Overview
The frescoes were painted between 1338 and 1339 for the room where the Nine met, and they are a political argument rather than a decoration: on one wall a well-governed city and countryside, prosperous and at work; on the other, tyranny, with the fields burnt and the streets empty. They are the earliest surviving landscape painting in western art of a real, identifiable place. The rest of the building is the civic museum, with Simone Martini’s Maestà in the next room.
Highlights
Give the Sala dei Nove twenty minutes and read the bad government wall as carefully as the good one, though it is the more damaged. Simone Martini’s Maestà of 1315 is in the adjoining hall and is the other reason to come. The ticket is separate from the Torre del Mangia; a combined one costs slightly less.