Tiny Murlo is emblematic in its emphatic stone-and-sun, so small a town that you feel everywhere the presence of the outside; people would be always passing out of the enclosure into the wide spaces. A large town like Montepulciano can begin to seem like a whole enclosed world, though those who lived in the town were always making the transit to an outside that flows away in all directions from the hilltop, for agriculture, and for trade, and now for the industries at the base of the hill, or to go back to Rome after the weekend.