Monteriggioni

Monteriggioni is a comune in the Province of Siena in the Italian region Tuscany. It borders on the communes of Casole d’Elsa, Castellina in Chianti, Castelnuovo Berardenga, Colle di Val d’Elsa, Poggibonsi, Siena and Sovicille. The town is architecturally and culturally significant; it hosts several piazzas, and is referenced in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
The money Monteriggioni made went to making the town better. Both Monteriggioni’s exterior walls and the buildings within are some the best preserved in all of Italy, attracting tourists, architects, medieval historians and archaeologists. “The town appears to float above the valley at night due to the hillside walls and towers being lit from below with light” tourists say.
The roughly circular walls, totalling a length of about 570 meters and following the natural contours of the hill, were built between 1213 and 1219. There are fourteen towers on square bases set at equidistance, and two portals or gates. One gate, the Porta Fiorentina opens toward Florence to the north, and the other, the Porta Romana, faces Rome to the south. The main street within the walls connects the two gates in a roughly straight line.
The main piazza, the Piazza Roma, is dominated by a Romanesque church with a simple, plain facade. Other houses, some in the Renaissance style (once owned by local nobles, gentry and wealthy merchants) facing into the piazza. Off the main piazza smaller streets give way to public gardens fronted by the other houses and small businesses of the town. In more hostile times, these gardens provided vital sustenance when enemies gathered without.