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GOURMET TRAVELLER 125

but many are still exactly where he painted them – in
Sansepolcro and close by within a small triangle, the
points of which are the cities of Arezzo in Tuscany,
Perugia in Umbria, and Urbino in Marche. They call
the tour of these works the Piero della Francesca trail,
and I’m about to follow it.
The centre of Sansepolcro is a rectangular grid
of narrow streets lined with elegant palazzi with
red-tiled roofs, all within fortified walls. It’s like
an open-air museum, preserved intact since della
Francesca’s time. Near the Museo Civico is the house
where the artist lived and worked and, in his later
years as his eyesight failed, spent much of his time
writing treatises on geometry and perspective. In his
influential 16th-century textThe Lives of the Artists,
Giorgio Vasari describes it as “a very fine property”,
and the imposing white townhouse occupying a whole
block is worth visiting. The most revealing feature
of the building is the altana, a covered terrace looking
over the rooftops to the mountains beyond. Della
Francesca would have been able to draw inspiration
for his paintings simply by taking in the view from
his own home.
The young della Francesca worked as an apprentice
to the painter Antonio di Giovanni in Anghiari,
a hilltop town with a stern grey castle. It’s a stone’s
throw away, on the other side of the Tiber, and it’s
where I’m headed next. Leaving behind the suburban
sprawl, a characteristic of even the prettiest Italian art
towns, the road crosses the plain that in 1440 was the

Above left:

Monterchi.

Above right:

The Legend

of the True

Cross. Opposite,

clockwise

from top left:

passing through

Monterchi;

the streets

of Anghiari;

The Legend

of the True

Crossin the

Cappella

Maggiore,

Arezzo;

Anghiari.

site of the Battle of Anghiari, in which a Florentine

army sent the invading Milanese packing. You can

learn all you need to know about the battle and da

Vinci’s botched attempt to immortalise it in a fresco

at the Museo della Battaglia in Anghiari.

From the top of the stradone, the town’s main

street, the bird’s-eye view over the Tiber Valley is

stunning (and for those daunted by the steep walk,

there’s a free lift). Along the winding lanes of the

centro storico are dozens of antiques shops and

furniture restorers’ workshops, and an open-air

arts and crafts fair is held every year in April,

when, they tell me, tutto il mondo comes here, too.

From here it takes only minutes to reach the

village of Monterchi, where della Francesca’s

mother, Romana, was born. Fittingly, it was here

that he painted his homage to maternity, the

Madonna del Parto. The full-length portrait of a

pregnant Virgin Mary is among his most famous

works. When I first saw her, statuesque in her royal

blue dress, the Madonna was hanging over the altar

in the church in the village cemetery. She’s since

been shifted to the dedicated Musei del Parto,

housed in an unprepossessing schoolhouse behind

the castle. The trattoria next door is aptly named

Senza Tempo, meaning timeless, like the surrounding

landscape of sunflower and lavender fields. The

painting is curtained off in a small room, and again

I enjoy the privilege of a moment of intimacy with

a sublime Renaissance masterpiece.➤