traveldk.com

An Etruscan city, then ancient Roman pottery centre, Arezzo was later home to Guido Monaco, who invented modern musical notation in the 11th century, the poet Petrarch (1304–74) and Giorgio Vasari (1512–74), architect and author of the first art history text, Lives of the Artists .

The town’s centre is the broad, sloping Piazza Grande. The bell-tower, façade and medieval Calendar reliefs of the 12th-century Santa Maria della Pieve are Lombard-Romanesque style, but the altarpiece (1320) is pure Sienese Gothic courtesy of Pietro Loren-zetti. The Duomo has excellent stained-glass windows by French master Guillaume de Marcillat, and a fresco by Piero della Francesca. The 14th-century San Francesco is graced with Piero’s recently restored Legend of the True Cross (1448–66).

Within its 14th-century walls, next to the travertine Romanesque Collegiata, Asciano’s Museo d’Arte Sacra contains Sienese works by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Segna di Buonaventura and Francesco di Valdambrino. The minuscule Museo Etrusco’s 3rd- to 5th-century BC painted vases are installed in a deconsecrated church.

Little more than a square of houses around a vast, Medici-built portico and basin steaming with naturally carbonated, volcanically heated waters. St Catharine bathed here for her scrofula (lymphatic tuberculosis), Lorenzo the Magnificent for his troublesome arthritis, but sadly the pool is no longer suitable for swimming.

Tool around the top of the city’s massive 16th-century ramparts shaded by trees, and peek down into elaborate gardens.

Medieval capital of the Mugello region, surrounded by Medici villas such as Cafaggiolo (see Villa di Cafaggiolo) and the Michelozzo-designed Castello del Trebbio (1461). In the town itself, painstakingly rebuilt after a 1919 earthquake, the 12th-century Pieve di San Lorenzo contains Renaissance altarpieces by Taddeo Gaddi and Bachiacca, apse murals by local Art Nouveau ceramics entrepreneur Galileo Chini (1906) and a damaged Madonna fresco by Giotto.

The tiny historic centre shelters a good Museo d’Arte Sacra, with Sienese School works by Duccio, Sano di Pietro and Matteo di Giovanni, who also left a Madonna and Child in the 14th-century Santi Piero e Paolo church.

San Romulado established this Benedictine community in 1012, though the monastery is 15th century and the Vasari-decorated church 16th. One mile (1.5km) up a forest path lies the secluded hermitage (only men admitted), a tiny village of monkish cottages alongside a Baroque church.

Carrara is a quarry town, its snowy white marble the source of grandiose sculpture from ancient Rome to Michelangelo to Henry Moore. The town’s Duomo is pure Carrara marble, and marble-cutting shops and sculptors’ studios fill the streets. On the main square, look for the plaque and relief of stone-carving tools that mark the house where Michelangelo once stayed. The Museo del Marmo features the ancient Roman altar Edicola di Fantiscritti.

The house in which the saint was born was made a sanctuary in 1466, with a modest Baroque church containing the 12th-century Pisan Crucifixion that gave Catherine the stigmata, a brick loggia (constructed in 1533 by Baldassare Peruzzi) and a small oratory with Baroque paintings by Il Riccio, Francesco Vanni and Il Pomarancio. Follow the staircase down past Catherine’s cell to see if the Oratorio dell’Oca and its frescoes of angels are open.

Santa Verdiana is Tuscany’s loveliest and most successful Baroque church. Its interior is swathed in frescoes celebrating the odd life of Verdiana, who walled herself into a cell here for 34 years with two snakes, which God sent to test her.