San Gimignano Geography, Climate & Nature

San Gimignano sits on a ridge in the Val d'Elsa, and the position is the reason for everything: the towers, the wealth that built them, and the wine.

The site

The walled town is at 324 metres, in a municipality covering 138 km² that runs from a low point of 64 metres up to 631 metres at Cornocchio. That is a considerable spread for one comune, and it is why the territory carries vineyard, olive and woodland at different heights.

Where it is, precisely

In the province of Siena, in central Tuscany — about halfway between Florence and Siena, and within reach of Volterra to the south-west. This is hill country between the Elsa and the Era, north-west of the Chianti and well north of the Val d'Orcia.

Why a ridge made a town rich

The Via Francigena, the medieval pilgrim road from northern Europe to Rome, ran through here. A walled town on a ridge astride a pilgrim route collects tolls, sells beds and lends money, and San Gimignano did all three — which is what paid for seventy-two towers. When the route's importance declined and the plague arrived in 1348, the same geography became a liability: a hill town off the new roads has no second act.

The vineyards

The Vernaccia di San Gimignano disciplinare is unusually tight about ground: the grapes must come from vigneti situati in terreni collinari del comune di San Gimignano — hill land, this commune only. The slopes you can see from the walls are, almost literally, the entire appellation.

What it means for a visitor

The centre is walled, compact and closed to cars; you park below and walk up, and the walk up is short but real. Everything inside is within fifteen minutes on foot.

San Gimignano sits at 324 metres on an exposed ridge, in a municipality that ranges from 64 to 631 metres, and the practical consequences matter more than the numbers.

What each season does

• Summer is hot and dry, and the town is the wrong shape for it: narrow stone streets facing the sun, very little shade, and the hardest hours coinciding exactly with the coach timetable. July and August days are best split — the streets at dawn, the museums and a long lunch in the middle, the walls again at dusk.
• Autumn is the best of the year. September and October bring warm days, cool nights, the Vernaccia harvest and thinning crowds.
• Winter is cool and damp rather than severe, with grey spells and short light. The ridge is windier than the valley. This is the season to have the place almost to yourself, at the cost of some closures.
• Spring is changeable, green and increasingly busy, with Easter among the heaviest weeks of the year.

A note on the old description

This page used to carry a paragraph claiming a "Mediterranean climate" with temperatures running between about 2 °C and 30 °C. No source could be found for those figures, so they are not repeated. What can be said without them is more useful anyway: the town has no shade, the streets hold heat, and the time of day you choose matters more here than the month.

San Gimignano's municipality covers 138 km² and falls from 631 metres to 64, which is a wide enough spread to carry several habitats — though the famous part of the commune is the 13.88 hectares inside the walls, where the ecology is urban.

What is here

• Vineyard and olive terrace occupy the hill slopes, and the Vernaccia disciplinare means that is not incidental: the appellation is restricted to hill land in this commune, so the slopes are under vine by law as much as by choice. As everywhere in Tuscany, the ecological value of a vineyard depends on whether the rows are grassed or kept bare.
• Oak and mixed woodland survives on the steeper and north-facing ground and in the gullies, with holm oak, downy oak and hornbeam. These fragments are the habitat reservoir of the whole territory.
• Watercourses in the Elsa catchment carry a riparian strip of willow, poplar and alder where they have not been straightened — fragmentary, but the only continuous linear habitat in farmed country.
• The town itself is a genuine habitat and an unusual one. Fourteen medieval towers and a dense mass of old masonry give swifts, swallows, house martins and bats exactly the nesting cavities that modern buildings deny them. On a summer evening the air between the towers is full of birds, and that is a direct consequence of the architecture the town is famous for.

The honest framing

This is a farmed and heavily visited landscape, not a wild one. Its ecological interest is the towers-as-cliffs point above, and the question of what survives in the woodland fragments between the vineyards. For unfarmed ground, the wooded hills south-west towards Volterra are the direction to go.

The best wildlife watching in San Gimignano requires no walking at all: stand in a square at dusk and look up.

The towers are cliffs

Fourteen medieval towers and a dense mass of old masonry function, biologically, as a cliff face. Common swifts and pallid swifts nest in the cavities and scream around the towers on summer evenings; house martins and barn swallows work the air lower down; bats emerge from the roofs at dusk and hunt the streets and the vineyard edges below the walls. Kestrels use the towers as hunting perches and occasionally nest on them.

This is the one thing the architecture gives wildlife, and it is substantial: modern buildings have no cavities, so towns like this one hold colonies that the surrounding countryside cannot support.

Mammals in the territory

Wild boar are abundant across the Tuscan hills, damage the vineyards and are hunted accordingly; they are the mammal most likely to be met on a track at dusk, and they are not dangerous if left alone — a sow with young excepted. Roe deer, red fox, stone marten, badger, crested porcupine and European hare all use the woodland fragments and field margins.

Birds of the farmed hills

Common buzzard and kestrel hunt the open slopes. Hoopoe and European bee-eater arrive in spring and are heard more often than seen. Jay, green woodpecker and great spotted woodpecker keep to the oak remnants; nightingale sings from the scrub along the tracks in May.

Where to look

Piazza della Cisterna at dusk, for the swifts and the bats — no equipment, no walk, no ticket. Otherwise the tracks outside the walls at first light, where the vineyards meet the woodland.