The Medieval Manhattan: 14 Towers, Italy's First DOC Wine & The Finest Gothic Frescoes in Tuscany
📍 San Gimignano, Italy📅 3-day itinerary
A hilltop town of 1,000 people within its walls where 14 medieval towers survive from the 72 that rival families built to display their power and threaten their neighbours, where the grape that produces Italy's first DOC wine has grown in the surrounding fossil-rich clay since 1276, and where the Collegiata church interior is so completely covered in Gothic frescoes — including the most graphically detailed Hell in Tuscany — that the bare stone is invisible.
Looking Across at the Other Thirteen Towers from the Top of the Tallest One & A Gothic Church Interior Where the Stone Walls Vanish Entirely Under Three Complete Medieval Fresco Cycles
Thirty-Four Miniature Jerusalem Chapels Built for Pilgrims Too Poor to Afford the Real Journey & The Alabaster-Carving City Where the Etruscan Dead Were Buried in Six Hundred Carved Urns
The Scallop-Shell Civic Square Where Two Bareback Horse Races Per Year Determine the Social Hierarchy of an Entire City & The Cathedral Floor Where 56 Marble Intarsia Panels Took 175 Years to Complete