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Botticelli’s Birth of Venus , Leonardo’s Annunciation and Michelangelo’s Holy Family are just three of the masterpieces that make this the top sight in all of Tuscany (see The Uffizi, Florence).

The Galleria Palatina features Raphael Madonnas and Titian beauties alongside works by Andrea del Sarto, Perugino, Signorelli, Caravaggio and Rubens. Palatial décor is the backdrop to collections of costumes, silverware and carriages (see Pitti Palace, Florence).

A battlemented medieval town hall with the best Gothic painting in Siena, including Lorenzetti’s incomparable Allegory of Good and Bad Government .

Italy’s top sculpture gallery, with the world’s best collection of Donatellos. Other sculptures by Cellini, Giambologna and Michelangelo.

One of Tuscany’s top Etruscan museums. Over 600 marble and alabaster funerary urns carved with myths or metaphors for the afterlife, a terracotta sarcophagus lid of an elderly couple, and small bronzes including the elongated boyish figure, Shade of the Evening .

The crowds come for Michelangelo’s David (1501–4), then stay for his Slaves , carved for the tomb of Julius II, and paintings by Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, Orcagna, Perugino and del Sarto.

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.

It may lack towering masterpieces, but this is Tuscany’s best survey of Sienese painting.

This hotchpotch collection preserves Etruscan finds as well as Renaissance and Baroque paintings, a few Egyptian artifacts, decorative arts, and works by the local Futurist Gino Severini.

The instruments displayed here are often as beautiful as they are scientifically significant. Exhibits include a mechanical “calculator” made of engraved disks, a perpetual motion machine and the telescopes with which Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter.