San Gimignano discovery guide

Fourteen medieval tower-houses still standing, out of seventy-two, inside a 13.88-hectare UNESCO-inscribed centre you can cross in fifteen minutes. Nowhere else in Europe kept its medieval skyline this intact, and the reason is bleak: the 1348 plague killed half the town and the building simply stopped.

The friction is that everybody knows. San Gimignano is a day trip from Florence and Siena, the coaches arrive late morning, and between about 11:00 and 16:00 the two main streets are a slow-moving queue of people.

The smart way is simply to be there outside those hours. Stay the night, or arrive before 10:00, and the same town is almost empty — the towers are better in low light anyway. Then drink the Vernaccia, which was the first DOC wine in Italy, in the town that grows it.

What the year does

San Gimignano is at 324 metres on a ridge, in a municipality that runs from 64 metres up to 631. The season decides the crowd far more than the weather.

• January–February — cold, quiet, and the best time to have the towers to yourself. Some restaurants close and the light is short, but a winter morning in an empty Piazza della Cisterna is the finest version of this town.
• March–April — the town wakes and the coaches return. Easter is extremely busy.
• May–June — beautiful and crowded. The hills are green, the evenings long. Come before 10:00.
• July–August — hot, hard and very full. There is little shade in the streets and the middle of the day is unpleasant. If you must, do the museums in the afternoon and the streets at dawn.
• September — the best month. Harvest in the Vernaccia vineyards, warm days, cooler nights, and the first thinning of the crowds.
• October — excellent, and quieter each week. Clear light on the towers.
• November–December — low season. Grey and damp, the museums uncrowded, and Christmas bringing the town out into its own squares.

If you have one visit: September, arriving the evening before and leaving after breakfast. The town belongs to its residents at both ends of the day.

Get the timing right first

This matters more here than anywhere else in Tuscany. Between roughly 11:00 and 16:00 the two main streets are solid with people; before and after, the town is quiet. If you can only come in the middle of the day, go straight out to the edges and work inward.

The towers, which are the point

Fourteen survive of seventy-two. The only one you can climb is the Torre Grossa, reached through the Palazzo Comunale — and the climb is worth it precisely because from up there you see the others as a group, which is impossible from the street. The palazzo also holds the Pinacoteca.

The Collegiata

The town's great church, and a surprise to anyone expecting plain Romanesque: the walls carry fresco cycles of the 14th and 15th centuries, and the Chapel of Santa Fina was painted by Ghirlandaio. Allow longer than you think.

The two squares

Piazza della Cisterna is the one you will recognise: triangular, sloping, paved partly in the 13th century, named for a cistern of 1287 and holding a well of 1346. Piazza del Duomo opens off it. Sit in one of them for half an hour rather than photographing both in five minutes.

The ticket

Two tickets cover the town. The civic museums ticket — €10 full, €8 reduced — takes in the Palazzo Comunale with the Pinacoteca and the Torre Grossa, the Complesso di Santa Chiara and the Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Ponte. The Complesso della Collegiata is ticketed separately at €7 full and €4 reduced. Both carry a €1 booking fee and are valid for one day.

Then the wine

Vernaccia di San Gimignano is a white, which is unexpected in this part of Tuscany, and it was the first DOC in Italy — 3 March 1966. It can be grown only on hill land inside this commune. Drink it here, at a producer, cold.

And walk out

Leave by any gate and look back. The towers from outside the walls, with vineyard in front of them, are the image the town is known for — and you will be nearly alone.

San Gimignano is a town that stopped, and knows it.

The towers are the whole character of the place and they are a record of competition rather than defence. In the 13th century this was a wealthy town on the Via Francigena, the pilgrim road from northern Europe to Rome, and the families who ran it built upward against one another — seventy-two tower-houses at the peak. A tower was a fortified residence, a strongroom and a statement of rank in one, and a skyline of them means a ruling class that was armed, rich and in permanent rivalry.

Then the 1348 plague killed about half the townsfolk, the survivors submitted to Florence, and San Gimignano was never again important enough to rebuild itself. That is the uncomfortable reason it looks the way it does: fourteen towers survive because the town became too poor and too marginal to knock them down. UNESCO inscribed the centre in 1990 under criterion (i) among others — a masterpiece of human creative genius — for a skyline that is partly an accident of failure.

The second thread is art the town could not afford to replace. The Collegiata's fresco cycles of the 14th and 15th centuries and Ghirlandaio's Chapel of Santa Fina are here for the same reason the towers are: nobody had the money or the motive to modernise.

And the third is the wine, which is the one place where San Gimignano was first rather than last. Vernaccia di San Gimignano became a DOC on 3 March 1966 — il primo vino in Italia a fregiarsi di tale titolo, the first wine in Italy to hold the title. The entire Italian appellation system began with a white wine from these hills.

San Gimignano has 7,780 residents and receives a volume of day visitors out of all proportion to that. The inscribed centre is 13.88 hectares. Almost every responsible choice here is about timing and about leaving money behind.

• Shift your hours, not your destination. The single most useful thing a visitor can do is come before 10:00 or after 16:00. It redistributes nothing about your own trip and everything about the town's load, and you get the place at its best.
• Stay the night. A day-tripper uses the streets, the toilets and the car park and buys a gelato. An overnight guest pays for a room and two meals in a town whose historic centre has to fund its own upkeep.
• Buy the Vernaccia here. Vernaccia di San Gimignano can legally be grown only on hill land within this one commune — the disciplinare says so explicitly — so buying it from a producer here is as direct as wine shopping gets. It was Italy's first DOC, in 1966.
• Buy the civic museums ticket, not just the tower. One ticket — €10 full, €8 reduced — covers the Palazzo Comunale with the Pinacoteca and the Torre Grossa, the Complesso di Santa Chiara and the Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Ponte together, so the two quieter sites are already paid for. Going to them pulls people off the main street and funds the places nobody queues at.
• Walk out of the gates. The hills below the walls are vineyard and olive, with marked tracks, and they are empty while the two main streets are full. The view of the towers from outside is the one the town is famous for.
• Keep the car outside. The centre is walled and closed to traffic. Park below and walk up — there is no alternative worth attempting.

What San Gimignano actually costs

Cheap to see and expensive to eat in the wrong place. The town is small, almost everything is walkable and free to look at, and the single ticket is good value — but the two main streets are a tourist high street and price accordingly.

The ticket

The civic museums ticket is €10 full and €8 reduced, valid one day, with a €1 booking fee, and it covers three sites: the Palazzo Comunale with the Pinacoteca and the Torre Grossa, the Complesso di Santa Chiara and the Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Ponte. The Complesso della Collegiata — the Duomo and its Museum of Sacred Art — is ticketed separately at €7 full, €6 for groups of at least twenty and €4 reduced.

On the civic museums ticket the reduced rate covers groups of at least twenty, school parties, visitors aged 6 to 17 and the over-65s, and entry is free for children aged 0 to 5, disabled visitors and their companions, EU Disability Card holders, residents of the comune, authorised tour guides and ICOM members. At the Collegiata the reduced rate covers ages 6 to 18 and students, and entry is free for children under 6, disabled visitors and companions, residents, clergy and authorised guides.

The wine

Vernaccia di San Gimignano is the thing to buy, and it is not expensive — this is a white wine from a small zone rather than a cult red. The disciplinare restricts it to hill land inside this one commune, so a bottle bought at a producer here has travelled no distance at all. It has been a DOC since 3 March 1966, the first in Italy, and a DOCG since 9 July 1993; a Riserva must spend at least 11 months maturing plus three in bottle.

Eating, and where the money goes wrong

The two main streets between the gates and the squares are where the day visitors eat, and the price-to-quality ratio there is the worst in the town. Walk one street off, or eat outside the walls, or eat late — after the coaches leave, the same town has a different set of restaurants open.

Everything else

• Accommodation inside the walls is the main cost and is worth it, because the town empties in the evening and you get it to yourself.
• Parking is outside the walls and charged. There is no alternative; the centre is closed to traffic.
• The towers, the squares and the walls cost nothing.