Монтеварки

Montevarchi keeps a Della Robbia jewel-box and a valley's working wardrobe. The Valdarno market town — founded at the medieval road's convenience between Florence and Arezzo — holds in its Collegiata di San Lorenzo one of Renaissance ceramics' most enchanting rooms: the Tempietto by Andrea della Robbia, a chapel entirely dressed in the family's glazed blue-and-white, cherub friezes and all, built around the town's famous relic of the Holy Milk — devotion rendered in porcelain light, with the adjoining museum of sacred art completing the treasury.

The town's modern vocation is contemporary in two registers: Il Cassero for Italian Sculpture, in the old fortress granary, has built a distinguished collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century plaster and bronze — a specialist museum of national reference — while the surrounding valley became one of fashion's production heartlands, the outlets and workshops of great houses making "Valdarno" a label-checked word and Montevarchi their market town.

Older commerce endures in the Thursday market's roar and the celebrated Valdarno chicken on local menus; older nature waits in the balze — the eroded ochre pinnacles of the ancient lakebed that Leonardo studied, now a protected landscape above the town, with the Pratomagno's chestnut heights behind. Della Robbia blue, sculptor's plaster, designer seconds and geological theatre: Montevarchi trades across the centuries.