Piazza del Pretorio

Every Italian hill village has one square that holds everything together, and in Sovana it is Piazza del Pretorio. Within a few paces stand the praetorian palace with its governors' shields, a Medici loggia, the old town hall with a sail bell tower, a marquises' portico and the church that keeps a rare early medieval canopy.

Why it matters

The piazza is the destination in miniature. The archaeological park manages Sovana's heritage, and the village's monuments gather around the square. Its very name records the praetor, the outside magistrate who dispensed justice under Siena and Florence, and the buildings around it trace the whole civic arc of the village: communal self-rule, foreign administration, noble patronage and parish life. Because Sovana contracted so sharply after its medieval peak, the square retained its historic form and offers a concentrated view of the town's institutional history.

What to notice

The square's long sides are defined by the church of San Mamiliano, the palace of the Bourbon del Monte marquises and the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where two Roman funerary cippi stand by the walls and an early medieval ciborium survives inside. Opposite them, the praetorian palace displays nine shields of Siena's and Florence's governors; the Loggia del Capitano bears Cosimo I's shield of 1570. The thirteenth-century palazzetto dell'Archivio, with its sail bell tower and clock, closes the square. The composition is compact enough that each building answers the others: civic against sacred, carved against rusticated.

Context and history

The square took its shape in the communal generations of the 1100s and 1200s, when Sovana — an Aldobrandeschi county seat, a bishopric, and the village that saw Ildebrando born around 1020 on his way to becoming Pope Gregory VII — raised its public architecture in local tuff. Justice gave the piazza its name: the praetorian palace housed the captain of justice and commissioners sent from Siena and then Florence, and their successive arms still line the facade. The religious edge of the square is older than everything civic on it, reaching back to the early Christian centuries around San Mamiliano and, in the case of the ciborium, to the early middle ages. Later centuries added only gently: a Medici loggia, a noble portico, a clock on the town hall. When the village fell to a few dozen inhabitants in the fifteenth century and its commune was finally dissolved in 1783, the square simply went quiet, which is why the club of Italy's most beautiful villages counts the borgo among its members today.