For many walkers the Sienese section is the finest stretch of the whole Italian Francigena: you walk inside the UNESCO landscape, on white gravel roads and ridge paths, from one medieval village to the next.
It is also a section you can do in a few days, without taking on the entire pilgrimage from Canterbury to Rome — which is why people with a week of holiday often come exactly here. This is how the part that passes beside us is made, stage by stage.
Siena → Ponte d’Arbia. You leave the city and enter the Crete almost at once: clay hills, little shade, silence. A long and fairly exposed stage, best started early in the warm months.
Ponte d’Arbia → San Quirico d’Orcia. Through Buonconvento, one of the best-preserved walled villages in the area, then on to Torrenieri and up to San Quirico. This is the stage that crosses the countryside a few kilometres from us.
San Quirico d’Orcia → Radicofani. Down to Bagno Vignoni with its thermal pool, along the river Orcia, then the long climb towards the rock of Radicofani, visible from half the valley. The hardest stage of the section, and the most spectacular.
Actual distances depend on the variants you choose, and times change a great deal with heat: in July and August, on these treeless ridges, the pace drops considerably. Waymarking is good, but it’s worth downloading the GPS track before setting out, especially where the route leaves the main gravel road.
The good windows are April–June and September–October. In spring the countryside is green and the days are getting longer; in autumn the temperatures are ideal and the landscape is that of the harvest and the ploughing.
July and August are hard: there is no shade for kilometres and the clay reflects the heat. People who walk in summer start at dawn and arrive before two in the afternoon. Winter is walkable, but after rain the clay of the Crete turns into a paste that sticks to your boots and triples the effort — the mal di crete that pilgrims complain about.
Water. Fountains between villages are few and not all of them are drinkable. Two litres per person in the warm months is not excessive.
Footwear. Gravel and clay punish light trekking sandals. You want a sole that grips on dry, slippery clay, which is the most common surface here.
Booking. Beds along the route are limited and fill up in the busy months. In this area you don’t turn up in the evening hoping for a room: you call ahead.
Our farm sits in the countryside between Buonconvento, San Giovanni d’Asso and Montalcino, inside the same landscape the Francigena crosses. We are not on the official track: we are just off it, and for some walkers that is precisely the reason to stop — a rest day in real countryside instead of another night in a historic centre.
People arriving on foot or by bicycle usually want three things: a bed, a proper dinner and somewhere to wash something. Dinner is by reservation — Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday — and the apartment has a fully equipped kitchen for those who prefer to cook. In summer there is the swimming pool, which after twenty-five kilometres under the Crete sun is worth more than any spa.
To work out whether the detour makes sense for your stage, write and tell us where you’re heading: getting back on the main route from here is short, but the right way depends on where you’re going.