The Via Francigena runs through much of the territory of the Natural and Cultural Artistic Park of the Val d’Orcia, a landscape still almost identical to that which crossed the traveler of the Middle Ages. Fortresses, castles, churches, abbeys, farms, hills, cypresses, woods, water: images known all over the world and that the whole world identifies as a maximum example of harmony between man and nature.
In 2004 UNESCO declared the Val d’Orcia a World Heritage Site with an exemplary motivation to understand the value and beauty of this land: “Val d’Orcia is an exceptional example of the redesign of the landscape in the Renaissance, which illustrates the ideals of good governance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Italian city-state and the aesthetic research that guided its conception.
The Val d’Orcia, a combination of art and landscape, geographical space and ecosystem, is the expression of wonderful natural characteristics but it is also the result and the testimony of the people who live there. Between the hard, rugged landscape of the Crete and the softer hills where the Mediterranean maquis, vineyards, olive groves, promiscuous crops are exchanged and intersect in frescoes of rare beauty, It is clearly understood how and how much the awareness of man has weighed on his works to depend on the resources of the surrounding environment and their use in a non-destructive way.