Val d'Orcia
— — the light the Sienese painters worked from.
Not only on a wall.
“The valley south of Siena that became a Renaissance painting before it became a UNESCO site. Cypresses single-file along the ridges. Small chapels at the end of long white roads. The hills go from green in May to copper in October, the same palette Ambrogio Lorenzetti laid down in his fresco of Good Government in Siena's town hall, six hundred years before any of this was protected. Five hill towns share the valley between them: Pienza, Montalcino, San Quirico d'Orcia, Castiglione, Radicofani. Nobody on the road at six in the morning except a flock of sheep and the man who minds them.
Val d'Orcia, 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.
The Val d'Orcia is a valley in southern Tuscany, in the province of Siena, named for the Orcia river that flows through it. Five comuni share the valley: Pienza, San Quirico d'Orcia, Castiglione d'Orcia, Montalcino, and Radicofani. UNESCO inscribed the cultural landscape in 2004, citing it as an outstanding example of redesigned Renaissance landscape ideals of good governance and aesthetic beauty. The valley sits between the medieval city of Siena, about 50 km north, and the conical bulk of Mount Amiata, a 1,738-metre dormant volcano to the south. The most photographed cypresses, in the countryside between San Quirico d'Orcia and Pienza, are reached by minor roads off the SS2 Cassia, the old Roman consular road that bisects the valley.
The light in Val d'Orcia became a subject of painting before it became a subject of photography. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, working in Siena around 1338, painted the cultivated hills of the surrounding contado into his fresco cycle Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico, which is among the earliest known landscape paintings of post-classical European art to depict a real, specific place. The valley's broad east-to-west orientation gives a long, low side-light through the late afternoon, the hour landscape photographers call the second light, which separates each cypress from the hill behind it and saturates the umber and ochre tones the Sienese pigment-makers once ground from local soils.
The valley has four distinct looks. From late April through early June the hills are vivid green, broken by yellow rapeseed fields and, in the second half of June, scattered patches of sunflowers; these are the months most travel photographers come. July and August are dry and hot, the wheat already cut, the hills the colour of unbleached linen. September and October turn the oaks copper and the vineyards of Montalcino gold; the Brunello harvest runs from mid-September. November through March is cold and often misty, with low cloud sitting in the river valley below San Quirico; snow on Mount Amiata, 1,738 metres to the south, is reliable in January and February. The hill-town restaurants thin out in winter; the light thins with them.