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The subject of the most popular aerial-shot postcard in Tuscany is a tiny hamlet two streets wide. It is entirely enclosed within medieval walls, whose 14 towers were compared by Dante to the Titans guarding the lowest level of Hell. The town holds a week-long medieval festival in July.

Tuscany’s greatest protected parkland. Coastal Monti dell’ Uccellina (“Mountains of the Little Bird”) is a large area of pine forests, teeming with boar, roe deer and porcupines, bird-filled marshland to the north, as well as tracts of pristine beach. A pack of wild horses and roaming long-horned white Maremma cattle are looked after by Butteri cowboys. Buses from Albarese take you to the park’s centre.

Quirky, private museum of armour. The 16th-century Florentine armour (joined by some Samurai colleagues) is arranged as a mounted army marching through the largest room.

A mezza porzione for smaller appetites costs less.

Siena’s medieval town hall is a genteel brick palace. The rooms were so gorgeously decorated with early 14th-century art – including Simone Martini’s Maestà and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s incomparable Allegory of Good and Bad Government – that they’ve been turned into a museum (see Siena’s Museo Civico).

Arnolfo di Cambio’s mighty town hall (1299–1302) is still Florence’s seat of government. Cosimo I hired Vasari to redecorate in the 1540s, frescoing a Medici marriage around Michelozzo’s 1453 courtyard and swathing the gargantuan Sala dei Cinquecento with an apotheosis of the Medici dynasty. Francesco I shut himself away from matters of state in his Studiolo to conduct scientific experiments.

Siena’s half-moon of a public square is one of the loveliest piazze in all of Italy, its broad slope home to the biannual Palio horse race and an ever-changing cast of strollers, coffee-drinkers, readers and picnickers. So rich is it in sightseeing opportunities that it counts among Tuscany’s Top 10 (see Siena’s Campo & Palazzo Pubblico).

Florence’s public living room and outdoor sculpture gallery. Michelangelo called Ammannati’s Neptune fountain a “waste of good marble”. Lining the Palazzo Vecchio’s arringheria – the platform from which orators “harangued” the crowds – are copies of Donatello’s Marzocco (Florence’s leonine symbol) and Judith , and Michelangelo’s David . The only original, Bandinelli’s Hercules (1534), was derided by Cellini as a “sack of melons”. Orcagna’s lovely 14th-century Loggia dei Lanzi shelters Cellini’s masterpiece Perseus (1545) and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1583).

Italy’s only perfectly planned Renaissance town centre was commissioned from Rossellino by Pope Pius II. The perimeter street offers views over the rumpled green, sheep-dotted landscape. The town’s many little shops specialize in Tuscan wines, honey and the best pecorino sheep’s milk cheese in all of Italy.

In the 15th century, Pope Pius II hired Rossellino to revamp his home village with an assemblage of buildings on the main square, including a retro-Gothic town hall, a palace for the bishop (housing the Museo Diocesano of paintings by Pietro Lorenzetti, Vecchietta and Bartolo di Fredi), a papal palace (great hanging gardens) and a Duomo (see Pienza’s Duomo). High Street Corso Rossellino is packed with wine and cheese shops.