The Crete Senesi: Tuscany's Strangest Landscape

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Southeast of Siena the postcard Tuscany stops. The Crete Senesi are bare clay hills — grey-white in summer, green-veined in spring, lunar at every season's edge — with lone farmhouses on their crests and almost nothing to buy a ticket for. It is the region's strangest landscape and its most underrated half-day.

Every other day trip from Siena has an object: a town, an abbey, a cellar. The Crete have a look — and that inversion is the point. This is the drive for the day you do not want an itinerary.

What you are looking at

The name means the Sienese clays: a belt of sediment hills running southeast of the city, roughly between the Arbia valley and the higher ground towards Monte Amiata. The soil drains and erodes into rounded crests, gullies and the occasional raw badland scar — the calanchi — and supports wheat, sheep and little else. What it grows best is composition: a single farmhouse, a cypress cluster, a ribbon of track on a bare curve. In spring the hills are green and rolling; by August they are cut to stubble and the land shows its bones. Photographers argue about which version is better. Both are.

How to drive it

There is no official circuit, which is liberating. The honest method: take the southern roads towards Asciano — the Crete's principal town, with a handsome medieval core — loop south towards the abbey country around Monte Oliveto, and come back by a different minor road than you went out on. An hour of driving sees the essential landscape; a half day with stops, a lunch and a wrong turn or two is the proper dose. The light matters more than the route: early morning and the last two hours of the day model the hills; midday flattens them.

Two courtesies that matter here more than anywhere: the famous farm tracks with the cypress rows are mostly private drives — photograph from the road's legal pull-offs, not from someone's front path; and the roads are working roads for tractors and sheep trucks — pull fully off to stop.

The one interior worth planning around

If the day wants an object after all, the southern Crete supply a serious one: Monte Oliveto Maggiore, the great Benedictine abbey in its cypress woods at the landscape's edge, mother house of the Olivetan congregation, with a famous frescoed cloister. Check current visiting arrangements at the abbey's own site before building the day around it — monastic hours are monastic hours — and treat it as the destination end of the Crete loop rather than a drive-past.

Beyond it you are minutes from Buonconvento on the valley floor — a brick-walled market town flat as the Crete are not — and the road home can run through it for the contrast.

Pairing it

The Crete pair naturally with the Val d'Orcia to their south — many drivers cross them without knowing on the way to Pienza — and with Montalcino's wine country to the southwest. As a half-day from Siena they also rescue an afternoon: out at three, golden hour on the clay, back for dinner. The day-trips hub places them among the twelve.

Without a car, be honest with yourself: this is a landscape drive. The 114 coach's Monteroni–Buonconvento corridor skirts the western edge, but the Crete reward the freedom to stop, which is the one thing a bus cannot give — the car-free alternatives.

Practical Information

Where: southeast of Siena, around and beyond Asciano; the essential landscape starts within an easy drive of the walls. Season: green and soft in spring; bare, pale and graphic from high summer; misted and strange in late autumn — there is no wrong season, only wrong hours (midday). Fuel and food: fill up and book nothing — lunch in Asciano or Buonconvento, found on the day. Photography: pull-offs only; private tracks are private; drones need the operator's own homework on current rules — we print none.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Crete Senesi? The bare clay hills southeast of Siena — an eroded, almost lunar farming landscape of wheat, sheep and lone farmhouses that looks like nowhere else in Tuscany.

Are the Crete Senesi worth visiting? If you have a car and half a day, emphatically — especially in early morning or evening light. It is a landscape to drive and photograph rather than a place with tickets.

What is there to see in the Crete Senesi? The landscape itself, the town of Asciano, and — with planning — the Benedictine abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore at the Crete's southern edge.

When is the best time to photograph the Crete Senesi? The first and last two hours of light, in any season; spring for green curves, late summer for the pale, graphic version.

By the Siena & Toscana editors