Radda in Chianti attractions

Radda's sights are an administration, a fortress, a church and a convent — and three of the four are outside the walls.

The Palazzo del Podestà is the town's argument for itself. Built in the Quattrocento, almost destroyed in 1478, rebuilt, enlarged in the eighteenth century with a second floor and the prisons, seat of the Capitano della Lega del Chianti for four hundred years and the town hall since 1865. Fifty-one coats of arms are set into its facade.

The Propositura di San Niccolò faces it across the square, raised above a flight of steps. Romanesque in origin, badly damaged in the last war, and given in 1926 the facade it had never had — along with the square below it and the public fountain whose water runs from a lion's mouth.

Volpaia is the one to drive to. A fortified borgo of the twelfth century at 617 metres, which in 1478 threw out its Sienese garrison and sent the enemy commissioner to Florence as a prisoner. Inside it stands the Commenda di Sant'Eufrosino, built 1443–1460, a national monument and the most important Renaissance building in the Chianti.

And below the town, the Casa Chianti Classico, in the eighteenth-century convent of Santa Maria al Prato — a sensory route, a permanent exhibition on three centuries of the Chianti's boundary, and a Neri di Bicci of 1474 in the church.