Abarth Rental in Siena

Siena rises out of the Tuscan hills in a fan of red brick and Gothic stone, its skyline still governed by the Torre del Mangia and the shell-shaped sweep of Piazza del Campo below it. Twice a year the square becomes a horse racetrack for the Palio, a rivalry between the city's seventeen contrade that predates the Renaissance and hasn't cooled since. Outside the walls, the Val d'Orcia opens into the kind of Tuscan countryside painters have chased for six centuries: cypress-lined ridgelines, vineyards, and the pale gravel of the strade bianche, the white roads that cut through Chianti and Montalcino wine country and give the region's spring cycling classic its name. They demand a different kind of driving discipline than tarmac, patient on the surface, precise through the camber changes. The Grand Hotel Continental, a converted seventeenth-century palazzo just off the Campo, has been the address for exactly this kind of Tuscan visit for years. Rent or hire an exotic car with Zeus Prestige and the strade bianche are exactly the roads this fleet was built to handle.