Siena Cathedral: Go Early, Stay Long

The striped black-and-white marble of the Duomo di Siena runs all the way through the walls. This is not a veneer applied to a brick core – it’s structural marble from quarries in the hills south of the city, and the effect inside is disorienting in the best possible way: the interior banding changes the spatial weight of the building, making it feel taller and more complex than its dimensions suggest. Florence has the Duomo and Santa Croce and the Uffizi and everything else compressing into a single city. Siena has this cathedral and the Campo below it and, because it gets far fewer visitors than it deserves, you can sometimes stand in the nave on a weekday morning with almost no one around you.

What to See Inside

The floor is the first thing. Fifty-six inlaid marble panels installed over several centuries, each depicting Old Testament scenes, allegories, and heraldic symbols, cover the cathedral floor from entrance to apse. Most of the floor is protected under wooden boards for most of the year; it’s fully revealed in late August and September for the marble floor season. If your dates overlap with that window, the floor is worth reorganising your Tuscany itinerary around.

Nicola Pisano’s pulpit (1268) in the nave is a key work in the transition from Romanesque to Gothic sculpture in Italy. The six carved narrative reliefs – the Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, the Last Judgment, and others – compress dozens of figures into each panel with an energy and spatial confidence that pointed toward the next century of Italian sculpture. Art historians argue about exactly how it anticipates later Gothic naturalism and whether Pisano or Arnolfo di Cambio deserves more credit for what came next. Standing in front of it makes the argument legible in a way that art history writing doesn’t always manage.

The Piccolomini Library off the left nave requires a separate small fee (around €4) on top of the cathedral entry. Ten large frescoes by Pinturicchio (1502-1508) cover the walls in colours that are extraordinary for their preservation – vivid blue and gold and green barely dimmed after five centuries. The scenes depict the life of Pope Pius II, a Sienese man who rose from humanist scholar to pope and whose library of Greek and Latin manuscripts was housed here after his death. The room is one of the best examples of Italian Renaissance fresco on a manageable scale.

Cathedral entry runs €5-8 depending on season. The OPA SI pass (around €15) gives combined access to the cathedral, the Museo dell’Opera, the Baptistery, and the Oratorio di San Bernardino – worth buying if you’re spending a full day in the centro storico.

The Museo dell’Opera

The museum occupies the would-be nave of the never-completed cathedral expansion – Siena started extending the Duomo in 1339 to make it the largest cathedral in the world, then stopped due to the Black Death and never resumed. The surviving structure now houses Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maesta altarpiece (1311), a massive Byzantine-influenced double-sided polyptych that was paraded through the city on the day it was completed with accompanying festivities. It anchors Sienese painting as the Uffizi anchors Florentine painting. The museum also accesses the Facciatone, the unfinished facade section you can climb for views across the terracotta rooftops to the Campo below.

Campo and Palazzo Pubblico

The Piazza del Campo a few minutes downhill is one of the finest medieval public spaces in Europe, a concave shell-shaped piazza that hosts the Palio horse race twice annually in July and August. The Palazzo Pubblico at the base holds the Museo Civico, containing Simone Martini’s Maesta (1315) and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338-1339), one of the most significant secular fresco cycles of the 14th century and – given its subject matter – one that rewards political interpretation. Entry around €9.

Getting There and Eating

Siena has no direct train service from Florence; take the SITA bus from Florence Santa Maria Novella (75 minutes, €8-10). The bus drops at Piazza Gramsci at the north end of the centro storico. The entire historical centre is pedestrianised.

Trattoria La Taverna di San Giuseppe on Via Giovanni Dupre is a long-standing Sienese restaurant serving ribollita, pappardelle al cinghiale, and Brunello by the carafe. Budget around €30-35 per head. Lunch is marginally cheaper than dinner. The covered market in Piazza del Mercato (the back of the Palazzo Pubblico, easy to miss) has good sandwiches and a genuinely local atmosphere for something quicker and cheaper.