A New York Road Trip Goes Looking for Piero, and Finds Tuscany's Smaller Towns

The New York Times published this week a travel account of a road trip through Tuscany in search of the early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, whose most celebrated works hang not in Florence but in the smaller towns of the region. The piece, published on 11 October, frames the journey explicitly as a search for the master's 'most resplendent' frescoes and panels, and it sends the writer beyond Florence, which it calls the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance.

That framing is the familiar one: Florence as the gateway, the region as the reward. It is also, from the Florentine side, a reminder of how the international travel press distributes attention across Tuscany — a handful of names carrying the weight of an entire artistic inheritance, and a circuit of small centres that depends on that attention for its visitors.

The Times does not give figures for the towns it visits, and this dispatch will not invent any. What the piece establishes is an itinerary: a car, a sequence of churches and civic museums, and the argument that Piero repays the detour. Whether the detour is taken by enough readers to matter to the towns themselves is a question the article does not address.

The choice of subject is itself a statement about how the foreign press now writes about Tuscan heritage. Piero della Francesca is a fifteenth-century painter whose surviving output is small and scattered, and whose reputation rests on works that are not in the Uffizi. A travel piece built around him is a piece built around movement between towns — precisely the kind of itinerary that regional tourism authorities have spent years trying to encourage as an alternative to the concentrated Florentine visit.

The Times describes the trip as a search for the artist's most resplendent works and locates them in towns beyond Florence. It does not name a route in the summary available, and we do not supply one. What can be said from the article as published is that the newspaper treats the dispersed geography of Piero's work as the point rather than the obstacle — the detour is the experience, not the cost of getting to it.

For Tuscany this is the recurring arithmetic of the postcard. Florence absorbs the overwhelming share of the region's visitors and the revenue that comes with them; the smaller centres hold the works and the fabric but far less of the traffic. Foreign arts and travel coverage of the kind the Times has just published is one of the few mechanisms that moves anyone out along the secondary roads at all, and it moves them in small, self-selecting numbers.

There is a conservation dimension the article does not raise and we will not manufacture. Churches and civic museums in small Tuscan towns have long faced the problem that their holdings are more significant than their visitor economies can support, and that the international attention which might help is episodic and driven by anniversaries, exhibitions and newspaper features rather than by any steady flow. A single prominent article can produce a season of visitors; it cannot produce a maintenance budget.

The piece also sits within a wider pattern in the foreign travel press this autumn, in which Tuscany is written about through a single artist, a single wine, or a single hill town, and the region is assembled from those parts for readers abroad. That is not a distortion so much as a compression. The reader in New York or London receives Tuscany as a sequence of named places with a painter attached to each; the resident receives it as a working landscape with a heritage problem attached to it.

What the Times article establishes, and what this dispatch can rest on, is modest and real: an international newspaper has judged that Piero della Francesca, and the towns that hold him, are worth a road trip and a full feature. For those towns, that judgment is the kind of coverage they cannot generate for themselves. Whether it converts into visitors, and whether those visitors spend beyond the ticket and the coffee, is not something the article claims, and not something we will assert.