Arezzo

The city sits on a Tuscan hilltop 80 km southeast of Florence, and the ground beneath it holds one of the densest layers of Etruscan, Roman, medieval and early-Renaissance building anywhere in the region, without the tour-bus crush of its more famous siblings. The lower streets and the upper square pull the town's whole history together: the Pieve di Santa Maria's Romanesque exterior and five-tier facade were widely copied across central Italy, the Cattedrale di San Donato is Gothic with stained glass by Guillaume de Marcillat, and the Casa Vasari is the painter-architect's own house, frescoed by himself. Giorgio Vasari was Arezzo's other native son, and beyond his own house his Loggia still frames one side of the sloped trapezoidal square, alongside the 14th-century facade of the Palazzo della Fraternita dei Laici and the Romanesque apse of the Pieve.

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale stands on the site of the Roman Amphitheatre, where the Vasi corallini, coral-red glazed Roman pottery, were made as a manufacturing centre for the empire. The fresco cycle narrates the journey of the Cross from Adam's grave through Solomon to Constantine to Heraclius in 10 panels of geometric serenity and silver-grey light, and the film that made the square famous used its slope as a stage set, the same slope the antique dealers now fill every first weekend of the month with more than 500 stalls drawing buyers from across Europe. Twice a year, in June and September, the four city quartieri, Porta Crucifera, Porta del Foro, Porta Sant'Andrea and Porta Santo Spirito, meet in the jousting tournament, riders charging the wooden target on horseback in a contest that has run since the 13th century.

The food is Tuscan: pici with hare ragù, ribollita, bistecca chianina from the Val di Chiana below the city, Pecorino Toscano, with Vino Nobile, Brunello and Chianti Classico all within an hour's drive south. Together the fresco, the square, the joust and the antique trade give the city a working civic life built on Renaissance art and medieval ritual rather than a museum piece preserved around it.