The Palazzo Comunale houses Lucignano's small but excellent civic museum, whose centrepiece is the Albero d'Oro (Golden Tree), a masterpiece of medieval goldsmithing that ranks among the finest reliquaries in Italy. The tree, dating from the mid-fourteenth century, is a dazzling construction of gilded silver, coral, enamel, and precious stones fashioned in the shape of a branching tree. It is the kind of object that justifies a detour on its own.
The museum also holds a collection of Sienese and Aretine paintings from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, including works attributed to Bartolo di Fredi, Luca Signorelli, and the workshop of Lippo Vanni. For a small-town museum in a town of fewer than four thousand people, the quality is genuinely surprising.