National Geographic asked the question in 2023: could Pienza be the most beautiful town in Italy? Its writer decided that it was, after looking out from the walls over the Val d’Orcia, where the hills run toward Monte Amiata and the roads disappear between fields and cypresses. Pienza has had that effect on people for a long time, although there is one reason its beauty may feel unusual: much of the town was designed that way.
Until the middle of the fifteenth century, Pienza did not exist; the place was known as Corsignano, a fortified Tuscan village southeast of Siena, important chiefly because Enea Silvio Piccolomini had been born there in 1405. Piccolomini had an unusually wide life even by Renaissance standards: scholar, diplomat, poet and humanist, he traveled through much of Europe before entering the Church comparatively late, became bishop of Siena and, in 1458, was elected pope as Pius II.
