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Pitigliano is an Italian town and comune of province of Grosseto in the south of Tuscany. The town stands on an abrupt tuff butte high above the Olpeta, the Fiora and the Lente rivers.

Pitigliano and its area were inhabited in Etruscan times, but the first extant written mention of Pitigliano dates only to 1061. In the early 13th century it belonged to the Aldobrandeschi family, and by the middle of the century it had become the capital of the surrounding county.

In 1293 the county passed to the Orsini family, which signaled the start of a hundred and fifty years of on-again, off-again wars with Siena, at the end of which, in 1455, a compromise of sorts was reached: Siena acknowledged the status of county to Pitigliano, which, in exchange, placed herself under the suzerainty of Siena.

For several hundred years Pitigliano was a frontier town between the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and, to the south, the Papal States. For this reason, the town was home to a flourishing and long-lived Jewish community, mostly made up by people fleeing from Rome during the Counterreformation persecutions. Jews of the town used one of the caves for their ritual Passover matzoh bakery, the "forno delle azzime". After the promulgation of racial laws under Nazi influence, all the Jews of the town reportedly escaped capture with the help of their Christian neighbors. Although there are almost no Jews left in town, not enough to provide a minyan, the synagogue (1598, with furnishings of the 17th and 18th centuries) is still officiated from time to time. It was restored in 1995.

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This the view of the old town from the neighboring hill to the west, on the Manciano road.

A stitch of seven vertical photos; unfortunately, even the "large" version had to be resized, to fit the 400 kb limit...

I have put a version with the selectively darkened sky in the WS.