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Cosimo il Vecchio built the monastery, including Europe’s first public library.

Cosimo il Vecchio de’ Medici commissioned Michelozzo to build this Dominican monastery in 1437. This was Fra Angelico’s home (see Fra Angelico (1395–1455)). He frescoed his brothers’ cells with devotional images and left a plethora of golden altarpieces now housed downstairs near Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper in the refectory. Fra Bartolomeo’s portrait of Savonarola hangs in the “Mad Monk’s” room, beside a scene of the theocrat’s fiery death (see Florence).

Frederick II built the imposing hilltop “Rocca” (great views) when this was the Tuscan stronghold of the German Holy Roman Emperors. The Duomo’s (rebuilt) Romanesque brick façade is studded with 13th-century North African majolica bowls.

This is Florence’s only Romanesque church, its green and white façade perched high above the city. The doors of Michelozzo’s tabernacle were painted by Agnolo Gaddi (1394–6).

Friendly little farming town with amazing Romanesque carvings on the Collegiata’s trio of 12th-century portals: fantastical creatures, stacked arches, tiny telamons and thin columns “knotted” in the centre and resting on toothless lions. Inside is a sumptuous Sano di Pietro altarpiece.

Medieval town with a reputation built around Buitoni pasta and home-grown genius Piero della Francesca. The Museo Civico houses (alongside works by Signorelli and natives Santi di Tito and Raffaellino del Colle) Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia (1445–62), San Giuliano fresco fragment (1455–8), and the compelling Resurrection .

Piero della Francesca’s home town retained some of his greatest, most psychologically penetrating works, including Madonna della Misericordia (1445–62), San Giuliano (1458) and the eerie Resurrection (1463), called the “best picture of the world” by Aldous Huxley.

Florence’s “Westminster Abbey” contains the tombs of such Tuscan geniuses as Michelangelo and Galileo, as well as Giotto frescoes and a renowned leather school. Off the lovely cloisters are a Renaissance chapel designed by Brunelleschi (decorated by Luca della Robbia), and a small museum with a Last Supper by Taddeo Gaddi and Cimabue’s Crucifix , restored after the infamous 1966 flood.

Gothic pantheon of cultural heroes, containing the tombs of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Rossini and Galileo (reburied here in 1737). Giotto frescoed the two chapels to the right of the altar. Through the sacristy is a renowned leather shop.

This Romanesque church contains some fine altarpieces covering all eras of Sienese painting. Highlights are Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Byzantine masterpiece Madonna del Bordone (1261), Matteo di Giovanni’s rather creepy Massacre of the Innocents (1491) and Francesco Vanni’s Mannerist Annunciation . In the transepts, the second chapels out on either side contain Gothic frescoes by Francesco and Niccolò di Segna and Pietro Lorenzetti, including another Massacre of the Innocents .