Pienza
— a whole town, drawn once and built at once.
Not only on a wall.
“A pope was born here when it was still a village called Corsignano. He came back as Pius II, hired an architect, and in three years turned it into the town he thought a town should be: one square, one church, one palace, the valley left to do the rest. The pecorino is still aged in cellars cut into the same stone. Late in the day the travertine goes the colour of the cheese, and the Val d'Orcia behind it softens into the view every other Tuscan postcard is trying to be.
Pienza, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Pienza sits on a travertine ridge at about 491 metres in the Val d'Orcia, in the province of Siena, southern Tuscany. Until 1459 it was a farming village called Corsignano, the birthplace of Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Elected Pope Pius II in 1458, he commissioned the architect Bernardo Rossellino to rebuild his home town as an ideal Renaissance city, and the core was finished by 1462. The plan follows the humanist principles of Leon Battista Alberti: a single trapezoidal square, Piazza Pio II, holding the cathedral, the Palazzo Piccolomini, and the town hall in deliberate balance. UNESCO inscribed the historic centre as a World Heritage Site in 1996.
The town is built almost entirely from local travertine, the warm honey-grey stone that turns Pienza gold in late light. Its centrepiece is the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, built by Rossellino as a Hallenkirche, a hall church whose three naves rise to equal height, flooding the interior with the kind of light Pius II had admired in churches in Germany and Austria. The cathedral was a problem from the start: it stands at the edge of the ridge over unstable clay, and the apse has been slowly subsiding toward the valley for more than five centuries, leaving cracks the town has fought ever since. Pius II forbade any alteration to his church on pain of excommunication.
Pienza was laid out to look at the view as much as to be looked at. Pius II set his palace, the Palazzo Piccolomini, with a three-storey loggia and a hanging garden facing south over the Val d'Orcia toward Monte Amiata, the extinct volcano that closes the skyline to the south. The valley below is the source image of Tuscany: ploughed clay hills, solitary cypresses, and the small chapel of Vitaleta on its own rise to the west. That light has pulled filmmakers for decades; the valley's wheat fields stood in for the afterlife in Ridley Scott's Gladiator. The whole Val d'Orcia became a UNESCO World Heritage landscape in 2004.