Tuscany

Tuscany takes its name from the Etruscans, whose city-states — Volterra, Cortona, Arezzo, Chiusi, Populonia — flourished from the 8th century BC before Rome absorbed them; their painted tombs and bronzes fill museums in Volterra and Florence. After the empire fell, the area passed through Lombard and Frankish hands as the March of Tuscany, with Lucca as its early capital.

From the 11th century the towns became independent communes, and the Middle Ages were a story of rivalry: Pisa was a maritime power until Genoa broke it at Meloria in 1284; Siena beat Florence at Montaperti in 1260, then lost half its people to the Black Death of 1348 and never finished its enlarged cathedral; Florence rose on wool, cloth and banking. The Medici, bankers turned rulers, dominated Florence from 1434 and became Grand Dukes of Tuscany in 1569 after conquering Siena. Under their patronage the city produced Brunelleschi's dome, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli, and Dante's Florentine speech became the basis of modern Italian.

The last Medici died in 1737 and the duchy passed to the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, which in 1786 made Tuscany the first state in the world to abolish the death penalty. Tuscany voted to join the new Kingdom of Italy in 1860, and Florence served as its capital from 1865 to 1871. The Second World War's front line crossed the region in 1944, when retreating Germans blew every Florentine bridge except the Ponte Vecchio, and the Arno flood of 1966 damaged thousands of artworks and books. Since the 1970s Tuscany has been one of Italy's most reliably left-voting regions and, for foreign buyers of its farmhouses, the picture of rural Italy.

Tuscans have a reputation within Italy for dry, sceptical wit and a local pride that is aimed as much at the next town as at anywhere abroad. The old rivalries live on in football derbies and above all in Siena's Palio, when the city's seventeen contrade — wards with their own church, museum, colours and baptisms — race bareback around the Piazza del Campo twice each summer. The regional accent, with its breathy "c" that turns casa into something like "hasa", is the closest Italian speech to the standard language it fathered.

Craft traditions remain strong: leather and gold in Florence, where the Ponte Vecchio's jewellers date from the 16th century, when a ducal decree evicted the butchers; marble at Carrara, where Michelangelo chose his blocks; alabaster in Volterra; textiles in Prato; paper around Lucca. The calendar is marked by the Scoppio del Carro, an exploding cart outside Florence's cathedral at Easter, the Giostra del Saracino jousts in Arezzo, June's calcio storico — a brutal 16th-century football played in costume in Piazza Santa Croce — and Lucca's candlelit Luminara di Santa Croce in September, while the grape and olive harvests in October and November still gather families in the countryside.

Religion is Catholic in observance if not in weekly attendance, and Tuscany also carries an old anticlerical, left-wing strain rooted in the sharecropping system that long shaped its countryside.

About 3.7 million people live in Tuscany, more than a third of them in the Florence–Prato–Pistoia belt along the Arno. Florence itself has around 360,000 residents; Livorno, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo, Siena and Grosseto are the other main centres. The population is ageing, and the countryside in the photographs was largely emptied when sharecropping ended, before Florentines and foreigners bought and restored its stone farmhouses.

The economy mixes tourism with fashion and leather (Gucci and Ferragamo are Florentine), Prato's textiles, paper around Lucca, the Piaggio Vespa works at Pontedera, Carrara marble, Livorno's port, and wine and olive oil. The universities of Pisa, Florence and Siena, along with Pisa's Scuola Normale, keep the smaller cities young.

Days run on an early espresso at the bar, a lunch still often eaten at home or in a trattoria in the smaller towns, shops that close from about one until four outside Florence, the evening passeggiata and dinner from around eight. In summer Florentines flee the heat for the Versilia beaches at Viareggio and Forte dei Marmi or for Elba, and the pressure of visitors on Florence's centre — short-term lets, tour groups, rising rents — is the political issue of the moment.

Tuscan cooking is peasant food made famous: unsalted bread, a habit traced to a 16th-century tax on salt; olive oil that Tuscans consider Italy's best; beans, which earned them the nickname "bean-eaters"; and meat grilled over wood. Stale bread becomes ribollita, a twice-cooked cabbage-and-bean soup, pappa al pomodoro, panzanella salad and crostini spread with chicken-liver pâté, while the bistecca alla fiorentina is a thick T-bone of Chianina beef, grilled rare and sold by weight. Pici, hand-rolled thick spaghetti, come from the Siena hills; wild-boar stews from the Maremma; lampredotto, a tripe sandwich, from Florence's street kiosks; cacciucco fish stew from Livorno; and castagnaccio chestnut cake from the Apennine valleys.

The cheese is pecorino, and the sheep's-milk pecorino of Pienza is the prized one. Sweets are plain: cantucci almond biscuits dipped in vin santo, Siena's panforte and ricciarelli, Prato's biscotti.

Wine is the region's global calling card — Chianti and Chianti Classico between Florence and Siena, Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano in the south, white Vernaccia di San Gimignano, and the "Super Tuscans" of Bolgheri on the coast. New oil is pressed in November and tasted on bread, and the autumn white-truffle fair at San Miniato draws buyers from across Italy.

Florence holds the Renaissance in a walkable centre: Brunelleschi's dome, Giotto's bell tower and the Baptistery doors, the Uffizi's Botticellis, Michelangelo's David in the Accademia, the Ponte Vecchio, the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens, and the view from Piazzale Michelangelo. Siena's shell-shaped Campo, striped cathedral and frescoed Palazzo Pubblico lie an hour and a half south; Pisa's Campo dei Miracoli — the Leaning Tower, cathedral and baptistery — and Lucca's intact Renaissance walls, walkable along the top, lie to the west.

The hill towns are the second draw: San Gimignano's towers, Volterra's Etruscan gate and alabaster workshops, Cortona, Montepulciano and Pienza, the "ideal city" laid out for Pope Pius II, with Arezzo's Piero della Francesca frescoes and Monteriggioni's ring of walls. Between them run the Chianti wine road from Florence to Siena and, further south, the Val d'Orcia's cypress-lined clay hills, a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, with the abbey of Sant'Antimo and the thermal pool in the square at Bagno Vignoni.

Beyond the postcards are the Apuan Alps above Carrara's white marble quarries, the Garfagnana valley, the Casentino forests with the monasteries of Camaldoli and La Verna, Monte Amiata, and the Maremma's cattle country with the cascading hot springs of Saturnia and the coastal Uccellina park. The Versilia coast has the beach resorts of Viareggio and Forte dei Marmi, and the Tuscan Archipelago National Park takes in Elba — Napoleon's villas, the Monte Capanne cable car and dozens of coves — along with Giglio and Capraia.