The Piero Trail

 

 

One of Italy's great art-orientated day trips, the jaunt from Arezzo to Monterchi and Sansepolcro – the two other eastern Tuscan sites with frescoes by Piero della Francesca – is also a good way to explore an attractive rural part of the region where locals far outnumber tourists. It's best to do the pilgrimage as a round trip, taking in the historic town of Anghiari on the way there or back.

 

Starting in Arezzo – where you will of course have already viewed Piero's inspired Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle – the SS73 trunk road heads east through dense and darkly wooded hills along the Cerfone valley, which finally opens out into sunny pastoralism just before the turn-off for Monterchi (15 miles/24km from Arezzo).

 

A sleepy hilltop village, Monterchi's place on the tourist map of Tuscany is entirely down to its proud possession of one of Piero's most celebrated, and most touching, works: the Madonna del Parto. It shows a subject that is rare in Christian art: a pregnant Madonna, one hand supporting her back in a posture that any woman in an advanced state of pregnancy will recognise, the other resting on her bulge at the point where the front stays of her sky-blue dress have been loosened to ease the strain.

 

Two adolescent angels hold open the curtain of the pavilion where the Virgin stands. They stare straight out at the viewer, almost daring us to look; Mary, on the other hand, has all her attention turned inwards, communing with the child inside.

It's a moving work, though it looks so disconcertingly perfect inside the climate-controlled glass box which has protected it since its restoration twenty years ago, that you could be forgiven for thinking it was a copy.

 

The cheerful market town of Sansepolcro lies just 10 miles (16km) north of Monterchi. This was Piero's hometown, and the centrally located Museo Civico has no less than four of the maestro's works: a handsome painted polyptych commissioned by a local confraternity, two detached fresco fragments showing Saint Julian and Saint Ludovico, and the pearl in the museum's crown: the fresco of the Resurrection, in which Christ stands solemn and imperious, one foot on his tomb in defiance of death, while the soldiers set to guard the sarcophagus sprawl on the ground, overcome by sleep.

 

Full of fine churches and palazzos, Sansepolcro is a sociable valley town without hilltop reserve or complexes, and it's a lovely place to while away a couple of hours. If lunch or dinner beckons, head for Da Ventura, a traditional wood-beamed place with good old-fashioned service and good old-fashioned local specialities like potato-filled tortelli in a sauce of cherry tomatoes and basil.

 

From Sansepolcro, it's worth taking the alternative route back to Arezzo via Anghiari. This pretty walled town is famous as the location of a battle between Florentine and Milanese troops in 1440, the subject of a famous unfinished (and subsequently lost or overpainted) fresco by Leonardo da Vinci.

 

Today it's one of those Tuscan towns where there's not a huge amount to see apart from a lovely historic centre. But it's also worth visiting for two craft traditions which still thrive.

 

One is linen weaving – monopolised these days by Busatti, whose warren of a shop on Via Mazzini (at no 14; 0575 788013; www.busatti.com) is a good place to pick up cut-price linen and cotton-linen sheets, bed covers and lengths of fabric. The other, less well known, is basket weaving. In an incongruously tall house standing on its own down in the Upper Tiber valley a mile or so out of town (follow signs to Pieve Santo Stefano, then Viaio; 0575 789266), the Luzzi family have been hand weaving wicker baskets for three generations.

 

The osiers used to make the baskets are cut from the banks of the Tiber and left to soak until April. Though various varieties and hues are used, the "house" colour is a lovely dark browny-green with a touch of purple in it, from an osier variety known as 'borgogna'.

 

The workshop, which can't have changed in decades, has a touch of magic about it, and the women who run the place and sell the baskets (at very reasonable prices for such a labour of love) are absolutely charming.