In Arezzo two are the obligatory stops in order to admire the stilistic genious of the “Biturgense” master: the Cathedral, which is a sort of casket to the unicum of Maddalena and the Bacci Chapel in the Basilica of St. Francis, which collects the extraordinary cicle of frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross, one of the most important testimony of the Italian rinascimental painting.

A single-nave building designed to reflect the practice typical of the mendicant orders of the day, construction on the Basilica of St Francis started in the second half of the thirteenth century and was completed in the fourteenth. The campanile was added in the sixteenth century. Painstakingly detailed restoration work has almost entirely re-established the original austere simplicity of the grandiose single-nave interior, which is flanked along the right by niches containing fourteenth-century and Renaissance ornamentation and along the left by stark Gothic chapels.

While you are inside the basilica, take the time to admire the stained glass by Marcillat, the canvases and frescos by Spinello and other rare and splendid pieces, such as the large crucifix panted by a contemporary of Cimabue, and make sure you go to the last side chapel on the left, to see the funerary monument to the jurist Roselli, which dates to the first half of the fifteenth century. But the basilica owes its fame above all to one of the masterpieces of all Renaissance painting: the Bacci Chapel, with its cycle of frescos of the Legend of the True Cross, painted by Piero della Francesca between 1452 and 1466. The chapel belonged to the wealthy Bacci family of merchants in Arezzo, who commissioned its decoration from the Florentine painter Bicci di Lorenzo in 1447.