The Church of San Biagio

The Church of San Biagio in Montepulciano, just outside the city, rises in the midst of a magnificent landscape that accentuates its monumentality. The masterpiece of the architect who designed it, Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, it is considered today one of the major monuments of sixteenth-century Italian architecture. The central-plan church, on which construction began in 1518 for the veneration of an earlier miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, constitutes a perfect synthesis of art and faith, natural environment and human endeavour, popular devotion and the genius of the mature Renaissance.