Ten days in Tuscany: no hire car, and you will eat better without one

The station puts you two minutes from a church most people walk past, which makes it the right first stop: quiet, enormous, and holding the painting that worked out how to put depth on a flat wall.

After that, do nothing structured. Walk south to the river, cross it, and be on the old bridge when the light goes. The centre is small enough that a first evening's aimless walking is not wasted, it is how you learn where everything is.

The cathedral group is four buildings on four tickets bundled together, and the climb is the one that matters. Brunelleschi built the dome without a supporting framework, in a herringbone brick pattern, as two shells with a staircase running between them. You go up inside that gap, past the Last Judgement at close range, and come out on the lantern.

It is not a climb for anybody who dislikes tight spaces: more than four hundred steps, no lift, one direction of travel.

In the afternoon, the museum across the square holds everything that has been taken off these buildings for safekeeping, including the original bronze door panels and an unfinished Michelangelo Pieta he attacked with a hammer.

Take the first entry of the day. The Uffizi holds the collection the last Medici left to the city, hung in the building Vasari put up as government offices, and by half past ten the Botticelli room is a scrum.

Do not try to see all of it. The rooms run in chronological order, so go straight to the early Renaissance while you are fresh and let yourself leave when you stop looking properly.

The square outside is the other half of the day and costs nothing. It has been the political centre of Florence for seven hundred years, and the sculpture standing under an open loggia on one side would be the main attraction of most cities.

One booked museum in the morning and then across the water. David was carved from a block another sculptor had abandoned, stood outside the town hall for close to four hundred years, and was moved indoors in 1873 when the weather started winning. The four unfinished Slaves in the corridor leading up to him are the more interesting sculptures.

In the afternoon cross to the Oltrarno, which was the artisan side and to a real extent still is, with workshops open onto the street.

The enormous palace there was bought by the Medici when they had outgrown the town hall, and behind it a hillside of terraces, fountains and grottoes climbs away from the city. It is the best place in Florence to spend two hours doing nothing.

The coach leaves from beside the station in Florence and takes about seventy minutes, climbing into the hills and stopping at the top of Siena, where you walk in through a gate.

Siena is a city on three ridges with valleys between them, so nothing is flat and the map lies about distances. Get your bearings at the huge brick barn of a church near the bus stop, which holds the head of the patron saint of Italy in a gilded case, and then walk down.

The square is the only flat place in Siena, and even it slopes. It is shaped like a shell, divided into nine segments for the nine men who governed the city when it was laid out, and everybody sits on it. Do nothing else on the first evening.

Everything today happens on one hilltop and still takes the whole day. The cathedral is striped in black and white inside and out, which at first reads as decoration and quickly becomes disorientating, because the bands make the columns bend and the nave seem to move.

Three things earn the ticket beyond the building. A pulpit carved by Nicola Pisano in the 1260s with seven panels of writhing figures. A library off the left aisle frescoed floor to ceiling in colours that still look wet. And the inlaid marble floor, if you have come in the few weeks of late summer and autumn when it is uncovered.

Across the square, the medieval hospital took in pilgrims, the sick and abandoned children for eight hundred years. Its main ward is frescoed with hospital work rather than saints, which makes it one of the few places you can see ordinary medieval life painted by people living it.

The building at the bottom of the square has been the city hall for eight hundred years and still is. Upstairs is the room the governing council met in, painted in 1338 with a picture of what happens when a city is well governed and what happens when it is not.

It is the first large secular painting cycle in Europe and still the most useful. Good government is a busy street, a wedding, men threshing, a woman shopping. Bad government is a tyrant with fangs and a road where somebody is being robbed. The councillors voted facing it.

Then stop. This is the day to buy something in a bakery, sit on the brick, climb the tower if your knees allow, and let the third day in a town do what third days do.

A long morning on trains, changing at Empoli, and about two and a half hours in total. It is the one genuine transfer of the trip, and Lucca rewards it immediately by being flat.

The town is a rectangle inside four kilometres of wall, and the first thing to find is a closed oval of houses in the middle of it. It was a Roman amphitheatre; the stone was quarried away for other buildings and the medieval town built houses on the foundations, so what survives is not the amphitheatre but its shape, with four low tunnels leading into the middle.

Then climb the tower with trees on top. A merchant family planted holm oaks in a garden on the roof of their tower in the fifteenth century and their descendants are still up there.

Lucca's cathedral has an off-centre front, because the builders ran into an existing bell tower and rearranged the arcades to fit rather than knock it down. Inside are two things worth crossing Tuscany for: a wooden crucifix the city has venerated since the Middle Ages and carries through the streets by candlelight every September, and a marble tomb of a young woman with a dog at her feet, carved by Jacopo della Quercia and one of the most beautiful things of its century.

Puccini was born a few streets away in 1858 and the house is now a small museum with the piano he wrote Turandot on.

Then hire a bicycle and do the walls. Four kilometres, entirely flat, shaded by plane trees, looking down into the gardens on one side and out to the plain on the other. It takes half an hour and everybody in Lucca is doing it.

Lucca's last surprise is a church with a gold mosaic across the whole upper front, glinting from the end of the street: twelfth century, Byzantine in style, and looking as though it belongs somewhere else entirely. Inside is a Romanesque font carved with the story of Moses and a mummified saint in a glass case.

Then a coffee, the food market, and the train. Pisa airport is about half an hour away with a change or a direct bus, and Florence is an hour and a half if you are flying from there instead.

It is the right way round to do this trip: you finish in the smallest, flattest, quietest of the three, with a bicycle ride and a slow morning, rather than in the middle of a crowd on a bridge.