Places to see in Siena

Striped black and white inside and out, with a marble floor of fifty-six inlaid panels that is uncovered only for part of the year, and the Piccolomini library off the nave frescoed in colours that look freshly mixed. Denser and stranger than Florence's cathedral. An hour and a half with the museum next door.

The cathedral's own museum, holding Duccio's Maestà — removed from the high altar and now shown alone, which is how it should be seen. The climb up the unfinished nave wall at the end gives the best rooftop view in the city and comes as a surprise to most visitors.

The town hall on the Campo, holding Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government — a fourteenth-century fresco cycle about how to run a city, painted in the room where it was run. Unusually direct for medieval art and worth reading about beforehand. An hour.

A shell-shaped square sloping to the town hall, divided into nine paved segments, and the finest public space in Italy by a fair margin. People sit on the brick and stay for an hour. Twice each summer it is packed earth and the Palio is run around its edge in about ninety seconds.

The town hall's bell tower over the Campo, built to exactly the height of the cathedral so that church and state stood level. Four hundred narrow steps, no lift, numbers capped at the top. The view over the tiled roofs and out into the Tuscan hills is the one people come to Siena for.