After our walk yesterday and seeing San Gimignano from afar we were looking forward to visiting it today. The town is known for its towers and its white wine. It is a small town but has become a focal point for day trips from both Florence and Sienna so we were a little worried about the crowds.
When we arrived at the gate of the town on the local bus we were startled by the crowds. There were at least ten tour busses unloading next to the gate and a couple of hundred people milling around with headphones on listening to guides.
We walked up the main street listening to mostly American voices all around us. But the town was charming, and there looked to be a bunch of interesting restaurants and wine bars so we got over our initial disappointment.
One of the things we have learned if a town is very crowded with tourists is to move away from the main street and look for side streets to explore. San Gimignano was a great town to explore this way.
We began by walking the walls of the town and enjoying the views. In all directions were olive orchards, and vineyards, but also undeveloped forest. A lot of the stores on the main street in town had stuffed wild boars in their front doors, we guessed they came from those forests.
From the walls we saw a tall hill in the center of town with three large trees. It looked like the highest point of the town so I decided to head us towards it. It was a pretty good climb, but there were plenty of things to look at as we went up so we had plenty of excuses to stop and get our wind.
At the top beside the three trees was a small building inside a courtyard. There was a tower there that gave us an incredible 360 degree view of the area. It was worth the effort.
After the climb we decided we had earned a lunch. We returned to one of the places we had seen in our exploration of the town. The area around San Gimignano is said to produce the best white wines in Italy and we wanted to give it a taste. Ton was feeling a little adventurous so she ordered a wild boar pasta, while I went with a regular pig pasta. We each picked a different producer of Vernaccia wine to go with pasta and enjoyed them both.
After lunch we continued our exploration of the town focusing on the towers the town is famous for. 14 towers remain in place. The tallest one is the Torre Grosso which belongs to the church. Later one of the merchants in town wanted to build a tower taller than the Torre Grosso, but the church intervened. So instead he built two towers side by side whose height added together exceeded the Torre Grosso.
The designer of the World Trade Center in New York was inspired by these two towers. If you look at them you can see the influence on the World Trade Center. By the way these towers did not serve any particular purpose, they were mostly built by rich people and the church to show off their wealth.
We are not big ice cream eaters, but at different times on this trip we have both craved a gelato. There are two competing gelato shops on the main square, one is supposed to be the best in the world, and the other the most famous. We learned the famous one once had Michelle Obama as a customer. We made our decision between best and famous by getting in the shorter of the two substantial lines.
Just as we thought the crowds were beginning to thin out another wave of tour busses rolled into town. We poked around in a few souvenir shops for gifts and then decided to head back to the campground for the evening.
