Trequanda

Just outside the village, in a wood of holm oaks and cypresses, stands an octagonal tower they call the Windmill, which was never a mill at all: it is a dovecote from the late seventeen hundreds. Inside, a brick spiral staircase climbs up, and the walls are covered with more than five hundred nesting holes set out like a chessboard, where carrier pigeons were raised. The rest of the municipality is oil and terracotta: at Petroio pots have been made for centuries and a museum tells the story, and in 2018 this landscape entered the national register of historic rural landscapes.

The coat of arms bears three gold chalices on red. The village appears in documents from the twelve hundreds as a fief of the Cacciaconti della Scialenga, and in 1211 the emperor Otto IV granted them the right to collect a toll from anyone passing through the land of Trequanda; in 1309 the Cacciaconti sold it to the Franzesi of Staggia for eighteen thousand lire, and it then came under Siena. Today's municipality has been put together and taken apart more than once: Castelmuzio was joined in 1833, Montisi left in 1877, and Trequanda, Castelmuzio and Petroio remain.