Behind the tower skyline San Gimignano hides an unusually dense art town: Gozzoli's frescoed choir at Sant'Agostino, a Pinacoteca of Sienese panels, an 18th-century theatre still programming, and Galleria Continua showing Ai Weiwei in an old cinema.
Inside the Palazzo Comunale, the Sala di Dante holds Lippo Memmi's 1317 Maestà; upstairs the Pinacoteca hangs Coppo di Marcovaldo, Pinturicchio and Filippino Lippi. The Camera del Podestà's profane wedding frescoes are the oddity.
Tucked into Piazza Pecori behind the Collegiata, this small museum gathers Benedetto da Maiano's marble bust, illuminated choir books, Sienese panel paintings and church silver stripped from parishes across the comune.
Benozzo Gozzoli's 17-panel Life of St Augustine (1464-65) wraps the choir; Piero del Pollaiuolo's Coronation of the Virgin sits on the high altar. The 15th-century cloister off the left aisle is usually empty.
Founded in 1990 inside a disused 1920s cinema, Continua shows Ai Weiwei, Kiefer, Boltanski and Michelangelo Pistoletto across four floors of raked seating and old projection booth. The invigilators talk you through the work.
The ex-convent of Santa Chiara holds three collections on one ticket: Raffaele De Grada's 20th-century landscapes, an Etruscan and Roman archaeological room, and the Spezieria di Santa Fina, a 16th-century pharmacy of majolica jars.
A 1794 horseshoe theatre of about 200 seats built into the Palazzo del Popolo, restored in 2002 and still programming prose, chamber concerts and the town's film society through autumn and winter.
A 1:100 hand-built clay reconstruction of the town as it stood in 1300, with all 72 towers, some 800 buildings and modelled streets, made over three years by sculptor Michelangelo Rubino. Guided runs in Italian and English.
The 1353 Medici fortress above town keeps one wall and a grass courtyard used from June to August for open-air cinema, jazz evenings and the Ferie delle Messi medieval pageant. Ramparts stay open into the evening.
A FAI property since 2015: a merchant family's 19th-century apartment left exactly as it was, wrapped around an unclimbable 13th-century tower, with a short film on how the tower families built and outbid each other.
This deconsecrated 1240 oratory keeps a Last Judgement and Paradise fresco cycle by Cenni di Francesco Cenni di Ser Cenni (1413) covering vault and apse, alongside a reliquary linked to Santa Fina.
Ten Romanesque and Gothic arches over spring-fed washing basins below Porta delle Fonti, used from about 1300 until the 1950s. Locals walk dogs down here and the olive terraces above frame the towers from underneath.
The half of the walled town where most of the thousand residents actually live: leather and ceramic workshops, a bookbinder, small alimentari, and doorways carved with the arms of the Ardinghelli and Salvucci clans.