The suites "La Città Ideale" are located
in Pienza a village on a a tiny bump of a hill in the
midst of the rolling farmland of Tuscany's Val d'Orcia,
where, at the height of the 15th-century Renaissance,
humanist Pope Pius II, with the help of architect Bernardo
Rossellino, converted the tiny village in which he had
been born into the ideal Renaissance city (la città
ideale in Italian). The Pope never achieved his goal completely,
for all Pius's dreams, Pienza never became more than a
village. However this village remains one of the grandest
achievements of Renaissance architecture and the only
intact example of a city-planning scheme from the era.
