Filming locations in Tuscany

The Tuscan countryside has stood in for paradise more than once, and never more memorably than in Gladiator. Ridley Scott's 2000 epic plants Maximus's sunlit memory of home, the Elysium he aches to return to, in the Val d'Orcia, with its rolling wheat fields and those lone, sentinel cypresses on the ridgelines. It is the landscape every visitor pictures when they think of Tuscany, and the film burned it into the collective imagination.

Best of all, you simply drive into it. The Val d'Orcia is a UNESCO-listed sweep of public roads and hill towns south of Siena, free to wander and photograph, greenest in spring and early summer before the harvest turns the fields gold. Base yourself in a small town like Pienza or Montalcino and lose a day on the back lanes, stopping wherever a cypress avenue or a stone farmhouse stops you.

For a sharper contrast, Tuscany also gave Succession one of its grand set pieces: the Castello di Celsa, whose Italianate gardens host the lavish, doomed family wedding that closes the show's third season. The private castle sits in the wooded hills west of Siena, and its gardens open on selected days with a ticket, so it pays to check the calendar before you set out.

The two stops bracket Siena nicely, the open Val d'Orcia to the south, the wooded Celsa to the west, so the city makes a logical hub, though the rhythm of this trip is unmistakably rural and built for a car. Distances are short but the roads are slow and gorgeous, and that is rather the point.

Treat Tuscany the way the films do, as a place to slow right down. Time the Val d'Orcia for the soft light of early morning or late afternoon, when the hills go gold and the cypresses throw long shadows, and pair the driving with the local table: a glass of Brunello in Montalcino, pecorino in Pienza, and you have a day the screen could only hint at.