoes and works of unquestionable value.
But Santa Maria will be just the start of an ideal walk in history: in front of it here that erects the “white and black Dome” – as Gabriele D’Annunzio called it, the romanesque-gothic cathedral devoted to Madonna Assunta (elevated to the sky) and situated where once was the ancient Roman castrum to dominate and guard the city. Real shrine of treasures – and a treasure itself –, the Dome of Siena was inaugurated, but the tradition is disputed, in 1179 and extended during the following centuries.

You can see the remains of a projected extension of the church that could become the biggest cathedral in the word if only the black plague of 1348 didn’t stop – as envious neighbors said – the senese arrogance.

Artists that worked in the Dome, or around the Dome, are the most important in the history of art and can be admired still today into the church or in the museums around it (Opera Metropolitana, Pinacoteca):

Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Pinturicchio, Jacopo della Quercia, Domenico Beccafumi, Donatello, Gianlorenzo Bernini, the Lorenzetti brothers, Simone Martini, not to talk of Duccio di Buoninsegna.
Descending from the Dome, here’s the politic heart of the town, the universally renown Piazza del Campo, with its typical shell shape formed by nine segments (to remember the aristocratic Governement of the Nine which, since 1287 to 1355, defined the power of the Republic and made the piazza as it is now) and the Palazzo Civico, with the San Bernardino da Siena coat on the façade, where you can see the Lorenzetti frescoes of Buon Governo (Good Governement) and the Simone Martini’s Maestà (Madonna as a Queen). The Campo is one of the most famous piazzas in the world, thanks to the race of the Palio (twice in a year): the competition among “contradas” shadowed by the beautiful Tower of Mangia.
Dazzled by so great a splendor, the visitor won’t renounce to walk along the thousand churches of the town, as San Domenico, seat of one of the two saint protectors of Italy, Caterina da Siena, or abandon himself to the great music offered each year by the Accademia Chigiana around the most astounding places in town.