Welcome to Lucignano, a turistic guide to the Valdichiana Pearl

Benvenuti a Lucignano

It is not easy to introduce Lucignano in a few lines. To trace its profile or to tell its history; to introduce it with a few simple brush strokes.   
This small medieval village, set on the summit of a gentle hill in the Val di Chiana, on  the border between the provinces of Arezzo and Siena, woken by the sun  in the early morning and caressed by the winds, is a kind of shelter for the soul.   
Its narrow roads in an elliptic form, the square stones of its houses, the wise geometry of its urban plan, the colours and the sounds of its enchanted spaces are a precise, constant reference to an idea of a fantastic place, (where constant memories and  the shrewd  sting of pride of being part of it live together in perfect symbiosis). where constant recall and the shrewd sting of pride live together in such a place as this in perfect symbiosis.  
Lucignano is therefore a dream that becomes reality by enchantment: all that is necessary is to enter the village, pass within the ancient gates and along the streets and the piazzas that lead to the summit, where - almost by a strange game of analogies - the symbols of the two eternal powers are present: - the religious power, by virtue of the Monumental Churches of the Collegiata of St. Michael Archangel and St. Francis and the  civil power , well represented by the ancient stately Palazzo Pretorio.   
And it becomes possible to derive from this place of dreams, this land of hidden charms and of authentic surprises, a heritage of symbols.   
Lucignano, therefore, is a place for the soul, a village where dreams are life,  all in a magic game of magic   
contradictions, that time postpones for ever...   
The more than thousand year history of ancient villages such as this, blends and almost loses itself with the testimony  of a religious presence as fascinating as it is discreet.  Lucignano, with its characteristically concentric form that seems to portray  a constant allusion to its winding upwards toward its summit, with a discontinuity denoted by the late fifteenth-century Collegiata (which repeats in its famous ellipsoidal church steps the history and the urban form of the village) indeed relives this particular "communion", this special upward tendency to meet the Mystery above...   
A great art critic defined Lucignano a long time ago as one of the last examples of "places of the spirit'', perhaps intending to mean both the beauty of the place and the sacred unity of its conformation, felt, above all, as an emotional fact, almost as a place appointed for intense and arduous reflections, perhaps prophetic....   

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