Tuscany in March
 

We are going to drive from Rome to Florence in early March. We are looking for the best scenic roads and places to visit in this season.

Places to visit:

- Firenze: the city where renaissance was born. Lots of buildings, museums, sights.

- Siena: a beautiful town with a historic central square and city hall.

- Pisa: the ensemble of the leaning towner, baptisterium and cathedral, all of white marble, is breathtaking.

- Volterra: an old Etruscan town with pre-Roman archeology.

- San Gimignano: a picture-postcard medieval town, with standing stone towers.

- Populonia: Etruscan tombs near the sea.

The fastest drive is via A1 which is quite scenic once you have left the surroundings of Rome. Most smaller roads through the Tuscan hills are scenic. Open viamichelin.com, enter start and destination and zoom in until some roads appear with green stripes. These green stripes indicate scenic roads.

The Tuscany countryside in the Val d'Orcia near Pienza is stunning in March, when it is covered by what "looks like" a green velvet blanket - with a grove of cypress trees sticking up and a perched medieval village here & there.

Here is something I previously posted.
http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...y-171368-2.cfm

And here is my wife's Shutterfly photobook from our early March trip in 2013, that included 2 weeks in the Val d'Orcia.
https://stududley.shutterfly.com/39
Click "Full screen"
Tuscany starts on page 26. All the countryside pictures are in the Val d'Orcia. Because of Shutterfly software problems, many titles & captions are missing or truncated.

Stu Dudley

You don't say how long you have for this drive, but my main suggestion is to drive as many of the smaller roads as possible. The A1 is fast but not nearly as scenic as the secondary and tertiary roads that crisscross all of Tuscany.

For example, the Via Chiantigiana.

http://www.chianti-italy.com/chiantigiana.htm

If you have time, visit Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Asciano. (Note that the monastery closes for a few hours in the middle of the day.)

http://www.monte-oliveto.com/

http://www.monteolivetomaggiore.it/lang1/index.html

And/or drive the smaller roads of the Val d'Elsa between Monteriggioni and Volterra and the Val d'Orcia mentioned by StuDudley.