The mystique of the Crete and the Val d'Arbia areas is timeless. Here each day represents another step in an ongoing cycle of changing colours and infinite silence. The Crete is home to some of the most remote vestiges of the Sienese heritage, with its towers and castles reaching toward the sky and its enchanting landscape in the Val d'Orcia. Here nature has created a sort of perfect island, with such unique geometry and hues that in the 1800s visitors drawn here by their love of the landscapes in 14th-century Sienese madonna icons were bewildered to find them faithfully reproduced. The Crete is a land where poets, writers and mystics have always found inspiration. The Crete Senesi and Val D’Arbia develops around Asciano. Here for centuries, life went on around the farmhouses and the farmer carried on the balance and the beauty of the countryside. Near Chiusure  and Monte Oliveto Abbey the landscape becomes surrealistic: The clay, modelled  by the wind and  water, draws spectaculars hills. The travertinos quarries are popular, local typical stone, in the area of Serre di Rapolano. In Buonconvento area  The Crete are softer and the sky bigger.
The Crete area are the most photographed of all Tuscany, thanks to the originality of its landscapes and to the presence of splendid historical and architectural witness. The predominant colours is grey, which becomes in various shades and different reflections during the day and the seasons: the yellow of the sunset and the summer  white light colour softly the grey of the Crete, a clay hills lay almost completely with no  tree vegetation everywhere cut by deep “Calanchi”. The traveller who likes the craftsmanship could find in the Crete area numerous terracotta laboratories, where the artisans work the clay according to technical traditions abandoned everywhere in name of the modern technology.