Italy Guide
Tuscany
Santa Maria della Scala
Address: Piazza Duomo 2
Opening time: daily: mid-March to Oct 10.30am–6.30pm; Nov to mid-March 10.30am–4.30pm
Price: €6
Website: www.santamaria.comune.siena.it
For nine hundred years up until the 1980s, this vast complex served as the city's main hospital. Today its wonderful interiors are being gradually converted into a major centre for art and culture, revealing works that have been inaccessible to all but the ill and most determined of visitors for centuries. Of the artworks, the highlight is the strikingly beautiful fresco St Anne and St Joachim (1512) – parents of the Virgin – by Beccafumi. Having failed to conceive during twenty years of marriage, the pair are each told by an angel to meet at Jerusalem's Golden Gate and kiss (the scene depicted in the fresco), a moment which symbolizes the Immaculate Conception of their daughter.