The subject
Pienza’s Streets of Love
Along one flank of Pienza run four tiny lanes with the most romantic names in Italy — Via dell’Amore, Via del Bacio, Via della Fortuna: the streets of love, of the kiss, of fortune.
They are barely streets at all: narrow stone alleys, a step or two wide, that branch off the main Corso il Rossellino and connect it to Via del Casello along the southern wall. Among them runs a fourth, Via Buia — the “dark lane” — a reminder that wherever there is light there is also shadow. Together they have become known as Pienza’s “streets of love”.
No one can say for certain who first gave them these names, or when — they belong to local memory rather than to any document. But the meaning is plain. These are lanes made for slipping away from the crowd on the main street: for a quiet word, a stolen kiss, a moment out of sight.
The Vicolo dell’Amore, the one I drew, does something lovely. It runs between tall honey-coloured walls and then simply stops at the town’s edge, opening on a bright rectangle of green hillside and blue sky. You walk down a dim stone corridor and the Val d’Orcia is suddenly there at the end of it, framed like a picture.
So I kept the drawing simple: two walls of warm stone leaning in, the paving falling away, and at the centre that little opening of green and sky. Ink for the stone, ochre for the light on it, and a single patch of green for the country waiting at the end of the lane.
Couples still come to walk these lanes and to be photographed beneath the signs. In a town a pope built to be perfect, it is these unplanned, human corners — the streets of love — that people seem to remember most.
See also · Tuscan Sketchbook
Un ricordo di Pienza ·
Pienza Sunlight ·
Castello di Meleto
