One thing is certain: The province of Siena is one of the most unspoiled on the Italian peninsula. Of course, these slopes were modeled by nature, not by man, but as I dodged the rainstorms, spiral notebook in hand, I found myself resorting to the language of art to describe the harmony of the agricultural shadings and hatchings running over their surfaces, these washes and stipplings of orchard and tilled field: They had the quality of expert drawing in their revelation of the underlying geological form. So only after much dawdling did I come to Siena itself, city of sweet vowels and brutal horsemen, which I entered in a blaze of sunshine that modulated at once to twilight amid the nearly meeting cornices and alleylike streets, from which cars are mercifully banned. Unchanged since my last visit, a distillation of the late-medieval, Siena insists on turning you now to the left and now to the right, on marching you up and marching you down: Its variety of levels, stairways, and sudden curves, its narrowings and widenings of passage, and the arcs of shadow that its massive palazzi describe on the streets during the course of a day's bemused excursion—all this makes for terrific entertainment. It's a warrant of bygone majesty that such a small, steep city holds so many pugnacious noble residences, their lower windows barred with grilles, as if to remind you that whatever tales are unfolding inside, whatever rich gifts or vows of love, they are not yours to know of. And over this dense procession of edifices, the impossibly slender tower of the Palazzo Pubblico leaps into the sky.

But the eternal Italy? Cesare Brandi, the great Sienese apostle of historic preservation, devoted many pages to blasting insensitive changes to the city's Gothic fabric. For immemorial beauty there is the Val d'Orcia, south of Siena, with its sweeping cadences of hillside and simple travertine architecture, its Romanesque churches guarded by inscrutable stone monsters, its remote abbeys where I had to stand at the door, begging admittance; this valley seems the sure embodiment of something that has always been. Yet actually nothing here is as it was only a few decades ago. A quasi-wasteland in 1900, it was largely colonized in the twenties according to the then-standard Tuscan sharecropping system, which was abolished after World War II; again abandoned, it was eventually resettled by Sardinian sheepherders, who helped create a pecorino sold all over Italy. The most famous product of the area is the wine known as Brunello di Montalcino; yet the Brunellos appeared on the market as a group of recognized vintages only about thirty-five years ago.

And consider this: Ever since the late forties, the province of Siena has voted for the Communists or, more recently, their ideological descendants. One of the most pleasant of Tuscan customs is the summertime Festa dell'Unità, which brings rollicking families together in meadows and pavilions all across the region, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Apennines, in the name of working-class solidarity. I have often joined in these festivities myself, listening to live bands and filling my plate with pasta; nobody has ever asked me my political views.