Tuscany: nine UNESCO sites, and Pienza is the smallest

Tuscany has 9 World Heritage sites in 2026, level with Veneto and one behind Lombardy, and the smallest of them, the centre of Pienza, covers 4.41³ hectares inside a listed landscape, the Val d'Orcia, of 61,187.96⁴ hectares.

The nine, by year

Eight of Tuscany's nine sites are Tuscan only; the ninth is a serial site shared with six other regions.

The national ranking counts each shared site in every region it touches: Lombardy 10, Tuscany 9, Veneto 9. With a different method, one lead region per site, the numbers change, and the source says so.

Pienza: a pope's ideal town on 4.41 hectares

The historic centre of Pienza was listed in 1996 under criteria i, ii and iv, and at 4.41³ hectares it is the smallest of the Tuscan sites. It exists because of one man's decision.

Pope Pius II, born Enea Silvio Piccolomini, had his native village redesigned from 1459³ by the architect Bernardo Rossellino, a pupil of Leon Battista Alberti. About 40 buildings were built or rebuilt.

The result is counted as the first application of the humanist principles of the ideal Renaissance city. Its 4.41³ hectares are about a third of San Gimignano's 13.88⁶.

Val d'Orcia: five comuni, and the places that aren't in it

The Val d'Orcia was listed in 2004 as a cultural landscape under criteria iv and vi, over 61,187.96⁴ hectares plus a buffer of 5,660.08⁴. It is a farmed landscape redrawn in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: clay plains with conical hills, each crowned by a fortified village.

Criterion vi is the unusual one. It was granted because the landscape shaped the painters of the Sienese school, one of the few Italian listings that rests partly on influence over art.

The listed area covers the historic centres and most of the land of five comuni in the province of Siena: Castiglione d'Orcia, Montalcino, Pienza, Radicofani and San Quirico d'Orcia. Many places marketed as Val d'Orcia lie outside those five.

San Gimignano: 14 towers left of about 72

The historic centre of San Gimignano was listed in 1990 under criteria i, iii and iv, on just 13.88⁶ hectares. Merchant families put up about 72 towers between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries as a show of wealth and power, and 14 survive.

There are no single tickets for the main monuments. The San Gimignano Pass costs €15, €12 for ages 6 to 17, in 2026, is valid 3 days, and adds €1 if bought in advance.

It covers the Collegiata complex, the Palazzo Comunale with the Pinacoteca and the Torre Grossa, the Santa Chiara complex and the church of San Lorenzo in Ponte. The Torre Grossa is the only tower in town you can climb, and the pass is the only way up.

More in Tuscany, San Gimignano, Piazza del Duomo in Pisa, Siena, the Uffizi and sites by region.

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