The facade of the Siena Cathedral is my second favorite in the country (the first is Orvieto). But it’s a close second. It’s such an exemplar of its Gothic moment, all recently cleaned and glowing. Believe it or not, what you see here was once planned only to be south end of one of the transepts of a much larger church. See the arches in the right background? Those arches were to be part of the bigger nave planned centuries ago. Yet work stalled and the large version was never completed. Today those partial elements of that unrealized project can still be seen. But what was built was plenty impressive and sufficiently monumental.