Monteriggioni

Monteriggioni is a walled hilltop town in the Siena province of Tuscany, Italy, built by the Republic of Siena between 1213 and 1219 as a frontier garrison facing the expansion of rival Florence. Its circuit of walls, 565 meters around, is crowned by fourteen square towers that survive at close to their original height, a completeness unusual among Tuscan medieval fortifications, and the town appears in Dante Alighieri's Inferno, where the poet compares a ring of giants at the edge of Hell to the tower-crowned walls of Monteriggioni; the walled village today has only about 50 permanent residents and has changed little since the medieval period.