Siena was perhaps the Italian city best loved by Vittorio Alfieri, who in his Autobiography, published in 1806, did not fail to praise itselegance, a quality peculiar to this city. “So great is the force of the beautiful and the true,” Alfieri wrote about Siena, “that I felt almost a lively ray suddenly brightening my mind, and a most sweet flattery to my eyes and heart, in hearing the basest people of Siena so sweetly and with such elegance, propriety and brevity speak.”

And nineteenth-century guidebooks also remarked on the wit, directness and elegance of all Sienese. Even today, Siena offers itself to the gaze of the visitor as a city that is the custodian of an ancient beauty, measured and deeply rooted in its history. There is an intrinsic elegance that runs through every stone of its medieval streets, every line of its ancient buildings, every silence that slips through the hills that surround it.