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Pistoia occupies a quiet but confident place in the Tuscan imagination, sitting between Florence to the east and Lucca to the west at the foot of the Apennine hills. It is a city that has never needed to compete for attention, and that self-assurance is visible in the fabric of the place itself: the medieval centre is compact and largely intact, its streets of pale stone and terracotta rooflines forming one of the better-preserved historic cores in the region. In 2017 it held the title of Italian Capital of Culture, a recognition that surprised some outsiders but felt entirely natural to anyone who had spent time here.

The Piazza del Duomo is the gravitational centre of the old town, and it earns that role without effort. The cathedral of San Zeno, the octagonal Baptistery in green and white Carrara marble, the Palazzo dei Vescovi and the Gothic Palazzo del Comune all face one another across the same square, making it one of the more coherent ensembles of civic and religious architecture in Tuscany. The interior of the cathedral holds the Altar of Saint James, a silver altarpiece that took craftsmen roughly two centuries to complete and remains one of the most extraordinary pieces of medieval metalwork in Italy. Pistoia has a habit of containing things of this calibre without advertising them loudly.