Guide to Cortona

"Steeped in history and rich in natural beauty, Cortona is one holiday hotspot you won't want to miss."

It's often said that the richer and more illustrious a past a place has had - the more it has to delight its modern visitors. There are very few places that demonstrate the truth of the saying better than Cortona. The Etruscans took one look over the fertile plains and rolling hills of the surrounding Tuscan countryside and immediately decided that here was an unrivalled place for a settlement. They must have had a fair inkling of the town's defensive possibilities too, because they laid the foundations for what would later become the forbidding defensive walls that encircled the town and contributed so richly to its power and wealth. Cortona was a semi-autonomous city-state in its own right, rivalling nearby Siena and Arezzo in prominence until the 15th century when it fell to the King of Naples, who later sold it to the Florentines. And many reminders of those glorious times remain within the city walls. A variety of distinguished piazzas can be reached by strolling through the complicated knot of narrow streets lined with overhanging, timbered medieval houses. You can see glimpses of the Etruscan and, surprisingly perhaps, the Egyptian civilisations by visiting Cortona's Museo dell'Accademia Etrusca, one of Tuscany's best museums. There's a very pretty 13th century campanile at Palazzo Comunale, great to visit in the evening, not to mention the melon tombs of the Tanella di Pitagora (so called because of the shape of the grassy mound that has grown over these ancient Etruscan burial places) on the plain just outside the town. So much has happened to Cortona in the past but you can be part of its future.

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