Dress up for the Sky Lounge bar, which perches on the roof of the medieval Consorti Tower, overlooking the Ponte Vecchio to the Tuscan hills.

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As the fourth man kneels, awaiting his fate, tall dark cypresses, white city walls and the Tuscan hills behind him recede into the distance.

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I'll be blogging about what I find in the coming days, but wanted to give you an initial flavour of life in this famous city, which sits on a dusty coastal plain just below a green, almost Tuscan, range of low hills.

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In the line of hills that divide the sepia-tinted Tuscan landscape south of Arezzo from the even more rapturous countryside around Siena, Castel Monastero has watched nearly a thousand years go past.

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