Cattedrale dei Santi Pietro e Donato
The cathedral sits at the top of Arezzo's old hill, its early-twentieth-century façade — completed between 1901 and 1914 to designs by Dante Viviani — giving little away about what accumulated inside over two and a half centuries of construction. Step through and your eyes go straight up: seven stained-glass windows by the French painter Guillaume de Marcillat fill the nave with colour the way few Italian cathedrals manage.
The building holds a remarkable density of authorship. Piero della Francesca painted a Mary Magdalene here in the 1460s. Giorgio Vasari designed the wooden choir in 1554. The cenotaph of Bishop Guido Tarlati, possibly conceived by Giotto, stands as one of the more quietly powerful funerary monuments in Tuscany.
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People who come back tend to time their visit for a clear morning, when the Marcillat windows — painted between 1516 and 1524 — catch direct light and the nave changes entirely. The Piero della Francesca fresco is easy to walk past; it's tucked near a pillar, small and still, worth stopping for longer than you think.
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Book directly at the providerHow Cattedrale dei Santi Pietro e Donato came to be
The cathedral's origins lie off-site: Pope Innocent III authorised its move to the current position in 1203, away from Colle di Pionta. Pope Gregory X visited in December 1275, died in Arezzo on 10 January 1276, and left 30 gold florins toward construction. Building began formally in 1278 under Bishop Guglielmino of the Ubertini, and by the Battle of Campaldino in 1289 the apse and first two bays were already consecrated.
Progress stalled when Arezzo submitted to Florence in 1384. Bishop Guido Tarlati had earlier driven a revival of the project during his tenure from 1312 to 1327, but the main campaign didn't resume until 1471, reaching structural completion in 1511. Marcillat arrived in 1516; Vasari's choir came in 1554; Salvi Castellucci finished the ceiling frescoes in 1663. The façade, the last major intervention, was finished in 1914.
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.