Greve in Chianti discovery guide

Because the shape of the square tells you what the town is for. Piazza Matteotti is an elongated triangle under porticoes — a mercatale, a working market place since the Middle Ages — with Romeo Pazzini's statue of Giovanni da Verrazzano at its centre.

The navigator's family castle stands two kilometres away, and Montefioralle, a walled borgo holding a house said to have been Amerigo Vespucci's, is a short climb above the town.

The friction is that Greve sits on the via Chiantigiana, so Florence–Siena traffic comes straight through and the square doubles as the car park. This is a town of 13,321 people, not a sealed medieval set.

The smart way is to base here rather than day-trip: walk up to Montefioralle in the late afternoon, come back down for dinner, and use Greve as the one place in Chianti with an evening of its own.

September and October are the months this town is built for. The grape harvest runs through them, the Chiantigiana is busy with working traffic as well as visitors, and the square is at its most alive.

May and June give the Chianti at its greenest and the long light that makes the drive worth taking slowly, with far fewer cars than autumn.

July and August are hot and busy, though less punishing than Florence: the record notes that summers here are everywhere cooler than in the centre of Florence, which is the single best argument for staying in Chianti and commuting in.

November to March is the quiet half. Expect real winter: in the valleys the minimums can fall several degrees below zero, and snow is frequent in some parts of the comune, though it never lies on the ground for many days. Much of the wine tourism closes down, and the town goes back to being a town.

Whenever you come, the square is free and always open. It is the one thing here with no season.

Start in the square and let it be a square. Sit under the porticoes of Piazza Matteotti before looking at anything. The triangle is not decorative: it is the shape a mercatale takes when three roads meet, and the town grew to that plan.

Then the church at the vertex. The Propositura di Santa Croce occupies one corner of the triangle and holds more than its plain exterior suggests — a 14th-century fresco of the Madonna and Child that used to stand in the tabernacle out on the piazza del Mercatale, a triptych by Bicci di Lorenzo, a 14th-century Florentine Annunciation, a wooden Crucifix attributed to an anonymous Spanish sculptor of the early 15th century, brought here from the pieve di San Cresci a Montefioralle, and a ciborium attributed to Santi Buglioni.

Then the two museums, which are about the two things the town has lived on. The Museo di San Francesco, in the former convent, opened on 7 September 2002; the Museo del vino occupies about eight hundred square metres of the old Greve cellars.

Then walk out. Montefioralle is the short climb and the best hour of the day. Beyond it the comune holds the castles of Uzzano, Canonica, Mugnana and Verrazzano, the borgo of Santa Lucia a Barbiano with the castle that was a stronghold in the wars between Florence and Siena, and a long view from Convertoie.

And give the pievi an afternoon if Romanesque churches interest you at all. This comune is unusually rich in them, and several — San Cresci, San Miniato di Rubbiana, San Pietro a Sillano — are documented a thousand years back.

Greve is a market town that became a wine town, and it has never entirely stopped being the first.

The evidence is in the plan. The square is a mercatale and was the principal market of the district; the porticoes exist so that trade could go on in the rain. The town was not founded as a seat of power — it was a dependency of the castle of Montefioralle and outgrew its castle because the roads met in its valley rather than on the hill.

That gives Greve a character quite different from the hill-villages around it. It is down in the Val di Greve, not up on a ridge; it is 13,321 people, not a few hundred; and it works for a living.

The town advertises explorers rather than saints. Giovanni da Verrazzano stands in the middle of the square, and Amerigo Vespucci is claimed by a house in Montefioralle. For a comune in the Tuscan interior to put two navigators at its centre is a choice, and it says something about how it sees itself.

It is also a Cittaslow town — which, in a place the Florence–Siena traffic drives straight through, is a deliberate position rather than a decoration.

And it is more mixed than the postcard. At the end of 2009 the comune had 1,747 foreign residents, the largest groups Albanian (404), Romanian (243) and Moroccan (150).

This is a working agricultural comune, not a wine theme park. Its territory runs to 169.38 square kilometres between the Monti del Chianti and the Florentine hills, and most of it is farmed. The vineyards along the Chiantigiana are somebody's crop.

Greve is a Cittaslow town, and that is a commitment rather than a label. The movement exists to protect the pace and the produce of small towns against the pressure of through traffic and mass visiting. Spending in the town — the market, the shops under the porticoes, the butchers — is how a visitor joins in rather than simply passing through.

Drive the Chiantigiana slowly and park once. The road is the attraction and the problem at the same time. Leave the car in Greve and walk to Montefioralle, which is the better experience anyway.

Montefioralle is inhabited. Its walls are partly absorbed into later houses and its lanes are fully paved and narrow. People live behind those doors; the borgo has no visitor infrastructure to absorb a crowd.

Remember what the town carries. Greve was designated a place of free internment during the war, and on 3 December 1943 a round-up near the frazione of San Michele took Goffredo Passigli and his sons Leone and Giuseppe, who were deported and died at Auschwitz. The town was liberated on 24 July 1944. This is recent history in a place that markets itself on wine.

Greve is the most affordable base in Chianti, for a structural reason: it is a town rather than a resort village. With 13,321 residents it has ordinary shops, ordinary bars and an ordinary weekly market, and prices reflect a place that has to serve the people who live in it.

The square costs nothing. Piazza Matteotti, its porticoes, the statue of Verrazzano and the exterior of Santa Croce are free and permanently accessible, as is the walk up to Montefioralle.

The museums are the only ticketed sights in the town itself — the Museo di San Francesco and the Museo del vino. Neither publishes a price through the sources used for this page, so budget rather than assume, and confirm locally.

The real cost in Chianti is the car. Greve sits on the via Chiantigiana and is connected onward to the A1 and the Florence–Siena road, but the castles, pievi and cellars of this comune are spread across 169 square kilometres. Without a car you will see the town; with one you will see the comune.

Cellar visits are the variable. They are commercial, they are usually by appointment, and they range from a few euro for a tasting to a great deal more. Nothing on this page should be read as a price for them.