Book excerpt: Pienza, a small hill town in north central Italy, represents one of the major architectural masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Starting in 1459, under the sponsorship of Pope Pius II, it was rebuilt into a model Renaissance cityscape. Renamed in the pope's honor, Pienza is both a monument to papal will and the high point in the career of the supervising architect, Bernardo Rossellino. Because its physical state has changed only slightly since the fifteenth century, Pienza offers us a unique opportunity to see a variety of building traditions (Roman, Florentine, Sienese) and theoretical positions (Brunelleschian and Albertian) combined in an almost perfectly preserved urban environment. "The town," writes Charles Mack, "is a Renaissance Williamsburg without the artificiality of restoration." Pienza, the first book-length treatment of the subject in English, traces the entire redevelopment of the community, from conception through construction, and establishes Pienza's place in the story of Renaissance architecture.