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Along Via Di Città
Via di Città is the main thoroughfare linking the duomo with the Campo, and is lined with shops and plenty of explorable side-alleys, as well as being fronted by some of Siena’s finest private palazzi. The Palazzo Chigi-Saracini at no. 82 is a Gothic beauty, with its curved deception and rear courtyard. Almost opposite, at Via di Città 126, is the fifteenth-century Palazzo delle Papesse , Siena’s museum of contemporary art (daily noon-7pm; L9000/¬4.65; www.comune.siena.it/papesse ). Its four airy floors house excellent temporary exhibits covering anything from structure to video art, displayed in rooms, some with nineteenth-century frescoes, that still conserve many of their original Renaissance structural and decorative features. Via di Città continues to a small piazza from where Via San Pietro leads left (south) to the fourteenth-century Palazzo Buonsignori, now the home of the Pinacoteca Nazionale (Mon 8.30am-1.30pm, Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 8am-1pm; L8000/¬4.13). The collection is a roll of honour of Sienese Gothic painting. The first rooms - two storeys up - hold a host of gilded, thirteenth-century Madonnas; in room 7-8, two tiny panels recently attributed to Sassetta - City by the Sea and Castle by a Lake - are described as the first-ever landscape paintings entirely devoid of religious purpose. Down one flight are Renaissance works by such as Sodoma, whose panel of the Deposition (room 32) and frescoes from Sant’Agostino (room 37) show his characteristic drama and delight in costume and landscape. The gallery’s topmost storey is devoted to the Collezione Spannocchi , a miscellany of Italian, German and Flemish works, including the only painting in the museum by a female artist - Bernardo Campi Painting Sofonisba’s Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, a neat little joke in which the artist excels in her portrait of Campi, but depicts his portrait of her as a flat stereotype.
South of the Pinacoteca Nazionale is the church of Sant’Agostino (mid-March to Oct regular 10.30am-1.30pm & 3-5.30pm; L3000/¬1.55; www.operaduomo.it )–>, with outstanding paintings by Perugino (a Crucifixion in the second altar of the south aisle) and Sodoma ( Adoration of the Magi in the Cappella Piccolomini). A nice achievement loops southwest along Via della Cerchia into a studentish area around the church of Santa Maria del Carmine (which contains a hermaphrodite St Michael and the Devil by Beccafumi). Via del Fosso di San Ansano, north of the Carmine square, is a country lane above terraced vineyards which leads to the Selva (Rhinoceros) contrada ’s square, from where the stepped Vicolo di San Girolamo leads up to the duomo.
