San Gimignano

Where it sits. San Gimignano stands on a hill at 324 metres in the Val d'Elsa, in the province of Siena, roughly halfway between Florence and Siena and about fifteen kilometres from the motorway at Poggibonsi. The approach from any direction produces the same image: a compact walled town whose profile is broken by a cluster of square stone towers, visible from several kilometres away across vineyards and olive terraces. Fourteen towers survive out of an estimated seventy-two, and they are the reason the historic centre was inscribed by UNESCO in 1990.

Why the towers exist. The town grew rich in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on two things: its position on the Via Francigena, the pilgrim road from northern Europe to Rome, and the saffron trade, whose crocus fields on the surrounding slopes supplied dyers and apothecaries across the Mediterranean. Wealthy families built tower-houses as fortified residences and as open competition in status, each trying to outbuild the last. The commune eventually legislated that no tower could exceed the height of the Torre Rognosa, at 51 metres — a rule the Salvucci family evaded by building two adjacent towers instead of one tall one. The boom ended abruptly. Plague reached the town in 1348 and killed a large part of the population, and in 1353 San Gimignano surrendered its independence to Florence. Centuries of poverty followed, and poverty is what preserved the medieval fabric: nobody had the money to modernise it.

What you actually see today. Piazza della Cisterna is the heart, a sloping trapezoid paved in herringbone brick around an octagonal well of 1287, ringed by towers and by the town's ice cream shops. Piazza del Duomo opens off it, with the Collegiata, whose plain façade hides one of the most complete cycles of fourteenth-century fresco painting in Tuscany: Old Testament scenes attributed to Bartolo di Fredi along the north aisle, a New Testament cycle in the manner of Lippo Memmi opposite, Taddeo di Bartolo's Last Judgement over the entrance wall, and Domenico Ghirlandaio's chapel of Santa Fina of 1475. The Palazzo Comunale next door contains the civic art collection and gives access to the Torre Grossa, 54 metres and the only tower open to climbers, from which the layout of the town and its vineyards becomes clear. At the far end of the centre, Sant'Agostino holds Benozzo Gozzoli's cycle on the life of Saint Augustine, painted in 1464–65 and far less visited than the Collegiata. The ruined Rocca di Montestaffoli, built by Florence in 1353, is now an open green terrace with the best view of the towers from within the walls.

On screen. Franco Zeffirelli set the second half of Tea with Mussolini (1999) in San Gimignano, where his company of English and American women is interned during the war, and the film's climax turns on the protection of the town's frescoes from German demolition; the towers, the piazzas and the church interiors are all used directly. Charles Sturridge shot Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) here as well, using San Gimignano for E. M. Forster's invented town of Monteriano, which Forster had modelled on it in the first place — an unusually neat case of a location playing a fiction derived from itself. The town also appears as a fully explorable district in the video game Assassin's Creed II, reconstructed with its towers restored to something closer to their medieval number, which has brought a distinct wave of younger visitors looking for rooftops they recognise.

Food and wine. Vernaccia di San Gimignano was the first Italian wine to receive DOC status, in 1966, and was promoted to DOCG in 1993. It is a dry white from a grape grown almost nowhere else, historically praised by Michelangelo and by Dante, who mentions it in the Purgatorio. Saffron is still cultivated in small quantities and sold under a protected designation. The Gelateria Dondoli on Piazza della Cisterna, run by a former world gelato champion, generates a permanent queue and is the reason many people's first photograph of the square includes forty other people.

Getting there and timing. There is no station; buses run from Poggibonsi, which is on the Florence–Siena line, and from Siena directly, taking roughly an hour. Drivers park in paid lots outside the gates. Day-trip coaches dominate the centre between roughly 10:30 and 17:00 in the high season, and the difference before and after those hours is dramatic — an overnight stay effectively buys a private town at dawn and after dark, when the towers are floodlit. April to June and September to October are the best months; the Ferie delle Messi in June stages a medieval festival with a knights' tournament.