Book Arezzo attraction tickets

Arezzo sits on a gentle hill in eastern Tuscany, where the Arno, Chiana, and Tiber valleys converge below it like the spokes of a wheel. The city has been continuously inhabited since Etruscan times, and that layered antiquity is not merely a talking point but something you feel walking its sloping streets, where medieval palazzi press against Roman foundations and Renaissance frescoes survive inside churches that have stood for seven centuries. It is a prosperous, self-possessed place, less visited than Florence or Siena yet no less serious about its own cultural inheritance.

The upper town is where most of that inheritance concentrates. The Piazza Grande, an irregular sloping square framed by Vasari's loggia on one side and the Romanesque apse of Santa Maria della Pieve on another, is one of the most architecturally compelling public spaces in all of Tuscany. Giorgio Vasari, the painter, architect, and biographer of the Renaissance artists, was born in Arezzo, and his presence is woven into the fabric of the city in a way that goes well beyond a single museum or plaque. The cathedral, which crowns the highest point of the hill, took more than two centuries to complete and contains a fresco of Mary Magdalene by Piero della Francesca, a painter whose mathematical precision and cool luminosity made him one of the defining figures of fifteenth-century Italian art. Piero's larger cycle, the Legend of the True Cross, fills the choir of the Basilica of San Francesco lower in the town and draws scholars and painters from across the world.