I visited this small town on 1 September 2016 on my way back from Arezzo. It is somewhere between 50 minutes to a one hour drive from Valliano. It was very much a spur of the moment thing. It looked interesting and the Arezzo road takes you right past the main city gate.
I parked at the bottom of the Corso Italia which was very easy but I have no idea whether it would have been too busy to park there during the day because I got there at about 18:00 or so. I followed the Corso Italia up past a mix of lovely shops, some standard looking restaurants and a lovely shop window on the corner advertising which looked like some amazing ceramics. Sadly the advert was for a shop based somewhere else in Castiglion Fiorentino and I have never managed to find the shop.
The walk from the main city gates to the main town gate takes about seven minutes and brings you up onto the top of the town and a piazza with a restaurant. It is the Piazza Municipale which has amazing restaurants/loggia with views down over the plains. One side of the loggia was taken up with a café bar and the other with a restaurant. If the food was as good as the views then I would highly recommended both.
The only other pub sign I saw was for the Velvet Underground pub (genuinely its name) which is past the piazza and down the hill to the other side.
The right hand turn off the Corso Italia takes you up to a green open space, more views and tall tower at the very top of the hill. The green space has walls and used to have an Etruscan temple though there are no remains other than the notice itself to tell you what used to be there. The museum by that space was closed (I think weekend opening times only?).
From the piazza municipale there, there are at least a couple of other good churches and the guidebook mentions a museum/art gallery somewhere in the town.
I had seen an interesting looking piazza on the left on my way up the Corso Italia so on my way back down the hill again I took a right-hand turn to go investigate it. It is fairly modest piazza with a church (San Francesco) off to one side. It seemed quite badly looked after in my impression, from the outside at least. The church itself was shut but from the door on the left there was beautiful classical music playing (Mozart??) and so I asked the man on the door if I could sneak in to listen through the door to have a listen. Heavenly.
The garden was a cloistered garden. Under the roofing on the right-hand side a small German orchestra was rehearsing for a concert that evening. There must have been 40 or so white plastic chairs I assume that was where they were going to be performing in the evening. The female conductor was taking the orchestra through a piece led by two solo flutes. There were only a couple of other watchers and a gaggle of kids – obviously with the orchestra. The two soloists were women (although the orchestra itself was mixed). One of the women was tall and thin which reminded me of that saying about people eventually looking after their pets. I wonder is true that people start to look like their pets, do musicians start to look like their instruments?
I did a little bit of research when I got back home. I have worked out that the orchestra was a German orchestra doing a show at 9.15pm that evening and apparently had been playing in Castiglion Fiorentino for 40 years now. Be a lovely thing to go and watch if we ever get the chance.
26 November 2016
We went back to Castiglion Fiorentino because I wanted to show Mrs R the town. However this time round it was a bit of a disappointment. Mostly the town was shut up, there was nowhere to eat (apart from an ok-ish looking restaurant). The views were totally lost in the mist.
I think the moral from that is that it is not a place to visit out of season. However if you are passing during the summer it is definitely worth a stop in just to do a bit of exploring and to sample the view.
Summer 2021
We went back for a morning one summer’s day and the place was how I remembered it from our first visit. Lovely view, very photogenic generally, so it made for a lovely trip. It is about an hour maximum to get there, and the drive is pretty pleasant too. Coffee in the Bar Maro on the way up the hill (on your left) once you have gone through the gates in the old town walls. Good coffee and biscuits!
I have always parked at the bottom of the hill but it seems that there is good parking area higher up, still outside the city walls, which we saw when we were following the Satnave coming out of Castiglione, and which would be worth bearing in mind if the little car park at the bottom of the hill, just outside the City walls is full up.