The walled town of San Casciano delivers storybook Tuscany—narrow pedestrian-only streets, covered stone passageways, a looming castle, and a café-lined piazza. Outside the walls, the archetypal landscapes of the Val d’Orcia unfurl in all their glory, with rolling fields of vineyards and olive groves punctuated by cypress trees and the profile of a hill town here and there.

While the setting is as idyllic as you might expect, there’s much more to San Casciano than the scenery. Just downhill from the town, nearly a thousand years of ancient history, long-buried in mineral-rich mud, is finally being revealed and is upending scholarly understanding of the period of Etruscan decline and Roman ascension.