People come to San Gimignano for the towers, and almost all of them stop in the square. Sant'Agostino stands at the other end of the town, ten minutes further on, and whoever gets there finds a church nearly empty of people and full of painting: behind the high altar is the cycle of the life of saint Augustine frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli, seventeen scenes, and it is the masterpiece nobody expects in San Gimignano.
What to see
The cycle tells the saint's life like a story in instalments: the child taken to school and beaten by the master, the studies, the journey, the conversion, the death. Gozzoli painted the architecture, landscapes and clothes of his own time, that is of the fifteenth century, so those scenes tell us more about how people lived then than about how they lived in the fourth century.
There is also a great saint Sebastian frescoed by the same painter, made as a votive offering after an outbreak of plague: the saint shields the town with his cloak while above Christ hurls the arrows of contagion. In the chapel of San Bartolo, instead, there is a marble altar carved by Benedetto da Maiano. The church itself is of the thirteenth century, in brick, austere, with tall Gothic windows along the flanks.
Visiting
The church is in piazza Sant'Agostino, at the northern end of the old town; free entry, closed at midday and with shorter hours in winter. Half an hour. You usually go in by the side door, and there is a coin machine to light the frescoes.
Our editors' tip
Go in the late afternoon, when the coaches have left: in the choir behind the altar you sit alone in front of seventeen scenes nobody is looking at. Then step out into the fifteenth-century cloister next door, which is quiet and almost always empty, and take a turn under the portico before heading back to the square.