The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Tuscany
11 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sacred places in Tuscany are Siena Cathedral, Leaning Tower of Pisa and Torre del Mangia. The list covers 11 sacred places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Tuscany is where the Italian Renaissance took shape, and much of it happened in and around its churches. Rival city-states, Florence, Siena and Pisa, competed through their cathedrals, baptisteries and bell towers, each commissioning the best architects and sculptors of the day. The region's coloured marbles, white from Carrara and dark green from Prato, gave those buildings their striped and inlaid surfaces.
Florence Cathedral is crowned by Brunelleschi's dome, the largest masonry dome ever built, and faces the octagonal Florence Baptistery with Ghiberti's gilded bronze Gates of Paradise. In the Medici Chapels, Michelangelo's New Sacristy holds his reclining figures of Night, Day, Dawn and Dusk. Outside the city, the Florence Charterhouse at Galluzzo spreads its monks' cells around a hilltop cloister, and the Great Synagogue, finished in 1882, rises with a green copper dome in Moorish style.
Siena Cathedral answers with black-and-white striped piers and a marble floor inlaid with scenes over several centuries, while the Torre del Mangia soars above the Piazza del Campo. In Pisa, the cathedral's bell tower began to lean on soft ground while it was still being built and has become the Leaning Tower known around the world.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Siena Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 2 | Leaning Tower of Pisa | Bell tower | ✓ |
| 3 | Torre del Mangia | Bell tower | |
| 4 | Florence Baptistery | Church building | |
| 5 | Pisa Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 6 | Giotto's Campanile | Bell tower | |
| 7 | Great Synagogue of Florence | Synagogue | |
| 8 | Florence Charterhouse | Carthusian monastery | |
| 9 | Florence Cathedral | Cathedral | ✓ |
| 10 | Medici Chapels | Mausoleum | |
| 11 | Pisa Charterhouse | Carthusian monastery |
01 Siena Cathedral
Duomo di Siena
Italy · 1.7 km from Siena43.318° N 11.329° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Anajim from Pixabay Inside, look down before you look up. The whole floor is a picture book of 56 inlaid marble panels made from the 14th to the 16th century by about forty artists: sibyls, Old Testament stories, Pinturicchio's Mount of Wisdom and Domenico Beccafumi's scenes of Elijah and Ahab in the choir. Most of the time the finest panels are covered for protection, and they are fully uncovered for only six to ten weeks a year, usually including September.
Did you know? The oldest of the six bells in the campanile was cast in 1149, before work on the present cathedral began.
02 Leaning Tower of Pisa
Torre di Pisa
Italy · 0.4 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.397° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by MaxiDesigns from Pixabay What saved the tower may have been sheer bad luck elsewhere. War broke out between Pisa and Genoa and halted construction for nearly a century, and that century of inactivity let the compromised soil gradually compress and stabilize under the tower's existing weight rather than collapsing under ever more of it.
Did you know? The whole structure weighs roughly 14,500 tonnes, and its walls are about 2.44 metres thick at the base.
03 Torre del Mangia
Italy · 1.4 km from Siena43.318° N 11.332° E
Image by roberto_bellasio from Pixabay The tower was a political statement as much as a bell tower. It belonged not to the Church but to the commune, the self-governing republic that ruled Siena from the Palazzo Pubblico, and it was built to rise level with the city's cathedral on its hill — a declaration that civic and religious power stood as equals.
Did you know? In the 1920s the archaeologist Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli found the lost Mangia statue, armless, in a ditch at his family's villa and gave it back to Siena.
04 Florence Baptistery
Battistero di San Giovanni
Italy · 0.9 km from Florence43.773° N 11.255° E
Zairon · CC BY 4.0 Its origins are a centuries-old puzzle. Medieval Florentines believed it was a Roman temple of Mars; excavations proved otherwise. Most scholars now date it to the eleventh or twelfth century, a proto-Renaissance building that already looks back to the Pantheon with its dome, classical columns and window surrounds. That Roman calm, achieved centuries before the Renaissance proper, is why it inspired Brunelleschi and generations of architects.
Did you know? Ghiberti's north doors took 21 years and cost roughly as much as Florence's annual defence budget; Donatello, Uccello and Masolino worked in his shop.
05 Pisa Cathedral
Duomo di Pisa
Italy · 0.5 km from Pisa43.723° N 10.396° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Makalu from Pixabay Before going in, walk around to the south transept to see the Portal of San Ranieri, which faces the tower. Its bronze doors were cast around 1180 by Bonanno Pisano and are the only doors to survive the fire of 1595; their twenty-four panels tell the life of Christ in a lively, almost cartoon-like style. The main façade doors are replacements made by the workshop of Giambologna after the fire.
06 Giotto's Campanile
Campanile di Giotto
Italy · 0.9 km from Florence43.773° N 11.256° E
Image by Makalu from Pixabay The painter Giotto, appointed master of works of the cathedral, laid the first stone on 19 July 1334 but lived to see only the lowest storey. Andrea Pisano carried on his design from 1343 to 1348, and Francesco Talenti finished the upper storeys between 1348 and 1359. The change of hands is written into the tower.
07 Great Synagogue of Florence
Sinagoga di Firenze
Italy · 1.5 km from Florence43.773° N 11.266° E
×“× ×™ · CC BY-SA 2.5 The design mixes Italian tradition with the Moorish Revival fashionable at the time. The façade combines white travertine with pink-toned stone, and two side towers crowned by small cupolas frame the entrance.
Did you know? The corner towers end in horseshoe arches topped by onion domes, and the facade above the three-arched entrance rises in tiers of paired horseshoe windows.
08 Florence Charterhouse
Certosa di Firenze
Italy · 5.9 km from Florence43.731° N 11.221° E
Mattana · CC BY-SA 3.0 The complex grew over two centuries. The Palazzo Acciaiuoli, designed for the founder's retreats, was only completed in the sixteenth century; the church of San Lorenzo, begun in 1341 and consecrated in 1394, received its stone façade from Giovanni Fancelli in 1556.
Did you know? When Napoleon's government suppressed the order in 1810, around 500 works of art were taken away, many never to return.
09 Florence Cathedral
Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore
Italy · 1 km from Florence43.773° N 11.257° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by spalla67 from Pixabay Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith by training, won the 1418 competition and built the dome between 1420 and 1436 without any supporting frame. His answer was two brick shells, one inside the other, held together by rings of sandstone beams acting like barrel hoops, with the bricks laid in a herringbone pattern so each fresh course leaned on the ribs rather than falling inward.
Did you know? The dome alone is estimated to weigh around 25,000 tonnes, roughly two-thirds of the total material that went into it.
10 Medici Chapels
Cappelle medicee
Italy · 0.6 km from Florence43.775° N 11.253° E
No machine-readable author provided. Richardfabi~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain The New Sacristy (Sagrestia Nuova) was begun in 1520 for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Pope Clement VII, and his cousin Pope Leo X as a family mausoleum. It was Michelangelo's first architectural work, conceived as a counterpart to Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy on the other side of the church: a cubic room under a dome, framed in grey pietra serena against white walls. Michelangelo also carved its tombs.
Did you know? Four river gods were planned for the bases of the tombs but never carved; only one model survives, at the Casa Buonarroti.
11 Pisa Charterhouse
Certosa di Pisa
Italy · 9.9 km from Pisa43.722° N 10.523° E
Gianni Careddu · CC BY-SA 4.0 The charterhouse was founded in 1366 under Francesco Moricotti, archbishop of Pisa, for the Carthusians, the strictest of the contemplative orders, whose monks lived largely alone in separate cells. In the following century it absorbed the community of the old Benedictine monastery on the island of Gorgona, off the Tuscan coast, and grew in wealth and influence.
Did you know? The University of Pisa's natural history collections began in the late 16th century as a cabinet of curiosities.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful sacred places in Tuscany?
- On our list, Siena Cathedral ranks first, followed by Leaning Tower of Pisa and Torre del Mangia.
- Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?
- The tower stands on soft, unstable ground of clay and sand, and it began to tilt soon after building started in the twelfth century. Construction continued for about two centuries, with upper floors built slightly curved to compensate.
- How was Brunelleschi's dome built?
- Filippo Brunelleschi built the dome without a full wooden framework, using two shells, herringbone brickwork and lifting machines of his own design. It was completed in the 1430s.
- What are the Gates of Paradise?
- They are the gilded bronze east doors of the Florence Baptistery, made by Lorenzo Ghiberti with ten Old Testament scenes in perspective. Michelangelo is said to have given them their name; the originals are now in the cathedral museum.
- How many sacred places are on this list in Tuscany?
- The list covers 11 sacred places.