Ingrandisci Siena, Chianti, Valdelsa, Crete, Val d’Arbia, Val d’Orcia, Monte Amiata, Val di Merse, Valdichiana. Cultural itineraries in and around Siena
From north-west to south-east, from San Gimignano to Castellina in Chianti to Abbadia San Salvatore and Chiusi, the province of Siena is dotted with a great number of museums, distributed among the capital and the smaller towns of the area. Thirty-four of them belong to a single system under the aegis of the Sienese Museums Foundation, including not only important archaeological and artistic museums, but also ethnographic, scientific and naturalistic ones.
Some of these extend beyond the walls of museum buildings, as they are at the heart of parks or archaeological excavations, in the middle of towns or mining areas, or – like the Sharecropping Museum in Buonconvento, the Museum of the Landscape in Castelnuovo Berardenga, or the Museum of the Woods in Orgia – have the history and current reality of the surrounding territory as their subject. All, without exception, conserve works of art, discoveries and objects of inestimable value, produced over the course of the centuries by this territory.
Our territory has conserved, largely intact, its exceptional landscape and cultural significance, to the point that it truly constitutes an enormous open-air museum. The museums disseminated through the province of Siena are thus not self-determining structures, but rather are integral parts of a context made up of towns, castles, parish churches, villas and farmhouses. Adhering to the fabric of the province’s historic towns and villages, their network is a bit like a sort of nerve system: each museum ideally branches out into a territory which is in turn condensed in it, enriching the system of which it is a part, and deriving an added value from its belonging to that same system.
The Sienese Museums Foundation, the Lions Club of Siena and Nuova Immagine Editrice have promoted the realisation of this guidebook to reflect and enhance these particular qualities. Naturally, it is a concise book, which does not aim to substitute the far more in-depth guidebooks offered by each individual museum, but rather to play an introductory role. At the same time, however, it is a precious and extremely useful tool that represents the profound unity of the museum system and territory of the province of Siena.
