In 1255 the commune of San Gimignano forbade private families to raise towers higher than the Torre Rognosa, which belonged to the podestà. The Salvucci got round the rule in the most direct way: they built two, twins, each one under the limit. The Ardinghelli, their rivals, answered in kind at the other end of town. When the town lived on saffron, wine and pilgrims on the via Francigena there were seventy-two towers; fourteen are left, and it is for that skyline that the old centre entered the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1990.
What to see
Piazza della Cisterna is triangular, slightly sloping, paved in herringbone brick. It takes its name from the tank dug beneath it in 1287 and from the travertine well-head on an octagonal base, widened in 1346 by the podestà Guccio Malavolti, who had his own coat of arms with a ladder carved into it. Until 1646 there were two squares, the Olmo and the Taverne, divided by the Ridolfi palace: then the family tower collapsed without warning onto the palace and the space became one. In the south-west corner the arch of the Becci, a gate in the first ring of walls, is wedged between the blunt blocks of the Becci and Cugnanesi towers; the north side has the Cortesi palace and the Devil's tower, the west the twin Ardinghelli towers.
An open passage leads to Piazza del Duomo, where religious and civic power stood side by side: the Collegiata, consecrated in 1148, and the palaces of the Podestà and of the People. From the latter you climb the Torre Grossa, begun on 21 August 1300 and finished in 1311, fifty-four metres, the tallest one left and the only one open to visitors; in its great hall, the same year the work began, Dante spoke as ambassador of the Guelph League. The plague of 1348 took half the population; soon after, San Gimignano handed itself to Florence and stopped building. That is exactly why the centre is still medieval.
Visiting
The centre is closed to traffic: car parks are outside the walls, the handiest below Porta San Giovanni, from which it is about ten minutes uphill to the two squares. San Gimignano is an hour by car from Florence and forty minutes from Siena, and the coaches unload between late morning and mid-afternoon, when the main street is walked in single file. The climb up the Torre Grossa is included in the civic museum ticket, on a narrow one-way stair. Three hours cover the two squares, the Collegiata and the tower; the Vernaccia is tasted in cellars inside the walls.
Our editors' tip
We stay the night inside the walls. After six in the evening the last coaches leave, Piazza della Cisterna empties and the residents come back; the towers, lit from below, throw a different shadow every hour. Early in the morning, before the shops open, the only sound is your own step on the brick.
