San Gimignano Culture

The towers as culture

It is worth being clear what they are. Seventy-two tower-houses at the medieval peak, fourteen standing now — and they were built by families competing with each other, not by a city defending itself. Height was rank. The result is the most legible surviving document of what a 13th-century Italian ruling class was like, and UNESCO inscribed the centre in 1990 under criterion (i), among others, for exactly that.

Painting

The Collegiata is the reason to buy the ticket rather than only walk the streets. Its walls carry fresco cycles of the 14th and 15th centuries, and the Chapel of Santa Fina was painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio — the artist in whose workshop Michelangelo trained. The Pinacoteca in the Palazzo Comunale holds the town's picture collection.

All of it survives for the same reason the towers do. After 1348 San Gimignano was poor and politically finished, and a town with no money modernises nothing.

Wine, where this town was first

Vernaccia di San Gimignano is a white wine, which surprises people in a region known for Sangiovese, and it holds a genuine first: approved as a DOC on 3 March 1966, it was il primo vino in Italia a fregiarsi di tale titolo — the first wine in Italy to carry the designation. Every Italian DOC and DOCG that followed is downstream of that decree. It became a DOCG on 9 July 1993, and a Riserva must mature at least 11 months plus three months in bottle.

The appellation is drawn as tightly as any in Italy: hill land within this single commune.

The pilgrim road

The Via Francigena is the thread connecting all of it. The road brought the money that built the towers, the travellers who needed the lodging, and the religious foundations whose churches hold the paintings. San Gimignano is what a service town on a great medieval route looks like when the route moves on.