Palazzo Comunale and Torre Grossa site features

The palace sits on the lower, eastern side of Piazza del Duomo, facing across the square to the staircase of the Collegiata, and it is immediately identifiable by being built of two different materials stacked on top of each other: the lower half of the front is stone, the upper half brick, with a row of arched windows running across it. Above the roofline the Torre Grossa goes up square and almost completely unornamented to 54 metres, which makes it a little over half as tall again as its nearest neighbours and the thing your eye returns to from anywhere in the town.

The battlements along the top are not medieval. They came from Giuseppe Partini's restoration between 1878 and 1881, and once you know that, the crisp regularity of them against the worn stone below is obvious.

Step through the front and you are in a small, high, open courtyard of 1323, with a stone cistern set in the middle of it since 1361. The walls here are the point: they are covered, almost to the height of a person and well above it, in the coats of arms of the men who held public office in the comune — some carved in relief, some painted, overlapping and repeating, a few centuries of civic vanity in one small space. A painted Sant'Ivo sits among them.

The first floor carries a stepped outdoor gallery facing the square, built so that officials could stand above a crowd and be seen as well as heard. Standing on it, the geometry of medieval public announcement is unmistakable.

The museum occupies the floors above, and the tower is entered from within the building and climbed by stair in a shaft that narrows as it rises, opening at the top onto a small platform with the roofs of San Gimignano directly below.

• The Torre Grossa (completed 1300) — 54 metres, the tallest tower inside the walls, square-sectioned and plain, climbable by stair to a small top platform.
• The two-material facade (1289–1298, expanded 14th century) — stone below, brick above, pierced by a row of arched windows: the clearest single illustration in the town of how its buildings were raised in stages as money allowed.
• The courtyard (1323) — open to the sky, lined with the carved and painted coats of arms of everyone who held public office in the comune, with a Sant'Ivo fresco among them.
• The cistern (1361) — set at the centre of that courtyard, a reminder that a hill town's civic headquarters needed its own water.
• The stepped gallery on the first floor — an outdoor platform over the square, built for dignitaries to address the crowd from.
• The Memmo di Filippuccio frescoes — with work by Lippo Memmi and others, the decoration the building was given as the seat of government.
• The picture gallery — Coppo di Marcovaldo, Lippo Memmi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Filippino Lippi, Il Sodoma and Pinturicchio: the Florentine and Sienese schools in one small museum.
• Partini's battlements (1878–1881) — a 19th-century crown on a medieval building, and worth spotting precisely because it is designed to look older than it is.