My Kind of Town: Buonconvento is my happy place
Buonconvento – sometimes translated as ‘happy place’ – is unusual for this part of Tuscany. It’s a medieval walled town (with post-war expansions) which is situated on a plain (and not a hill) at the intersection of the Arbia and Ombrone rivers, surrounded by the grey clay-scarred hills of the Crete Senesi. Located approximately 16 miles to the south-east of Siena ,the town became an important trading centre in the thirteenth century and later a military town for the City State of Siena, which presumably triggered the need for the high town walls and gates which were constructed between 1371 and 1383.
This is a town which my partner in practice, Stephen Proctor, and I know well. We have visited with our families for over 10 years and spent many a happy moment promenading along its long principal street, the Via Soccini, with children in tow, sampling the many flavours of gelato.
Over the years this ancient town has become for us a touchstone for high-density low-rise neighbourhood design”
Over the years this ancient town has become for us a touchstone for high-density low-rise neighbourhood design. Its streets – and there are only three within the original medieval walls – are well proportioned, narrow and tall. Via Soccini, once part of the pilgrims’ route to Rome – the Via Francigena – is entered via a large gated portal, Porta Senesi, on its northern walled boundary and opens out into a post-war square in the south.
The town’s southern gate, the Porta Romana, unfortunately fell victim to the fierce fighting during the second world war, but in many ways the modern configuration here makes for an interesting transition between old and new, becoming a vibrant threshold between two very different neighbourhoods and a celebration of an evolving town.
There is a slight inflection in the alignment of Via Soccini, with a palazzo, campanile and clock celebrating a Cullenesque townscape moment at the town’s epicentre. This is a street shared by pedestrians, cars, bicycles and the ever-present Piaggio Ape (the workhorse of rural Italy). Yet despite its narrow dimensions and lack of defined pavements, it appears to cope perfectly with the everyday hustle and bustle of a working town.
In response to recent pressures to deliver residential expansions to towns and cities in the UK, we have pondered the characteristics that make good neighbourhoods. Central to our thoughts has been the need to respect and celebrate boundaries, the thresholds which help define character and identity.
There are many lessons to learn from this simple walled town that are relevant to the current placemaking debate”
At Buonconvento there are no ill-defined random back garden fences, the ubiquitous default configuration which define the edges to recent suburban expansions in the UK. Here there are tall stone and brick walls, and it is these which give the town its character-defining and distinctive red hue.
These are punctuated by five gateways located at strategic intervals around the perimeter of the old town. Three lead out into the verdant landscape of the Ombrone river plain on two sides of the town and one opens out to the Piazza Giacomo Matteotti and the post-war new town expansion. The remaining pedestrian route connects to the Piazzale Garibaldi – a tree-lined space which appears in a typically relaxed way to form the town’s peripheral carpark. This could potentially be a landscape disaster, a no man’s land of tarmac and road markings. Somehow, here it provides a visual buffer and setting to those wonderfully textured town walls when viewed from the Via Cassia, the busy arterial road which connects Siena and ultimately Rome via the Val d’Orcia. This space recalls the edge-of-town parking and parking barns so loved by Ralph Erskine in his many schemes for new neighbourhoods in Sweden, and reminds me of the encouragement he gave to the edge-of-settlement parking we created at Greenwich Millennium Village and are now proposing in other new neighbourhood plans.
There are many lessons to learn from this simple walled town that are relevant to the current placemaking debate. But above all it’s good to remember that Buonconvento remains a happy place.
