Hot Air Balloon Rides in Siena
One ride, about an hour long, over the clay hills and cypress lines around Siena. Take-off is at dawn from the countryside outside the walls. 310 EUR per person.
Siena gets one balloon flight on this site, at 310 EUR a seat, and the scarcity is normal. Italian ballooning runs out of a small number of bases, and most of the Tuscan ones sit further north in Chianti. What the Siena flight has that the Chianti ones do not is the Crete Senesi, the clay country south-east of the city, where the ground looks stripped back to bare geology. About an hour in the air, at first light, from a field outside the walls.
The clay hills from above
The Crete Senesi are built on old marine clay and they behave like nothing else in Tuscany. No vine rows, no thick woodland, just long grey-brown ridges combed into contour lines by the plough, erosion gullies cut into the steeper faces, and the occasional farmhouse alone at the top of a rise. The same hills turn green with young wheat in spring and blond by late June. Asciano, Rapolano Terme and the cypress avenue up to the Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore all sit inside this country, and you pass over some of them on the mornings the wind sends you that way. Other mornings you go somewhere else entirely. A pilot chooses a height, not a heading. Siena itself, the striped cathedral and the Torre del Mangia standing out of a brick-coloured mass, tends to sit on the horizon rather than under the basket.
Booking one flight a day
With a single product and one take-off each morning, the calendar fills early in high season, so book before you travel rather than after you arrive. The Tuscan season runs from April to October. The meeting time is uncomfortable in the way all ballooning is: you leave in the dark, because the calm window opens at first light and shuts soon after. The hour in the basket also sits inside a much longer morning of briefing, inflation, flight and the drive back to the cars. Landings happen in stubble and ploughed clay, so wear shoes you do not mind ruining and bring a layer for the cold at altitude; the packing notes cover the rest. Italian crews finish with a toast, and that habit has a specific origin worth knowing before someone hands you a glass. Age, height and mobility thresholds vary between operators, and the who can fly page sets out the usual ones. Marginal mornings get scrubbed, and with one departure a day a cancellation means waiting for the next free slot.
