Pieve di Santa Maria
The church turns its back on Corso Italia and faces Piazza Grande with its apse — a deliberate orientation that tells you something about how seriously Arezzo once took its civic identity. Stand on the piazza side and the curved Romanesque stonework rises above the roofline like a quiet counterpoint to the square's more theatrical architecture.
Inside, the nave runs between columns with Corinthian capitals, and Pietro Lorenzetti's 1320 polyptych — Madonna and Saints, commissioned by Bishop Guido Tarlati — holds the high altar. Somewhere beneath the nave floor, in chestnut boxes, lie the bones of Giorgio Vasari.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return tend to seek out the fifth column from the left on the apse — the one that bows slightly outward, misshapen by design or accident, depending on which theory you believe. They also look up at the central doorway's carved calendar reliefs, the Ciclo dei Mesi, which reward a slower second look than most visitors give them.
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Book directly at the providerHow Pieve di Santa Maria came to be
The pieve appears in documents as early as 1008, and during Arezzo's communal era it became a flashpoint in the city's long conflict with its bishops — a church that was also, in effect, a political position. The current structure took shape through the 12th and 13th centuries, with the three-loggiaed façade and the apse added or renovated in that period. The bell tower — nicknamed the Tower of a Hundred Holes, though its actual window count is 80 — was begun in 1216 and finished in 1330.
Giorgio Vasari oversaw a 16th-century interior renovation and was later buried in a chapel here. A 19th-century restoration stripped out the Baroque additions his era had introduced, returning the interior closer to its Romanesque and Gothic bones.
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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.