126 GOURMET TRAVELLER
At a grocer’s shop under the castle walls, I treat
myself to a souvenir: a bottle of red wine called Gusto
di Piero della Francesca, with a label featuring details
from his paintings. The grocer, a thickset man with
white hair and an apron, says it’s made from local
sangiovese grapes, but bottled in Arezzo, the next stop
on the trail. The journey passes through pleasant
wooded hills and takes half an hour by car.
The old part of Arezzo, built on a hill encircled by
modern boulevards, may not attract the tourist hordes
of Florence and Siena but here, too, history and art are
waiting at every corner. I make a beeline
for the 14th-century Basilica of San
Francesco, halfway between the train
station and the cathedral. Behind its
plain brick façade the church houses
della Francesca’s so-called Arezzo cycle,
a series of frescoes of The Legend of the
True Cross. The narrative sequence is baffling, but the
colour and composition of the scenes of war and peace
are compelling. One of them, The Dream of Constantine,
is a technical tour de force in which della Francesca
depicts a nocturnal scene brightened by artificial light.
No other Italian artist had attempted this before him.
One indicator of the enduring impact of della
Francesca’s art is the influence it has exerted over
other genres. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film The
Gospel According to St. Matthew, costumes, art direction
and photography are all inspired by the Arezzo cycle,
while Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s triptych
The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca seeks to capture
in music the wonder it evokes. You can glimpse the
frescoes in the cycle from the church portal, but to
observe them at close quarters you have to buy a ticket.
Visitors are organised into groups of 25 and the full tour
takes half an hour. There’s no chance of savouring these
works on my own. But the cathedral at the top of the
hill – where I go later to see another of della Francesca’s
frescoes, Saint Mary Magdalen – is virtually empty.Della Francesca’s landscapes
are dreamlike, yet you
can still see them as you
travel along the trail.Clockwise from
top left: Madonna
del Parto; the
walls of Città
di Castello; Antica
Bottega Toscana,
Arezzo; Piazza
Grande, Arezzo.