A Road Trip Past Florence, and the Towns That Hold the Paintings

The New York Times published a travel piece on Sunday describing a writer's road trip through Tuscany in search of the most resplendent works of Piero della Francesca, an itinerary that took her to towns beyond Florence. The framing is familiar to anyone who reads the foreign travel pages: the birthplace of the Renaissance is treated as a departure point rather than a destination, and the reward is found further out.

Piero is an unusual figure to build a route around, and that is precisely what makes the piece interesting as a piece of coverage rather than a guide. He worked in the fifteenth century across the towns of the upper Tiber valley and the Marche, and his surviving frescoes are not gathered in a single museum. They are in churches and civic buildings in places that take effort to reach. A road trip is not a stylistic choice here; it is the only way the material can be seen at all.

For Tuscany, the practical question raised by any such itinerary is distribution. The region receives an enormous volume of visitors and concentrates them in a handful of squares. Foreign travel writing that pushes readers toward Sansepolcro, Monterchi or Arezzo is, in effect, doing dispersal work that no regional campaign has managed at the same scale. The New York Times did not frame it that way, and it would be a mistake to claim it did.

The Times piece is one of a run of recent foreign dispatches that treat Tuscany's interior as the real subject and Florence as the crowded threshold. Earlier this month a New York road trip in search of Piero was covered in these pages, and the pattern across the international travel press is consistent: the smaller towns are presented as the place where the art still sits in the building it was made for, and the city is presented as the place where one queues.

That contrast is not invented by journalists. It reflects a genuine condition of Tuscan heritage, in which the region's most famous holdings are under sustained visitor pressure while its equally significant holdings in smaller centres are under-visited. The foreign press notices this because its readers are the ones doing the queueing. Whether the resulting coverage actually redistributes anything is another matter. Travel writing has a long record of creating the crowding it later laments, and the towns on a Piero itinerary are not large.

There is a conservation dimension the coverage only gestures at. Frescoes in small churches are not museum objects. They sit in buildings with their own humidity, their own heating decisions, their own parish finances, and they are viewed by whoever happens to walk in. A sudden increase in foreign visitors to a chapel in the Tiber valley is not a neutral event for the paint on the wall, and the international travel press rarely addresses what a recommended itinerary costs the recommended site.

Read from Florence, the more useful observation is about how the region is described abroad. The city's own institutions — the Uffizi chief among them — are covered internationally as destinations, with the attendant arguments about ticketing, queues and crowd management. The Piero towns are covered as discoveries. Both framings are forms of marketing, and neither is a plan. What the Times has produced is a good itinerary and an implicit question: whether Tuscany wants its early Renaissance to remain a thing one drives to, or to become a thing one queues for.