Most visitors to Siena never get past the Campo and the cathedral, which leaves the northern half of the city to the people who live in it. This walk goes there. It starts at Porta Camollia, the gate where pilgrims from the north came in, crosses the ramparts of the fortress Florence built to hold the city down, and then follows the life of Saint Catherine, Siena's own saint and one of the patron saints of Italy, from the church that keeps her head to the fountain at the bottom of her street and the house where she was born. It ends among the bankers of Piazza Salimbeni and in the vast Franciscan church on the city's eastern edge. It is one of our quieter self-guided walking tours, about three kilometers long, with one deep valley in the middle that you will not forget.

Before you set off

The walking takes about forty-five minutes, so allow two to three hours with time inside the churches and the sanctuary, and a little longer if you want to circle the fortress walls. The first part is easy, a gentle stroll downhill from the gate and some ramps up onto the bastions. The middle is the hard part. From San Domenico a steep lane and steps drop into the valley of Fontebranda, and from the fountain you climb straight back up through the sanctuary and on to the main street on the ridge, a short but real climb with a sharp gradient. After that it is gentle going to the end. Streets are paved in stone and can be slick when wet, so wear shoes with grip. The fortress park has trees, but the lanes in between are mostly open, so carry water on a hot day. San Domenico and the Sanctuary of Saint Catherine are working places of prayer with their own hours and services, so check before you go, dress with shoulders and knees covered, and keep your voice down inside. Mornings are calmest, and this side of town stays relaxed even when the Campo is heaving.

Porta Camollia

Walk through the arch to the outer side of the gate and turn around to read the Latin words carved above it: Cor magis tibi Sena pandit, Siena opens her heart to you wider than this gate. It is one of the loveliest welcomes any city has ever carved over its door, and it went up around 1600, when the gate was rebuilt and the Medici grand duke who now ruled Siena was due to ride through it. Porta Camollia faces north, and for travelers on the Via Francigena, the great medieval pilgrim road from Canterbury to Rome, this was the way into the city. Around the year 990 an English archbishop, Sigeric, wrote down the stops on his journey home from Rome, and Siena is on his list. Pilgrims still walk the route today, and you may see a few with backpacks and walking poles passing under the arch. A short way outside the gate stands a column marking a famous meeting in 1452, when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III first met his young bride, Eleanor of Portugal, here in front of the city, a match arranged by Siena's bishop of the day. The street running back into town is lined with ordinary shops and bars, the everyday Siena this walk is about. When you are ready, go back through the gate, follow the main street south for a couple of minutes, then bear right and downhill toward the trees and the long brick bastions of the fortress, about ten minutes.

Fortezza Medicea

Siena skyline Torre del Mangia

Climb up onto the ramparts and walk out along the top. The Fortezza Medicea is a broad square of brick walls with an arrow-shaped bastion at each corner, built to face both ways, outward against any enemy and inward against the city itself. Its story is the end of Siena's freedom. For four hundred years Siena was an independent republic, but by the 1550s it was caught between the great powers of the day. Spanish troops of the emperor Charles V built a fortress on this hill to control the town, and in 1552 the Sienese rose up, threw the garrison out with French help and tore the fortress down. The answer was a long siege by imperial and Florentine forces. The city starved, and in April 1555 it surrendered. Some of the defenders carried on the republic for a few more years from the hill town of Montalcino, but Siena itself was soon handed to Cosimo I de' Medici of Florence, the old enemy. Cosimo built this new fortress in the 1560s, and it said all it needed to about who was now in charge. Today it is something much gentler, a park on the walls where locals run laps, walk dogs and sit on the grass, and the views over the rooftops and out to the hills are some of the best in town. From the eastern bastions you can already see your next stop, the tall brick church on the next hill. Leave the fortress by the gate facing the city and follow the tree-lined avenue south past the football stadium to the church, about eight minutes.

Basilica di San Domenico

In front of you is the huge, barnlike brick church of the Dominican friars, plain on the outside the way the preaching orders liked their churches. It was begun in the thirteenth century, and this is where Catherine's spiritual life took shape. She was a girl of the neighborhood just down the hill, and as a teenager she joined the Mantellate, laywomen who wore the Dominican habit while living at home. Inside, near the entrance, a raised chapel called the Cappella delle Volte is where she prayed and where she received that habit. On its wall is a fresco portrait of her by Andrea Vanni, a painter who knew her, and it is considered the only true likeness of her. Look at the face, calm and long, nothing like the swooning saint of later art. On the right side of the nave is the chapel of Saint Catherine, with frescoes by Sodoma of her ecstasies, and in a marble tabernacle on the altar is her head. Catherine died in Rome in 1380 and her body lies there still, but in 1384 the head was brought home to Siena. The story goes that Sienese admirers smuggled it out of Rome in a bag, and when guards stopped them and looked inside, they found only rose petals, which turned back into the relic once the city was safe. Before you leave, go out to the side of the church and look across the valley, where the cathedral and the Torre del Mangia line up on the opposite ridge. Then take the steep lane and steps down the hill below the church to the south, about four minutes.